bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908–61)
Authors: Baldwin Thomas
Published: September 2018

Merleau-Ponty belongs to the group of French philosophers who transformed French philosophy in the early post-war period by introducing the phenomenological methods of the German philosophers Husserl and Heidegger. His central concern was with ‘the phenomenology of perception’ (the title of his major book), and his originality lay in his account of the role of the bodily sense-organs in perception, which led him to develop a phenomenological treatment of the sub-personal perceptions that play a central role in bodily movements. This account of the sub-personal aspects of life enabled him to launch a famous critique of Sartre’s conception of freedom, which he regarded as an illusion engendered by excessive attention to consciousness. None the less, he and Sartre cooperated for many years in French political affairs, until Merleau-Ponty became exasperated by the orthodox Marxism-Leninism of the French Communist Party in a way in which Sartre, who remained a fellow-traveller, did not. As well as several substantial political essays, Merleau-Ponty wrote widely on art, anthropology and, especially, language. He died leaving some important work incomplete.

Although his work is still esteemed within the French academic establishment, his influence in France has waned, because of a tendency there to study his German forebears almost to the exclusion of all else. But elsewhere, and most notably in the USA, Merleau-Ponty’s work is widely studied, especially now that questions about the distinction between personal and sub-personal aspects of life have become so prominent.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908–61)
Authors: Landes Donald A.
Published: September 2018

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) was a key figure in twentieth-century French philosophy and one of the principal proponents of existential phenomenology. Through his subtle and wide-ranging descriptions of lived and embodied experience, particularly in his major text Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty made significant contributions on a variety of topics, including behaviour, perception, habit acquisition, language, expression, history and politics. His broader interests in the philosophical consequences of these descriptions led him to address many classical philosophical problems (for example, freedom, temporality, the relation of the soul and body, ontology, etc.). Perhaps his most lasting contribution was in directing philosophical inquiry to the role of the lived body in the operative structures of meaning across all human experience. This aspect of his work has been a starting point for contemporary studies of embodiment in both philosophy and other disciplines, from new approaches in cognitive science to phenomenological contributions in performance studies, gender studies and applied sciences. Merleau-Ponty’s interests evolved throughout his career, leading to a greater engagement with structuralism in the early 1950s and to a more explicit attempt to answer ontological questions about nature and philosophical methodology in the late 1950s. At the time of his death in 1961, Merleau-Ponty was developing a phenomenological ontology in a manuscript that was published posthumously as The Visible and the Invisible (1964). He argued that human experience is marked by a certain reversibility in that we are at once subjects and objects, touching and touched, seeing and seen. Our bodies are both of the world and open to the world; we are a node or a moment in the flesh of the world. For Merleau-Ponty, in this unfinished ontological project the notion of ‘flesh’ appears to name an ontological principle or element by which a folding back occurs via a self-reflexive experience and thus the spacing takes place where experience and being can appear.
Neurath, Otto (1882–1945)
Authors: Cat Jordi , Cartwright Nancy
Published: September 2018

An Austrian socialist philosopher, economist, sociologist and historian, Neurath was a charismatic orator and an energetic cultural activist. Deeply concerned with education as a tool for social progress and cooperation, he founded museums and created the Isotype language for visual education. During the Bavarian Revolution he headed a plan for the centralized socialization of the Bavarian economy. A determined supporter of the scientific attitude and opponent of metaphysics (which he believed to have pernicious political and social consequences), he was a founder member of the Vienna Circle and a heterodox proponent of logical empiricism. He spearheaded the Unity of Science Movement that launched the project of an encyclopedia of unified science.
Oakeshott, Michael Joseph (1901–90)
Authors: Minogue Kenneth
Published: September 2018

Although Michael Oakeshott was in his own time a lone figure in a philosophical world dominated by Oxford analysis, he has come to be recognized as the most notable British political philosopher of the twentieth century. He is best known for his view that political activity is neither purely empirical nor the application of ideas, but ‘the pursuit of intimations’. His image of culture as a conversation between different kinds of understanding has been widely accepted. Oakeshott first became celebrated in attacking what he called ‘rationalism’ in the Cambridge Journal (which he edited) in 1947. Oakeshott’s rationalist is a restless political meddler who believes that politics is putting ideas into effect. The fullest statement of his political philosophy is On Human Conduct (1975), in which the modern state is understood as a tension between civil and enterprise association. Exploring the idea of a civil association is perhaps Oakeshott’s most notable contribution to political philosophy.
Ortega y Gasset, José (1883–1955)
Authors: Orringer Nelson R.
Published: September 2018

The Spanish philosopher Ortega borrowed themes from early twentieth-century German philosophy and applied them with new breadth and urgency to his own context. Calling his philosophy ‘vital reason’ or ‘ratiovitalism’, he employed it initially to deal with the problem of Spanish decadence and later with European cultural issues, such as abstract art and the mass revolt against moral and intellectual excellence. Vital reason is more a method for coping with concrete historical problems than a system of universal principles. But the more disciplined the method became, the deeper Ortega delved into Western history to solve the theoretical and practical dilemmas facing the twentieth century.
Owen, Gwilym Ellis Lane (1922–82)
Authors: Cooper John M.
Published: September 2018

G.E.L. Owen led the reorientation in ancient philosophy that began in the 1950s in Britain and North America. He approached the texts with a profound knowledge of classical scholarship, but also as an analytic philosopher, understanding them as conceptual investigations of live philosophical interest. Concerned primarily with the logic of argumentation, philosophy of science and metaphysics, he wrote influential articles on Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle. Equally important were his classes at Oxford (1953–66), at Harvard (1966–73) and finally at Cambridge, in which he constantly developed and tested his ideas and methods.
Popper, Karl Raimund (1902–94)
Authors: Jarvie Ian C.
Published: September 2018

Popper belongs to a generation of Central European émigré scholars that profoundly influenced thought in the English-speaking countries in this century. His greatest contributions are in philosophy of science and in political and social philosophy. Popper’s ‘falsificationism’ reverses the usual view that accumulated experience leads to scientific hypotheses; rather, freely conjectured hypotheses precede, and are tested against, experience. The hypotheses that survive the testing process constitute current scientific knowledge. His general epistemology, ‘critical rationalism’, commends the Socratic method of posing questions and critically discussing the answers offered to them. He considers knowledge in the traditional sense of certainty, or in the modern sense of justified true belief, to be unobtainable.

After the Anschluss, Popper was stimulated by the problem of why democracies had succumbed to totalitarianism and applied his critical rationalism to political philosophy. Since we have no infallible ways of getting or maintaining good government, Plato’s question ‘Who should rule?’ is misdirected. To advocate the rule of the best, the wise or the just invites tyranny disguised under those principles. By contrast, a prudently constructed open society constructs institutions to ensure that any regime can be ousted without violence, no matter what higher ends it proclaims itself to be seeking. Couched in the form of extended critiques of Plato and Platonism as well as of Marx and Marxism, Popper’s political philosophy has had considerable influence in post-war Europe, East and West.
Reichenbach, Hans (1891–1953)
Authors: Salmon Wesley C.
Published: September 2018

Philosophy of science flourished in the twentieth century, partly as a result of extraordinary progress in the sciences themselves, but mainly because of the efforts of philosophers who were scientifically knowledgeable and who remained abreast of new scientific achievements. Hans Reichenbach was a pioneer in this philosophical development; he studied physics and mathematics in several of the great German scientific centres and later spent a number of years as a colleague of Einstein in Berlin. Early in his career he followed Kant, but later reacted against his philosophy, arguing that it was inconsistent with twentieth-century physics.

Reichenbach was not only a philosopher of science, but also a scientific philosopher. He insisted that philosophy should adhere to the same standards of precision and rigour as the natural sciences. He unconditionally rejected speculative metaphysics and theology because their claims could not be substantiated either a priori, on the basis of logic and mathematics, or a posteriori, on the basis of sense-experience. In this respect he agreed with the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, but because of other profound disagreements he was never actually a positivist. He was, instead, the leading member of the group of logical empiricists centred in Berlin.

Although his writings span many subjects Reichenbach is best known for his work in two main areas: induction and probability, and the philosophy of space and time. In the former he developed a theory of probability and induction that contained his answer to Hume’s problem of the justification of induction. Because of his view that all our knowledge of the world is probabilistic, this work had fundamental epistemological significance. In philosophy of physics he offered epoch-making contributions to the foundations of the theory of relativity, undermining space and time as Kantian synthetic a priori categories.
Ricoeur, Paul (1913–2005)
Authors: Thompson John B.
Published: September 2018

Paul Ricoeur is one of the leading French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Along with the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ricoeur is one of the main contemporary exponents of philosophical hermeneutics: that is, of a philosophical orientation which places particular emphasis on the nature and role of interpretation. While his early work was strongly influenced by Husserl’s phenomenology, he became increasingly concerned with problems of interpretation and developed – partly through detailed inquiries into psychoanalysis and structuralism – a distinctive hermeneutical theory. In his later writings Ricoeur explores the nature of metaphor and narrative, which are viewed as ways of creating new meaning in language.
Ryle, Gilbert (1900–76)
Authors: Lyons William
Published: September 2018

Alongside Wittgenstein and Austin, Ryle was one of the dominant figures in that middle period of twentieth-century English language philosophy which became known as ‘Linguistic Analysis’. His views in philosophy of mind led to his being described as a ‘logical behaviourist’ and his major work in that area, The Concept of Mind (1949), both by reason of its style and content, has become one of the modern classics of philosophy. In it Ryle attacked what he calls ‘Cartesian dualism’ or the myth of ‘the Ghost in the Machine’, arguing that philosophical troubles over the nature of mind and its relation with the body arose from a ‘category mistake’ which led erroneously to treating statements about mental phenomena in the same way as those about physical phenomena. For Ryle, to do something was not to perform two separate actions - one mental, one physical - but to behave in a certain way.

Much of Ryle’s work had a similar theme: philosophical confusion arose through the assimilation or misapplication of categorically different terms, and could only be cleared up by a careful analysis of the logic and use of language. He later became preoccupied with the nature of reflective thinking, since this stood as an example of an activity which seemed to evade the behaviouristic analysis that he recommended. Ryle was also a considerable Plato scholar, though his work in this area has been less influential.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80)
Authors: Howells Christina
Published: September 2018

Sartre was a philosopher of paradox: an existentialist who attempted a reconciliation with Marxism, a theorist of freedom who explored the notion of predestination. From the mid-1930s to the late-1940s, Sartre was in his ‘classical’ period. He explored the history of theories of imagination leading up to that of Husserl, and developed his own phenomenological account of imagination as the key to the freedom of consciousness. He analysed human emotions, arguing that emotion is a freely chosen mode of relationship to the outside world. In his major philosophical work, L’Être et le Néant(Being and Nothingness) (1943a), Sartre distinguished between consciousness and all other beings: consciousness is always at least tacitly conscious of itself, hence it is essentially ‘for itself’ (pour-soi) – free, mobile and spontaneous. Everything else, lacking this self-consciousness, is just what it is ‘in-itself’ (en-soi); it is ‘solid’ and lacks freedom. Consciousness is always engaged in the world of which it is conscious, and in relationships with other consciousnesses. These relationships are conflictual: they involve a battle to maintain the position of subject and to make the other into an object. This battle is inescapable.

Although Sartre was indeed a philosopher of freedom, his conception of freedom is often misunderstood. Already in Being and Nothingness human freedom operates against a background of facticity and situation. My facticity is all the facts about myself which cannot be changed – my age, sex, class of origin, race and so on; my situation may be modified, but it still constitutes the starting point for change and roots consciousness firmly in the world. Freedom is not idealized by Sartre; it is always within a given set of circumstances, after a particular past, and against the expectations of both myself and others that I make my free choices. My personal history conditions the range of my options.

From the 1950s onwards Sartre became increasingly politicized and was drawn to attempt a reconciliation between existentialism and Marxism. This was the aim of the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason) (1960) which recognized more fully than before the effect of historical and material conditions on individual and collective choice. An attempt to explore this interplay in action underlies both his biography of Flaubert and his own autobiography.
Sellars, Wilfrid Stalker (1912–89)
Authors: de Vries Willem
Published: September 2018

Wilfrid Sellars was an original, systematic philosopher in post-Second World War America. At a time when many thought of philosophy as piecemeal puzzle-solving, Sellars sought to develop a unified and coherent approach to philosophical issues across many different fields. His early work, up through his classic essay ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (1956), prefigured the major developments in subsequent Anglo-American philosophy. First, a powerful critique of ‘the myth of the given’ or foundationalism in semantics and epistemology; this is the idea that some of our knowledge (or meanings or of facts) is simply given to us entirely independently of any other knowledge we have – or, in other words that knowledge and meanings come in atoms, each of which could be had independently of any others. Second, Sellars articulated a functionalist approach to meaning and intentionality; functionalism holds that the meaning of linguistic expressions or the intentional content of mental states is a matter of the functional role the expression or state plays in the activity of the linguistic community. Finally, Sellars proposed the idea that folk psychology is much like a theory explaining behaviour. In subsequent work, Sellars elaborated on these themes in distinctive fashion. While responding to logical empiricism in ways that consciously mirrored Kant’s response to Hume, Sellars rejected Kant’s idealism in favour of the idea that science ultimately reveals what the world is in itself. This scientific realism combined with a semantic theory that treated apparent reference to abstract entities as a way to address the function or conceptual role of various terms or concepts. He was a thoroughgoing naturalist, but also argued that normative or prescriptive/evaluative discourse can neither be reduced nor eliminated. Rather, normative discourse is essential to and generated by interactions of rational agents in social structures. Though our cognitive and conative capacities have developed through evolution, normative discourse enables us to subject their use to assessment and at least some editorial control. Besides his profound contributions to the literature of philosophy, Sellars contributed to the discipline also as a distinguished teacher and influential editor.
Strawson, Peter Frederick (1919–2006)
Authors: Snowdon Paul F.
Published: September 2018

Strawson taught at the University of Oxford from 1947, becoming Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1968, and retiring in 1987. A sequence of influential books and articles established him as one of the leading philosophers in Oxford during that period. He had a crucial role in the transition there from the dominance of Austin and linguistic philosophy in the 1950s to the more liberal and metaphysical approaches in the 1960s and later. The principal topics about which he has written are the philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology and the history of philosophy.

Strawson became famous with ‘On Referring’ (1950), in which he criticized Russell for misconstruing our ordinary use of definite descriptions. Strawson endorses the slogan ‘ordinary language has no exact logic’, a viewpoint which is explored in Introduction to Logical Theory (1952). He argues that the utility of formal logic in its application to ordinary speech does not imply that the meaning of ordinary language is captured by the semantics of standard formal systems.

In Individuals (1959), Strawson’s most discussed work, his task is descriptive metaphysics. He attempts to describe the referentially basic subject matter of our thought. They are relatively enduring, perceptible and reidentifiable bodies. The other element in the basic framework is what Strawson calls persons, enduring entities with both material and psychological features. In The Bounds of Sense (1966), Strawson continued the development of his metaphysical and epistemological ideas, by combining a critical study of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, with the defence of some transcendental claims similar to Kant’s. To think of oneself as an enduring subject of experience requires that one recognize objects which are independent of oneself. So the major epistemological problem in the empiricist tradition, of building up to the external world from private experiences, cannot arise.

Skepticism and Naturalism; Some Varieties (1985a) studies the conflicts between fundamental opinions which are natural to us, such as that we know things, and philosophical viewpoints claiming that these opinions are mistaken. Strawson argues that scepticism about these natural views can and should be resisted. Throughout his career, Strawson has tried to describe the basic content of our thoughts and experiences, to counter scepticism about or revisions of such thoughts, to illuminate them by making analytical connections between their basic elements, as well as investigating language, our vehicle for expressing these thoughts. He has linked his explorations to the insights of philosophers of the past, while engaging in critical debate with the period’s other leading philosophers, such as Austin, Quine, Davidson and Dummett.
Vlastos, Gregory (1907–91)
Authors: Graham Daniel W.
Published: September 2018

A leading figure in the study of ancient Greek philosophy, Vlastos was a pioneer in the application to ancient philosophers of the techniques of analytic philosophy. Concentrating on figures of early Greek philosophy, he made major contributions to the understanding of the Presocratics, Socrates and Plato. He saw the Presocratics as applying ethical concepts to nature which ultimately rendered nature intelligible. He distinguished between the early dialogues of Plato, which represent the philosophy of Plato’s master Socrates – a philosophy the early Plato shared – and the middle dialogues in which Plato develops a transcendental metaphysics and rationalist epistemology to ground Socratic ethical concepts. Vlastos’s work played a major role in bringing the history of philosophy into the mainstream of philosophical research.
Whitehead, Alfred North (1861–1947)
Authors: Bradley James
Published: September 2018

Whitehead made fundamental contributions to modern logic and created one of the most controversial metaphysical systems of the twentieth century. He drew out what he took to be the revolutionary consequences for philosophy of the new discoveries in mathematics, logic and physics, developing these consequences first in logic and then in the philosophy of science and speculative metaphysics. His work constantly returns to the question: what is the place of the constructions of mathematics, science and philosophy in the nature of things?

Whitehead collaborated with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica (1910–13), which argues that all pure mathematics is derivable from a small number of logical principles. He went on in his philosophy of science to describe nature in terms of overlapping series of events and to argue that scientific explanations are constructed on that basis. He finally expanded and redefined his work by developing a new kind of speculative metaphysics. Stated chiefly in Process and Reality (1929), his metaphysics is both an extended reflection on the character of philosophical inquiry and an account of the nature of all things as a self-constructing ‘process’. On this view, reality is incomplete, a matter of the becoming of ‘occasions’ which are centres of activity in a multiplicity of serial processes whereby the antecedent occasions are taken up in the activities of successor occasions.
Von Wright, Georg Henrik (1916–2003)
Authors: Niiniluoto Ilkka
Published: September 2018

G.H. von Wright was one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. Born in Helsinki, Finland, von Wright did his early work on logic, probability and induction under the influence of logical empiricism. In 1948–51 he served as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s successor at Cambridge, but returned to his homeland and later became a member of the Academy of Finland. He did pioneering work on the new applications of logic: modal logic, deontic logic, the logic of norms and action, preference logic, tense logic, causality and determinism. In the 1970s his ideas about the explanation and understanding of human action helped to establish new links between the analytic tradition and Continental hermeneutics. Von Wright’s later works, which are eloquent books and essays written originally in his two native languages (Swedish and Finnish), deal with issues of humanism and human welfare, history and future, technology and ecology.
Phenomenological movement
Authors: Embree Lester
Published: September 2018

The phenomenological movement is a century-old international movement in philosophy that has penetrated most of the cultural disciplines, especially psychiatry and sociology. It began in Germany with the early work of Edmund Husserl, and spread to the rest of Europe, the Americas and Asia. In contrast with a school, a movement does not have a body of doctrine to which all participants agree; rather, there is a broad approach that tends to be shared. The phenomenological approach has at least four components.

First, phenomenologists tend to oppose naturalism. Naturalism includes behaviourism in psychology and positivism in social sciences and philosophy, and is a worldview based on the methods of the natural sciences. In contrast, phenomenologists tend to focus on the socio-historical or cultural lifeworld and to oppose all kinds of reductionism. Second, they tend to oppose speculative thinking and preoccupation with language, urging instead knowledge based on ‘intuiting’ or the ‘seeing’ of the matters themselves that thought is about. Third, they urge a technique of reflecting on processes within conscious life (or human existence) that emphasizes how such processes are directed at (or ‘intentive to’) objects and, correlatively, upon these objects as they present themselves or, in other words, as they are intended to. And fourth, phenomenologists tend to use analysis or explication as well as the seeing of the matters reflected upon to produce descriptions or interpretations both in particular and in universal or ‘eidetic’ terms. In addition, phenomenologists also tend to debate the feasibility of Husserl’s procedure of transcendental epoché or ‘bracketing’ and the project of transcendental first philosophy it serves, most phenomenology not being transcendental.

Beyond these widely shared components of method, phenomenologists tend to belong to one or another of four intercommunicating and sometimes overlapping tendencies. These tendencies are ‘realistic phenomenology’, which emphasizes the seeing and describing of universal essences; ‘constitutive phenomenology’, which emphasizes accounting for objects in terms of the consciousness of them; ‘existential phenomenology’, which emphasizes aspects of human existence within the world; and ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’, which emphasizes the role of interpretation in all spheres of life. All tendencies go back to the early work of Husserl, but the existential and hermeneutical tendencies are also deeply influenced by the early work of Martin Heidegger. Other leading figures are Nicolai Hartmann, Roman Ingarden, Adolf Reinach and Max Scheler in realistic phenomenology, Dorion Cairns, Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schutz in constitutive phenomenology, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir in existential phenomenology, and Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur in hermeneutical phenomenology.
Beauvoir, Simone de (1908–86)
Authors: Sandford Stella
Published: September 2018

Beauvoir was an existentialist philosopher, novelist and writer. Her early philosophical work (including The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947) attempted to develop an existentialist ethics, rethinking the ideas of freedom, responsibility and action through the prism of the self–other relation. Her work helped to shift existential thought towards a greater emphasis on embodiment and the analysis of oppression. This approach culminated in The Second Sex (1949), an interdisciplinary study of the oppression and situation of women. This is both a historical investigation into the social conditions that cast women as 'Other' and second to men and a philosophical (existential and phenomenological) account of the lived experience of 'feminine' existence. The Second Sex is of outstanding importance for feminist philosophy and the philosophy of sex and gender, as well as being a major influence on the women's movement since the 1960s. Beauvoir is also well known for her philosophical novels and plays, political essays, travel writing and published letters. Her last book, Old Age (1970), is one of very few philosophical works on ageing and old age. She was co-founder (1945) and lifetime editor of the important political and philosophical journal Les temps modernes. As a prominent public intellectual she was an influential supporter of many leftist and, in later life, feminist causes.
Dummett, Michael Anthony Eardley (1925–2011)
Authors: Taylor Barry
Published: September 2018

For Michael Dummett, the core of philosophy lies in the theory of meaning. His exploration of meaning begins with the model proposed by Gottlob Frege, of whose work Dummett is a prime expositor. A central feature of that model is that the sense (content) of a sentence is given by a condition for its truth, displayed as deriving from its constituent structure. If sense so explicated is to explain linguistic practice, knowledge of these truth-conditions must be attributed to language users by identifying features of use in which it is manifested. Analysis of truth suggests we seek such manifestation in patterns of assertion. But scrutiny of those patterns shows that there is no distinction between use which manifests knowledge of classical truth-conditions, and use which manifests knowledge of a weaker kind of truth - for example, one which holds whenever we possess a potential warrant for a statement.

Such considerations motivate reconstruing sense as given by conditions for this weaker kind of truth. But rejigging Fregean semantics in line with such a conception is highly nontrivial. Mathematical intuitionism, properly construed, gives us models for doing so with mathematical language; Dummett’s programme is to extend such work to everyday discourses. Since he further argues that realism consists in defending the classical semantics for a discourse, this programme amounts to probing the viability of antirealism about such things as the material world, other minds and past events.
Kripke, Saul Aaron (1940–)
Authors: Jubien Michael
Published: September 2018

Saul Kripke is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. He is also one of the leading mathematical logicians, having done seminal work in areas including modal logic, intuitionistic logic and set theory. Although much of his work in logic has philosophical significance, it will not be discussed here.

Kripke’s main contributions fall in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of logic and mathematics. He is particularly well known for his views on and discussions of the following topics: the concepts of necessity, identity and ‘possible worlds’; ‘essentialism’ – the idea that things have significant essential properties; the question of what determines the referent of an ordinary proper name and the related question of whether such names have meanings; the relations among the concepts of necessity, analyticity, and the a priori; the concept of belief and its problems; the concept of truth and its problems; and scepticism, the idea of following a rule, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘private language argument’. This entry will be confined to the topics of identity, proper names, necessity and essentialism.
Reinach, Adolf (1883–1917)
Authors: Smith Barry
Published: September 2018

Adolf Reinach, a German philosopher of Jewish extraction, was born in Mainz and died on the battlefield in Flanders. He is of principal note as the inventor, in 1913, of a theory of speech acts (or ‘social acts’ to use Reinach’s own terminology) which in some respects surpasses the later work of thinkers such as J.L. Austin and Searle. Reinach was a leading member of the so-called Munich–Göttingen school of phenomenologists who were inspired by Husserl’s early realism and who rejected Husserl’s subsequent turn to ‘transcendental idealism’, drawing their inspiration rather from the more analytic orientation of thinkers such as Franz Brentano and other Austrian philosophers.
Cavell, Stanley (1926–)
Authors: Mulhall Stephen
Published: September 2018

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Stanley Cavell has held the Walter M. Cabot Chair in Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University since 1963. The range, diversity and distinctiveness of his writings are unparalleled in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. As well as publishing essays on modernist painting and music, he has created a substantial body of work in film studies, literary theory and literary criticism; he has introduced new and fruitful ways of thinking about psychoanalysis and its relationship with philosophy; and his work on Heidegger and Derrida, taken together with his attempts to revitalize the tradition of Emersonian Transcendentalism, have defined new possibilities for a distinctively American contribution to philosophical culture. This complex oeuvre is unified by a set of thematic concerns – relating to scepticism and moral perfectionism – which are rooted in Cavell’s commitment to the tradition of ordinary language philosophy, as represented in the work of J.L. Austin and Wittgenstein.
Hoernlé, Reinhold Friedrich Alfred (1880–1943)
Authors: Sweet William
Published: September 2018

Perhaps the best known of South African philosophers, Hoernlé was a member of the generation of students influenced by the early British idealists, such as Green, Caird, Bradley, and Bosanquet. Like many of his contemporaries, Hoernlé left Britain to pursue his career in some of the universities of the Empire, providing an opportunity for fruitful contact between the main currents of European philosophy and the cultures and traditions of his adopted country. Hoernlé sought to provide a systematic philosophy that could be applied to questions of social and public policy as well as politics. His position responds to trends in continental European philosophy and addresses some of the criticisms of idealism raised in the early twentieth century by Russell, Schiller, and the American ‘new realists’. Hoernlé’s most significant contribution, however, was in the application of liberal political thought to the multiethnic environment of South Africa. Although Hoernlé’s liberalism has been criticized for not providing an effective alternative to the then-current race relations in South Africa, in his time he was seen by many as a strong progressive force, and his analysis of pluralism and cultural diversity in the state bears on contemporary discussions of multiculturalism.
Sen, Amartya (1933–)
Authors: Qizilbash Mozaffar
Published: September 2018

Amartya Sen is one of the leading economists of the twentieth century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998. His influence extends well beyond economics to philosophy, gender studies and other disciplines. He has made numerous path-breaking contributions to economics notably to social choice theory, the economics of welfare and development and work at the borderline of economics and philosophy. Sen has challenged economists to give freedom a more significant role in the study of development and social choice. His critique of utilitarianism was in part provoked by its apparent blindness to considerations of equality and rights. The ‘capability approach’ emerged from that critique and has had a deep influence on foundational arguments, as well as debates about measurement issues, relating to well-being, justice, poverty and development, as well as on public policy.
Gurwitsch, Aron (1901–73)
Authors: Arvidson Sven
Published: September 2018

Aron Gurwitsch was a phenomenologist who produced important work on the structure of consciousness. He was concerned with how consciousness is organized, especially its invariant, formal structure. His main work, The Field of Consciousness (1964), argues that consciousness is always structured in a three-fold pattern: theme, thematic field and margin. The theme is the focus of attention, the thematic field is the relevant context and the margin contains items merely co-present with the theme and its thematic field. Gurwitsch applied his philosophy of organization to wide-ranging issues, including social encounters, logic, culture and critiques of psychology. Gurwitsch successfully integrated insights from Gestalt psychology and phenomenological philosophy to advance the problem of conscious organization in a way that neither discipline alone could achieve. His insights on attention and consciousness have become increasingly relevant for phenomenology and the cognitive sciences.
Consciousness, phenomenology of
Authors: Jacobs Hanne
Published: September 2018

Phenomenology is an approach to consciousness that originates at the beginning of the twentieth century in the work of Edmund Husserl. A phenomenological account of consciousness begins from a first-person reflection on consciousness that puts out of play our everyday or natural-scientific preconceptions about consciousness and the world and describes the structural features of our consciousness of the world. This project is carried on in the phenomenological works of authors such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, albeit with sometimes quite different emphases and aims.

Insofar as phenomenology describes the structures of consciousness by virtue of which there is a world for us, phenomenology is a form of transcendental philosophy. Specifically, phenomenologists describe how the structures of intentionality, self-awareness, temporality, attention, embodiment, and intersubjectivity make possible our consciousness of worldly things, situations, and events. According to them, the world is not just an objective nature comprised of spatiotemporally extended and causally connected things; it is also always an intersubjectively accessible world that is shot through with values and organized in light of practical projects, due to which the world appears with a significance that is variable across time and space.

Husserl maintains that phenomenological descriptions of the essential structures of consciousness that make possible the experience and knowledge of the world—that is, of transcendental consciousness—can also be taken as psychological descriptions of consciousness conceived as a natural event in the world. In this way, a number of contemporary philosophers draw on specific descriptive insights from the phenomenological tradition to address issues in contemporary philosophy of mind and drive the empirical investigation of consciousness forward (such as Gallagher and Schmicking 2010; Dahlstrom et al. 2015; Petitot et al. 1999; Thompson 2007; Zahavi and Gallagher 2012; Zahavi 2012). Alternatively, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty explicitly draw on insights from psychology and psychopathology to inform their phenomenology of consciousness, which is a strategy that has also been employed by some contemporary phenomenologists (see Zahavi 2000).
Hintikka, Jaakko (1929–2015)
Authors: Niiniluoto Ilkka
Published: September 2018

Jaakko Hintikka was a Finnish philosopher who developed important new methods and systems in mathematical and philosophical logic. Over a distinguished career in universities in Finland and the USA, he was one of the most cited analytic philosophers and published prolifically in mathematical and philosophical logic, philosophy of language, formal epistemology, philosophy of science and history of philosophy. Hintikka was a pioneer of possible-worlds semantics, epistemic logic, inductive logic, game-theoretical semantics, the interrogative approach to inquiry and independence-friendly logic. He was an expert on Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Peirce and Wittgenstein. He also influenced philosophy as a successful teacher and the long-time editor of the journal Synthese.
Latour, Bruno (1947–)
Authors: Harman Graham
Published: September 2018

Bruno Latour is a French philosopher whose work and influence have been mainly in the social sciences, and he is one of the world’s most cited authors in this field. Along with Michel Callon and John Law he is considered one of the founders of actor-network theory (ANT), a method of avoiding abstract terms such as ‘society’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘the economy’ by focusing on the role of individual actors in building up any collective. ANT is thus a ‘flat ontology’ that places humans, nonhumans, concepts and fictional characters on the same footing. All entities are equally real, though not equally strong: neutrons simply have more or better allies attesting to their existence than Popeye, square circles or white ravens. Entities are termed ‘actors’ or ‘actants’, since they can be known and understood only by the effects they have on other things: there is no substance or thingly surplus hidden behind their concrete actions.

From the late 1990s Latour partly renounced ANT due to its inability to distinguish between the truth conditions of differing modes of reality, a problem he tried to address in his new ‘modes of existence’ project. Among the chief influences on his work are the semiotics of A.J. Greimas, the metaphysics of A.N. Whitehead, the pragmatism of William James, and the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.
Intentionality, phenomenological perspectives
Authors: Drummond John
Published: September 2018

Intentionality – the directedness of mental experiences to an object – is one of the main themes of phenomenology. Franz Brentano revived the medieval doctrine of intentionality, but it was Edmund Husserl who pioneered the phenomenological approach to intentionality and provided a detailed account of its structure. Husserl employed a phenomenological methodology that is descriptive, that aims at revealing the essential structures of intentional experience and that considers without presuppositions drawn from other quarters both the experience and its object just as they are experienced. Phenomenological investigations of intentionality explore, in other words, both the experience’s directedness to its object and the object’s being given in a particular manner or under a particular conception. In part to distinguish his view from psychological views, Husserl adopts a technical vocabulary in his discussions. He refers to the complex of mental performances and syntheses that account for the experience’s directedness as the ‘noesis’, and he refers to the object just as experienced as the ‘noema’. Thus, for Husserl, the study of intentionality is the analysis of the noesis-noema correlation.

This formula should not mislead: the intentional correlation is not a simple, one-noesis-to-one-noema correlation. Reflection reveals immediately that the experience of an object is temporally extended and that a single object is experienced in a multiplicity of appearances, from many perspectives and under many different aspects or conceptions. This requires that phenomenology examine the temporal structure of both the experience and the experienced object. Moreover, phenomenology must examine the role of the body in generating multiple appearances of an object from different spatial perspectives as well as how differences in embodiment affect our understanding of objects. Finally, since something is an object only to the extent that it is experienced by a multiplicity of persons, phenomenology must also examine intersubjectivity to determine how it is that an object is the same for all of us and how history – our shared temporality – contributes to the understanding of our shared world. All these issues flow from the reflection on the intentionality of experience and were considered by Husserl and his successors.
Lifeworld and science
Authors: Dodd James
Published: September 2018

In phenomenology, ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt) denotes the immediate, everyday, concrete whole of the subjectively experienced world. Its original elaboration in the thought of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) played a central role in his attempt to ground the rationality of the sciences in the active and passive syntheses of subjective life.

Husserl's concept of lifeworld was originally influenced by the work of Richard Avenarius (1843–1896) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), and progressively deepened throughout his philosophical career until it reached its most sophisticated form in the 1930s. Though relevant to a wide variety of analyses of ethical life, perceptual experience and the problem of history, the lifeworld plays its perhaps most important role in Husserl's phenomenological interpretation of scientific rationality. The lifeworld plays a critical role in Husserl’s mature conception of science in two fundamental respects: first, the lifeworld provides the framework for Husserl’s investigation of the origin of basic concepts of logical reasoning (such as negation and states of affairs) in lived experience; second, it anchors his account of rational evidence and truth in the prediscursive dimensions of lived experience. The concept of the lifeworld has proven to be one of Husserl's most important philosophical contributions and has been subsequently developed in a number of post-Husserlian strands of phenomenology and sociology.
Bataille, Georges (1897–1962)
Authors: Maskit Jonathan
Published: September 2018

Georges Bataille was born in Billom, France, raised in Reims, and spent much of his adult life in Paris. Never formally trained as a philosopher, he worked from 1922 to 1942 as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale. In addition to his philosophical works, Bataille also wrote on the history of art as well as a number of critical works and novels.

Owing to his position outside academic philosophy, Bataille was able to treat diverse topics in ways which might have been unacceptable otherwise. His work addresses the importance of sacrifice, eroticism and death, as well as the kinds of ‘expenditure’ evidenced by what he called the general economy. It draws on diverse sources (Hegel, Nietzsche, Marcel Mauss, anthropological research, and the history of religion, among others) and treats a wide range of topics: the role of art in human life, the practice of sacrifice in ancient and modern cultures, the role of death in our understanding of subjectivity, and the limits of knowledge.
Blanchot, Maurice (1907–2003)
Authors: Milchman Alan , Rosenberg Alan
Published: September 2018

Maurice Blanchot was a dominant voice in French philosophy and letters from the 1940s, initiating a postmodern discourse which has had a profound impact on Bataille, Levinas, Foucault and Derrida. His early writings, between 1930 and 1940, consisted of cultural and political criticism. The experience of the Second World War led him to disengage from politics and he became an essayist and novelist. His works have included novels, narratives, and criticism, notably. From the 1970s onwards he produced a series of fragmentary writings in which the line between literature and philosophy is shattered and, since the 1980s, meditations on language, death, the ‘disaster’ and community.
Camus, Albert (1913–60)
Authors: Sprintzen David A.
Published: September 2018

Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957 for having ‘illuminated the problems of the human conscience in our times’. By mythologizing the experiences of a secular age struggling with an increasingly contested religious tradition, he dramatized the human effort to ‘live and create without the aid of eternal values which, temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary Europe’(1943). Thus the challenge posed by ‘the absurd’ with which he is so universally identified.