96 résultats pour "and"

• Animals and ethics

  Animals and ethics Does morality require that we respect the lives and interests of nonhuman animals? The traditional doctrine was that animals were made for human use, and so we may dispose of them as we please. It has been argued, however, that this is a mere ‘speciesist' prejudice and that animals should be given more or less the same moral consideration as humans. If this is right, we may be morally required to be vegetarians; and it may turn out that laboratory research using animals, and m...

• Animal language and thought

  Animal language and thought The question of animal language and thought has been debated since ancient times. Some have held that humans are exceptional in these respects, others that humans and animals are continuous with respect to language and thought. The issue is important because our self-image as a species is at stake. Arguments for human exceptionalism can be classified as Cartesian, Wittgensteinian and behaviourist. What these arguments have in common is the view that language and thoug...

• Ash'ariyya and Mu'tazila

  Ash'ariyya and Mu'tazila The Mu'tazila - literally 'those who withdraw themselves' - movement was founded by Wasil bin 'Ata' in the second century AH (eighth century AD). Its members were united in their conviction that it was necessary to give a rationally coherent account of Islamic beliefs. In addition to having an atomistic view of the universe, they generally held to five theological principles, of which the two most important were the unity of God and divine justice. The former led them to...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Bentham and James Mill

  Bentham and James Mill Jeremy Bentham was born in 1748 in London; his prosperous father, a lawyer who became wealthy from property rather than the law, planned out for his son a brilliant legal career. After an early education at Westminster and Oxford he was called to the Bar in 1769. However, instead of mastering the complexities, technicalities, precedents and mysteries of the law in order to carve out a successful career, Bentham's response to such chaos and absurdity was to challenge the wh...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: ABELARD AND HÉLoÏsE

  ABELARD AND HÉLoÏsE Peter Abelard was just thirty years old when Anselm died. Born into a knightly family in Brittany in 1079, he was educated at Tours and went to Paris in about 1100 to join the school attached to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, run by William of Champeaux. Falling out with his teacher, he went to Melun to found a school of his own, and later set up a rival school in Paris on Mont Ste Geneviève. From 1113 he was William's successor at Notre Dame. While teaching there he took lodgi...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Doubt and the Cogito - DESCARTES

  Descartes insisted that the first task in philosophy is to rid oneself of all prejudice by calling in doubt all that can be doubted. The second task of the philosopher, having raised these doubts, is to prevent them leading to scepticism. This strategy comes out clearly in Descartes' Meditations. As the title suggests, the work is not intended to be read as an academic treatise. It is meant to be followed in the frame of mind of a religious retreat, such as St Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exe...

• English: how do artists and writers portray the difficulties and painful aspects of love?

  Oral d’anglais spécialité: encounters How do artists and writers portray the difficulties or painful aspect of love? INTRODUCTION Love is the deepest relationship between two hearts. The union of two hearts and two hearts and two minds, the gift of self to another human being, the desire to dedicate one’s life to making the other person evolve and progress, these are the finest sentiments of a human heart. But love can also be a source of conflict or pain. All these difficulties have i...

• How do social media platforms influence the body perceptions of young people through the promotion of unrealistic beauty standards and body positivity and what are the consequences?

  ● How do social media platforms influence the body perceptions of young people through the promotion of unrealistic beauty standards and body positivity and what are the consequences? Social media platforms play a significant role in shaping the body perceptions of young people through the promotion of both unrealistic beauty standards and body positivity. On one hand, these platforms inundate users with curated images of flawless bodies, often achieved through filters, editing, and sel...

• Byzantine philosophy

  Byzantine philosophy In Byzantium from the ninth century through to the fifteenth century, philosophy as a discipline remained the science of fundamental truths concerning human beings and the world. Philosophy, the 'wisdom from without', was invariably contrasted with the 'philosophy from within', namely theology. The view that philosophy is 'the handmaiden of theology', which the Greek Church Fathers derived from Philo and the Alexandrian school of theology, was not the dominant position in By...

• Bowne, Borden Parker

  Bowne, Borden Parker (1847-1910) Bowne was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of the American personalist school of philosophy. His position is theistic and idealistic, and finds in human persons the key to meaning in the world. Knowledge comes only through personal experience, through which we understand ourselves to be enduring thinking entities with a certain degree of freedom. The uniformity of God's activity is such as to make nature intelligible to us, but our minds are never...

• Brentano, Franz Clemens

  Brentano, Franz Clemens (1838-1917) Brentano was a philosopher and psychologist who taught at the Universities of Würzburg and Vienna. He made significant contributions to almost every branch of philosophy, notably psychology and philosophy of mind, ontology, ethics and the philosophy of language. He also published several books on the history of philosophy, especially Aristotle, and contended that philosophy proceeds in cycles of advance and decline. He is best known for reintroducing the schol...

• al-Sijistani, Abu Sulayman Muhammad

  al-Sijistani, Abu Sulayman Muhammad (c.932-c.1000) Al-Sijistani was one of the great figures of Baghdad in the fourth century AH (tenth century AD). He assembled around him a circle of philosophers and litterateurs who met regularly in sessions to discuss topics related to philosophy, religion and language. As a philosopher with a humanistic orientation, his concerns went beyond subjects of strictly philosophical nature. His philosophical ideas displayed Aristotelian and Neoplatonic motifs. He c...

• Certeau, Michel de

  Certeau, Michel de (1925-86) Michel de Certeau, a French philosopher trained in history and ethnography, was a peripatetic teacher in Europe, South America and North America. His thought has inflected four areas of philosophy. He studied how mysticism informs late-medieval epistemology and social practice. With the advent of the Scientific Revolution, the affinities the mystic shares with nature and the cosmos become, like religion itself, repressed or concealed. An adjunct discipline, heterolog...

• Applied ethics

  Applied ethics Applied ethics is marked out from ethics in general by its special focus on issues of practical concern. It therefore includes medical ethics, environmental ethics, and evaluation of the social implications of scientific and technological change, as well as matters of policy in such areas as health care, business or journalism. It is also concerned with professional codes and responsibilities in such areas. Typical of the issues discussed are abortion, euthanasia, personal relatio...

• Anaximander

  Anaximander (c.610-after 546 BC) The Greek philosopher Anaximander of Miletus followed Thales in his philosophical and scientific interests. He wrote a book, of which one fragment survives, and is the first Presocratic philosopher about whom we have enough information to reconstruct his theories in any detail. He was principally concerned with the origin, structure and workings of the world, and attempted to account for them consistently, through a small number of principles and mechanisms. Like...

• Buddha

  Buddha (6th-5th century B C ) The title of Buddha is usually given to the historical founder of the Buddhist religion, Siddhārtha Gautama, although it has been applied to other historical figures, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, and to many who may be mythological. The religion which he founded was enormously successful and for a long period was probably the most widespread world religion. It is sometimes argued that it is not so much a religion as a kind of philosophy. Indeed, Buddhism bears close c...

• Berkeley, George

  Berkeley, George George Berkeley, who was born in Ireland and who eventually became Bishop of Cloyne, is best known for three works that he published while still very young: An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), and in particular for A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). In thePrinciples he argues for the striking claim that there is no external, material world; that houses, trees and the like are simply coll...

• TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS - Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Ludwig Wittgenstein was the grandson of a Jewish land-agent and the son of a steel millionaire who had nine children by a Catholic wife, and baptized all of them into the Catholic faith. Born in Vienna in 1889, he attended the Realschule in Linz, where he was a contemporary of Adolf Hitler. At school he lost his faith, and soon after came under the influence of Schopenhauer's idealism. After studying engineering in Berlin and Manchester he went to Cambridge, where his philosophical gifts were re...

• Aristippus the Elder

  Aristippus the Elder (c.435-c.355 BC) Aristippus of Cyrene was a member of Socrates' entourage who after Socrates' death (399 BC) founded the Cyrenaic school. He was primarily interested in practical ethics. He focused on the concepts of pleasure and pain, and classed them as bodily motions of which we are conscious. He considered pleasure a major component of happiness, but also attributed intrinsic value to virtue and emphasized the importance of study and exercise as means to self-control. Ar...

• Archytas

  Archytas (early to mid 4th century BC) Archytas of Tarentum (modern Taranto in southern Italy) was a contemporary and personal acquaintance of Plato, and the last of the famous Pythagoreans in antiquity. An ancient source (Proclus)chytas with those mathematicians 'who increased the number of theorems and progressed towards a more scientific arrangement of them' and ranks him among the predecessors of Euclid. His chief contribution in mathematics was to find a solution for the doubling of the cub...

• Anaxagoras

  Anaxagoras (500-428 BC) Anaxagoras of Clazomenae was a major Greek philosopher of the Presocratic period, who worked in the Ionian tradition of inquiry into nature. While his cosmology largely recasts the sixth-century system of Anaximenes, the focus of the surviving fragments is on ontological questions. The often quoted opening of his book - 'all things were together' - echoes the Eleatic Parmenides' characterization of true being, but signals recognition of time, change and plurality. Even so...

• Aurobindo Ghose

  Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) Aurobindo Ghose was a leading Indian nationalist at the beginning of the twentieth century who became a yogin and spiritual leader as well as a prolific writer (in English) on mysticism, crafting a mystic philosophy of Brahman (the Absolute or God). Aurobindo fashioned an entire worldview, a system intended to reflect both science and religion and to integrate several concerns of philosophy - epistemology, ontology, psychology, ethics - into a single vision. Of partic...

• Cattaneo, Carlo

  Cattaneo, Carlo (1801-69) The figurehead of the Italian democratic movement prior to the unification of Italy, Carlo Cattaneo developed a theory of federalism as a practice of self-government, envisaging a United States of Italy. He identified the bourgeoisie as the most dynamic force in contemporary history and regarded scientific culture as the engine of progress. Often dubbed the first Italian positivist, he perceived empirical philosophy as a kind of synthesis of all the sciences, but also s...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Alexander of Aphrodisias

  Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. AD 200) The Peripatetic philosopher Alexander was known to posterity as the commentator on Aristotle, until Averroes took over this title. His commentaries eclipsed most of those of his predecessors, which now survive only in scattered quotations. Used by Plotinus, Alexander's commentaries were the basis for subsequent work on Aristotle by Neoplatonist commentators, and even though some themselves survive only in quotations by these later writers, Alexander's int...

• Aristotle (384-322 BC)

  Aristotle (384-322 BC) Aristotle of Stagira is one of the two most important philosophers of the ancient world, and one of the four or five most important of any time or place. He was not an Athenian, but he spent most of his life as a student and teacher of philosophy in Athens. For twenty years he was a member of Plato's Academy; later he set up his own philosophical school, the Lyceum. During his lifetime he published philosophical dialogues, of which only fragments now survive. The 'Aristote...

• Cassirer, Ernst

  Cassirer, Ernst (1874-1945) Cassirer is one of the major figures in the development of philosophical idealism in the first half of the twentieth century. He is known for his philosophy of culture based on his conception of 'symbolic form', for his historical studies of the problem of knowledge in the rise of modern philosophy and science and for his works on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Cassirer expanded Kant's critique of reason to a critique of culture by regarding the symbol as the...

• Aristotelianism, medieval

  Aristotelianism, medieval Although there are many possible definitions, 'medieval Aristotelianism' is here taken to mean explicit receptions of Aristotle's texts or teachings by Latin-speaking writers from about AD 500 to about AD 1450. This roundabout, material definition avoids several common mistakes. First, it does not assert that there was a unified Aristotelian doctrine across the centuries. There was no such unity, and much of the engagement with Aristotle during the Middle Ages took the...

• Alighieri, Dante

  Alighieri, Dante (1265-1321) 'radical Aristotelians', such as Boethius of Dacia and Aubry of Reims (see Averroism). These Parisian masters claimed that philosophy is autonomous and should not be subordinated to any other discipline, in particular not to theology, because it provides humans with all the knowledge required for obtaining happiness. Since humans are essentially rational animals, they fully realize their capacities if they dedicate themselves to the most rational activity, philosophy...

• Arama, Isaac ben Moses

  Arama, Isaac ben Moses (c.1420-94) Like many of his fifteenth-century Spanish contemporaries, Arama opposed the Aristotelianism of Maimonides. His philosophical sermons and biblical commentaries attack Jewish Aristotelians on charges of subordinating revelation to reasoning, upholding an eternal universe whose necessity limits God's power, and excluding miracles and individual providence. Yet while stressing the fallibility of human reason, Arama is no fideist. An eclectic, he values reason and...

• Artistic style

  Artistic style Artistic style is a problematic notion in several ways. Sometimes the term refers to style in general, as it does in 'Good style requires good diction'. Sometimes it refers to style as a particular, as in 'Van Gogh's style' or 'the Baroque style'. In antiquity, style was a rhetorical concept referring to diction and syntax; consequently style is very often identified with the formal elements of a work of art as opposed to the content. However, the kind of subject matter an artist...

• al-Razi, Fakhr al-Din

  al-Razi, Fakhr al-Din (1149-1209) Imam Fakhr al-Din al-Razi was one of the outstanding figures in Islamic theology. Living in the second half of the sixth century AH (twelfth century AD), he also wrote on history, grammar, rhetoric, literature, law, the natural sciences and philosophy, and composed one of the major works of Qur'anic exegesis, the only remarkable gap in his output being politics. He travelled widely in the eastern lands of Islam, often engaging in heated polemical confrontations....

• Aquinas, Thomas

  Aquinas, Thomas (1224/6-74) Aquinas lived an active, demanding academic and ecclesiastical life that ended while he was still in his forties. He nonetheless produced many works, varying in length from a few pages to a few volumes. Because his writings grew out of his activities as a teacher in the Dominican order and a member of the theology faculty of the University of Paris, most are concerned with what he and his contemporaries thought of as theology. However, much of academic theology in the...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Adverbs

  Adverbs Adverbs are so named from their role in modifying verbs and other non-nominal expressions. For example, in ‘John ran slowly', the adverb ‘slowly' modifies ‘ran' by characterizing the manner of John's running. The debate on the semantic contribution of adverbs centres on two approaches. On the first approach, adverbs are understood as predicate operators: for example, in ‘John ran slowly', ‘ran' would be taken to be a predicate and ‘slowly' an operator affecting its meaning. Working this...

• Art criticism

  Art criticism To criticize a work of art is to make a judgment of its overall merit or demerit and to support that judgment by reference to features it possesses. This activity is of great antiquity; we find Aristotle, for example, relating the excellence of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to the excellence of its plot construction. Criticism became a topic in philosophy because reflection on the kinds of things said by critics generated various perplexities and in some cases encouraged a general sceptic...

• Chisholm, Roderick Milton

  Chisholm, Roderick Milton (1916-) Chisholm is an important analytic philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. His work in epistemology, metaphysics and ethics is characterized by scrupulous attention to detail, the use of a few basic, undefined or primitive terms, and extraordinary clarity. One of the first Anglo-American philosophers to make fruitful use of Brentano and Meinong, Chisholm translated many of Brentano's philosophical writings. As one of the great teachers, Chisholm...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Anselm of Canterbury

  Anselm of Canterbury The next major figure in the Western intellectual tradition and the dominant thinker of the late eleventh century is A nselm of C anterbury.74 M arenbon arrives at an ambivalent judgement in his case, on one hand denying him the title of ‘philosopher' because his argumentation does not arrive finally at its conclusions but assumes them from the outset, and on the other conceding it in recognition of his contributions to the study of the language—thought relation and of the...

• Art, abstract

  Art, abstract The use of the term 'abstract' as a category of visual art dates from the second decade of the twentieth century, when painters and sculptors had turned away from verisimilitude and launched such modes of abstraction as Cubism, Orphism, Futurism, Rayonism and Suprematism. Two subcategories may be distinguished: first, varieties of figurative representation that strongly schematize, and second, completely nonfigurative or nonobjective modes of design (in the widest sense of that ter...

• Berdiaev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich

  Berdiaev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Nikolai Berdiaev, Russian religious idealist, was one of many non-Marxist thinkers expelled from Russia by communist authorities in 1922. Although attracted to Marxism in his youth, even then he tempered it with a Neo-Kantian ethical theory. Well before the Bolshevik Revolution, he became seriously disenchanted with Marxist philosophy (though not with the idea of socialism) and embarked on the career of elaborating a personalistic Christian philosophy that occupi...

• Philosophy of Anthropology

  Anthropology, philosophy of Anthropology, like philosophy, is multifaceted. It studies humans' physical, social, cultural and linguistic development, as well as their material culture, from prehistoric times up to the present, in all parts of the world. Some anthropological sub-fields have strong ties with the physical and biological sciences; others identify more closely with the social sciences or humanities. Within cultural and social anthropology differing theoretical approaches disagree abo...

• Areté

  Aretē A pivotal term of ancient Greek ethics, aretē is conventionally translated 'virtue', but is more properly 'goodness' - the quality of being a good human being. Philosophy came, largely through Plato, to recognize four cardinal aretai: wisdom (phronēsis), moderation (sōphrosynē), courage (andreia) and justice (dikaiosynē). Others, considered either coordinate with these or their sub-species, included piety, liberality and magnanimity. The term generated many controversies. For example, is a...

• Camus, Albert

  Camus, Albert (1913-60) Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957 for having 'illuminated the problems of the human conscience in our times'. By mythologizing the experiences of a secular age struggling with an increasingly contested religious tradition, he dramatized the human effort to 'live and create without the aid of eternal values which, temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary Europe'(1943). Thus the challenge posed by 'the absurd' with which he is so univ...

• Asmus, Valentin Ferdinandovich

  Asmus, Valentin Ferdinandovich (1894-1975) One of the most accomplished thinkers in the Soviet Marxist tradition, Asmus wrote extensively in many areas of philosophy, and was widely regarded as the Soviet Union's principal Kant scholar. Early in his career, he became associated with the influential school of 'dialecticians' led by A.M. Deborin and produced a number of significant writings in the history of philosophy. When Deborin and his followers were condemned as 'Menshevizing idealists' in 1...

• Atomism, ancient

  Atomism, ancient Ancient Greek atomism, starting with Leucippus and Democritus in the fifth century BC, arose as a response to problems of the continuum raised by Eleatic philosophers. In time a distinction emerged, especially in Epicurean atomism (early third century BC), between physically indivisible particles called 'atoms' and absolutely indivisible or 'partless' magnitudes. The term 'atom' (atomon), literally 'uncuttable', was coined in the fifth century BC by the first atomists, Leucippus...

• Antiochus

  Antiochus (c.130-68 BC) For most of his career the Greek philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon, a pupil of Philo of Larissa, was an orthodox ‘sceptical' Academic. He then changed his philosophy: some called him a Stoic, but he himself claimed to be returning to the Old Academy of Plato and his immediate successors. He took a generous view of his new home, urging that the Peripatetics and the Stoics were not new schools of thought but mere modifications of Platonism, and the philosophical position whi...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: THE EUTHYPHRO OF PLATO

  THE EUTHYPHRO OF PLATO After the trial portrayed in the Apology, there was a delay before sentence of death was carried out. A sacred ship had set out on its annual ceremonial voyage to the i s l a n d o f D e l o s, a n d u n t i l i t r e t u r n e d t o A t h e n s t h e t a k i n g o f h u m an life was ta b o o . P l a t o h a s re pres ente d t h e s e d a y s b etween conde m n a t i o n a n d e x ecutio n i n a pair of unforgettable dialogues, the Crito and the Phaedo. No one knows how m...

• Antiphon

  Antiphon (late 5th century BC) Antiphon was a Greek Sophist. His most famous work, On Truth, partially survives in two substantial papyrus fragments, plus a number of purported quotations. It sets up a bold antithesis between the claims of physis (nature) and nomos (law/convention), arguing that it is more advantageous to follow nature when one can do so without detection. The antithesis suggests several important questions about the meaning of 'nature' and its role in ethics, the origin of soci...

• THE MATERIAL WORLD - DESCARTES

  Descartes' Meditations brought him fame throughout Europe. He entered into correspondence and controversy with most of the learned men of his time, especially through the intermediary of a learned Franciscan, Marin Mersenne. Some of his friends began to teach his views in universities; and in the Principles of Philosophy he set out his metaphysics and his physics in the form of a textbook. Other professors, seeing their Aristotelian system threatened, subjected the new doctrines to violent attac...

• Parenting and capitalism

  Parenting and Capitalism In order to begin our research on the development of parenting under the capitalist system, we must first show and read the history of the formation of the so-called family. With the first division of labor, women were left at home to take care of their new borns while men owned lands and exploited slaves for production. Little after that, with the industrial revolution, women and children began working in lands and industries to try and create the demand want...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: THE PHAEDo of Plato

  THE PHAEDo The dialogue with which Plato concludes his account of Socrates' last days is called the Phaedo, after the name of the narrator, a citizen of Parmenides' city of Elea, who claims, with his friends Simmias and Cebes, to have been present with Socrates at his death. The drama begins as news arrives that the sacred ship has returned from Delos, which brings to an end the stay of execution. Socrates' chains are removed, and he is allowed a final visit from his weeping wife Xanthippe with...

• Atheism

  Atheism Atheism is the position that affirms the nonexistence of God. It proposes positive disbelief rather than mere suspension of belief. Since many different gods have been objects of belief, one might be an atheist with respect to one god while believing in the existence of some other god. In the religions of the west - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - the dominant idea of God is of a purely spiritual, supernatural being who is the perfectly good, allpowerful, all-knowing creator of everyth...