bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Noninvasive Sweat-Based Diagnosis of Visceral Leishmaniasis and Post Kala-Azar Dermal Leishmaniasis
Authors: Topno Roshan Kamal , Shankar Vikas , Dikhit Manas Ranjan , Madhukar Major , Pandey Krishna , Das V. N. R. , Kumar Maneesh , Kumar Bipin , Agrawal Kanhaiya , Siddiqui Niyamat Ali , Sahoo Ganesh Chandra , Kumar Rishikesh , Singh Ashish Kumar , Kumar Rajeev , Singh Dharmendra , Das Pradeep
Published: September 2018

The diagnosis of visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is one of the foremost barriers in the control of this disease, as demonstration of the parasite by splenic/bone marrow aspiration is relatively difficult and requires expertise and laboratory support. The aim of the present study was to find a noninvasive diagnostic approach using the existing recombinant kinesine-39 (rK-39) immunochromatographic nitrocellulose strips test (ICT) with a human sweat specimen for the diagnosis of VL. The investigation was carried out on specimens (blood, sweat, and urine) collected from 58 confirmed VL, 50 confirmed post kala-azar dermal leishmaniasis (PKDL), 36 healthy control, and 35 patients from other diseases. The data obtained from this study reveal that 96.6% clinically confirmed active VL participants were found to be positive when tested against a sweat specimen. Interestingly, the scenario was similar when tested against a blood specimen (96.6% positive by rK-39). Moreover, a test of both sweats and blood specimens from 50 PKDL participants resulted in 100% positivity, whereas no healthy control participants were found to be rK-39 positive. The sensitivity of the rK-39 ICT in sweat specimen was 94.7%, whereas the specificity was 100% in healthy controls from endemic, nonendemic, and other infectious diseases, respectively. No difference was observed in sweat specimen of VL and PKDL cases which signifies its reliability. However, further evaluation of this method on a larger scale could enhance the reliability of the proposed model so that it could be used efficiently in VL management and eradication.
Beeckman, Isaac (1588–1637)
Authors: Callergård Robert
Published: September 2018

Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637) was a Dutch pioneer of early modern atomist and mechanist speculation. By profession a maker of candles and water supply systems, and later head of various Latin schools, Beeckman devoted a lifetime to studies in natural philosophy, and has received considerable scholarly attention since the rediscovery of his Journal which he kept between 1604 and 1634.

Beeckman’s topics in these studies were the atomist assumption that natural phenomena result from nothing but the motion in empty space of small and hard bits of matter and the mechanist assumption that causal impact in the natural world takes place by way of direct contact of matter with matter. To this revival of ancient schools of atomist thought Beeckman added the principle of inertia, which he formulated independently of Galileo. Beeckman’s approach to the study of physics is a combination of applied mathematics and a preference for explanations that can be displayed visually. Notable among his achievements are his derivation of the law of falling bodies and a proof in acoustics that the length of a sounding string is inversely proportional to the frequency.

Beeckman’s scientific connections included Pierre Gassendi and Marin Mersenne. His most remarkable relation, however, was to Descartes. Their collaboration on the study of free fall is a chapter in the history of pre-Newtonian classical mechanics and their personal relationship a topic for biographers interested in Descartes’ life and the development of his philosophy.
Content: wide and narrow
Authors: Segal Gabriel
Published: September 2018

Debates about wide and narrow content concern the representational contents of psychological states such as beliefs and desires. In the mid-twentieth century, it became common among philosophers to think of the primary kind of content of psychological states as being the things in the world that the states refer to, or as being relations to those things. This kind of referential or extensional content is essentially relational, requiring the subject to stand in some relation to an existing thing outside their skin. Hence the moniker "wide content." This was a radical departure from historically more common views according to which the primary content of psychological states does not depend on the subject standing in some relation to an existing thing outside their skin. That is, traditionally it has been more common to think of psychological content as being "narrow" rather than wide. Narrow content is content that is not wide.

The question of whether verbal or psychological content is sometimes or always wide, narrow, or both is hotly debated among philosophers. As noted above, the middle of the twentieth century saw the ascension of wide theories of content, but by the turn of the millennium there was a resurgence of the narrow theory, particularly among those who hoped to explain the phenomena of consciousness in terms of psychological content. For there is a strong tendency to think that what a subject’s conscious experiences are like for her does not depend on distal facts about the world she inhabits.
Aristotle Commentators
Authors: Sorabji Richard
Published: September 2018

Aristotle’s school treatises were given renewed prominence by Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century bc, and from then on numerous commentaries were written on them. The main modern edition runs to 15,000 pages. They are not just commentaries, but represent the thought and classroom teaching on philosophy quite generally first of the Peripatetic (that is, Aristotelian) school, and then of the Neoplatonists between ad 200 and 600, with further activity from the ninth century in the Islamic world and from the eleventh in the Byzantine. As in the traditions of Islam, India and China, a great deal of original philosophy was done in the form of commentary.
Vernia, Nicoletto (d. 1499)
Authors: Mahoney Edward P.
Published: September 2018

Nicoletto Vernia was a celebrated Aristotelian philosopher during the second half of the fifteenth century. His acquaintances included such personalities as Ermolao Barbaro, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Pietro Pomponazzi and Agostino Nifo. His special interests were in natural philosophy and psychology, but he also revealed interests in logic. Although usually characterized as a rigid Averroist, he moved from a clear commitment to Averroes as the true interpreter of Aristotle to a preference for the Greek commentators, especially Themistius and Simplicius. Nonetheless, throughout his career he also maintained a noteworthy interest in Albert the Great. After first attempting to conciliate Albert with Averroes as much as possible, he later attempted to conciliate Albert with the Greek commentators. He was one of the first Renaissance Aristotelians to use the commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul that is attributed to Simplicius, and also to cite Plato, Plotinus and their translator and expositor, Marsilio Ficino.
Cudworth, Ralph (1617–88)
Authors: Hutton Sarah
Published: September 2018

Ralph Cudworth was the leading philosopher of the group known as the Cambridge Platonists. In his lifetime he published only one work of philosophy, his True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678). This was intended as the first of a series of three volumes dealing with the general topic of liberty and necessity. Two further parts of this project were published posthumously, from the papers he left when he died: A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731) and A Treatise of Freewill (1838).

Cudworth’s so-called Cambridge Platonism is broadly Neoplatonic, but he was receptive to other currents of thought, both ancient and modern. In philosophy he was an antideterminist who strove to defend theism in rational terms, and to establish the certainty of knowledge and the existence of unchangeable moral principles in the face of the challenge of Hobbes and Spinoza. He admired and borrowed from Descartes, but also criticized aspects of Cartesianism.

Cudworth’s starting point is his fundamental belief in the existence of God, conceived as a fully perfect being, infinitely powerful, wise and good. A major part of his True Intellectual System is taken up with the demonstration of the existence of God, largely through consensus gentium (universal consent) arguments and the argument from design. The intellect behind his ‘intellectual system’ is the divine understanding. Mind is antecedent to the world, which is intelligible by virtue of the fact that it bears the stamp of its wise creator. The human mind is capable of knowing the world since it participates in the wisdom of God, whence epistemological certainty derives. The created world is also the best possible world, although not bound by necessity. A central element of Cudworth’s philosophy is his defence of the freedom of will – a meaningful system of morals would be impossible without this freedom. Natural justice and morality are founded in the goodness and justice of God rather than in an arbitrary divine will. The principles of virtue and goodness, like the elements of truth, exist independently of human beings. A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality contains the most fully worked-out epistemology of any of the Cambridge Platonists and constitutes the most important statement of innate-idea epistemology by any British philosopher of the seventeenth century.
Digby, Kenelm (1603–65)
Authors: Mercer Christia
Published: September 2018

Seventeenth-century English Catholic, original member of the Royal Society, and one of the first philosophers to produce a fully developed system of mechanical philosophy, Sir Kenelm Digby cut a dashing figure as a poet, privateer and philosopher. As a Catholic and royalist, he spent much of his life in semi-exile on the continent where he conversed with many of the political and intellectual leaders of his time; as a philosopher, he was favourably compared to René Descartes and John Locke. He attempted to wed the philosophy of Aristotle to the new mechanical physics, which maintained that every event in the material world is reducible to matter in motion. His interests and writings cover a wide range, from religion and magic to vegetative growth and literary commentary. The explicit goal of his most significant book, Two Treatises (1644), was to prove the immortality of the human soul. To this end, the first treatise constitutes an exhaustive study of bodies and their features. By showing that all corporeal qualities are to be explained in strictly material terms, he prepares the way for a thorough discussion of the soul. Digby argues that the soul must be immaterial (and hence immortal) because otherwise its features cannot be explained. He went on to apply the mechanical principles which he developed in this work to a variety of topics, including some traditionally associated with the occult. His works on alchemical, medical and religious topics were also widely read.
Fontenelle, Bernard de (1657–1757)
Authors: Schonfeld Martin
Published: September 2018

Despite his considerable historical importance and vast output of literary, critical and philosophical works, Fontenelle did not make original contributions to philosophy. He popularized a modern view of nature, and raised doubts about institutionalized religions and unexamined theistic beliefs. As a champion of science and secularization, Fontenelle was extremely influential; his Entretiens (Conversations) of 1686 were quickly translated into many languages and became one of the basic texts of the early Enlightenment.
Jungius, Joachim (1587–1657)
Authors: Hafner Ralph
Published: September 2018

Joachim Jungius was one of the most important seventeenth-century reformers of Aristotelian logic. Through critical assessment of Suárez and by recourse to Ramus, Zabarella and Melanchthon, he tried to replace Aristotelian syllogistics with a logic based on empirical judgment. This differed sharply from other contemporary attempts to reform logic in Protestant Europe. Jungius was a pioneer in the development of the modern concept of ‘element’ in chemistry, and made an important contribution to the classification of plants.
Le Grand, Antoine (1629–99)
Authors: Easton Patricia A.
Published: September 2018

Le Grand was the foremost expositor and popularizer of Cartesian philosophy in England during the seventeenth century. He wrote on ethics, politics, logic and numerous scientific topics. His Cartesian system is one of the most complete, emphasizing mind–body dualism and interaction, innate ideas, mechanism and method. His theory of signification is important in the Cartesian debate on ideas.
Régis, Pierre-Sylvain (1632–1707)
Authors: Lennon Thomas M.
Published: September 2018

Régis helped to define and disseminate Cartesianism. He proselytized on its behalf, defended it against its critics and innovators, and wrote the systematic textbook for which Descartes had hoped. Although primarily an expositor of Descartes’ views, he sometimes developed them in creative ways that tended towards empiricism. He seems to have been led in this direction by Robert Desgabets who, while adhering to Descartes’ principles, consciously departed from what Descartes actually said in order to be ‘more Cartesian than Descartes himself’. The same may often be said of Régis.
Henricus Regius (1598–1679)
Authors: Garber Daniel
Published: September 2018

Henricus Regius supported many of Descartes’ doctrines, such as the distinction between mind and body, but disagreed with Descartes’ arguments for that distinction, and rejected metaphysics. Their differences led to a celebrated public dispute which lasted until Descartes’ death.
Rohault, Jacques (1617–72)
Authors: Verbeek Theo
Published: September 2018

Rohault belongs (with Régis and de Cordemoy) to a generation which did much to consolidate the position of Cartesian physics in France. He is particularly famous for his experimental attitude. He contributed to the debate over the physical interpretation of the Eucharist.
Campbell, Archibald (1691–1756)
Authors: Maurer Christian
Published: September 2018

Archibald Campbell was a Scottish moral philosopher and theologian. Like his more famous contemporary Francis Hutcheson, Campbell studied with the controversial theologian John Simson in Glasgow. In his moral philosophy, Campbell vigorously defends an egoistic view of human nature as solely motivated by self-love, and he rejects Hutcheson’s claims about the reality of disinterested benevolence and of a disinterested moral sense. However, much like Hutcheson, Campbell combines his assertion of the selfish hypothesis with an optimism regarding our naturally virtuous tendencies. This opposes Hobbes and Mandeville, as well as orthodox Calvinism.

Campbell presents self-love as a morally innocent source of motives, and claims that in the form of the desire for esteem, it motivates us to morally virtuous actions. In his philosophy of religion, Campbell stresses the incapacity of natural reason to discover the fundamental truths of religion without supernatural revelation. Purportedly against the Deists, Campbell also argues for the reality of immutable moral laws of nature. In 1735/6, these claims, along with others, caused Campbell to be examined by a conservative orthodox Presbyterian Committee for Purity of Doctrine. Campbell’s case allows for crucial insights into the profound transformations of moral philosophy and theology at the dawn of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Blair, Hugh (1718–1800)
Authors: Sher Richard
Published: September 2018

Blair was the foremost literary critic and preacher of the Scottish Enlightenment. He participated in the thriving cultural life of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, and along with William Robertson, Adam Ferguson and other enlightened Moderate party clergymen was a close friend of that city’s greatest philosopher, David Hume.
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de (1707–88)
Authors: Wokler Robert
Published: September 2018

Both as a scientist and as a writer, Buffon was one of the most highly esteemed figures of the European Enlightenment. In depicting the perpetual flux of the dynamic forces of Nature, he portrayed the varieties of animal and vegetable species as subject to continual change, in contrast with Linnaeus, whose system of classification based on physical descriptions alone appeared timeless. But Buffon’s definition of a species in terms of procreative power excluded the evolutionary hypothesis that any species could become transformed into another. Hybrids, as imperfect copies of their prototypes, were in his scheme ultimately destined to become sterile rather than to generate fresh species. By virtue of the same definition, he judged that the different races of mankind formed family members of a single species, since the mating of humans of all varieties was equally fertile.
Carmichael, Gershom (1672–1729)
Authors: Moore James , Silverthorne Michael
Published: September 2018

Gershom Carmichael was a teacher and writer of pivotal importance for the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. He was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, predecessor of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. Carmichael introduced the natural law tradition of Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke to the moral philosophy courses he taught at the University of Glasgow (1694–1729). His commentaries on Samuel Pufendorf’s work on the duty of man and citizen (1718 and 1724) made his teaching available to a wider readership in Great Britain and in Europe. He also composed an introduction to logic, Breviuscula Introductio ad Logicam, (1720 and 1722) and a brief system of natural theology, Synopsis Theologiae Naturalis (1729).
D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond (1717–83)
Authors: Johnson Paul F.
Published: September 2018

Mathematician, scientist and man of letters, Jean D’Alembert is a central figure of the French Enlightenment. As a young man he made significant contributions to the refinement of mathematical techniques, and later was actively engaged in the theoretical controversies which surrounded the gradual assimilation of Newtonian mechanics into the mainstream of European science. For twelve years (1746–58) he was co-editor, with Denis Diderot, of the Encyclopedia, the serial publication of which was one of the defining events of the Enlightenment period as a whole. D’Alembert frequented the various Paris salons where much of the intellectual fervour and high-spiritedness of the age was cultivated and given shape. As Secretary of the French Academy he worked assiduously to advance the cause of human knowledge.

D’Alembert’s philosophy is characterized by an abiding commitment to the clarity and precision which attends mathematical abstraction. He believed that in its essence the natural order is internally structured by laws whose operation can be articulated under the principles of geometry. All natural phenomena are to be explained under the terms of those basic mathematical principles that govern the scientific domain in which they are located (chemistry or astronomy for example), and all scientific domains could be brought ultimately to perfect consistency and systematic order within a comprehensive theory. The events and processes which constitute the natural order reflect the reality of the mathematical structure which underlies them. As he says in the Preliminary Discourse (1751) to the Encyclopedia (1751–65), ‘The universe would only be one fact and one great truth for whoever knew how to embrace it from a single point of view’.
Hamann, Johann Georg (1730–88)
Authors: Beiser Frederick
Published: September 2018

Hamann was one of the most important critics of the German Enlightenment or Aufklärung. He attacked the Aufklärung chiefly because it gave reason undue authority over faith. It misunderstood faith, which consists in an immediate personal experience, inaccessible to reason. The main fallacy of the Aufklärung was hypostasis, the reification of ideas, the artificial abstraction of reason from its social and historical context. Hamann stressed the social and historical dimension of reason, that it must be embodied in society, history and language. He also emphasized the pivotal role of language in the development of reason. The instrument and criterion of reason was language, whose only sanction was tradition and use.

Hamann was a sharp critic of Kant, whose philosophy exemplified all the sins of the Aufklärung. Hamann attacked the critical philosophy for its purification of reason from experience, language and tradition. He also strongly objected to all its dualisms, which seemed arbitrary and artificial. The task of philosophy was to unify all the various functions of the mind, seeing reason, will and feeling as an indivisible whole.

Although he was original and unorthodox, Hamann’s critique of reason should be placed within the tradition of Protestant nominalism. Hamann saw himself as a defender of Luther, whose reputation was on the wane in late eighteenth-century Germany.

Hamann was also a founder of the Sturm und Drang, the late eighteenth-century literary movement which celebrated personal freedom and revolt. His aesthetics defended creative genius and the metaphysical powers of art. It marked a sharp break with the rationalism of the classical tradition and the empiricism of late eighteenth-century aesthetics.

Hamann was a seminal influence upon Herder, Goethe, Jacobi, Friedrich Schlegel and Kierkegaard.
Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826)
Authors: Murphey Murray G.
Published: September 2018

Thomas Jefferson came from a privileged background, began his public career as a lawyer, and rose to hold the governorship of his home state of Virginia and to serve his country successively as minister to France, secretary of state, vice-president and president. His proudest declared achievements were to have been author of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and founder of the University of Virginia. An architect, inventor, scientist, educator and writer, he was one of the most versatile and brilliant men of his generation. In philosophy his main contribution was to political theory, where he supported a social contract theory and a doctrine of natural rights.
Johnson, Samuel (1709–84)
Authors: Porter Roy
Published: September 2018

Famous as a man of letters and lexicographer, Johnson was no formal academic philosopher – indeed he was suspicious of abstractions. His works perfectly embody the darker side of the eighteenth-century mind, with its distrust of theoretical reason and system-mongering, and a profound sensitivity to the imperfections of a human existence in which there was more to be endured than to be enjoyed.
Knutzen, Martin (1713–51)
Authors: Laywine Alison
Published: September 2018

Martin Knutzen was a follower of Christian von Wolff. His work is the result of an effort to reconcile Wolff’s system, more persuasively than Wolff himself had, with common sense, Christian faith and the latest results in the natural sciences. Because Wolff had come under fire from Christian Pietists for apparently trying to resurrect Leibniz’ system of pre-established harmony, thereby possibly flirting with Spinozism and therefore atheism, Knutzen argued from Leibnizian premises that real interaction is at work in the world at large and is constitutive of the mind–body union. Knutzen was Kant’s teacher.
Paley, William (1743–1805)
Authors: Brown Charlotte R.
Published: September 2018

William Paley, theologian and moral philosopher, expressed and codified the views and arguments of orthodox Christianity and the conservative moral and political thought of eighteenth-century England. Paley says that his works form a unified system based on natural religion. Like others during this period, Paley thought that reason alone, unaided by revelation, would establish many Christian theses. He is confident that a scientific understanding of nature will support the claim that God is the author of nature. Paley belongs to the anti-deist tradition that holds that revelation supplements natural religion. The most important revelation is God’s assurance of an afterlife in which the virtuous are rewarded and the vicious are punished. Natural and revealed religion, in turn, provide the foundation for morality. God’s will determines what is right and his power to reward and punish us in the afterlife provide the moral sanctions. On the whole, Paley is concerned with sustaining Christian faith, and ensuring that people known what their duties are and do them.
Smith, Adam (1723–90)
Authors: Haakonssen Knud
Published: September 2018

Despite his reputation as the founder of political economy, Adam Smith was a philosopher who constructed a general system of morals in which political economy was but one part. The philosophical foundation of his system was a Humean theory of imagination that encompassed a distinctive idea of sympathy. Smith saw sympathy as our ability to understand the situation of the other person, a form of knowledge that constitutes the basis for all assessment of the behaviour of others. Our spontaneous tendency to observe others is inevitably turned upon ourselves, and this is Smith’s key to understanding the moral identity of the individual through social interaction. On this basis he suggested a theory of moral judgment and moral virtue in which justice was the key to jurisprudence. Smith developed an original theory of rights as the core of ‘negative’ justice, and a theory of government as, primarily, the upholder of justice. But he maintained the political significance of ‘positive’ virtues in a public, non-governmental sphere. Within this framework he saw a market economy developing as an expression of humanity’s prudent self-interest. Such self-interest was a basic feature of human nature and therefore at work in any form of society; but commercial society was special because it made the pursuit of self-interest compatible with individual liberty; in the market the poor are not personally dependent upon the rich. At the same time, he recognized dangers in commercial society that needed careful institutional and political management. Smith’s basic philosophy is contained in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), but a major part concerning law and government was never completed to Smith’s satisfaction and he burnt the manuscript before he died. Consequently the connection to the Wealth of Nations (1776) can only be partially reconstructed from two sets of students’ notes (1762–3 and 1763–4) from his Lectures on Jurisprudence at Glasgow (Smith [1762–6] 1978). These writings are complemented by a volume of essays and student-notes from lectures on rhetoric and belles-lettres.

Although a philosopher of public life and in some measure a public figure, Adam Smith adhered to the Enlightenment ideal of privacy to a degree rarely achieved by his contemporaries. He left no autobiographical accounts and, given his national and international fame, the surviving correspondence is meagre. The numerous eyewitness reports of him mostly relate particular episodes and individual traits of character. Just as there are only a few portraits of the man’s appearance, there are no extensive accounts of the personality, except Dugald Stewart’s ‘Life of Adam Smith’ (1793), written after Smith’s death and designed to fit Stewart’s eclectic supplementation of common sense philosophy. While Smith was a fairly sociable man, his friendships were few and close only with men who respected his desire for privacy. David Hume was pre-eminent among them.
Stewart, Dugald (1753–1828)
Authors: Madden Edward H.
Published: September 2018

Dugald Stewart was, after Thomas Reid, the most influential figure in the Common Sense School; he was a major influence on Victor Cousin and Théodore Jouffroy in France and on most academic philosophers in the United States. Along with Reid and Cousin, Stewart made the Scottish tradition the dominant philosophy in America for half a century. His Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind and Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man were his most important works and went through a number of printings. The abridged edition of his Active and Moral Powers was reprinted ten times from 1849 to 1868.

Stewart followed Reid in claiming that any philosophy which contravenes the principles of common sense must be false, and the problem is to discover and eliminate the premise which yields such results. He added the requirement that philosophical propositions must not change the meanings of concepts in ordinary life, and he also added a new dimension to Reid’s agency theory. More than any other writer he emphasized correctly the epistemic similarities between Reid and Immanuel Kant, but he followed Reid in avoiding Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena.

Stewart disagreed with Reid in avoiding the phrase ‘principles of common sense’ as misleading, rejected his mentor’s realistic interpretation of universals and provided his own nominalistic alternative. He also modified to some extent, though quite cautiously, Reid’s rigid inductivism and made some concessions to a realistic interpretation of scientific hypotheses. Stewart was equipped to discuss issues in the philosophy of science since he was well versed in mathematics and physics, having been professor of mathematics at Edinburgh for ten years before being named professor of moral philosophy. Stewart was arguably the first and finest philosopher of science in the Scottish tradition.
Bolzano, Bernard (1781–1848)
Authors: Kunne Wolfgang
Published: September 2018

Bernard Bolzano was a lone forerunner both of analytical philosophy and phenomenology. Born in Prague in the year when Kant’s first Critique appeared, he became one of the most acute critics both of Kant and of German Idealism. He died in Prague in the same year in which Frege was born; Frege is philosophically closer to him than any other thinker of the nineteenth or twentieth century. Bolzano was the only outstanding proponent of utilitarianism among German-speaking philosophers, and was a creative mathematician whose name is duly remembered in the annals of this discipline. His Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Science) of 1837 makes him the greatest logician in the period between Leibniz and Frege. The book was sadly neglected by Bolzano’s contemporaries, but rediscovered by Brentano’s pupils: Its ontology of propositions and ideas provided Husserl with much of his ammunition in his fight against psychologism and in support of phenomenology, and through Twardowski it also had an impact on the development of logical semantics in the Lwów-Warsaw School.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834)
Authors: Perkins Mary Anne
Published: September 2018

Although much of Coleridge’s life and his best critical and creative powers were devoted to the attempt to develop a philosophical system, he is less well known as a philosopher than as a romantic poet. This is partly because many of his writings remained unpublished until recent years; they now shed new light on the extent of his knowledge of intellectual history, and on the significance of his philosophical synthesis.

As a young man, Coleridge was attracted by the materialist philosophies and theories of human nature which had become part of the Enlightenment’s ‘Science of Man’. These coincided with his support for the drive towards progress and human brotherhood which he thought inspired the French Revolution. At Cambridge (1791–4) religious doubt accompanied his radical politics and he turned from orthodox Christianity to Unitarianism.

Gradually, however, he became dissatisfied with the ‘mechanistic’ reductive principles of British eighteenth-century thought. His visit to Germany (1798–9) and his subsequent study of German ideas convinced him that here was a spectrum of philosophical insights which was more adequate to the whole of human nature; one through which ‘head and heart’ might be reconciled.

Coleridge’s work reflects his experience of a world subject to violent revolutionary upheavals and his sense of widespread intellectual and moral confusion. Becoming convinced in the early years of the nineteenth century of both the intellectual and spiritual value of Christianity, he sought to re-establish a unity between religious faith and experience and critical philosophy. His ‘ideal Realism’ reconciled elements of Greek and German philosophy with reinterpretations of Judaeo-Christian themes and doctrines, and with the moral lessons he believed history provided. Any sound philosophy must, he insisted, do justice to every aspect of human nature. He declared that he was not concerned to be ‘original’ but to provide a new synthesis, and boldly claimed to have been the first to have ‘attempted to reduce all knowledges into harmony’; although his copious notes intended for an Opus Maximum, the ‘Logosophia’, were never organized into publishable form.
Dühring, Eugen Karl (1833–1921)
Authors: Small Robin
Published: September 2018

Versatile and prolific, Eugen Dühring constructed a metaphysical system uniting naturalism with a priori principles, such as a ‘law of definite number’ which asserts that everything countable must be finite; hence, the natural world must be limited, and past time must have a beginning. Value judgments are based on natural drives and feelings: in particular, the concept of injustice arises from the resentment produced by injury. Since criminal law is ‘a public administration of revenge’, the deterrent function of punishment is irrelevant to its rightness. In politics, Dühring combined his socialism with a fervent racism, chauvinism and anti-Semitism.
Aesthetics, Chinese
Authors: Goldberg Stephen J.
Published: September 2018

In China, poetry, painting and calligraphy are traditionally known as the ‘Three Perfections’ of the cultivated scholar. They are construed as ethico-aesthetic acts of self-signification and are evaluated as to their efficacy in fostering harmonious relations of social exchange within the concrete circumstances of particular social contexts. In contrast to Western notions of mimesis, the Chinese poetic tradition assumes the existence of fundamental, mutually implicating correlations between the patterns (wen) immanent in nature and those of human culture.

This gives rise to two traditions of Chinese poetics. First, there is the canonical tradition of Confucian exegesis, in which a poem was assumed to invoke a network of pre-established categorical correlations (lei) between poet and world, which enabled the imagery to be read as verbal indices of both personal feeling and the relative stability of the social and natural order. Second, there is the non-canonical tradition of neo-Daoist and Buddhist-inspired poetics which represented a shift from the didactic to the affective power of natural imagery to make reference to the poet’s state of mind.

Calligraphy and painting were adopted by the gentleman-scholar as ethico-aesthetic practices of xiushen (self-cultivation) and self-expression, and for promotion of social exchange. Early writings describing calligraphy and painting deploy metaphorical imagery that makes reference to both nature and the body. This imagery invoked the indigenous correlative rhetoric that sought consonance between the patterns immanent within the natural order and those of the human realm. The embodiment of tradition, through the practice of making artistic references to the past, was fundamental to the art of the scholar-painter, for it served to establish one’s artistic lineage and to sanction or authorize one’s own self-presentation within a particular historical situation.
Yin–yang
Authors: Ames Roger T.
Published: September 2018

Yin and yang always describe the relationships that obtain among unique particulars. Originally these terms designated the shady side and the sunny side of a hill, and gradually came to suggest the way in which one thing ‘overshadows’ another in some particular aspect of their relationship. Any comparison between two or more unique particulars on any given topic is necessarily hierarchical: one side is yang and the other is yin. The nature of the opposition captured in this pairing expresses the mutuality, interdependence, hierarchical relationship, diversity and creative efficacy of the dynamic relationships that are immanent in and give value to the world. The full range of difference in the world is deemed explicable through this pairing.
Sunzi
Authors: Ames Roger T.
Published: September 2018

Sunzi: The Art of Warfare (or Sunzi bingfa), a text traditionally ascribed to Sun Wu, a contemporary of Confucius, is the most widely read military classic in human history. Although it provides counsel on military strategy and tactics, it is fundamentally a philosophical text, reflecting a way of thinking and living that is distinctively Chinese. The received text has thirteen ‘core’ chapters, but in 1972 an additional six chapters of the original eighty-two-chapter text was recovered from a Han dynasty tomb. In the same tomb, a text called Sun Bin (or Sun Bin bingfa), ascribed to a later descendent of Sun Wu, was also recovered. This work elaborates on the substance of the Sunzi’s military philosophy.
Literature, Japanese philosophy in modern
Authors: Anderer Paul
Published: September 2018

Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, virtually all major lines of Western thought and the works of both major and minor Western philosophers have been explored and used by Japanese writers in an effort to forge a modern Japanese literature. The history of translation alone reveals a concern to bring over synoptic summaries of Western philosophy, as well as the primary works of specific thinkers. Academic philosophy as a discipline of advanced study was established in the 1880s, the decade which corresponds to the beginnings of widespread literary reform and the often-cited creation of the first modern Japanese novel, Futabatei’s Ukigumo (Floating Cloud) in 1889.

However, Japanese novelists, dramatists, poets and critics did not assimilate philosophical influences naïvely or passively, nor was Japanese literature made over in the shape of specific Western ideas regarding the nature and function of the self, society or literary aesthetics. Indeed, the avid translation and discussion of Western ideas frequently provoked a nativist reaction or modification. The revival of traditional tropes, the language of Confucian ethics, Buddhist practice and Shintō legends), itself often reflects the pervasive presence of Western ideas on the modern literary scene.
Islam, concept of philosophy in
Authors: Leaman Oliver
Published: September 2018

There is no generally accepted definition of what Islamic philosophy is, and the term will be used here to mean the sort of philosophy which arose within the culture of Islam. There are several main strands to Islamic philosophy. Peripatetic philosophy follows broadly the Greek tradition, while Sufism uses the principle of mystical knowledge as its leading idea. Some would argue that Islamic philosophy has never lost its concentration on the Qur’an and other significant Muslim texts, and that throughout its history it has sought to understand the essence of the realities both of the Sacred Book and of the created world. The decline of Peripatetic philosophy in the Islamic world did not mean the decline of philosophy as such, which continued to flourish and develop in other forms. Although it is sometimes argued that philosophy is not a proper activity for Muslims, since they already have a perfect guide to action and knowledge in the Qur’an, there are good reasons for thinking that Islamic philosophy is not intrinsically objectionable on religious grounds.
Aesthetics in Islamic philosophy
Authors: Black Deborah L.
Published: September 2018

The major Islamic philosophers produced no works dedicated to aesthetics, although their writings do address issues that contemporary philosophers might study under that heading. The nature of beauty was addressed by Islamic philosophers in the course of discussions about God and his attributes in relation to his creation, under the inspiration of Neoplatonic sources such as the pseudo-Aristotelian Theology of Aristotle, a compilation based upon the Enneads of Plotinus. Considerations of artistic beauty and creativity were also addressed in works inspired by Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics, and Islamic philosophers also adapted some of Plato’s views on literature and imitation, particularly those expressed in the Republic.

On the whole, Islamic philosophers did not view artistic and literary creativity as ends in themselves. Rather, their interest was in explaining the relations of these activities to purely intellectual ends. In the case of poetics and rhetoric in particular, the emphasis in Islamic philosophy was pragmatic and political: poetics and rhetoric were viewed as instruments for communicating the demonstrated truths of philosophy to the populace, whose intellectual abilities were presumed to be limited. The medium of such communication was usually, although not necessarily, that of religious discourse. Islamic philosophers also devoted considerable attention to explaining the psychological and cognitive foundations of aesthetic judgment and artistic production within the spectrum of human knowledge. They argued that rhetoric and poetics were in some important respects non-intellectual arts, and that poetics in particular was distinctive in so far as it addressed the imaginative faculties of its audience rather than their intellects.
al-Dawani, Jalal al-Din (1426–1502)
Authors: Cooper John
Published: September 2018

Jalal al-Din al-Dawani was a prominent philosopher and theologian from Shiraz, who came to the note of Western scholars through an English translation of his ethical treatise the Akhlaq-e Jalali (Jalalean Ethics), published in 1839. Although the larger part of his work written in Arabic has been little studied, he did write extensively and engaged in a famous and lengthy philosophical dispute with another leading philosopher, Sadr al-Din al-Dashtaki. His metaphysical views were quoted, and refuted, by Mulla Sadra. He emerges as a thinker who combined elements of illuminationist and Peripatetic philosophy (and possibly also interests in Ibn al-‘Arabi) to confront theological, ethical, political and mystical concerns.
Ibn Miskawayh, Ahmad ibn Muhammad (c.940–1030)
Authors: Leaman Oliver
Published: September 2018

Like so many of his contemporaries in the fourth and fifth centuries AH (tenth and eleventh centuries ad) Ibn Miskawayh was eclectic in philosophy, basing his approach upon the rich variety of Greek philosophy that had been translated into Arabic. Although he applied that philosophy to specifically Islamic problems, he rarely used religion to modify philosophy, and so came to be known as very much an Islamic humanist. He represents the tendency in Islamic philosophy to fit Islam into a wider system of rational practices common to all humanity.

Ibn Miskawayh’s Neoplatonism has both a practical and a theoretical side. He provides rules for the preservation of moral health based on a view of the cultivation of character. These describe the ways in which the various parts of the soul can be brought together into harmony, so achieving happiness. It is the role of the moral philosopher to prescribe rules for moral health, just as the doctor prescribes rules for physical health. Moral health is based upon a combination of intellectual development and practical action.
al-Razi, Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya’ (d. 925)
Authors: Walker Paul E.
Published: September 2018

Perhaps the most famous and widely respected Islamic authority on medicine in the medieval period, al-Razi also aspired to a comparable achievement in philosophy and the other sciences such as alchemy. His success in these other subjects, however, was seldom recognized either in his own time or later; in philosophy, for example, more writers cite him for purposes of rejection and refutation than for admiration and emulation. However, his ideas were and are important. Chief among his positive contributions is his advocacy of a doctrine of equal aptitude in all humans, which grants no special role for unique and divinely favoured prophets and which recognizes the possibility of future progress in the advancement of knowledge. Philosophically, al-Razi was by his own admission a disciple of Socrates and Plato, much of whose teaching he knew on the basis of the latter’s Timaeus. Accordingly, he was noted for upholding the eternity of five primary principles, God, soul, time, matter and space, and for a concept of pleasure that sees it as the return to a normal harmony following a serious deviation or disruption which is itself pain.
Shah Wali Allah (Qutb al-Din Ahmad al-Rahim) (1703–62)
Authors: Khan Hafiz A. Ghaffar
Published: September 2018

Shah Wali Allah of Delhi, the greatest Muslim scholar of eighteenth-century India, made an immense contribution to the intellectual, economic, social, political and religious life of the Muslim community in India, the effects of which persist to the present day. He lived during a time when the Muslim empire was losing ground on the Indian subcontinent, with the Muslim community divided and at odds. Seeking to give theological and metaphysical issues a new rational interpretation and labouring to harmonize reason and revelation, he tried to reconcile the various factions of the Indian Muslims, thereby protecting the empire from collapse.

Shah Wali Allah contended that the root cause of the downfall of the Indian Muslims was their ignorance of the sacred scripture of Islam. He initiated a movement with the theme ‘Back to the Qur’an’, and translated the Qur’an into Persian to facilitate its understanding among all the Muslims of India. It is believed to be the first complete translation of the Qur’an from the Arabic by an Indian Muslim scholar.
Saadiah Gaon (fl. early 10th century)
Authors: Goodman L.E.
Published: September 2018

Saadiah Gaon al-Fayyumi was the first systematic philosopher of Judaism and a pioneering exegete, grammarian, lexicographer, liturgist and chronologist. His Kitab al-mukhtar fi ’l-amanat wa-’l-’i‘tiqadat (Book of Critically Chosen Beliefs and Convictions) uses reason, experience and tradition to elaborate a monotheistic theology and pluralistic ethics.

Organized in ten thematic treatises, the work, familiarly known by the title of its Hebrew translation, Sefer Emunot ve-De‘ot (The Book of Beliefs and Convictions), opens with a striking epistemological prelude laying out the sources of knowledge in sense experience, reason and (for the recipients of Scripture) tradition. Saadiah defends sense experience on the grounds that scepticism is self-undermining. He defends reason as the basis of critical and scientific knowledge; and he defends the Jewish sources of traditional learning on the grounds of the continuity and trustworthiness of their transmission. He treats tradition not as an independent source of knowledge but as a means of preserving primary knowledge acquired in the past.

The ten treatises of the work defend creation against alternative cosmological theories, argue for God’s unity and incorporeality, explain the human situation as a trial designed to test and reward human goodness, defend God’s justice and the substantiality and immortality of the soul, affirm the national restoration promised by the prophets of Israel, and lay out the constituents of the good life, which Saadiah argues is undermined by excessive attention to any one of the varied goods available to us. Committed to reason, science, free will and God’s ultimate justice, Saadiah champions the veracity of Scripture using his formidable philological skills and learning to find appropriable interpretations of biblical language whenever the apparent textual sense to be ruled out by reason, science, another text, or a sound tradition. In keeping with the Rabbinical and Biblical outlook, he upholds the value of this life on the grounds that only here are authentic choices possible. Saadiah’s philosophy profoundly influenced Maimonides and later Jewish thinkers; his biblical commentaries are still consulted for their philosophical and philological insights.