52 résultats pour "that"

• Anomalous monism

  Anomalous monism Anomalous monism, proposed by Donald Davidson in 1970, implies that all events are of one fundamental kind, namely physical. But it does not deny that there are mental events; rather, it implies that every mental event is some physical event or other. The idea is that someone's thinking at a certain time that the earth is round, for example, might be a certain pattern of neural firing in their brain at that time, an event which is both a thinking that the earth is round (a type...

• Belief

  Belief We believe that there is coffee over there; we believe the special theory of relativity; we believe the Vice-Chancellor; and some of us believe in God. But plausibly what is fundamental is believing that something is the case - believing a proposition, as it is usually put. To believe a theory is to believe the propositions that make up the theory, to believe a person is to believe some proposition advanced by them; and to believe in God is to believe the proposition that God exists. Thus...

• 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...

• 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...

• 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...

• Artistic forgery

  Artistic expression Many kinds of psychological state can be expressed in or by works of art. But it is the artistic expression of emotion that has figured most prominently in philosophical discussions of art. Emotion is expressed in pictorial, literary and other representational works of art by the characters who are depicted or in other ways presented in the works. We often identify the emotions of such characters in much the same way as we ordinarily identify the emotions of others, but we mi...

• 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...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: THE THEORY OF IDEAS of PLATO

  THE THEORY OF IDEAS of PLATO Plato's theory arises as follows. Socrates, Simmias, and Cebes are all called ‘men'; they have it in common that they are all men. Now when we say ‘Simmias is a man' does the word ‘man' stand for something in the way that the word ‘Simmias' stands for the individual man Simmias? If so, what? Is it the same thing as the word ‘man' stands for in the sentence ‘Cebes is a man'? Plato's answer is yes: in each case in which such an expression occurs it stands for the same...

• Artistic expression

  Artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) tries to make computer systems (of various kinds) do what minds can do: interpreting a photograph as depicting a face; offering medical diagnoses; using and translating language; learning to do better next time. AI has two main aims. One is technological: to build useful tools, which can help humans in activities of various kinds, or perform the activities for them. The other is psychological: to help us understand human (and animal) minds, or...

• Categories

  Categories Categories are hard to describe, and even harder to define. This is in part a consequence of their complicated history, and in part because category theory must grapple with vexed questions concerning the relation between linguistic or conceptual categories on the one hand, and objective reality on the other. In the mid-fourth century BC,Aristotle initiates discussion of categories as a central enterprise of philosophy. In the Categories he presents an 'ontological' scheme which cla...

• 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...

• Asceticism

  Asceticism The term 'asceticism' is derived from the Greek word, askēsis, which referred originally to the sort of exercise, practice or training in which athletes engage. Asceticism may be characterized as a voluntary, sustained and systematic programme of self-discipline and self-denial in which immediate sensual gratifications are renounced in order to attain some valued spiritual or mental state. Ascetic practices are to be found in all the major religious traditions of the world, yet they h...

• Aristotelianism, Renaissance

  Aristotelianism, Renaissance By the Renaissance here is meant the period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries during which there was a deliberate attempt, especially in Italy, to pattern cultural activities on models drawn from antiquity. However, Aristotelianism during that period was not cut off from medieval developments, since earlier interests and topics of discussion still held the attention of philosophers, theologians and non-academic intellectuals. Moreover, given that Aristoteliani...

• 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...

• 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...

• 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...

• 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...

• 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...

• 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: 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...

• 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...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Sidgwick

  Sidgwick Unlike John Stuart Mill or Jeremy Bentham, Henry Sidgwick's is hardly a household name in intellectual circles beyond the world of professional philosophy. His standing amongst many contemporary moral philosophers as possibly the greatest nineteenthcentury writer on ethics would come as a shock to such householders, as would C.D. Broad's estimate of his book The Methods of Ethics as ‘one of the English philosophical classics' and ‘on the whole the best treatise on moral theory that has...

• 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...

• 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...

• 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...

• 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...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Albert the Great

  Albert the Great (1200-80) Albert the Great was the first scholastic interpreter of Aristotle's work in its entirety, as well as being a theologian and preacher. He left an encyclopedic body of work covering all areas of medieval knowledge, both in philosophy (logic, ethics, metaphysics, sciences of nature, meteorology, mineralogy, psychology, anthropology, physiology, biology, natural sciences and zoology) and in theology (biblical commentaries, systematic theology, liturgy and sermons). His ph...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: PLATO'S REPUBLIC

  PLATO'S REPUBLIC Plato relied on the Theory of Ideas not only in the area of logic and metaphysics, but also in the theory of knowledge and in the foundations of morality. To see the many different uses to which he put it in the years of his maturity, we cannot do better than to consider in detail his most famous dialogue, The Republic. The official purpose of the dialogue is to seek a definition of justice, and the thesis which it propounds is that justice is the health of the soul. But that an...

• Kant's Moral Philosophy

  Just as the first Critique set out critically the synthetic a priori principles of theoretical reason, the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) set out critically the synthetic a priori principles of practical reason. This is a brief and eloquent presentation of Kant's moral system. In morals, Kant's starting point is that the only thing which is good without qualification is a good will. Talents, character, self-control, and fortune can be used to bad ends; even happiness can be corrup...

• 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...

• 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...

• Charity

  Charity Within at least some branches of Christianity, the term 'charity' has been used to mean the love mandated by Jesus. In recent theological writings, however, there has been a tendency to replace it with the Greek word agapē. There has been some disagreement in the twentieth century concerning the precise nature and functioning of Christian love, a major catalyst for debate having been Anders Nygren's book Agapē and Eros (1930-6). Numerous scholars have complained that charity does not hav...

• 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...

• “The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.” V.W

  “The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.” V.W This quotation of Virginia whoolf voices women’s struggle over the times, indeed the feminist author is trying to make us realize , the word of the author sheds light upon how women have been treated since the beginning of the humanity. Nowadays, the woman issue has become an important matter in today’s society. Indeed, the women are always being critized,...

• Augustinianism

  Augustinianism The influence of Augustine on Western philosophy is exceeded in duration, extent and variety only by that of Plato and Aristotle. Augustine was an authority not just for the early Middle Ages, when he was often the lone authority, but well into modern times. He was in many ways the principal author in contention during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and in France alone he was variously received by authors as diverse as Montaigne, Descartes, Malebranche, Arnauld and Pasca...

• 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...

• 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...

• 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...

• Rights

  EMPT IN BINGERVILLE S’INSTRUIRE POUR MIEUX SERVIR Union-Discipline-Travail - KOUASSI SERGE-YVAN - KRAH N'DRI - KONÉ MALICK - LEBY AUDE -SÉRIFOU AKEEM -TRAYÉ BALEZIN TEACHER: Mrs KOUAME

• 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 TRANSCENDENTAL ANALYTIC: THE SYSTEM OF PRINCIPLES - KANT

  None the less, Kant's exploration of the principles underlying our judgements is of the highest interest. A priori judgements, we recall, may be analytic or synthetic. The highest principle of analytic judgements is the principle of non-contradiction: a self-contradictory judgement is void, and the mark of an analytic judgement is that the contradiction of it is self-contradictory. But the principle of non-contradiction will not take us beyond the field of analytic propositions: it is a necessar...

• 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 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...

• Ariston of Chios

  Ariston of Chios (early to mid 3rd century BC) The Greek philosopher Ariston (alternatively Aristo), from the Aegean island of Chios, was an exceptionally independent-minded member of the early Stoic school. A pupil of the founder Zeno of Citium, he was among the most prominent philosophers working at Athens in the mid-third century BC. He concentrated on ethics, dismissing logic and physics as irrelevant. Like many contemporary philosophers, including Zeno, Ariston undoubtedly saw his own views...

• 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...

• 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...

• 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...

• 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...

• 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....

• 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...