bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Aesthetics, in modern philosophy
Authors: Costelloe Timothy M.
Published: September 2018

The term aesthetics is derived linguistically from the Greek term meaning sensitive or sentient. It is first used to designate a particular area of philosophical inquiry in mid-eighteenth-century Germany, though the intellectual origins of the discipline trace to earlier French and British writers, with the latter providing many founding texts of the emerging area of study. The new subject matter was distinguished by its rise coeval with the Continental Enlightenment and a focus on philosophical issues surrounding the fine arts and judgements of value captured by concepts of beauty, sublimity, and their relata.

In France, the seventeenth-century tradition of criticism divides into two strands of thought: one influenced directly by Cartesian rationalism, the other modified by principles drawn from British empiricism. German contributions to aesthetics develop within a rationalist framework derived from Leibnizian philosophy and marked an effort to systematize the newly articulated domain of knowledge. British writers follow primarily empiricist principles but fall into three groups depending on whether they emphasize an internal sense, the faculty of imagination, or psychological processes of association. The British aesthetic tradition is also distinguished by debates over the picturesque, an aesthetic drawn from landscape painting and inseparable from the history of English landscape gardening.
Beattie, James (1735–1803)
Authors: Wood Paul
Published: September 2018

James Beattie was famed as a moralist and poet in the late eighteenth century, and helped to popularize Scottish common-sense philosophy. At Marischal College, Aberdeen, Beattie cultivated a lecturing style which differed significantly from that of his Aberdonian predecessors. Because he believed that the form of abstract analysis characteristic of the science of the mind in his day often led students into the morass of Humean scepticism, Beattie endeavoured to inculcate sound moral and religious principles through the study of ancient and modern literature. Consequently his version of common-sense philosophy diverged from that developed by Thomas Reid. Beattie was more of a practical moralist than an anatomist of the mind, and his treatment of common-sense epistemology lacked the philosophical range and rigour of Reid’s.
Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832)
Authors: Harrison Ross
Published: September 2018

Jeremy Bentham held that all human and political action could be analysed in terms of pleasure and pain, and so made comprehensible. One such analysis is how people actually do behave; according to Bentham, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Another such analysis is of how they ought to behave. For Bentham, this is that they should maximize utility, which for him is the same as producing the greatest happiness of the greatest number, which, again, is the same for him as maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. His chief study was planning how there could be a good system of government and law; that is, how laws could be created so that people being as they actually are (seeking their own pleasure) might nevertheless do what they ought (seek the greatest pleasure of all). The instruments which government use in this task are punishment and reward, inducing action by threats and offers. For Bentham, punishment is done not for the sake of the offender, but to deter other people from doing the same kind of thing. Hence on his theory it is the apparent punishment which does all the good, the real punishment which does all the harm.

Bentham thought that the primary unit of significance was the sentence, not the word. He used this idea to produce profound analyses of the nature of law and legal terms, such as’ right’, ‘duty’ or ‘property’. These are what he calls names of fictions – terms which do not directly correspond to real entities. However, this does not mean that they are meaningless. Instead, meaning can be given to them by translating sentences in which they occur into sentences in which they do not occur. Thus legal rights are understood in terms of legal duties, because sentences involving the former can be understood in terms of sentences involving the latter; these in turn can be analysed in terms of threats of punishment or, again, pleasure and pain. This gives sense to legal rights, but sense cannot be given in the same way to natural rights. For Bentham, we have no natural rights and the rights that we do have, such as property rights, are created by government, whose chief task is to protect them. Bentham also worked out how people could be protected from government itself, designing an elaborate system of constitutional law in which representative democracy was a central element.

Bentham invented the word ‘international’, and when he died he had an international legal and political influence. His chief influence in philosophy has been as the most important historical exponent of a pure form of utilitarianism.
Maine de Biran, Pierre-François (1766–1824)
Authors: Moore F.C.T.
Published: September 2018

Maine de Biran claimed that the starting point for our understanding of human beings lay in introspective psychology: it was the awareness of willed effort. A proper understanding of the will should be the foundation of all work in psychology, including empirical psychology, as well as in the human sciences in general, which should work together towards a coordinated ‘anthropology’. Contrary to the assumptions of associationist psychology, mental facts were essentially relational, and language was a constitutive feature of them, rather than being a secondary device intended to represent them. But conscious mental life arose from and was influenced by a subconscious underlayer which could be studied only by the joint use of physiological and introspective methods. Biran rejected the view that mental states can be reduced to, or are nothing other than, physical states. There was a partial ‘symbolic’ correspondence between them, which meant that physical accounts and mental accounts could not be translated into each other without loss. Later in his life, though still maintaining the belief that psychology was primary, he held that it was necessary to accommodate questions of metaphysics, morality and religion. He published very little during his lifetime, and many of the ‘works’ found in editions are (sometimes conjectural) editorial restitutions made from a jumbled mass of much corrected manuscripts. His failure to complete a single work on what the eighteenth century had called the ‘Science of Man’ (which he said was the greatest interest of his entire life) reflects the times: this eighteenth-century project was fragmenting into the multiplicity of human sciences which were emerging as the nineteenth century came. But his insistence on the primacy of the will remains a major challenge for the human sciences of today.
Campbell, George (1719–96)
Authors: Suderman Jeffrey M.
Published: September 2018

George Campbell, Scottish minister, professor and religious thinker, is now remembered primarily for The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776). Here he employed the Scottish Enlightenment’s developing science of human nature to explain the effectiveness of the classical rules of rhetoric. He did this by relating the various ends of persuasive discourse to the natural faculties and propensities of the human mind. In his own time Campbell was better known as a religious apologist, using an enlightened theory of evidence in A Dissertation on Miracles (1762) to defend the believability of Christian miracles against the sceptical attack of David Hume.
Common Sense School
Authors: Madden Edward H.
Published: September 2018

The term ‘Common Sense School’ refers to the works of Thomas Reid and to the tradition of Scottish realist philosophy for which Reid’s works were the main source. The ideas of the school were carried abroad – to France; and to the USA, where they were highly influential, particularly among leading academics critical of Calvinism. Interest in Reid and the tradition to which he gave rise was revived almost a century later by leading American philosophers and their students.
Common Sense School
Authors: Wood Paul
Published: September 2018

The school of common sense philosophy originated in the mid-1730s in Aberdeen in the circle of clergymen and academics associated with Thomas Reid. During the 1750s and 1760s the details of the philosophy of common sense were developed by Reid, Alexander Gerard and George Campbell, largely in response to the irreligious implications of Hume’s writings. Their ideas subsequently served as the starting point for the different formulations of common sense philosophy published by James Beattie and James Oswald. Beattie, Oswald and Reid were widely attacked in the 1770s and 1780s for their appeals to common sense, most notably by Joseph Priestley and Immanuel Kant. These attacks prompted Dugald Stewart to reformulate the appeal to common sense principles in the 1790s. However, Stewart’s version of common sense philosophy found little support in Scotland and the school effectively disappeared with his death in 1828.
Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de (1743–94)
Authors: Williams David
Published: September 2018

The Marquis de Condorcet belongs to the second generation of eighteenth-century French philosophes. He was by training and inclination a mathematician, and his work marks a major stage in the development of what is known today as the social sciences. He was held in high regard by contemporaries for his contributions to probability theory, and he published a number of seminal treatises on the theory and application of probabilism. He is best known today for the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795), his monumental, secularized historical analysis of the dynamics of man’s progress from the primitive state of nature to modernity.

Condorcet’s principal aim was to establish a science of man that would be as concise and certain in its methods and results as the natural and physical sciences. For Condorcet there could be no true basis to science without the model of mathematics, and there was no branch of human knowledge to which the mathematical approach was not relevant. He called the application of mathematics to human behaviour and organization ‘social arithmetic’.

The central epistemological assumption, upon which his philosophy was based, was that the truths of observation, whether in the context of the physical or the moral and social sciences, were nothing more than probabilities, but that their varying degrees of certainty could be measured by means of the calculus of probabilities. Condorcet was thus able, through mathematical logic, to counteract the negative implications of Pyrrhonic scepticism for the notions of truth and progress, the calculus providing not only the link between the different orders of knowledge but also the way out of the Pyrrhonic trap by demonstrating man’s capacity and freedom to understand and direct the march of progress in a rationally-ordered way.

In his Esquisse Condorcet set out to record not only the history of man’s progress through nine ‘epochs’, from the presocial state of nature to the societies of modern Europe, but in the tenth ‘epoch’ of this work he also held out the promise of continuing progress in the future. He saw the gradual emancipation of human society and the achievement of human happiness as the consequence of man having been endowed by nature with the capacity to learn from experience and of the cumulative, beneficial effects of the growth of knowledge and enlightenment. Condorcet’s Esquisse laid the basis for the positivism of the nineteenth century, and had a particularly significant impact on the work of Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte.
Encyclopedists, 18th-century
Authors: Mason John Hope
Published: September 2018

The Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers was published in seventeen folio volumes (about 20 million words) between 1751 and 1765, accompanied by eleven volumes of engravings (1762–72). Its chief editor was Diderot, with D’Alembert acting as co-editor for the first seven volumes. The work was an expression of the Enlightenment belief in improvement through knowledge.
Enlightenment, Continental
Authors: Wokler Robert
Published: September 2018

The Enlightenment is frequently portrayed as a campaign on behalf of freedom and reason as against dogmatic faith and its sectarian and barbarous consequences in the history of Western civilization. Many commentators who subscribe to this view find the Enlightenment’s cosmopolitan opposition to priestly theology to be dangerously intolerant itself, too committed to uniform ideals of individual self-reliance without regard to community or diversity, or to recasting human nature in the light of science. Modern debates about the nature of the Enlightenment have their roots in eighteenth-century controversies about the arts and sciences and about ideas of progress and reason and the political consequences of promoting them. Even when they shared common objectives, eighteenth-century philosophers were seldom in agreement on substantive issues in epistemology or politics. If they were united at all, it was by virtue only of their collective scepticism in rejecting the universalist pretensions of uncritical theology and in expressing humanitarian revulsion at crimes committed in the name of sacred truth.
Enlightenment, Scottish
Authors: Berry Christopher J.
Published: September 2018

This term refers to the intellectual movement in Scotland in roughly the second half of the eighteenth century. As a movement it included many theorists – the best known of whom are David Hume, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid – who maintained both institutional and personal links with each other. It was not narrowly philosophical, although in the Common Sense School it did develop its own distinctive body of argument. Its most characteristic feature was the development of a wide-ranging social theory that included pioneering ‘sociological’ works by Adam Ferguson and John Millar, socio-cultural history by Henry Home (Lord Kames) and William Robertson as well as Hume’s Essays (1777) and Smith’s classic ‘economics’ text The Wealth of Nations (1776). All these works shared a commitment to ‘scientific’ causal explanation and sought, from the premise of the uniformity of human nature, to establish a history of social institutions in which the notion of a mode of subsistence played a key organising role. Typically of the Enlightenment as a whole this explanatory endeavour was not divorced from explicit evaluation. Though not uncritical of their own commercial society, the Scots were in no doubt as to the superiority of their own age compared to what had gone before.
Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe (1651–1715)
Authors: Riley Patrick
Published: September 2018

Fénelon is best-known for his utopian political novel Aventures de Télémaque fils d’Ulysse (Telemachus, Son of Ulysses) (1699), which contrasts the rustic simplicity of Greek antiquity with the corrupt luxuriousness of Louis XIV’s Versailles. The crucial philosophical works of Fénelon are the Refutation of Malebranche (c.1686–7) and the Maxims of the Saints (1697).
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814)
Authors: Breazeale Daniel
Published: September 2018

Fichte developed Kant’s Critical philosophy into a system of his own, which he named ‘Theory of Science’ or Wissenschaftslehre. Though Fichte continued to revise this system until the end of his life, almost all of his best known and most influential philosophical works were written in first portion of his career, when he was a professor at the University of Jena.

The task of philosophy, as understood by Fichte, is to provide a transcendental explanation of ordinary consciousness and of everyday experience, from the standpoint of which philosophy must therefore abstract. Such an explanation can start either with the concept of free subjectivity (‘the I’) or with that of pure objectivity (the ‘thing in itself’), the former being the principle of idealism and the latter that of what Fichte called ‘dogmatism’ (or transcendental realism). Though neither of these first principles can be theoretically demonstrated, the principle of freedom possesses the advantage of being practically or morally certain. Moreover, according to Fichte, only transcendental idealism, which begins with the principle of subjective freedom and then proceeds to derive objectivity and limitation as conditions for the possibility of any selfhood whatsoever, can actually accomplish the task of philosophy.

One of the distinctive features of Fichte’s Jena system is its thoroughgoing integration of theoretical and practical reason, that is, its demonstration that there can be no (theoretical) cognition without (practical) striving, and vice versa. Another important feature is Fichte’s demonstration of the necessary finitude of all actual selfhood. The ‘absolute I’ with which the system seems to begin turns out to be only a practical ideal of total self-determination, an ideal toward which the finite I continuously strives but can never achieve. Also emphasized in Fichte’s Jena writings is the social or intersubjective character of all selfhood: an I is an I only in relationship to other finite rational subjects. This insight provides the basis for Fichte’s political philosophy or ‘theory of right’, which is one of the more original portions of the overall system of the Wissenschaftslehre, a system that also includes a foundational portion (or ‘first philosophy’), a philosophy of nature, an ethics and a philosophy of religion.
Franklin, Benjamin (1709–90)
Authors: Murphey Murray G.
Published: September 2018

Benjamin Franklin was a candlemaker’s son who became a successful businessman, politician, diplomat, scientist, philosopher, writer, and social reformer. He played a major role in winning American independence and in American intellectual history. In philosophy Franklin was a deist, and struggled much with problems of morality and determinism.
Gerdil, Giancinto Sigismondo (1718–1802)
Authors: Riley Patrick
Published: September 2018

A lifelong member of the Barnabite religious order, Gerdil became well-known as the most eminent Italian disciple of Malebranche (and critic of Locke); in 1764 he published a critique of Émile (1762) which Rousseau himself called the only attack worth reading in its entirety. Only extreme old age kept Cardinal Gerdil from being elected Pope at Venice in 1798.
Godwin, William (1756–1836)
Authors: Philp Mark
Published: September 2018

William Godwin is considered the founder of philosophical anarchism. His An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) contends that although government is a corrupt force in society, perpetuating dependence and ignorance, it will increasingly be rendered impotent by the gradual spread of knowledge. Politics will be displaced by an enlarged morality as truth conquers error and mind subordinates matter. He predicts the end to cooperative activities (which restrain individual freedom), the abandonment of marriage and private property, and increasing longevity and ultimate immortality.

Godwin’s moral theory is often described as utilitarian, but he understands pleasure to be inseparable from the development of truth and wisdom through the full and free exercise of private judgment and public discussion. As such, his position is better understood as perfectionist.
Hartley, David (1705–1757)
Authors: Allen Richard C.
Published: September 2018

David Hartley’s Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749) offers an inclusive study of human beings, one that brings together neuro-physiology, cognitive and moral psychology, and theology. According to Hartley, the ‘frame’ of body and brain grounds consciousness, so that mind is not something separate from body. Experiences of happiness and suffering combine to shape a person’s evolving sense of self, and this self may grow into awareness of our duty to act always out of love. Expectations of one’s place in the vastness of time help bring this growth about, for these put into perspective the pleasures and pains of the present moment.

‘Association’ is the central principle unifying Hartley’s Observations on Man At the end of the first volume, Hartley makes a bold statement: if an organism ‘could be endued with the most simple kinds of sensation, [it] might also arrive at all that intelligence of which the human mind is possessed’ (17949, vol. 1: Conclusion). Just as association can account for the ‘mind’ of a jellyfish, so also can the theory account for the forms of intelligence that go into living complete human lives. Association first names the physiological processes that generate ideas, and then the psychological processes by which perceptions, emotions, and thoughts fuse or break apart. These processes involve mastering the skilled (‘decomplex’) actions that fill our daily lives, as well as the acts by which the self forms and transforms, as we grow in sympathy, ‘theopathy’ and the moral sense.
Helvétius, Claude-Adrien (1715–71)
Authors: Hulliung Mark
Published: September 2018

Helvétius was one of the most noteworthy and notorious figures of the French Enlightenment. In common with his fellow philosophes, he asserted that all philosophical discussions should be based on the empiricism of Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (1689). But unlike Voltaire, d’Alembert, and the other members of ‘the party of humanity’, Helvétius took literally the notion that each person is a tabula rasa at birth – he boldly argued the case for unabashed environmental determinism. We are what our surroundings have made us, and nothing more.

Immediately after Helvétius published De l’Esprit in 1758, the Catholic authorities cited his book as definitive proof that the philosophes were out to destroy religion, throne, family, and all that is sacred. Only the struggle between court and parliament over control of censorship, along with his ties to Madame de Pompadour and the Duc de Choiseul, saved Helvétius. After suffering the indignity of three recantations, he decided upon posthumous publication of his second major work, De l’Homme (1773).

Not a single philosophe accepted Helvétius’ view that the mind is a completely passive recipient of data received through the senses; nor did any of his comrades second his constantly reiterated claim that all sensibility may be reduced to physical sensations. Some privately expressed their exasperation that Helvétius published so much that seemed to vindicate every charge the Church lodged against them: that they were materialists, advocates of free love, and champions of a scandalous hedonism. Nevertheless at least a few of the philosophes, after setting aside the philosophical suppositions of De l’Esprit, came to appreciate that the larger concern of Helvétius was with their own search for the social and political preconditions of an independent intelligentsia, the would-be agents of Enlightenment.
Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803)
Authors: Beiser Frederick
Published: September 2018

Herder was a central figure in the German intellectual renaissance of the late eighteenth century. His achievement spanned virtually every domain of philosophy, and his influence, especially upon Romanticism and German idealism, was immense. In social and political philosophy he played a prominent role in the development of historicism and nationalism. In metaphysics he developed the doctrine of vitalist pantheism, which later became important for Goethe, Schelling and Hegel. In the philosophy of mind he formulated an organic theory of the mind-body relationship, which was crucial for Schelling and Hegel. And in aesthetics he was among the first to defend the value of ethnic poetry and the need for the internal and historical understanding of a text.

Herder’s main aim was to extend the powers of naturalistic explanation to the realm of culture, so that characteristic human activities, such as art, religion, law and language, could be included within the scientific worldview. But he also wanted to avoid reductivistic forms of explanation that viewed such activities as nothing more than matter-in-motion or stimulus-response mechanisms. He insisted that explanation in the cultural sphere had to be holistic and internal as well as mechanical and external. An action had to be understood in its historical context and according to the intention of the agent and not simply as another instance of a causal regularity between events. Herder’s programme, then, was to develop naturalistic yet non-reductivistic explanations for the realm of culture. He attempted to realize this programme in many spheres, especially language, history, religion and the mind.
Illuminati
Authors: Jacob Margaret C.
Published: September 2018

Begun in 1776 in Bavaria, the Illuminati were an overtly political as well as morally orientated secret organization that imitated the forms of freemasonry. While masonic lodges forbade discussion of politics and religion at their meetings, the Illuminati did the reverse. They were openly yet paradoxically secret about their irreligion and their devotion to the radical French Enlightenment; and they wanted reform in the absolutist states of Central Europe. The authorities arrested and persecuted them, but their activism foreshadows the French Revolution and a desire for more representative systems of government in Continental Europe. Despite the notoriety of the Illuminati, no more than about 600 members have been identified.
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1743–1819)
Authors: di Giovanni George
Published: September 2018

Polemicist and literary figure, Jacobi was an outspoken and effective defender of individualism. He accused philosophers of conceptualizing existence according to the requirements of explanation, thus allowing no room for individual freedom or for a personal God. In a series of polemics that influenced the reception of Kant, Jacobi applied his formula, ‘Consistent philosophy is Spinozist, hence pantheist, fatalist and atheist’, first to Enlightenment philosophy and then to idealism. Jacobi was not however opposed to reason; in ‘faith’ and ‘feeling’ he sought to recover the intuitive power of reason philosophers ignored.

Jacobi also criticized the literary movement spearheaded by the young Goethe, because of its latent fatalism. He dramatized in two novels the problem of reconciling individualism with social obligations. An exponent of British economic and political liberalism, Jacobi was an early critic of the French revolution which he considered the product of rationalism.
Home, Henry (Lord Kames) (1696–1782)
Authors: Emerson Roger L.
Published: September 2018

Henry Home (better known as Lord Kames, his title as a Scottish judge of the Courts of Session and Justiciary) was an important promoter of and contributor to the Scottish Enlightenment. His philosophy was a search for causes which could serve as the bases of policies to improve most aspects of Scottish life and thought. His writings, like his involvements in clubs, government bodies and improving economic activities, were all means to enlightened and improving ends. Kames was perhaps the most typical thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment, uniting interests in philosophy, science, belles lettres, history, education and practical improvements of every sort.
Lambert, Johann Heinrich (1728–77)
Authors: Zoller Gunter
Published: September 2018

Lambert was a German mathematician, physicist, astronomer and philosopher, who was among the leading figures of German intellectual life in the late eighteenth century. As a practising scientist, who made important discoveries in many areas, Lambert was interested in philosophical questions regarding the methods of scientific knowledge. In his philosophical works he sought to reform metaphysics by subjecting it to the procedures and standards of mathematics, advocating a combination of conceptual analysis and deductive construction in philosophy. With Lambert the tradition of German rationalist thought reaches directly into the time of Kant, who had great esteem for his analytic skills.
Law, William (1686–1761)
Authors: Stanwood Paul G.
Published: September 2018

William Law is popularly known for a single devotional work, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), but was the author of seventeen other treatises concerned with many of the philosophical and theological issues of the earlier eighteenth century in England. Early on he embraced the thought of Nicolas Malebranche, and later the mystical philosophy of Jakob Boehme. Law’s methodology is an awkward mixture of these influences, for he wanted to find reason in the ‘creaturely Spirit’ of the natural life (The Spirit of Love, 1752). He seems finally to have abandoned reason in favour of Boehme’s ‘metaphysical scheme’, which enables him to discover meaning and coherence in a post-Enlightenment world.
La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de (1709–51)
Authors: Wellman Kathleen
Published: September 2018

La Mettrie is best known as the author of the eighteenth-century materialist manifesto, L’Homme machine (1747). His interest in philosophical issues grew out of his preoccupation with medicine, and he developed a tradition of medical materialism within the French Enlightenment. Born in St Malo, into the family of a prosperous textile merchant, La Mettrie pursued a medical career in Paris. He also studied for two years with the renowned Hermann Boerhaave in Leiden. After a brief period of medical practice, La Mettrie devoted his efforts to his translations and commentaries on Boerhaave’s medical works. He also began to publish the works that made him a pariah to both the Faculty of Medicine of Paris and to the orthodox – that is, his medical satires and his first work of materialist philosophy, L’Histoire naturelle de l’âme (1745). Because of the outrage provoked by these works, he was exiled to Holland in 1745. But L’Homme machine, the text in which he applied his materialism thoroughly and explicitly to human beings, was too radical even for the unusually tolerant Dutch, and La Mettrie was forced to seek asylum at the court of Frederick the Great where he later died. His willingness to publish ideas his contemporaries considered too dangerous led the philosophes to repudiate him.
Oswald, James (1703–93)
Authors: Stewart M.A.
Published: September 2018

James Oswald, Scottish theological writer, used the philosophy of ‘common sense’ to try to found religious and moral conviction on principles that were impervious to scepticism. In a long running controversy over Church discipline, he defended the right of individual parishes to choose their ministers, seeing the prevailing system of patronage as favouring the advocates of a fashionable kind of civility that was too tolerant of scepticism and intellectual innovation, and too indifferent to the Church’s traditional concerns with public and private morality. Though never part of the Aberdeen philosophical community, Oswald corresponded with Reid, and late in life collaborated with him in charitable work for the sons of clergy.
Priestley, Joseph (1733–1804)
Authors: Schofield Robert E.
Published: September 2018

A major figure of the British Enlightenment, Joseph Priestley is best known as a scientist and for his discovery of oxygen, though he was by profession a theologian, and also wrote on politics and education – more, indeed, than on science or metaphysics. His philosophical speculations were generally brought to support his theological arguments and were usually structured in a rhetorical rather than in a formal, systematic mode. He was a Unitarian in theology, an associationist, determinist and monist, with a curiously spiritualized materialism dependent, in part at least, on his scientific studies.
Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772)
Authors: Laywine Alison
Published: September 2018

Swedenborg was an eighteenth-century Swedish dignitary of considerable learning who believed that he had the power to communicate with spirits and angels and that these beings would help him fulfil the task allotted to him by God, namely to reveal the hidden meaning of Scripture and to usher in the new Church. His thought attracted the critical attention of no less a figure than Immanuel Kant.
Tucker, Abraham (1705–74)
Authors: McNair T.
Published: September 2018

Like many of his eighteenth-century British contemporaries, Abraham Tucker was an empiricist follower of John Locke. Tucker held that the mind begins as a blank slate and remains nothing more than a passive receptacle for ‘trains’ of ideas with ‘a motion of their own’. In his moral philosophy Tucker proposed that the motive of all our actions is the prospect of our own satisfaction, and that the maximization of everyone’s satisfaction is the ultimate moral good. (The latter view became a central tenet of the utilitarians who followed him.) According to Tucker, God ensures that our self-interested motivation will be congruent with morality, for God has arranged that we will be rewarded for good and punished for evil – either in this world or in the next. Among those most influenced by his work was the utilitarian and philosophical theologian William Paley.
Turnbull, George (1698–1748)
Authors: Wood Paul
Published: September 2018

George Turnbull was an early champion of the use of empirical methods in the moral sciences. Involved in contemporary religious debate, he favoured religious toleration and the use of rational argument in defence of Christian belief. He also made contributions to educational theory and practice.
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) (1694–1778)
Authors: Williams David
Published: September 2018

Voltaire remains the most celebrated representative of the reformers and free-thinkers whose writings define the movement of ideas in eighteenth-century France known as the Enlightenment. He was not, however, a systematic philosopher with an original, coherently argued world-view, but a philosophe who translated, interpreted and vulgarized the work of other philosophers. His own writings on philosophical matters were deeply influenced by English empiricism and deism. His thought is marked by a pragmatic rationalism that led him, even in his early years, to view the world of speculative theorizing with a scepticism that was often expressed most effectively in his short stories. As a young man, Voltaire was particularly interested in Locke and Newton, and it was largely through his publications in the 1730s and 1740s that knowledge of Lockean epistemology and Newtonian cosmology entered France and eventually ensured the eclipse of Cartesianism.

After his stay in England Voltaire became interested in philosophical optimism, and his thinking reflected closely Newton’s view of a divinely ordered human condition, to which Alexander Pope gave powerful poetic expression in the Essay on Man (1733–4). This was reinforced for the young Voltaire by Leibnizian optimism, which offered the view that the material world, being necessarily the perfect creation of an omnipotent and beneficent God, was the ‘best of all possible worlds’, that is to say the form of creation chosen by God as being that in which the optimum amount of good could be enjoyed at the cost of the least amount of evil.

Voltaire’s later dissatisfaction with optimistic theory brought with it a similar loss of faith in the notion of a meaningful order of nature, and his earlier acceptance of the reality of human freedom of decision-taking and action was replaced after 1748 with a growing conviction that such freedom was illusory. The 1750s witness Voltaire’s final abandonment of optimism and providentialism in favour of a more deterministically orientated position in which a much bleaker view of human life and destiny predominates. Pessimistic fatalism was a temporary phase in his thinking, however, and was replaced in turn by a melioristic view in which he asserted the possibilities of limited human action in the face of a hostile and godless condition.
Alexander, Samuel (1859–1938)
Authors: Emmet Dorothy
Published: September 2018

Alexander propounded a metaphysical system based on a view of Space-Time differentiated into ‘motions’ from which new qualities emerged at certain levels of organization; matter, life and mind being those qualities so far realized. Space-Time is a process with a ‘nisus’ (that is, an internal drive) towards a quality, as yet unrealized, called ‘Deity’.
Boutroux, Émile (1845–1921)
Authors: Gil Didier
Published: September 2018

The French philosopher Émile Boutroux wanted to reestablish metaphysics in the face of a growing tendency towards materialism, but without rejecting the natural sciences. He hoped to achieve this by showing that only an immaterial mind that is a free and final cause of everything that is determined can give an absolute foundation to the sciences and to nature. Scientific determinism, according to which all phenomena are governed by mathematical necessities, is not incompatible with freedom. Indeed, the contingency of things and of human reason, which one sees in scientific experience, shows that the mind is free; it is therefore only mind which can give a determined existence to things and necessity to scientific explanations. In trying to reconcile metaphysics and science through a philosophy of nature, Boutroux represents a major turning point in French spiritualism, foreshadowing not only Bergson but also Bachelard.
Bradley, Francis Herbert (1846–1924)
Authors: Candlish Stewart
Published: September 2018

Bradley was the most famous and philosophically the most influential of the British Idealists, who had a marked impact on British philosophy in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. They looked for inspiration less to their British predecessors than to Kant and Hegel, though Bradley owed as much to lesser German philosophers such as R.H. Lotze, J.F. Herbart and C. Sigwart.

Bradley is most famous for his metaphysics. He argued that our ordinary conceptions of the world conceal contradictions. His radical alternative can be summarized as a combination of monism (that is, reality is one, there are no real separate things) and absolute idealism (that is, reality is idea, or consists of experience – but not the experience of any one individual, for this is forbidden by the monism). This metaphysics is said to have influenced the poetry of T.S. Eliot. But he also made notable contributions to philosophy of history, to ethics and to the philosophy of logic, especially of a critical kind. His critique of hedonism – the view that the goal of morality is the maximization of pleasure – is still one of the best available. Some of his views on logic, for instance, that the grammatical subject of a sentence may not be what the sentence is really about, became standard through their acceptance by Bertrand Russell, an acceptance which survived Russell’s repudiation of idealist logic and metaphysics around the turn of the century. Russell’s and G.E. Moore’s subsequent disparaging attacks on Bradley’s views signalled the return to dominance in England of pluralist (that is, non-monist) doctrines in the tradition of Hume and J.S. Mill, and, perhaps even more significantly, the replacement in philosophy of Bradley’s richly metaphorical literary style and of his confidence in the metaphysician’s right to adjudicate on the ultimate truth with something more like plain speaking and a renewed deference to science and mathematics.

Bradley’s contemporary reputation was that of the greatest English philosopher of his generation. This status did not long survive his death, and the relative dearth of serious discussion of his work until more general interest revived in the 1970s has meant that the incidental textbook references to some of his most characteristic and significant views, for example, on relations and on truth, are often based on hostile and misleading caricatures.
Brentano, Franz Clemens (1838–1917)
Authors: Chisholm Roderick M. , Simons Peter
Published: September 2018

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 scholastic concept of intentionality into philosophy and proclaiming it as the characteristic mark of the mental. His teachings, especially those on what he called descriptive psychology, influenced the phenomenological movement in the twentieth century, but because of his concern for precise statement and his sensitivity to the dangers of the undisciplined use of philosophical language, his work also bears affinities to analytic philosophy. His anti-speculative conception of philosophy as a rigorous discipline was furthered by his many brilliant students. Late in life Brentano’s philosophy radically changed: he advocated a sparse ontology of physical and mental things (reism), coupled with a linguistic fictionalism stating that all language purportedly referring to non-things can be replaced by language referring only to things.
Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881)
Authors: Le quesne A.L.
Published: September 2018

Although widely influential as a historian, moralist and social critic, Carlyle has no real claim to be considered a philosopher. He does have some importance as one of the transmitters of the ideas of the German Idealists, such as Kant and Fichte, to Britain, and as one of the chief British spokesmen for the Romantic exaltation of the imagination above the understanding; but his grasp of philosophical issues is vague. His later writings are dominated by the idea, derived from his childhood Calvinism, of a divine justice working in history through the medium of great men (‘heroes’) who are its conscious or unconscious instruments.
Cieszkowski, August von (1814–94)
Authors: Stepelevich Lawrence S.
Published: September 2018

Cieszkowski is perhaps best known for being the first to revise Hegel’s philosophy of history into a basis for future social reform. His introduction of the idea of ‘praxis’ as a synthesis between abstract theory and undirected practice was fundamental in the development of the Young Hegelian school, which formed shortly after Hegel’s death and sought the radical transformation of all then-existing political, religious and economic orders.
Cournot, Antoine Augustin (1801–77)
Authors: Mounce H.O.
Published: September 2018

Cournot is best known for his work in applying mathematical techniques to economic and social affairs and is generally acknowledged to be the founder of econometrics. His work in philosophy, however, is at least as distinguished. His philosophy may be seen as a meditation on continuity and discontinuity, on law and brute empirical fact, which is unassimilable to law. Empiricism is exclusively preoccupied with the latter phenomenon, rationalism with the former. Cournot affirmed the reality of both. His philosophy thus mediates between empiricism (which, when it is consistent, leads on his view to scepticism) and rationalism (which, when it is consistent, loses contact with reality).

Continuity is real because the world is not a chaos; it is a network of events, forming various series, which reveal necessary and determinable relations. But discontinuity is also real, for the order we discern in the various events is not a single order. The series are independent and the points where they intersect cannot be predicted from within the series themselves. Brute contingency is therefore as real as law. Consequently, though the world may be known, it can never be reduced to a single scheme.
Du Bois-Reymond, Emil (1818–96)
Authors: Robinson Daniel N.
Published: September 2018

Emil du Bois-Reymond conducted pioneering research in electrophysiology which established him as a major figure in German science in the second half of the nineteenth century. His influence extended further through his more general writings in politics and philosophy of science, in which he argued for theoretical restraint and for the recognition that certain problems (for example, the mind–body problem) fell beyond scientific modes of inquiry and explanation.
Eliot, George (1819–80)
Authors: Beer John
Published: September 2018

George Eliot is the pseudonym of the English writer Mary Ann Evans, whose mind was strongly influenced by the main philosophical currents of the time and who made a distinctive contribution of her own through her critical essays and fiction.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82)
Authors: Goodman Russell B.
Published: September 2018

The American philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson developed a philosophy of flux or transitions in which the active human self plays a central role. At the core of his thought was a hierarchy of value or existence, and an unlimited aspiration for personal and social progress. ‘Man is the dwarf of himself’, he wrote in his first book Nature (1836). Emerson presented a dire portrait of humankind’s condition: ‘Men in the world of today are bugs or spawn, and are called "the mass" and "the herd"’. We are governed by moods which ‘do not believe in one another’, by necessities real or only imagined, but also, Emerson held, by opportunities for ‘untaught sallies of the spirit’ – those few real moments of life which may nevertheless alter the whole.

Emerson’s lectures drew large audiences throughout America and in England, and his works were widely read in his own time. He influenced the German philosophical tradition through Nietzsche – whose The Gay Science carries an epigraph from ‘History’ – and the Anglo-American tradition via William James and John Dewey. Emerson’s major works are essays, each with its own structure, but his sentences and paragraphs often stand on their own as expressions of his thought.
Fries, Jacob Friedrich (1773–1843)
Authors: Wood Allen W.
Published: September 2018

Fries was a German post-Kantian philosopher, active chiefly in Jena and Heidelberg. He was a personal as well as a philosophical enemy of Hegel. Fries’ version of Kantian philosophy opposed the speculative idealism of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, developing an ‘anthropological critique of reason’. Fries also emphasized subjectivity in ethics and religion. In politics he was a republican and a German nationalist. For his participation in the Wartburg Festival of 1817 (a gathering of radical student fraternities), Fries was removed from his professorship at Jena in 1820, but restored in 1824. He wrote both scholarly and popular treatises on metaphysics, logic, ethics and politics, as well as mathematics and natural science. His continuing influence early in this century was mediated chiefly by the Göttingen Neo-Kantian Leonard Nelson and by Rudolf Otto’s theory of religious experience.
Gioberti, Vincenzo (1801–52)
Authors: Piccinini Mario
Published: September 2018

The work of Vincenzo Gioberti was a life-long attempt to reconnect philosophy and Christianity, and tradition and progress, within the political turmoil of early nineteenth-century Italy and the rise of new philosophies of history. His critique of subjectivism led him to propose a Neoplatonic scheme (epitomized in what he called the ‘ideal formula’), which finds its root in an original intuition of being. From this intuition he deduced that the Being as the creator is God. But reflective judgment is not mere contemplation: as thinking and creating are the same in God (God is ‘the first philosopher’), so thinking and acting are the same in man, as an image of God. History and civilization are the continuation of the creative process in which the return of existence to being leads duality to unity again, although it keeps the ontological gap of creatural relationship.