bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Schurman, Anna Maria van (1607–78)
Authors: O'Neill Eileen
Published: September 2018

The first woman to attend a Dutch university, Schurman studied ancient languages and theology. Her Latin treatise on the expedience of scholarship for women made this ‘Star of Utrecht’ the most famous female intellectual in seventeenth-century Europe. She was among the few women to publish views on Counter-Reformation controversies concerning predestination and transubstantiation. Her autobiography served as an apology for the Pietist sect, Labadism.
Suchon, Gabrielle (1631–1703)
Authors: Le doeuff Michele
Published: September 2018

Seventeenth-century rationalist feminist philosopher and author of two books dealing with many moral, social and political issues, Suchon advocated liberty, knowledge, authority and the possibility of an unmarried life for women. In this she did not employ any ready-made philosophy but created her own. Freedom and knowledge are everyone’s natural rights, understood as rights that get their strength from themselves only and are to be observed everywhere alike.
Aristotelianism in the 17th century
Authors: Ariew Roger
Published: September 2018

Aristotelians in the seventeenth century comprised a group of mostly anonymous textbook writers whose chief claim to fame is that their philosophy was opposed by such as Descartes and Galileo. In line with the characterization of them by their opponents, their philosophy has generally been depicted as extremely conservative, monolithic and moribund. However, it is difficult to ratify such judgments. As Aristotelians, these philosophers do not seem particularly conservative; they appear to have assimilated many of the scientific developments of the seventeenth century, and the diversity and range of their views is quite broad. Some of the doctrines peculiar to them, or their particular developments of older views, can be seen as the background against which modern philosophy developed.
Substance, mode, and accident in modern philosophy
Authors: Silverman Alex
Published: September 2018

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries inherited, and were witness to, the decline of the metaphysics of substance, mode, and accident of the Aristotelian tradition. The causes of this decline can be gleaned from an investigation of various puzzles which arose during the period, and of the ways in which different philosophers reacted to these puzzles.

One such puzzle concerns independence. A substance is meant to be something that exists independently – but what meets this standard, other than God? Another puzzle concerns identity. A substance is meant to be something which in some sense supports (etymologically, stands under) its modes or accidents – but how can we penetrate to the nature, or identity, of the substance itself? A third puzzle concerns unity. A substance is meant to be unified in a way that a heap of stones is not – but what qualifies as a genuine unity?

The puzzles were initially raised by those, such as Descartes and Locke, who did not intend for them to radically modify our understanding of substance, mode, and accident. But radical changes followed shortly thereafter nonetheless. Spinoza maintained that God or Nature is the only substance, all other things being mere modes of God. Conway, Leibniz, and Berkeley argued that the world is fundamentally spiritual or mind-like. And eventually, Hume and Kant questioned whether the notions of substance, mode, and accident were, in some sense, unavoidably problematic.

As an investigation of this debate reveals, theories of substance, mode, and accident were intertwined with many other enduring philosophical themes, including the nature of reality, the mind–body relation, and the limits of human knowledge.
Alison, Archibald (1757–1839)
Authors: Townsend Dabney
Published: September 2018

Archibald Alison was born in Edinburgh but was educated at Balliol and ordained in the Church of England. He returned to Edinburgh in 1800 as an Anglican clergyman and served there until his death. His published works included collections of sermons, but he is best known for his Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste. This work was published in 1790, the same year as Immanuel Kant’s third Critique; but it became popular only after a second edition appeared in 1811.
Bonnet, Charles (1720–93)
Authors: Moore F.C.T.
Published: September 2018

In his youth, Bonnet made a meticulous and creative study of insects, which won him international fame for his discoveries, as well as his methods. He turned to psychology and offered a detailed, but speculative, account of the physiology of mental states. His empirical work was overtaken by speculative ambition. In later life, he developed (from elements already present in his early studies) a comprehensive view of the universe, of its history and its natural history, of theology and of moral philosophy. Christianity was proved, the great chain of being was mapped over time towards an ultimate perfection, and human morality, based on self-love, formed part of the Creator’s scheme. The Creator, at the moment of creation, brought into being all the elements from which this vast unfolding would occur, without further intervention.
Brown, Thomas (1778–1820)
Authors: Bryant Christopher
Published: September 2018

Thomas Brown was the last prominent figure in the Scottish philosophical tradition deriving from David Hume and Thomas Reid. Like Reid, he took the mind’s knowledge about itself to be a datum it is pointless to challenge or try to justify, since no other grounds can be more certain for us. But he defended Hume’s account of causation as nothing more than invariable succession. The mind, therefore, is a simple substance, whose successive states are affected by and affect the states of physical objects: the laws according to which these changes take place are no harder to grasp than the effects of gravitation. Brown’s lectures, published as delivered daily to Edinburgh students, seek to classify the laws of the mind so that we can conveniently understand ourselves, and direct our lives accordingly; the last quarter of his course draws conclusions for ethics and natural religion.
Burke, Edmund (1729–97)
Authors: Hampsher-monk Iain
Published: September 2018

Edmund Burke’s philosophical importance lies in two fields, aesthetics and political theory. His early work on aesthetics, the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), explored the experiential sources of these two, as he claimed, fundamental responses, relating them respectively to terror at the fear of death and to the love of society.

Active in politics from 1759, and Member of Parliament from 1765, he wrote and delivered a number of famous political pamphlets and speeches, on party in politics – Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents (1770), on the crisis with the American colonies – On Conciliation with America (1775), on financial reform and on the reform of British India – Speech on Mr Fox’s East India Bill (1783). While clearly informed by a reflective political mind, these are, however, pièces d’occasion, not political philosophy, and their party political provenance has rendered them suspect to many commentators.

His most powerful and philosophically influential works were written in opposition to the ideas of the French Revolution, in particular Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which has come to be seen as a definitive articulation of anglophone political conservatism. Here Burke considered the sources and desirability of social continuity, locating these in a suspicion of abstract reason, a disposition to follow custom, and certain institutions – hereditary monarchy, inheritance of property, and social corporations such as an established Church. His Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) insisted on the distinction between the French and Britain’s revolution of 1688; while his final works, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795), urged an uncompromising crusade on behalf of European Christian civilization against its atheist, Jacobin antithesis.
Butler, Joseph (1692–1752)
Authors: Frey R.G.
Published: September 2018

Joseph Butler the moral philosopher is in that long line of eighteenth-century thinkers who sought to answer Thomas Hobbes on human nature and moral motivation. Following the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, he rejects any purely egoistic conception of these. Instead, he analyses human nature into parts, of which he notices in detail appetites, affections, and passions on the one hand and the principles of self-love, benevolence and conscience on the other. His ethics consists in the main in showing the relation of these parts to each other. They form a hierarchy, ordered in terms of their natural authority, and while such authority can be usurped, as when the particular passions overwhelm self-love and conscience, the system that they constitute, or human nature, is rightly proportioned when each part occupies its rightful place in the ordered hierarchy. Virtue consists in acting in accordance with that ordered, rightly proportioned nature.

As a philosopher of religion, Butler addresses himself critically to the eighteenth-century flowering of deism in Britain. On the whole, the deists allowed that God the Creator existed but rejected the doctrines of natural and, especially, revealed religion. Butler’s central tactic against them is to argue, first, that the central theses associated with natural religion, such as a future life, are probable; and second, that the central theses associated with revealed religion, such as miracles, are as probable as those of natural religion. Much turns, therefore, on the success of Butler’s case in appealing to what is present in this world as evidence for a future life.
Du Châtelet-Lomont, Gabrielle-Émilie (1706–49)
Authors: Walters Robert L.
Published: September 2018

The name of this aristocratic woman, a true intellectual with a passion for mathematics, philosophy and science, is linked to that of Voltaire, whose life and interests she shared for fifteen years. In the rural retreat of Cirey they studied, disagreed, wrote and published. She was introduced to Newtonian science by Maupertuis and Voltaire but departed from their views, when she tried to combine Leibnizian metaphysics with Newton’s empirically based science in her Institutions de physique (1740). She translated Newton’s Principia from Latin into French and added a commentary on the system of the world (1745–9, published 1756).
Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de (1715–80)
Authors: Johnson Paul F.
Published: September 2018

One of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment period, Condillac is the author of three highly influential books, published between 1746 and 1754, in which he attempted to refine and expand the empirical method of inquiry so as to make it applicable to a broader range of studies than hitherto. In the half-century following the publication of Newton’s Principia Mathematica in 1687, intellectual life in Europe had been engaged upon a fierce debate between the partisans of Cartesian physics, who accepted Descartes’ principles of metaphysical dualism and God’s veracity as the hallmark of scientific truth, and those who accepted Newton’s demonstration that the natural order constituted a single system under laws which could be known through painstaking observation and experiment. By the mid-eighteenth century Newton had gained the ascendancy, and it was the guiding inspiration of the French thinkers, known collectively as the philosophes, to appropriate the methods by which Newton had achieved his awesome results and apply them across a broader range of inquiries in the hope of attaining a similar expansion of human knowledge. Condillac was at the centre of this campaign.

Condillac’s first book, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), bears the subtitle A Supplement to Mr. Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding. While Condillac is usually seen as merely a disciple and popularizer of Locke offering little of any genuine originality, and while he did indeed agree with Locke that experience is the sole source of human knowledge, he attempted to improve on Locke by arguing that sensation alone – and not sensation together with reflection – provided the foundation for knowledge. His most famous book, the Treatise on the Sensations (1754) is based upon the thought-experiment of a statue whose senses are activated one by one, beginning with the sense of smell, with the intention of showing how all the higher cognitive faculties of the mind can be shown to derive from the notice the mind takes of the primitive inputs of the sense organs. Condillac also went beyond Locke in his carefully argued claims regarding the extent to which language affects the growth and reliability of knowledge. His Treatise on Systems (1749) offers a detailed critique of how language had beguiled the great seventeenth-century systems-builders like Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza and led them into erroneous conceptions of the mind and human knowledge, the influence of which conceptions was as insidious as it was difficult to eradicate.
Diderot, Denis (1713–84)
Authors: Wokler Robert
Published: September 2018

Chief editor of the great eighteenth-century Encyclopédie (1751–72), Diderot set out a philosophy of the arts and sciences which took the progress of civilization to be a measure of mankind’s moral improvement. He did not regard that progress as having produced universal benefits, however, and perceived the Christian religion which had accompanied it as morally harmful to those who subscribed to it and even more dangerous to societies thus far untouched by it. Religious dogmas tended to pervert the organic development of human passions, and secular education which presumed that all minds were equally receptive to instruction threatened to thwart the natural evolution of human faculties in other ways.

Like Rousseau, Diderot subscribed to a philosophy of education which encouraged curiosity rather than promoted truth. He stressed the need for the adaptability of moral rules to the physiological characteristics of the individuals to whom they applied, pointing to a connection between human cultures and biology in a manner that would influence fresh outlooks upon the sciences of man at the end of the Age of Enlightenment.
Enlightenment, Scottish
Authors: Wood Paul
Published: September 2018

Rooted in the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment was a branch of the Moderate Enlightenment that dominated the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. Enlightenment in Scotland crystallized c.1690 and was the creation of three groups: the virtuosi led by Sir Robert Sibbald, clergymen in the Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches who promoted religious moderation and modern learning, and the first generation of Scottish Newtonians. All three helped to remodel Scotland’s five universities and, by the 1720s, Scottish academics were in the vanguard of Enlightenment across Europe In the 1730s Francis Hutcheson's work on moral theory and aesthetics gave a new impetus to Scottish philosophy. Later, during the heyday of the Scottish Enlightenment c.1745-c.1783, David Hume transformed the study of the science of man through his writings on the anatomy of the mind, politics, economics, history and religion. But because Hume’s work was regarded as irreligious, he was denied an academic post in 1745 and attempts to have him excommunicated from the Church of Scotland in the mid-1750s gained broad support.Hume’s irreligious scepticism provided the stimulus for the rise of Thomas Reid’s school of common sense philosophy, which to some extent revivified Scottish intellectual life from the 1760s onwards. Nevertheless, the Scottish Enlightenment went into decline c.1783 and, by the time of Dugald Stewart’s death in 1828, had largely faded from view.
Ferguson, Adam (1723–1815)
Authors: Kettler David
Published: September 2018

Rarely mentioned by philosophers except as companion of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson contributed a political consciousness to the moral philosophy of eighteenth-century Scotland. In An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Ferguson used a comparative method to reflect on a commercial society distinguished by refined division of labour and to caution against its political dangers. With his intentionally elevated rhetoric he sought to counter his philosophical contemporaries’ analytical aloofness from the negative effects of the civility, commerce, security and critical philosophy they prized. Ferguson’s textbooks and Roman history deserve philosophical attention for their help with interpreting his distinctive social diagnosis of the liberal political constitution.
Gerard, Alexander (1728–95)
Authors: Townsend Dabney
Published: September 2018

Alexander Gerard was Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic (1752) and Professor of Divinity (1759) at Marischal College, and Professor of Divinity (1773) at King’s College, Aberdeen. A leading member of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, he wrote a new plan of education for Marischal College as well as works on divinity. He is best known, however, for his Essay on Taste (1759). In 1774, he returned to the subject with An Essay on Genius. Gerard was associated with Thomas Reid (1710–96) in the Philosophical Society until Reid’s transfer to Glasgow in 1764. The work of David Hume (1711–76) was a principal influence.
Hartley, David (1705–1757)
Authors: Porter Roy
Published: September 2018

David Hartley commands a distinctive place in Enlightenment thinking for his attempt to establish an empiricist epistemology upon a foundation of ontological materialism – in other words, a philosophy of mind that incorporates a physiology of the brain. He also set forth an optimistic vision of human progress which was nonetheless cast within the framework of a transcendental theology. Though his views might seem to be a singular fusion of disparate strands, they nevertheless epitomized much liberal and advanced English thinking of the time, and exercised considerable influence upon the philosophical radicalism of subsequent generations.
Monboddo, Lord (James Burnett) (1714–99)
Authors: Wokler Robert
Published: September 2018

In speculating that orang-utans’ vocal organs must have been designed for speech, Monboddo was convinced that these creatures were primitive humans who had not yet entered society. His chief contribution to the history of linguistics and anthropology turns upon two propositions: that language is not natural to man, and that close physical resemblance between species is evidence of biological relation.
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat (1689–1755)
Authors: Hulliung Mark
Published: September 2018

Montesquieu, one of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment, was famous in his own century both in France and in foreign lands, from Russia to the American colonies. Later generations of French philosophes took for granted his concern to reform the criminal laws, to replace the Inquisition with a reign of tolerance, and to repudiate the vicious conquests of the Spaniards in the Americas. They also accepted his finding that Protestant, commercial, and constitutionalist England and Holland represented all the best possibilities of Europe; whereas Catholic, economically backward, and politically absolutist Portugal and Spain represented the worst of the Western world and constituted a warning to the French.

Although the findings and specific reforms proposed by Montesquieu were repeated by many another figure of the French Enlightenment, his work in certain respects remained unique in the circles of the most advanced thinkers. In his efforts to think systematically about politics and to do so by employing the comparative method, he stands virtually alone in his age. Other thinkers sharing his commitments resorted to the universalizing language of natural rights when they ventured into the realm of political philosophy. Or, like Voltaire, they tied their thoughts about politics to a succession of specific issues, each essay bearing so indelibly the imprint of specific time and place that there was no room for theory in their writings. Finally, as is true of Diderot or D’Alembert, many of the philosophes were slow to recognize what Montesquieu knew from the outset, that if Enlightenment does not extend to politics it is futile.

Steeped in Montaigne’s scepticism, Montesquieu found that in the absence of absolutes there were good reasons to appreciate the ‘more than/less than’ and ‘better than/worse than’ judgments of comparative analysis. In his notebooks he commented that the flaw of most philosophers had been to ignore that the terms beautiful, good, noble, grand, and perfect are ‘relative to the beings who use them’. Only one absolute existed for Montesquieu and that was the evil of despotism, which must be avoided at all costs.

Montesquieu wrote three great works, each teaching lessons about despotism and freedom,The Persian Letters (1721), the Considerations of the Grandeur of the Romans and the Cause of Their Decline (1734), and The Spirit of the Laws (1748).
Paine, Thomas (1737–1809)
Authors: Kuklick Bruce
Published: September 2018

Thomas Paine, born in Norfolk, England, spent his early years as an undistinguished artisan and later excise officer. In 1774 he emigrated to America and settled in Philadelphia where he became a journalist and essayist. His Common Sense (1776) and sixteen essays on The Crisis (1776–83) were stunning examples of political propaganda and theorizing. In the late 1780s, in Europe, Paine wrote The Rights of Man (1791–2) and attacked the English political system. During the French Revolution he was a Girondin in the French Convention and wrote The Age of Reason (1794, 1796), savagely criticizing Christianity. He died in New York in 1809, an important figure in the sweep of the revolutionary politics in America, England, and France at the end of the eighteenth century.
Price, Richard (1723–91)
Authors: Darwall Stephen
Published: September 2018

Richard Price was a Welsh dissenting minister who contributed widely to philosophy and public life in latter-eighteenth-century Britain. The leading British ethical rationalist of the period, Price did much to establish intuitionistic and deontological traditions in ethics. He put forward searching criticisms of alternative empiricist conceptions, arguing that they could not account for morality’s necessity and that they lacked an adequate theory of moral agency. More constructively, he argued that, contrary to the empiricists, all knowledge depends on the contribution of reason, and that rationalistic moral knowledge is no more problematic in principle than ordinary empirical knowledge. He also articulated a normative ethics of integrity that stressed the duty diligently to search out moral truth and then to act on the truth as one sees it.

As a political philosopher, Price made fundamental contributions through his doctrine of liberty as self-determination. The moral duty individuals have to determine themselves by their best moral judgment, Price believed, ultimately grounds the values of political liberty, independence, and democracy as well. Price’s radicalism on these scores earned him the famous opposition of Edmund Burke. Nor was Price’s sponsorship of these ideas simply theoretical. He was an important friend of the American Revolution, and his pamphlets analysing and defending it were taken seriously by proponents and opponents alike.

Price also did important work on the mathematical theory of probability and in proposing and instituting various social and economic reforms and practices upon its basis. He was instrumental in making Thomas Bayes’ ideas about probability accessible to the learned world, and in making use of these and other probabilistic theories in developing insurance, self-help, and other financial schemes.
Tetens, Johann Nicolaus (1736–1807)
Authors: Zoller Gunter
Published: September 2018

Tetens was a German philosopher, mathematician and physicist, with a second career as a Danish government official, who was active in Northern Germany and Denmark during the second half of the eighteenth century. Together with Johann Heinrich Lambert and Moses Mendelssohn, Tetens forms the transition from the German school philosophy of Leibniz, Wolff and Crusius to the new, critical philosophy of Kant. Tetens’ philosophical work reflects the combined influence of contemporary German, British and French philosophical currents. His main contribution to philosophy is a detailed descriptive account of the principal operations of the human mind that combines psychological, epistemological and metaphysical considerations. While showing a strong empiricist leaning, Tetens rejected the associationist and materialist accounts of the mind, favoured in Britain and France, and insisted on the active, spontaneous role of the mind in the formation and processing of mental contents.
Witherspoon, John (1723–94)
Authors: Fechner R.J.
Published: September 2018

John Witherspoon, Scottish-American clergyman, political leader and educator, was born at Gifford, East Lothian, educated at Edinburgh University and ordained Presbyterian minister. In his mid-forties he went to America as president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University. He held political office for New Jersey and played a major role in organizing the Presbyterian Church in America and improving the College at Princeton. Witherspoon was representative of eighteenth-century Scottish and American Calvinists who tried to reconcile their orthodox theological doctrines with the Enlightenment’s philosophical currents of empiricism, scepticism, and utilitarianism by harmonizing reason and revelation. Although Witherspoon was a philosophical eclectic, Francis Hutcheson’s moral sense philosophy was the major source of his utilitarian ethics and republican politics. Witherspoon was not an original thinker, but his popularization of Scottish common sense and moral sense philosophy through his forceful personality and effective teaching laid the foundation for its dominance of nineteenth-century American academic philosophy.
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (1742–99)
Authors: Zoller Gunter
Published: September 2018

Lichtenberg was a German mathematician, physicist and astronomer, a highly successful university teacher in the field of experimental physics and a prolific writer of essays on scientific and cultural issues. He was one of the leading public figures of the German late Enlightenment, much admired for his satirical and witty style. Today he is known chiefly for his posthumously published notebooks. In thousands of entries, ranging from a single word to several pages, Lichtenberg recorded observations and thoughts about himself and the world. Only a fraction of those entries belong to the tradition of aphoristic writing developed after Lichtenberg and under his influence. A good proportion of the entries are of philosophical interest. Through the radical form as well as content of the notebooks Lichtenberg has become a contemporary to generations of his philosophical readers.
Boole, George (1815–64)
Authors: Hailperin Theodore
Published: September 2018

George Boole, a British mathematician, is credited with making a fundamental contribution to modern logic. If Leibniz’s manuscript essays on logic, effectively unknown until the end of the nineteenth century, are excluded, then Boole’s algebra of logic (1847, 1854) was the first successful mathematical treatment of one part of logic. The treatment was mathematical in the broad sense of using a formal language expressed in symbols with definite rules. It was also mathematical in a narrow sense of being closely modelled after numerical algebra, from which it differed by an additional axiom, x2=x. Letter symbols of this algebra were conceived as representing classes, 1 standing for a ‘universe’ of objects and 0 for the empty class. By identifying logical terms with their extensions, that is, with classes, inferences of a much more general character than those of the traditional syllogistic could be carried out. Boole also showed how this algebra could be used in propositional logic, presenting its earliest systematic general formulation.
Cousin, Victor (1792–1867)
Authors: Leopold David
Published: September 2018

French philosopher, educationalist and historian, Victor Cousin is primarily associated with ‘Eclecticism’ and the history of philosophy, but his work also includes contributions to aesthetics, philosophy of history and political theory. He was a prolific writer and editor, and a significant figure in the development of philosophy as a professional discipline in France.
De Morgan, Augustus (1806–71)
Authors: Merrill Daniel D.
Published: September 2018

Augustus De Morgan was an important British mathematician and logician. Much of his logical work was directed to expanding the traditional syllogistic theory, and to meeting the objections of Sir William Hamilton and his allies to the techniques he used. More important for the future of logic, though, was De Morgan’s work in two areas: the logic of complex (compound) terms, in which he essentially developed the theory of Boolean algebra, and his introduction of the logic of relations as a serious topic for formal logic. His work on probability logic, while flawed, was also significant.
Fechner, Gustav Theodor (1801–87)
Authors: Robinson Daniel N.
Published: September 2018

Fechner was a pioneer in experimental psychology and the founder of psychophysics, the speciality within psychology devoted to quantitative studies of perception. In his foundational Elemente der Psychophysik (Elements of Psychophysics) (1860), he defined the mission of the new science to be the development of an ‘exact theory of the functionally dependent relations of… the physical and the psychological worlds’. It is in this work that Fechner developed the law of sensation-magnitudes (Fechner’s Law): the strength of a sensation is proportional to the logarithmic value of the intensity of the stimulus. Among his contemporaries he was well known not only for basic research in the field of electricity, but also as the author of a number of satirical works under the name ‘Dr Mises’.
Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas (1804–72)
Authors: Sass Hans-Martin
Published: September 2018

Ludwig Feuerbach, one of the critical Young Hegelian intellectuals of the nineteenth century, has become famous for his radical critique of religious belief. In Das Wesen des Christentums (Essence of Christianity) (1841) he develops the idea that God does not exist in reality but as a human projection only, and that the Christian principles of love and solidarity should be applied directly to fellow humans rather than being regarded as an indirect reflection of God’s love. In religion, the believer ‘projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object of an object, another being than himself’. Religious orientation is an illusion and is unhealthy, as it deprives and alienates the believer from true autonomy, virtue and community, ‘for even love, in itself the deepest, truest emotion, becomes by means of religiousness merely ostensible, illusory, since religious love gives itself to man only for God’s sake, so that it is given only in appearance to man, but in reality to God’ (Feuerbach 1841: 44, 48). In Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Principles of the Philosophy of the Future) (1843) he extends his criticism to all forms of metaphysics and religion: ‘True Dialectics is not the Monologue of the sole Thinker, rather the Dialogue between I and Thou’, he writes in paragraph 62 (1846–66 II: 345), criticizing in particular his former teacher Hegel. The philosophy of the future has to be both sensual and communal, equally based on theory and practice and among individuals. In an anonymous encyclopedia article (1847) he defines his position: ‘the principle from which Feuerbach derives everything and towards which he targets everything is "the human being on the ground and foundation of nature"’, a principle which ‘bases truth on sensuous experience and thus replaces previous particular and abstract philosophical and religious principles’ (1964– III: 331). Feuerbach’s sensualism and communalism had great influence on the young Karl Marx’s development of an anthropological humanism, and on his contemporaries in providing a cultural and moral system of reference for humanism outside of religious orientation and rationalistic psychology. In the twentieth century, Feuerbach influenced existential theology (Martin Buber, Karl Barth) as well as existentialist and phenomenological thought.
Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich (1834–1919)
Authors: Weindling Paul
Published: September 2018

Haeckel was the leading German Darwinist. His evolutionary philosophy of monism differed substantially from the views of Darwin or of British evolutionary philosophers such as Herbert Spencer or the dualist T.H. Huxley. Haeckel’s monism asserted the unity of physical and organic nature, and included mental processes and social phenomena. Its initial form was mechanistic, seeking to reduce vital processes to physicochemical laws and substances. However, his efforts to construct the history of life meant that Haeckel became preoccupied with historical processes. In its final form, his monism was pantheistic. Although Haeckel has been regarded as a forerunner of national socialism, a contextual reading of his works does not support this interpretation.
Herbart, Johann Friedrich (1776–1841)
Authors: Langewand Alfred
Published: September 2018

From 1798, Herbart developed a ‘realistic’ alternative to the idealistic philosophy of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. His theoretical philosophy, which centres around metaphysics and psychology, is sharply critical of the idealistic concept of subjectivity. His practical philosophy rests on ethics and educational theory, each of which presumes the existence of the other.
Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1767–1835)
Authors: Beiser Frederick
Published: September 2018

Along with Schiller and Goethe, Humboldt was one of the chief representatives of Weimar classicism, a movement that aspired to revive German culture along the lines of ancient Greece. Humboldt’s philosophical significance resides mainly in two areas: political theory and the philosophy of language. In political theory he was one of the founders of modern liberalism; and in the philosophy of language, he was among the first to stress the importance of language for thought, and of culture for language.
Lotze, Rudolph Hermann (1817–81)
Authors: Sullivan David
Published: September 2018

Lotze was among the pre-eminent figures in German academic philosophy between the demise of Absolute Idealism and the rise of Neo-Kantianism proper. He sought to avoid two extremes: first, that of an idealism which seeks to deduce the world from a single, general principle; and, second, that of a realism which, by divorcing reality from the mind, splits the world into two utterly separate spheres. The search for knowledge should be tempered by a recognition of the results of natural science and sobered by the awareness that reality will, by necessity, always outstrip thought. Furthermore, our mental life cannot be reduced to purely intellectual functions: feelings and evaluations, for example, are also an integral part of human existence. While there can be no a priori deduction of a metaphysical system, a teleological interpretation, which elucidates the ultimate value of man and the world, must supplement purely naturalistic explanation. The universe has the significance of an unfolding plan, where things are subject to the general laws of order, expressing spiritual import. In this way, Lotze combined a kind of respect for the findings of scientific research with his own peculiar idealistic programme.
Martineau, Harriet (1802–76)
Authors: Webb R.K.
Published: September 2018

Harriet Martineau has been called the first woman sociologist and the first woman journalist in England, both better claims on the attention of posterity than her mostly derivative philosophical writings. Yet she is a revealing – and was in her own time widely influential – instance of the survival of eighteenth-century determinism and materialism. Although she eventually rejected the Unitarianism in which she had been brought up, the Necessarian philosophy she drew from it merged easily into her mature positivism. Her abridged translation (1853) of the Cours de philosophie positive was the first introduction of this seminal work by Auguste Comte to English-speaking readers.
Meinong, Alexius (1853–1920)
Authors: Simons Peter
Published: September 2018

Meinong was an Austrian philosopher and psychologist who taught at the University of Graz. He contributed substantially to psychology, epistemology, value theory, ethics and probability theory, but is best known for his theory of objects, in which he advocates the radical view that there are objects which are wholly outside being, including impossible objects. Meinong influenced Russell and the American ‘new realists’. Though widely rejected, his views have proved difficult to refute decisively and he has found sympathetic support from a number of logicians and philosophers.
Newman, John Henry (1801–90)
Authors: Ker Ian
Published: September 2018

John Henry Newman was the principal architect of the Catholic revival (the Oxford or Tractarian movement) within the Church of England in the 1830s, and went on to become probably the most seminal of modern Roman Catholic thinkers. Although primarily a theologian, Newman regarded his defence of religious belief in terms of a philosophical justification of non-demonstrable certainty as his most important life work.
Oken, Lorenz (1779–1851)
Authors: Gower Barry
Published: September 2018

In the early nineteenth century, Oken was one of several German scientists who developed views about the metaphysical presuppositions of science, promoted by Kant and especially by Schelling in order to forge links between their scientific investigations and the prevailing Romantic style of thought. Oken’s particular concern was with biology, where he introduced bold taxonomic principles drawing on analogies with mathematical polarities and with our sensory and emotional capacities.
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809–65)
Authors: Vernon Richard
Published: September 2018

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French social theorist, political activist and journalist. Claiming to be the first person to adopt the label ‘anarchist’, he developed a vision of a cooperative society conducting its affairs by just exchanges and without political authority. In his lifetime he exercised considerable influence over both militants and theorists of the European left, and he is remembered today as one of the greatest exponents of libertarian socialism. His last writings, though still strongly libertarian, advocated a federal state with minimal functions.
Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772–1829)
Authors: Beiser Frederick
Published: September 2018

Schlegel was the major aesthetician of the Romantic movement in Germany during its first formative period (1797–1802). In these years he developed his influential concepts of Romantic poetry and irony, created an original approach to literary criticism and edited the journal of the early Romantic circle, Athenäum. Along with F. von Hardenberg (Novalis),F.W.J. Schelling and F.D.E. Schleiermacher, he was also a guiding spirit in the development of a Romantic metaphysics, ethics and politics. His metaphysics attempted to synthesize Fichte’s idealism and Spinoza’s naturalism. His ethics preached radical individualism and love against the abstract formalism of Kant’s ethics. In his early politics Schlegel was very radical, defending the right of revolution and democracy against Kant. In his later years, however, he became much more conservative. His final works are a defence of his neo-Catholic mysticism.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst (1768–1834)
Authors: Meckenstock Gunter
Published: September 2018

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was the most notable German-speaking protestant theologian of the nineteenth century. He gave significant impetus to the re-orientation of theology after the Age of Enlightenment (see his speeches Über die Religion (On Religion) (1799), and also Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study) (1811a)) and he enjoyed a wide audience in Berlin both as preacher and Professor of Theology and Philosophy. Throughout his life he was a fervent advocate of the union between the Lutheran and the Reformed Church established in the so-called Old Prussian Union, and his compendium Der christliche Glaube (The Christian Faith) (1821, 1822) is held to be the first dogmatics transcending the denominational boundaries between the Reformation Churches. His translation of Plato attained the status of a classic. In his university lectures and academic speeches on philosophy he made a profound and lasting impression on his audience, both in his historical and systematic thought. He also had an important hand in the reform of the German Universities. In theology and philosophy he strove to find an independent and intermediate position between the Enlightenment, German Idealism and Romanticism.
Sidgwick, Henry (1838–1900)
Authors: Schultz Bart
Published: September 2018

Henry Sidgwick was a Cambridge philosopher, psychic researcher and educational reformer, whose works in practical philosophy, especially The Methods of Ethics (1874), brought classical utilitarianism to its peak of theoretical sophistication and drew out the deep conflicts within that tradition, perhaps within the age of British imperialism itself. Sidgwick was profoundly influenced by J.S. Mill, but his version of utilitarianism – the view that those social or individual actions are right that maximize aggregate happiness – also revived certain Benthamite doctrines, though with more cogent accounts of ultimate good as pleasure, of total versus average utility, and of the analytical or deductive method. Yet Sidgwick was a cognitivist in ethics who sought both to ground utilitarianism on fundamental intuitions and to encompass within it the principles of common-sense ethics (truthfulness, fidelity, justice, etc.); his highly eclectic practical philosophy assimilated much of the rationalism, social conservatism and historical method of rival views, reflecting such influences as Butler, Clarke,Aristotle, Bagehot, Green, Whewell and Kant. Ultimately, Sidgwick’s careful academic inquiries failed to demonstrate that one ought always to promote the happiness of all rather than one’s own happiness, and this dualism of practical reason, along with his doubt about the viability of religion, led him to view his results as largely destructive and potentially deleterious in their influence.
Simmel, Georg (1858–1918)
Authors: Frisby David
Published: September 2018

Georg Simmel was a prolific German philosopher and sociologist, who was one of the principal founders of sociology in Germany. His philosophy and social theory had a major impact in the early decades of the twentieth century, both among professional philosophers and sociologists and within the cultural and artistic spheres. This is true of his foundation for sociology, his philosophy of art and culture, his philosophy of life and his philosophy of money. His thought ranged from substantive issues within the philosophical tradition to a concern with the everyday world and its objects.
Taine, Hippolyte-Adolphe (1828–93)
Authors: Evans Colin
Published: September 2018

Hippolyte Taine dominated the intellectual life of France in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was seen as the leader of the positivist, empiricist, anti-clerical forces in a period characterized by dramatic advances in science and technology and inspired by the hope that scientific method could be applied to human affairs. Yet at the heart of his life and work was the rationalist, essentialist imperative of Spinoza and of Hegel: to demonstrate the world as system, as necessity, to ‘banish contingency’. The story of his life is the story of the abandonment of this project: it is a long, painful learning experience ending in the acceptance of loss; his richly varied works can be seen as the products of this philosophical journey.
Wundt, Wilhelm (1832–1920)
Authors: Brockmeier Jens
Published: September 2018

The German philosopher, psychologist and physician Wilhelm Wundt founded the world’s first psychological laboratory in Leipzig in 1879 – at a time when psychology was still generally regarded as a theoretical and institutional part of philosophy. This event typified his life’s work and its reception in many respects. On the one hand Wundt tried to develop psychology as an independent science by defining its subject matter and methodology; on the other, he wanted to integrate psychology into the context of philosophy, cultural theory and history. With both attempts he acquired world fame and at the same time became a most controversial figure. Systematizing his approach, Wundt worked on a great amount of material in very different disciplines. He has been called the last philosophical ‘polyhistor’ in the tradition of Leibniz and Hegel, as well as the first modern scientist in psychology.
Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (Lewis Carroll) (1832–98)
Authors: Heath Peter
Published: September 2018

Dodgson, an Oxford teacher of mathematics, is best known under his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll. Although not an exceptional mathematician, his standing has risen somewhat in the light of recent research. He is also of note as a symbolic logician in the tradition of Boole and De Morgan, as a pioneer in the theory of voting, and as a gifted amateur photographer. His literary output, ranging from satirical pamphleteering, light verse and puzzle-making to an immense correspondence, is again largely amateur in nature, and would hardly have survived without the worldwide success of his three master-works, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking-Glass (1871) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876). Together with portions of his two-volume fairy-novel Sylvie and Bruno (1889/93) they are the only writings, ostensibly for children, to have attracted or deserved the notice of philosophers.
Engels, Friedrich (1820–95)
Authors: Carver Terrell
Published: September 2018

Until the 1970s the most influential framework for understanding Marx’s career and ideas was the one established by Engels. This framework was crucially related to his understanding of philosophy and its supposed culmination in Hegel’s systematic and all-encompassing idealism.

Engels claimed that Marx had grounded Hegel’s insights in a materialism that was coincident with the physical and natural sciences of his day, and that Marx had identified a dialectical method applicable to nature, history and thought. With respect to history, Marx was said to have formed a ‘materialist conception’, from which his analysis of capitalist society and its ‘secret’ of surplus value were derived. Together these intellectual features were the core of the ‘scientific socialism’ which, Engels argued, should form the theory, and inform the practice, of the worldwide socialist or communist movement. This was to abolish the poverty and exploitation necessarily engendered, he claimed, by modern industrial production.

Philosophically the tenets of dialectical and historical materialism have been defended and modified by orthodox communists and non-party Marxists, and expounded and criticized by political and intellectual opponents. The three laws of dialectics, and the doctrine that history is determined by material factors in the last instance, have been attacked as tautologous and indeterminate. Engels’s view that scientific socialism is a defensible representation of Marx’s project has also been challenged by textual scholars and historians.