bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832)
Authors: Boyle Nicholas
Published: September 2018

Goethe was a statesman, scientist, amateur artist, theatrical impresario, dramatist, novelist and Germany’s supreme lyric poet; indeed he provided the Romantic generation which followed him with their conception of what a poet should be. His works, diaries and about 12,000 letters run to nearly 150 volumes. His drama Faust (1790–1832) is the greatest long poem in modern European literature and made the legend of Dr Faust a modern myth. He knew most of the significant figures in the philosophical movement of German Idealism (though he never met Kant), but he was not himself a philosopher. His literary works certainly addressed contemporary philosophical concerns: Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris) (1779–86) seems a prophetic dramatization of the ethical and religious autonomy Kant was to proclaim from 1785; in his novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (The Elective Affinities) (1809) a mysterious natural or supernatural world of chemistry, magnetism or Fate, such as ‘Naturphilosophie’ envisaged, seems to underlie and perhaps determine a human story of spiritual adultery; in Faust, particularly Part Two, the tale of a pact or wager with the Devil seems to develop into a survey of world cultural history, which has been held to have overtones of Schelling, Hegel or even Marx. But whatever their conceptual materials, Goethe’s literary works require literary rather than philosophical analysis. There are, however, certain discrete concepts prominent in his scientific work, or in the expressions of his ‘wisdom’ – maxims, essays, autobiographies, letters and conversations – with which Goethe’s name is particularly associated and which are capable of being separately discussed. Notable among these are: Nature and metamorphosis (Bildung), polarity and ‘intensification’ (Steigerung), the ‘primal phenomena’ (Urphänomene), ‘the daemonic’ (das Dämonische) and renunciation (Entsagung).
Hamilton, William (1788–1856)
Authors: Mounce H.O.
Published: September 2018

Sir William Hamilton was a leading exponent of the Scottish philosophy of ‘common sense’. This philosophy had its origin in the works of Thomas Reid, but it was through Hamilton that it achieved its most subtle form and exerted its greatest influence.

‘Common-sense’ philosophy, on a superficial view, may seem to hold that philosophical problems should be settled by appealing to the commonly accepted opinions of ordinary people. But that is not what it holds. The ‘common sense’ to which it refers are certain powers and beliefs natural to the mind and therefore common alike to the learned and vulgar. Hamilton holds that these powers and beliefs can neither be doubted nor justified. They carry their own authority. This view derives its significance from a point which has often been overlooked. When we doubt or justify a belief, we stand outside that belief and compare it with the world. But the power to compare a belief with the world itself presupposes beliefs about the world. We cannot step outside all our beliefs. That is why, according to Hamilton, certain powers and beliefs must carry authority.
Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard von (1842–1906)
Authors: Adair-Toteff Christopher
Published: September 2018

Eduard von Hartmann was born in Berlin and lived there for most of his life. He was a prolific writer of both scholarly and popular works on a wide variety of topics, including aesthetics, ethics, religion and politics. He forecast a gloomy future for Germany, insisting that the only way to rectify the problems of modernity was with a strong nationalistic Germany ruled by an educated elite.
Hess, Moses (1812–75)
Authors: Avineri Shlomo
Published: September 2018

Hess was a socialist philosopher, closely connected with the Young Hegelians, who influenced the initial philosophical development of Karl Marx, and later articulated, in the context of a critique of European bourgeois society, one of the first calls for the re-establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine.
Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich (1770–1843)
Authors: Walker Nicholas
Published: September 2018

An outstanding German poet, Hölderlin is now widely recognized as one of the most important writers and thinkers of his time. After an initial period of critical neglect and relative public indifference, he eventually came to enjoy a privileged status in German cultural life at the beginning of the twentieth century, and has continued to exercise a profound influence on modern literature and critical thought. Hölderlin’s work emerged within the context of Kant’s Critical Revolution and developed in constant interaction with the German Idealist speculation this subsequently provoked, against the background of the French Revolution and the fundamental issues raised in its wake for an entire generation. Hölderlin was personally acquainted with many of the leading figures of the period, including Schiller, Goethe, Herder, Novalis, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. His writings reflect and respond to many of the central philosophical concerns and themes of his time, in a highly original and prescient fashion. However, it is only since Wilhelm Dilthey that the importance of his specific influence on the intellectual development of Schelling and Hegel in particular has been fully recognized, so that he has even been described as the ‘Doctor Seraphicus’ of German Idealism. His work subsequently provided a frequent point of reference for the Frankfurt School’s engagement with the heritage of German Idealism and the problem of the relationship between aesthetics, ethics and politics. More recently, Hölderlin has become a major presence in much contemporary critical and deconstructive theory, largely through the pervasive influence of Martin Heidegger.
Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich (1781–1832)
Authors: Lecea Teresa Rodriguez De
Published: September 2018

Krause sought an overall explanation of reality in the manner of the post-Kantian idealists; the key elements of his thoughts are the concepts of organism and harmony, involving the incorporation of opposing elements rather than their annihilation. Three main themes characterize his philosophy: the doctrine of science, together with the equivalence of knowledge and being, or rational realism; the religious doctrine of panentheism which proclaims, ‘everything in God’; and the social doctrine of the League of Humanity.
Lachelier, Jules (1832–1918)
Authors: Piclin Michel
Published: September 2018

Lachelier is, along with Octave Hamelin, one of the foremost French metaphysicians of the nineteenth century. An idealist, he was a major figure in the neo-spiritualist movement, which opposed the materialism dominating scientific thought at the time. For all that, Lachelier did not set up a division between consciousness and life, but, following the example of Maine de Biran and Ravaisson, he rather saw in mind the inwardness of life, at work in the whole of nature.
Reinhold, Karl Leonhard (1757–1823)
Authors: di Giovanni George
Published: September 2018

A catalyst in the rise of post-Kantian idealism, Reinhold popularized Kant’s critical philosophy by systematizing it in the form of a theory of consciousness. Reinhold shifted from one position to another, however, each time declaring his latest philosophical creed as ultimate. For this he was ridiculed by his more famous contemporaries, including Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, and his historical reputation suffered accordingly. Recent re-evaluations, however, suggest that there was considerable coherence to his philosophical wanderings.

A sometime priest who converted to Protestantism, active freemason and popular teacher, Reinhold advocated political intervention in the promotion of enlightened practices. He steadfastly defended the French Revolution.
Renouvier, Charles Bernard (1815–1903)
Authors: Fedi Laurent
Published: September 2018

Charles Renouvier is the main representative of French Neo-Kantianism in the nineteenth century. Following Kant, he delimited the conditions for the legitimate exercise of the faculty of knowledge, and denounced the illusions of past metaphysics. Wishing to go further than Kant in this direction, he criticized the notions of substance and of actual infinity. According to him, relation is the basis of all our representations, reality is finite, and certainty rests on liberty. In ethics, he took into consideration, beyond the ideal of duty, the existence of the desires and interests to which history testifies.
Rosmini-Serbati, Antonio (1797–1855)
Authors: Verucci Guido
Published: September 2018

In the reactionary, anti-Enlightenment, spiritualistic climate of Italy and Europe in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Italian philosopher Rosmini set out to elaborate a Christian, Catholic system of philosophy which drew elements from Platonic, Augustinian and Thomist thought, while also taking account of recent philosophical developments, especially Kantian ones, as well as of the new liberal political trends in the culture of the time. His aim was to restore the principle of objectivity in the field of gnoseology, as well as in ethics, law and political thought.
Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de (1760–1825)
Authors: Leopold David
Published: September 2018

An influential French social theorist, Saint-Simon propounded a philosophy of history and an account of the future organization of industrial society. He predicted a ‘golden age’, where harmony between individual capacities and social structures, reflected in a reordering of ‘temporal’ and ‘spiritual’ power, would overcome disorder and banish idleness. He has been variously portrayed as a utopian socialist, the founder of sociology and a prescient madman.
Scheler, Max (1874–1928)
Authors: Steinbok A. J. , Davis Zachary
Published: September 2018

Max Scheler (1874–1928) was an early and greatly influential pioneer in the development of the phenomenological tradition at the outset of the twenty-first century. Examined most extensively in his magnum opus, Formalism in Ethics and a Non-Formal Ethics of Value, Scheler is best known for his contribution to the phenomenological approach to an ethical value theory. His approach is predominantly motivated by providing an alternative to the rationalistic accounts of ethics, most notably the ethics of Immanuel Kant. Rather than ground ethics in a notion of reason, Scheler seeks to show that ethics is grounded in the experience of value and in particular in the value of persons. Scheler’s restless mind and spirit, however, led him to explore and introduce novel avenues of inquiry for phenomenological investigation that are still being explored. In addition to ethics, Scheler wrote original works on the nature of religious experience, the sociology of knowledge, philosophical anthropology, epistemology, metaphysics, history, and politics. Propelled by both the originality of his thought and his engaging personality, Scheler was one of the most sought-after thinkers in Germany and Europe during his lifetime. With the rise of National Socialism soon after his death, Scheler’s works were removed from German libraries due to his Jewish heritage and, as a consequence, Scheler’s pivotal contribution to phenomenology continues to be rediscovered.
Stirner, Max (1806–56)
Authors: Leopold David
Published: September 2018

Max Stirner is the author of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own), first published in Germany in 1844 and best known for its idiosyncrasies of argument and idiom. Stirner condemns modernity as entrenched in religious modes of thought and envisages a positive egoistic future in which individuals are liberated from the tyranny of those ideas and social arrangements which restrict autonomy. The Ego and Its Own was an impulse to the decline of the Hegelian left as a coherent intellectual movement, and played an important role in the genesis of Marxism; Stirner has also been variously portrayed as a precursor of Nietzsche, an individualist anarchist and a forerunner of existentialism.
Thoreau, Henry David (1817–62)
Authors: Gould Timothy
Published: September 2018

Thoreau was one of the founders of the new literature that emerged within the fledgling culture of the United States in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. He inherited an education in the classics and in the transcendentalism of his older friend and teacher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau forged a means of writing which was dedicated to recording particular events in all their transience but capable of rendering graphic the permanent laws of nature and conscience. His incorporation of both confidence and self-questioning into the texture of his writing forms the ground of his standpoint as an observer of human lives and other natural histories.

Thoreau’s relation to philosophy goes beyond his inheritance from Plato, Kant, Emerson and Eastern thought. Above all, his quest for philosophy is evident in the ways his writing seeks its own foundations. It is in the act of writing that Thoreau locates the perspectives within which to give an account of the humanness of a life. His project is to report sincerely and unselfconsciously a life of passion and simplicity, using himself as a representative of basic human needs and projects. Influenced by Plato’s Republic, Thoreau gives an account of some basic human needs, such as food, shelter and society. But also, like Plato, he shows that the particular institutions by which human needs are met are very far from being necessary. Tracing the relationship between need and necessity is one of the primary goals of Thoreau’s work.
Vaihinger, Hans (1852–1933)
Authors: Adair-Toteff Christopher
Published: September 2018

Hans Vaihinger was a German philosopher and historian of philosophy. Much of his work was a response to Kant’s philosophy, and he contributed to the revival of interest in Kant at the end of the nineteenth century both in his published commentaries and in founding a journal and society for the discussion of Kant’s thought. He developed his own philosophy, the philosophy of ‘as-if’, which was derived from the Kantian notion of ‘heuristic fictions’.
Venn, John (1834–1923)
Authors: Merrill Daniel D.
Published: September 2018

John Venn was a British symbolic logician and methodologist of science. He is known for having invented the method of Venn diagrams for judging the validity of categorical syllogisms and for advocating the ‘compartmental’ conception of categorical propositions which they display. He strongly defended Boole’s algebraic methods in logic by giving them clear logical meanings. He provided the first systematic formulation of the frequency theory of probability, and he showed the uncertainties inherent in the use of J.S. Mill’s inductive methods.
Whewell, William (1794–1886)
Authors: Fisch Menachem
Published: September 2018

William Whewell’s two seminal works, History of the Inductive Science, from the Earliest to the Present Time (1837) and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon their History (1840), began a new era in the philosophy of science. Equally critical of the British ‘sensationalist’ school, which founded all knowledge on experience, and the German Idealists, who based science on a priori ideas, Whewell undertook to survey the history of all known sciences in search of a better explanation of scientific discovery. His conclusions were as bold as his undertaking. All real knowledge, he argued, is ‘antithetical’, requiring mutually irreducible, ever-present, and yet inseparable empirical and conceptual components. Scientific progress is achieved not by induction, or reading-out theories from previously collected data, but by the imaginative ‘superinduction’ of novel hypotheses upon known but seemingly unrelated facts. He thus broke radically with traditional inductivism – and for nearly a century was all but ignored. In the Philosophy the antithetical structure of scientific theories and the hypothetico-deductive account of scientific discovery form the basis for novel analyses of scientific and mathematical truth and scientific methodology, critiques of rival philosophies of science, and an account of the emergence and refinement of scientific ideas.
Bauer, Bruno (1809–82)
Authors: Stepelevich Lawrence S.
Published: September 2018

The career of the Hegelian theologian Bruno Bauer is marked by his sudden turn from a reasoned defender of Christianity into one of its most extreme critics. His radical interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy, which he first used to defend orthodox biblical hermeneutics, ultimately led him to become, as one of his admirers said, the ‘Robespierre of theology’. As the leader of the so-called ‘Young Hegelian’ school, Bauer was one of Hegel’s most gifted students. However, his condemnation of theology in general and his thesis that the New Testament was merely the fictional product of an unknown author contributed to the general distrust of Hegelianism among religious thinkers. Although his many theological and historical writings now remain largely unread, his ‘Critical Philosophy’ and his radical atheism exerted a strong influence upon Marx, who was his student and friend, and is still evident in such contemporaries as Jürgen Habermas.
Ruge, Arnold (1802–80)
Authors: Sass Hans-Martin
Published: September 2018

Arnold Ruge was the most influential liberal writer and activist of the radical wing of Young Hegelianism. For him philosophy was a challenge to translate the humanist ideals of emancipation and self-determination into the realities of moral, cultural and political practice. As editor of powerful intellectual journals such as Hallesche und Deutsche Jahrbuecher (1838–43) with Theodor Echtermeyer, ‘Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publizistik’ (1843), ‘Deutsch-Franzoesische Jahrbuecher’ (1844) with Karl Marx, and ‘Die Akademie’ (1850), he became the leading promotor of liberal philosophy and civic emancipation in Germany. Ruge represented the citizens of Breslau in the Frankfurt Paulskirche parliament in 1848–9 and worked briefly with Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and Guizeppe Mazzini in establishing a short-lived ‘European Democratic Committee’ in London in 1849.

Ruge understood his critical educational, cultural and political activities as a direct calling from the heritage of European enlightenment and German idealism, thus transforming idealistic theory and vision into the realities of political practice and agitation. In this manner he promoted such radical figures as Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach.
Mill, James (1773–1836)
Authors: Ball Terence
Published: September 2018

James Mill, who is today remembered mainly as Bentham’s chief disciple and John Stuart Mill’s father, was a British philosopher, political theorist, historian, psychologist, economist, educationist and journalist. He was also largely responsible for clarifying and systematizing Bentham’s utilitarianism, for introducing a distinction between ‘lower’, animal pleasures and ‘higher’, uniquely human ones, and for organizing the small but influential band of Bentham’s followers that became known as the ‘philosophic radicals’. In politics, he favoured representative democracy as the only practicable system of government capable of maximizing individual and communal happiness.
American philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries
Authors: Goodman Russell B.
Published: September 2018

Jonathan Edwards, the first great American philosopher, interpreted Calvinist theology within the newer framework of Newtonian physics and Lockean empiricism in his Freedom of the Will (1754). However, he was all but forgotten by the end of the eighteenth century, when political rather than theological issues held centre stage. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the moral sense theory of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Lockean liberalism and classical republican theory all contributed to the thought of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and others who saw themselves as parties to a contract with a monarch, defenders of the rights of humans, and members of a new and virtuous republic.

In the early nineteenth century, Scottish common sense realism prevailed in the universities, but the most original and influential philosophical writing came from the communities of the transcendentalists. Emerson and Thoreau developed philosophies of life, language, knowledge and being in writings drawing on the Greek and Roman classics, English and German Romanticism, Christianity, and non-Western thought. After the Civil War (1861–5), a series of clubs in the East and Midwest, and the new Journal of Speculative Philosophy made Hegel more accessible to Americans; while in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the ‘Metaphysical Club’ of William James, Charles Peirce, Chauncey Wright and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr became the birthplace of pragmatism.

The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the professionalization of American philosophy: new graduate departments at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, professional journals, and state-supported universities in the Midwest building non-denominational departments of philosophy. By the end of the century, James had published his vast Principles of Psychology (1890) and enunciated a version of pragmatism; Peirce had produced an outpouring of writing on pragmatism, scientific method, logic, semiotics and metaphysics; and Josiah Royce and John Dewey were launched on influential academic careers.
Fourier, Charles (1772–1837)
Authors: Leopold David
Published: September 2018

Fourier was a French utopian socialist who criticized the economic and domestic structures of the modern social world for their failure to respect human nature. He discerned twelve basic human ‘passions’ which combined to generate 810 basic personality types. On the basis of this account of human diversity, he advocated the establishment of small voluntary communities organized to provide fulfilling work and sexual liberation. Some of the more extravagant elements of his ‘social’ theory (his views on cosmogony, metempsychosis and ‘universal analogy’) were played down by his followers.
Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg) (1772–1801)
Authors: Bowie Andrew
Published: September 2018

Novalis (the name is a pseudonym adopted for his published writings) was, together with Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the leading philosophical thinker of ‘early German Romanticism’. Until recently Novalis was regarded primarily as a poet and as the author of the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, who wrote some philosophical work in conjunction with his writings on natural science and on the political matters of his day. In the wake of the renewed philosophical interest in the philosophy of J.G. Fichte and other German idealist thinkers, there has been a reassessment of the writings of both Schlegel and Novalis. It is now apparent that, far from being, as most commentators present them, defenders of Fichte’s ‘subjective idealism’, Novalis and Schlegel arrived at significant criticisms of Fichte’s idealism and initiated an anti-foundationalist tendency in modern philosophy which still has significant resonances today.
Mazzini, Giuseppe (1805–72)
Authors: Bellamy Richard
Published: September 2018

Mazzini was a leading figure in the struggle for Italian unification during the nineteenth century. A theorist of nationalism as well as an activist, he also promoted nationalist movements elsewhere in Europe and advocated a federation between the European peoples. His writings consist mainly of essays, the most famous being the Dei Doveri dell’Uomo (On the Duties of Man) and Thoughts on Democracy in Europe. He has been seen as a forerunner of the liberal nationalism advocated by certain contemporary political theorists.
De Sanctis, Francesco (1817–83)
Authors: Henry Barbara
Published: September 2018

Francesco De Sanctis was a literary critic and historian of Italian literature. He is best remembered for his major work, Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature), and as a Hegel scholar, reformer and professor at the University of Naples, politician and militant patriot. Commentators are unanimous that De Sanctis’s biographical and intellectual life comprised two inseparable strands, the literary and the political. For this reason all his writings, even the more narrowly literary critical ones, must be read from the point of view of his commitment to promoting the moral and institutional renewal of Italian society. His Storia della letteratura italiana is the ‘civil history’ of Italy. De Sanctis, actively militant on both the Right and Left, defined his position as ‘moderate left-wing, in politics as in art’.
Spaventa, Bertrando (1817–83)
Authors: Henry Barbara
Published: September 2018

Trained within the circle of Neapolitan Hegelians in the 1840s, Bertrando Spaventa was influenced by Antonio Tari and taught Kantian and socialist thought (for example, Proudhon) by Ottavio Colecchi. Forced into exile following the 1848 Revolution, he moved to Florence and, in 1850, to Turin. He returned to Naples in 1861, where he taught philosophy and created a critical, non-doctrinal Hegelian school, in which Hegelian categories (in particular that of ‘being’) were reinterpreted in an epistemological sense, and the thinking subject was given primacy. His interpretation of Hegel greatly influenced Giovanni Gentile, who took Spaventa as a starting point for reconstructing the genealogy of his philosophy of actualism. Spaventa’s most important historical thesis is the ‘circulation of ideas’, according to which the fundamental doctrines of Italian Renaissance philosophy (Bruno and Campanella in particular) were developed by other European philosophers – Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel – and then taken up again in the philosophy of the Italian spiritualists.
Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf (1802–72)
Authors: Adair-Toteff Christopher
Published: September 2018

Trendelenburg was a philosopher, Aristotelian scholar and legal theorist who was known primarily because of his close critical analyses of Aristotle and his attempts to find a middle way between idealism and realism, which led to his argument with Kuno Fischer regarding Kant’s theory of space. Although he never founded any philosophical school he had great influence on a number of philosophers, including Hermann Cohen, Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Paulsen.
Tieck, Ludwig (1773–1853)
Authors: Macdonald Iain
Published: September 2018

Ludwig Tieck was perhaps not the most historically influential figure of early German Romanticism, but he was one of its most important proponents; moreover, he was also among the most eminent German men of letters during the first half of the nineteenth century. Though not philosophically inclined, his stories, fairy-tales, novellas and novels explore the inter-relationship of language, art and nature in an attempt to convey and redeem the mystery and wonder of nature and everyday life.
French Revolution, philosophical background and influence of
Authors: Millhorn Jim
Published: September 2018

The French Revolution is clearly defined as a benchmark event of the modern era. It remains the revolution by which all others are measured. Any discussion of political and social ideology, sovereignty, or nationality hark back to forces unleashed by the French Revolution. Nineteenth-century Europe, not France alone, was haunted by memories of the Revolution. As the century advanced, however, the new ideologies of liberalism, conservatism and socialism coalesced and developed their own identities independent of the Revolution. The triumph of the Bolsheviks in Russia generated a renewed interest in the concept of revolution that lasted throughout the Cold War. At the dawn of the twenty-first century the French Revolution remains a subject of relentless analysis, yet at the same time its philosophical heritage has increasingly been called into question.
Eclecticism
Authors: Mcclellan Chris
Published: September 2018

Eclecticism in philosophy is the construction of a system of thought by combining elements of the established systems of a previous age. The term ‘eclecticism’ is derived from the Greek verb eklegein / eklegesthai: to pick out, choose, or select. Diogenes Laertius (c.ad 300–50) attributes an ‘eclectic school’ to Potamo of Alexandria (c. early 3rd century ad) ‘who made a selection from the tenets of all the existing sects’. Many philosophers of the Greco-Roman period are known as ‘eclectics’, and one can find the entire period of philosophy from the second century bc to the third century ad referred to as an age of ‘eclecticism’. In such cases the term is often used pejoratively to designate a discordant collection of unoriginal ideas. More recently, however, the French philosopher Victor Cousin (1792–1867) expressed an optimistic view of eclecticism while using the term in reference to his own philosophy. Cousin viewed the entire history of thought as dominated by the two competing philosophies of empiricism (or sensualism) and idealism (or rationalism). The true philosophy would eliminate conflicting elements and combine the remaining truths within a single, unified system. Cousin’s eclecticism, with its strong historical orientation, was the predominant school of thought in France throughout most of the nineteenth century and was also of considerable influence in Brazil.
Althusser, Louis Pierre (1918–90)
Authors: Callinicos Alex
Published: September 2018

Louis Althusser was the most influential philosopher to emerge in the revival of Marxist theory occasioned by the radical movements of the 1960s. His influence is, on the face of it, surprising, since Althusser’s Marx is not the theorist of revolutionary self-emancipation celebrated by the early Lukács. According to Althusser, Marx, along with Freud, was responsible for a ‘decentring’ of the human subject. History is ‘a process without a subject’. Its movement is beyond the comprehension of individual or collective subjects, and can only be grasped by a scientific ‘theoretical practice’ which keeps its distance from everyday experience. This austere version of Marxism nevertheless captured the imagination of many young intellectuals by calling for a ‘return to Marx’, with the implication that his writings had been distorted by the official communist movement. In fact, Althusser later conceded, his was an ‘imaginary Marxism’, a reconstruction of historical materialism reflecting the same philosophical climate that produced the post-structuralist appropriations of Nietzsche and Heidegger by Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault. Most of the philosophical difficulties in which Althusser found himself can be traced back to the impossibility of fusing Marx’s and Nietzsche’s thought into a new synthesis.
Anderson, John (1893–1962)
Authors: Baker A.J.
Published: September 2018

Arguing against metaphysical ‘ultimates’ (that is, supposed unconditioned conditions of things), relative truth, appeals to subjective experience, and opposing some of the main tendencies of twentieth-century philosophy, Anderson developed a wide-ranging realist and empiricist philosophy. Highly critical of religion, he was much concerned with other cultural values and advanced views (influential in Australia) on freedom of thought, education, ethics and aesthetics. In ethics, for example, his view is that objective good is not good because it is approved of by certain people; rather those who approve of good (or have other relations to it) do so because it is good. He carefully distinguished questions about the intrinsic character of good from those about relations social groups may have to it, and goes on to develop an account of intrinsic goods as certain socio-mental activities: enterprise or freedom, objective inquiry, artistic production and appreciation, love and courage.

Similarly, in aesthetics he distinguishes characteristics of works of art from possible relations between artists, works, appreciators and critics, such as a work’s relation to a writer’s intentions. In Anderson’s view the character and structure of the work itself alone provides an aesthetic criterion for assessing the merit of works of art.
Arendt, Hannah (1906–75)
Authors: Parekh B.
Published: September 2018

Hannah Arendt was one of the leading political thinkers of the twentieth century. She observed Nazi totalitarianism at close quarters and devoted much of her life to making sense of it. In her view it mobilized the atomized masses around a simple-minded ideology, and devised a form of rule in which bureaucratically minded officials performed murderous deeds with a clear conscience. For Arendt the only way to avoid totalitarianism was to establish a well-ordered political community that encouraged public participation and institutionalized political freedom. She considered politics to be one of the highest human activities because it enabled citizens to reflect on their collective life, to give meaning to their personal lives and to develop a creative and cohesive community. She was deeply worried that the economically obsessed modern age discouraged political activity, and created morally superficial people susceptible to the appeal of mindless adventurism.
Broad, Charlie Dunbar (1887–1971)
Authors: Smith Peter
Published: September 2018

A Cambridge contemporary of Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, C.D. Broad wrote on an exceptional range of topics, including causation, perception, the philosophy of space and time, probability and induction, mind and body, ethics and the history of philosophy. He typically set out a number of received positions on a topic, explored their consequences with great clarity, and then came to a cautious estimate of where the truth probably lay. However, Broad made some notable contributions of his own, especially on perception (he defended a representative theory), induction (he argued that our inductive practices require the existence of natural kinds), and time (he argued that tensed facts cannot be analysed away). Although his talents lay in very careful analysis, Broad insisted that there was a proper place in philosophy for metaphysical speculation; he particularly admired McTaggart, and his monumental Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy (1933, 1938) contains some of Broad’s best work.
Cassirer, Ernst (1874–1945)
Authors: Verene Donald Phillip
Published: September 2018

Cassirer is one of the major figures in the development of philosophical idealism in the first half of the twentieth century. He is known for his philosophy of culture based on his conception of ‘symbolic form’, for his historical studies of the problem of knowledge in the rise of modern philosophy and science and for his works on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Cassirer expanded Kant’s critique of reason to a critique of culture by regarding the symbol as the common denominator of all forms of human thought, imagination and experience. He delineates symbolic forms of myth, religion, language, art, history and science and defines the human being as the ‘symbolizing animal’. All human experience occurs through systems of symbols. Language is only one such system; the images of myth, religion and art and the mathematical structures of science are others.

Being of Jewish faith, Cassirer left Germany in 1933 with the rise of Nazism, going first to Oxford, then to university positions in Sweden and the USA. In the last period of his career he applied his philosophy of culture generally and his conception of myth specifically to a critique of political myths and to the study of irrational forces in the state.
Dewey, John (1859–1952)
Authors: Gouinlock James
Published: September 2018

The philosophy of John Dewey is original and comprehensive. His extensive writings contend systematically with problems in metaphysics, epistemology, logic, aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and education, and philosophical anthropology. Although his work is widely read, it is not widely understood.

Dewey had a distinctive conception of philosophy, and the key to understanding and benefiting from his work is to keep this conception in mind. A worthwhile philosophy, he urged, must be practical. Philosophic inquiry, that is, ought to take its point of departure from the aspirations and problems characteristic of the various sorts of human activity, and an effective philosophy would develop ideas responsive to those conditions. Any system of ideas that has the effect of making common experience less intelligible than we find it to be is on that account a failure. Dewey’s theory of inquiry, for example, does not entertain a conception of knowledge that makes it problematic whether we can know anything at all. Inasmuch as scientists have made extraordinary advances in knowledge, it behoves the philosopher to find out exactly what scientists do, rather than to question whether they do anything of real consequence.

Moral philosophy, likewise, should not address the consternations of philosophers as such, but the characteristic urgencies and aspirations of common life; and it should attempt to identify the resources and limitations of human nature and the environment with which it interacts. Human beings might then contend effectively with the typical perplexities and promises of mortal existence. To this end, Dewey formulated an exceptionally innovative and far-reaching philosophy of morality and democracy.

The subject matter of philosophy is not philosophy, Dewey liked to say, but ‘problems of men’. All too often, he found, the theories of philosophers made the primary subject matter more obscure rather than less so. The tendency of thinkers is to become bewitched by inherited philosophic puzzles, when the persistence of the puzzle is a consequence of failing to consider the assumptions that created it. Dewey was gifted in discerning and discarding the philosophic premises that create needless mysteries. Rather than fret, for instance, about the question of how immaterial mental substance can possibly interact with material substance, he went to the root of the problem by challenging the notion of substance itself.

Indeed, Dewey’s dissatisfaction with the so-called classic tradition in philosophy, stemming at least from Plato if not from Parmenides, led him to reconstruct the entire inheritance of the Western tradition in philosophy. The result is one of the most seminal and fruitful philosophies of the twentieth century.
Gentile, Giovanni (1875–1944)
Authors: Bellamy Richard
Published: September 2018

Best known as the self-styled philosopher of Fascism, Gentile, along with Benedetto Croce, was responsible for the ascendance of Hegelian idealism in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. His ‘actual’ idealism or ‘actualism’ was a radical attempt to integrate our consciousness of experience with its creation in the ‘pure act of thought’, thereby abolishing the distinction between theory and practice. He held an extreme subjectivist version of idealism, and rejected both empirical and transcendental arguments as forms of ‘realism’ that posited the existence of a reality outside thought.

His thesis developed through a radicalization of Hegel’s critique of Kant that drew on the work of the nineteenth-century Neapolitan Hegelian Bertrando Spaventa. He argued that it represented both the natural conclusion of the whole tradition of Western philosophy, and had a basis in the concrete experience of each individual. He illustrated these arguments in detailed writings on the history of Italian philosophy and the philosophy of education respectively. He joined the Fascist Party in 1923 and thereafter placed his philosophy at the service of the regime. He contended that Fascism was best understood in terms of his reworking of the Hegelian idea of the ethical state, a view that occasionally proved useful for ideological purposes but which had little practical influence.
Hare, Richard Mervyn (1919–2002)
Authors: Price A.W.
Published: September 2018

R.M. Hare was the creator of the ethical theory called ‘prescriptivism’. This holds that moral statements differ from purely factual ones in prescribing conduct; they differ from simple imperatives in invoking universal principles that apply to all similar cases. The theory has three aspects: prescriptivity and universalizability as formal features of moral statements; appeal to the Golden Rule (that we should do to others as we wish them to do to us) for selecting moral principles; two levels of practical thinking, critical and intuitive.
Kemp Smith, Norman (1872–1958)
Authors: Calder Robert R. , Davie George
Published: September 2018

Norman Kemp Smith is now most widely known for his translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. This was begun in 1913 while Kemp Smith was completing his Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason which, together with his classic studies on Descartes and Hume, established his reputation as the greatest British philosophical scholar of his day. But he was also an outstanding member of the now forgotten British ‘Critical Realist’ movement, much respected by A.N. Whitehead, which also included among others Kemp Smith’s mentor Robert Adamson, Adamson’s English pupil G. Dawes Hicks, James Ward, and his pupil G.F. Stout. Science and scientistic fallacies, psychology, including developmental psychology and the histories of science and philosophy were alike concerns of a group of independent thinkers. Their work was obscured by subsequent English philosophers’ lack of attention, and the prevailing false assumption that the work of those antecedent thinkers was dominated comprehensively by views mistakenly attributed to ‘Hegel’ or ‘Idealism’.
Kojève, Alexandre (1902–68)
Authors: Roth Michael S.
Published: September 2018

Alexandre Kojève developed an idiosyncratic and widely influential reading of G.W.F. Hegel in a seminar in Paris from 1933 to 1939. Kojève read Hegel as having discovered that truth was the product of history, and that history was the product of the human desire and struggle for recognition. Kojève emphasized that once this desire was satisfied, history, properly so-called, was over. He claimed that for all essential purposes this human desire had been satisfied in the modern period, and thus that we had experienced (and Hegel had come to know) the end of history. The notes from this seminar were published in 1947 and continued to have an important impact on French philosophy throughout the post-war period.
Kotarbiński, Tadeusz (1886–1981)
Authors: Stanosz B.
Published: September 2018

Kotarbiński was one of the founders and main representatives of the Polish philosophical school known as the Lwów–Warsaw School and akin to, though independent of (and less radical than), the Vienna Circle; an anti-metaphysical, pro-scientific, rationalistic school of philosophy, which was very active and influential between the First and the Second World Wars.

Kotarbiński’s programme for philosophy was a minimalistic and a practical one: he stressed the need to purify the field of philosophy of questions and concepts that lack factual content or logical coherence. According to him, the term ‘philosophy’ should be used, if at all, to denote only logic (understood as the philosophy of cognitive thought) and the philosophy of action, including moral philosophy. His numerous (more than 500) works are devoted to logic and philosophy of action in this broad sense. One of his main original ideas is the doctrine of reism or concretism, a special version of nominalism.

Kotarbiński was admired by several generations of his pupils for his unusual pedagogical gifts, his integrity and his moral courage.
Lewis, Clarence Irving (1883–1964)
Authors: Rosenthal Sandra B.
Published: September 2018

The American philosopher C.I. Lewis held that in all knowledge there are two elements: that which is presented to sense and the construction or interpretation which represents the creative activity of the mind. Contrary to Kant, Lewis claimed that what is fixed and unalterable is not the structure that we bring to the sensibly presented, but rather the sensibly presented itself. The categories that mind imposes do not limit experience; they determine the interpretation we place upon experience, and if too much of experience eludes our categorizations, new ones should be established. It is pragmatically necessary that we create interpretive structures which will work in getting us around in sensory experience. This important and novel doctrine, Lewis’ ‘pragmatic a priori’, emerged through the development of ideas which took root during his study of logic. The problems of choosing among alternative logics led him to assert the need for pragmatic criteria. The way we conceptually structure or categorize experience answers to pragmatic criteria of purposes, intents and interests. Only within a context defined by a priori categorizations can empirical judgments be made. These empirical judgments proceed from apprehensions of the sensibly presented to assertions of objectivities. Moral judgments require both judgments of good and decisions of right. Judgments of value are tied to qualitative satisfactions disclosed in experience and are empirical claims. Decisions about the morally right are based on imperatives of reason.
Lorenzen, Paul (1915–95)
Authors: Roberts Julian
Published: September 2018

Paul Lorenzen, German philosopher of mathematics and sciences, programmatically set about implementing mathematical constructivism in wider philosophical contexts. Trained as a mathematician, he spent the greater part of his teaching career at the University of Erlangen, Germany. Here he assembled what came to be known as the ‘Erlangen school’, which included Wilhelm Kamlah, Kuno Lorenz, Jürgen Mittelstraß, Peter Janich, Oswald Schwemmer and others. In its heyday, the school also influenced work at the universities of Konstanz and Marburg, and was one of the main alternatives to ‘traditional’ philosophies such as hermeneutics.

The school’s interests embraced mathematical logic, the major thinkers of the idealist and hermeneutic traditions (though not Heidegger), and a high level of philological expertise in classical philosophy. Regrettably, though, its encyclopedic initiative has remained incomplete, and the school has largely disbanded in the face of increasing polarization between straight analytical philosophy and a tougher response by existing traditions. To some extent, Lorenzen’s own express interest in left-wing political traditions became a liability in view of the sobriety and retrenchment that characterized the 1980s.
Łukasiewicz, Jan (1878–1956)
Authors: Wolenski Jan
Published: September 2018

Before 1918, Łukasiewicz’s interests centred on logic (in the broad sense) and philosophy, and he worked on induction and probability. He also wrote an important historical book on the principle of contradiction in Aristotle. After 1918, Łukasiewicz concentrated almost entirely on mathematical logic and was the main organizer of the Warsaw School of Logic. The discovery of many-valued systems of logic is perhaps the most important result he achieved. He also invented an ingenious logical symbolism in which brackets (or other punctuation signs) are not necessary (bracket-free or Polish notation). Propositional calculi became a favourite topic of Łukasiewicz’s logical investigations. The history of logic was another subject in which Łukasiewicz achieved important results.
McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis (1866–1925)
Authors: Baldwin Thomas
Published: September 2018

McTaggart was one of the last of the ‘British Idealists’, the group of British philosophers, such as B. Bosanquet and F.H. Bradley, who took their inspiration from Hegel. In his early writings from the 1890s, McTaggart gave a critical exposition of themes from Hegel’s logic before advancing his own distinctive idealist positions concerning time, the mind, and reality in general. But in his writings from 1910 he developed an independent account of the structure of existence from which he then argued for the same idealist positions as before.

The thesis for which McTaggart is now most famous is that of the unreality of time; what is even more difficult to come to terms with is his thesis that the ultimate reality of the world comprises a community of selves wholly constituted by their loving perceptions of each other. This thesis is a manifestation of a mysticism that is an essential element in McTaggart’s philosophy; yet this mysticism is combined with a rationalist determination, reminiscent of Spinoza, to vindicate mystical insights by the light of pure reason alone.