bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gans, Eduard (1797–1839)
Authors: Stepelevich Lawrence S.
Published: September 2018

Gans was an influential legal theorist and an admirer of Hegel’s doctrines regarding the nature and purposes of political institutions. He attempted to extend the role of those doctrines to the practical reform of German legal theory. Gans criticized this theory as being neither universal nor in accord with natural human rights. One of the most evident expressions of this partiality of the law was to be found in the legal disregard of the natural civil rights of Jewish citizens. Gans looked to the past, to Roman law, with its universal applications and its firm structures based upon natural rights, as a model upon which a future German legal system could be constructed.
Sieyes, Emmanuel Joseph (1748–1836)
Authors: Kelly Duncan
Published: September 2018

The Abbé Sieyes is best known for his 1789 pamphlet What is the Third Estate?, which set the constitutional agenda for the new French National Assembly. His rhetorical attacks on aristocratic privilege, alongside his promotion of the Third Estate, political representation and popular sovereignty, marked him as a first-rate political thinker. His writings also had a practical impact. Yet he had trained as a priest, only entering political life in 1788. His subsequent fate became intertwined with that of the Revolution. Ironically, Sieyes, who helped ‘open’ the revolution, also played a part in its conclusion, laying the ground for Napoleon’s coup d’état of 1799.
Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Comte de (1816–82)
Authors: Bernasconi Robert
Published: September 2018

Although best remembered as the author of Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, Gobineau’s main literary activity was as a novelist and writer on Asia. Even though his thesis that racial mixing was the main cause of the decline of civilizations came to be widely accepted, as did his conviction that the White race alone was capable of civilization, his cultural pessimism was not so widely shared. Gobineau understood his work as an answer to the philosophies of progress because it established that the fall of civilizations was inevitable. However, subsequent generations invoked his name in their attempt to justify radical social programmes designed, for example, to restore a racial purity that Gobineau himself believed to be neither possible nor desirable in the sense in which they understood it.
Heine, Heinrich (1797–1856)
Authors: Bowie Andrew
Published: September 2018

Heinrich Heine was one of the most significant German literary and political figures during the period after the Napoleonic wars until the 1848 Revolution. He is associated with the movement called ‘Young Germany’, which sought radical political and social reform. His literary work includes some of the most memorable German poetry of the nineteenth century, characterized by bitter irony, wit and intensity of feeling. His iconoclastic cultural essays, travel writings and reflections on contemporary art, politics and society are written with a stylistic verve and humour which influenced Nietzsche, among many others. His contribution to philosophy lies both in his renewal of German prose style, and his manner of connecting philosophy to social, political and cultural life. His philosophically oriented texts form part of the critique of religion in the 1830s and 1840s associated with Feuerbach, Marx and others. Heine’s demands for greater social justice are particularly distinguished by their criticisms of the aspects of Christianity which repress the sensuous side of human existence.
Villari, Pasquale (1827–1917)
Authors: Patriarca Silvana
Published: September 2018

Pasquale Villari was the most famous Italian historian of the second half of the nineteenth century and the author of what is considered the first ‘manifesto’ of positivism in Italy, ‘La filosofia positiva e il metodo storico’ (Positive Philosophy and the Historical Method) (1866). Based on a historicist approach partly inspired by Vico and De Sanctis and on a preference for Mill over Comte, Villari’s positivism is commonly described as ‘critical-historicist’ or ‘methodological’ in contrast to more scientistic and naturalistic versions. His historiography focused on Italy and particularly Florence during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In his essays on the philosophy, theory, and methodology of history he attempted to define the specific nature of history as a moral/social science in its relation to philosophy, art and the natural sciences. He was also the author of numerous essays on educational matters and the arts, and an authoritative political and social commentator.
Ørsted, Hans Christian (1777–1851)
Authors: Wilson Andrew D.
Published: September 2018

Hans Christian Ørsted, the Danish chemist and physicist, discovered electromagnetism in 1820. This epochal discovery fundamentally changed the development of physical science, leading to the ground-breaking research of Michael Faraday, Andre-Marie Ampere, James Clerk Maxwell, Heinrich Hertz, Albert Einstein, and others. In his scientific work, Ørsted espoused a dynamical theory of matter which had its roots in Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics of nature, and he remained committed to the belief in the fundamental interconnection of natural forces, a commitment that can be traced back to his religious instruction as a youth and to Friedrich von Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. During the early years of his career, he strove to provide a rigorous metaphysical foundation for the science of chemistry. Throughout his life and scientific work, Ørsted understood natural laws and phenomena to be the rational revelation of God, and sought to develop a unified view of nature reflecting this belief.
Bachelard, Gaston (1884–1962)
Authors: Tiles Mary
Published: September 2018

One indication of the originality of Bachelard’s work is that he was famous for his writings both in the philosophy of science and on the poetic imagination. His work demonstrates his belief that the life of the masculine, work-day consciousness (animus), striving towards scientific objectivity through reasoning and the rectification of concepts, must be complemented by the life of a nocturnal, feminine consciousness (anima), seeking an expanded poetic subjectivity, as, in reverie, it creates the imaginary.

In common with other scientist-philosophers writing in the first half of the twentieth century, Bachelard reflected on the upheavals wrought by the introduction of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The views at which he arrived were, however, unlike those of his contemporaries; he argued that the new science required a new, non-Cartesian epistemology, one which accommodated discontinuities (epistemological breaks) in the development of science. It was only after he had established himself as one of France’s leading philosophers of science, by succeeding Abel Rey in the chair of history and philosophy of science at the Sorbonne, that Bachelard began to publish works on the poetic imagination. Here his trenchantly anti-theoretical stance was provocative. He rejected the role of literary critic and criticized literary criticism, focusing instead on reading images and on the creative imagination.
Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859–1941)
Authors: Ansell-Pearson Keith
Published: September 2018

Bergson’s thinking focuses on the major questions of philosophy: What is time? What is the nature of consciousness? What is the significance of evolution? What are the sources of morality? Many readers, including prominent philosophers of the twentieth century, have admired him for the clarity, rigour, and precision he seeks to bring to bear on these topics. He has had his detractors too (the most prominent example being Bertrand Russell). Bergson’s thinking orients itself around a philosophy of life and the attempt is made to think beyond the human condition: that is, beyond our established and prevailing habits of representation. It is from the primacy that is to be accorded to life that adequate conceptions of other areas of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, can be developed. Such a method of thinking has to work against the most inveterate habits of the mind and consists in an interchange of insights that correct and add to each other. For Bergson such an enterprise ends by expanding the humanity within us and so allows humanity to surpass itself by reinserting itself in the whole. This is accomplished through philosophy, for it is philosophy that provides us with the means for reversing the normal directions of the mind, so upsetting its habits. According to Bergson, the human intellect has evolved as a practical instrument for manipulating material reality and its habits are fundamentally those of utility and control. By contrast, philosophy has the ‘duty’ to ‘examine the living without any reservation as to practical utility’, and it seeks to free itself from habits that are strictly intellectual (Bergson [1907] 2007a: 126).
Brunschvicg, Léon (1869–1944)
Authors: Loi Maurice
Published: September 2018

Brunschvicg occupied a central place in French philosophy during the first part of the twentieth century. In 1909 he became a professor at the Sorbonne, teaching there and at the École Normale Supérieure for the next thirty years. His indefatigable activity, wide curiosity and erudition made him a leading figure of French philosophy. His influence is manifest in the work of Bachelard, Piaget, Guéroult, Nabert, Koyré and Sartre. His most important work lay in the field of the philosophy of mathematics, where (among other things) he introduced French philosophers to the work of Frege and Russell.
Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970)
Authors: Creath Richard
Published: September 2018

Carnap was one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century, and made important contributions to logic, philosophy of science, semantics, modal theory and probability. Viewed as an enfant terrible when he achieved fame in the Vienna Circle in the 1930s, Carnap is more accurately seen as one who held together its widely varying viewpoints as a coherent movement. In the 1930s he developed a daring pragmatic conventionalism according to which many traditional philosophical disputes are viewed as the expression of different linguistic frameworks, not genuine disagreements. This distinction between a language (framework) and what can be said within it was central to Carnap’s philosophy, reconciling the apparently a priori domains such as logic and mathematics with a thoroughgoing empiricism: basic logical and mathematical commitments partially constitute the choice of language. There is no uniquely correct choice among alternative logics or foundations for mathematics; it is a question of practical expedience, not truth. Thereafter, the logic and mathematics may be taken as true in virtue of that language. The remaining substantive questions, those not settled by the language alone, should be addressed only by empirical means. There is no other source of news. Beyond pure logic and mathematics, Carnap’s approach recognized within the sciences commitments aptly called a priori – those not tested straightforwardly by observable evidence, but, rather, presupposed in the gathering and manipulation of evidence. This a priori, too, is relativized to a framework and thus comports well with empiricism. The appropriate attitude towards alternative frameworks would be tolerance, and the appropriate mode of philosophizing the patient task of explicating and working out in detail the consequences of adopting this or that framework. While Carnap worked at this tirelessly and remained tolerant of alternative frameworks, his tolerance was not much imitated nor were his principles well understood and adopted. By the time of his death, philosophers were widely rejecting what they saw as logical empiricism, though often both their arguments and the views offered as improvements had been pioneered by Carnap and his associates. By his centenary, however, there emerged a new and fuller understanding of his ideas and of their importance for twentieth-century philosophy.
Croce, Benedetto (1866–1952)
Authors: Bellamy Richard
Published: September 2018

The leading Italian philosopher of his day, Croce presented his philosophy as a humanist alternative to the consolations of religion. A Hegelian idealist, he argued that all human activity was orientated towards either the Beautiful, the True, the Useful or the Good. These ideals were the four aspects of what, following Hegel, he termed spirit or human consciousness. The first two corresponded to the theoretical dimensions of spirit, namely intuition and logic respectively, the last two to spirit’s practical aspects of economic and ethical willing. He contended that the four eternal ideals were ‘pure concepts’ whose content derived from human thought and action. Spirit or consciousness progressively unfolded through human history as our ideas of beauty, truth, usefulness and morality were steadily reworked and developed.

Croce insisted that his idealism was a form of ‘absolute historicism’, since it involved the claim that all meaning and value evolved immanently through the historical process. He strenuously denied that spirit could be regarded as some form of transcendent puppet-master that existed apart from the human beings through which it expressed itself. He accused Hegel of making this mistake. He also maintained that Hegel’s conception of the dialectic as a synthesis of opposites had paid insufficient attention to the need to retain the distinct moments of spirit. He argued that the Beautiful, the True, the Useful and the Good, though linked, ought never to be confused, and he criticized aestheticism and utilitarianism accordingly.

Croce developed his thesis both in philosophical works devoted to aesthetics, ethics, politics and the philosophy of history, and in detailed historical studies of Italian and European literature, culture, politics and society. Opposition to the Fascist regime led him to identify his philosophy with liberalism on the grounds that it emphasized the creativity and autonomy of the individual. In practical politics, however, he was a conservative.
Ducasse, Curt John (1881–1969)
Authors: Madden Edward H.
Published: September 2018

Ducasse was a highly systematic philosopher and scarcely any field or topic escaped his attention. He criticized Hume’s account of causality, advocated ‘soft determinism’ and developed an ‘adverbial’ realist account of our knowledge of the external world. He was a dualist on the mind–body relation, a ‘progressive hedonist’ in ethics, a defender of the ‘will to believe’, an expressionist in the philosophy of art, a scourge of art critics and a critic of theism. He also wrote on propositions, truth, signs, liberal education, linguistic metaphilosophy and paranormal phenomena. His influence on younger philosophers has been greatest, however, in the areas of causality, adverbial realism, progressive hedonism, the will to believe and aesthetics. Ducasse died in 1969, but his work remains significant, especially through his influence on Roderick Chisholm and Wilfred Sellars.
Evans, Gareth (1946–80)
Authors: McDowell John
Published: September 2018

Frege’s notion of sense is a conception of content whose application is controlled by the idea of rationality. A Fregean outlook is often taken to imply that singular reference is always mediated by descriptions, and hence to be inconsistent with the insights that have motivated proponents of ‘direct reference’. But in his major work, The Varieties of Reference (1982), Gareth Evans showed how a treatment of singular reference on Fregean lines can accommodate those insights. This means that the semantics of singular reference need not be distanced from the philosophy of mind, in the way that proponents of ‘direct reference’ typically suppose. Within the framework provided by this synthesis, Evans gave detailed treatments of the different ways in which thought and speech are directed at particular objects. Particularly notable are his discussions of demonstrative thinking, which exploits the perceptible presence to the thinker of the object it concerns; of first-personal thinking; and of singular statements of nonexistence.
Foucault, Michel (1926–84)
Authors: Gutting Gary
Published: September 2018

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and historian of thought. Although his earliest writings developed within the frameworks of Marxism and existential phenomenology, he soon moved beyond these influences and developed his own distinctive approaches. There is no overall methodological or theoretical unity to Foucault’s thought, but his writings do fall into several main groups, each characterized by distinctive problems and methods. In his early studies of psychiatry, clinical medicine and the social sciences, Foucault developed an ‘archaeology of knowledge’ that treated systems of thought as ‘discursive formations’ independent of the beliefs and intentions of individuals. Foucault’s archaeology displaced the human subject from the central role it played in the humanism which had been dominant since Kant. While archaeology provided no account of transitions from one system to another, Foucault later introduced a ‘genealogical’ approach, which seeks to explain changes in systems of discourse by connecting them to changes in the non-discursive practices of social power structures. Like Nietzsche’s, Foucault’s genealogies refused all comprehensive explanatory schemes, such as those of Marx or Freud. Instead he viewed systems of thought as contingent products of many small, unrelated causes. Foucault’s genealogical studies also emphasize the essential connection between knowledge and power. Bodies of knowledge are not autonomous intellectual structures that happen to be employed as Baconian instruments of power. Rather, they are essentially tied to systems of social control. Foucault first used his genealogical approach to study the relations between modern prisons and the psychological and sociological knowledge on which they are based. He next proposed a similar analysis of modern practices and ‘sciences’ of sexuality, but eventually decided that such a study had to begin with an understanding of ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of the ethical self. This study was published in two volumes that appeared just before his death.
Grice, Herbert Paul (1913–88)
Authors: Baker Judith
Published: September 2018

Grice was a leading member of the post-war Oxford group of analytic philosophers. His small body of published work, together with an oral tradition, has been deeply influential among both philosophers and theoretical linguists. His outline of general rules of conversation began a new era in pragmatics. Grice’s analysis of speaker’s meaning explicates semantic notions in terms of the psychological concepts of intention and belief. His theory of conversation is based on the nature of language as a rational, cooperative activity. His account of conversational rules gave him a tool that he applied to a wide class of philosophical problems. Although Grice is most famous for his work on language and meaning, his interests cover a full range of philosophical topics, including ethics, moral psychology and philosophical psychology.
Habermas, Jürgen (1929–)
Authors: Baynes Kenneth
Published: September 2018

Jürgen Habermas, German philosopher and social theorist, is perhaps best known for his wide-ranging defence of the modern public sphere and its related ideals of publicity and free public reason, but he has also made important contributions to theories of communication and informal argumentation, ethics, and the foundations and methodology of the social sciences. He studied in Göttingen, Zurich and Bonn, completing a dissertation on Schelling’s philosophy in 1954. After working for a short time as Theodor Adorno’s research assistant at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt he held professorships in Heidelberg and Frankfurt and, from 1971 to 1981, was co-director of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg. With the publication of Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) he became widely recognized as the leading intellectual heir to the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, a variant of Western Marxism that included such figures as Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. His two-volume The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) is a major contribution to social theory, in which he locates the origins of the various political, economic and cultural crises confronting modern society in a one-sided process of rationalization steered more by the media of money and administrative power than by forms of collective decision-making based on consensually grounded norms and values.
Jaspers, Karl (1883–1969)
Authors: Salamun Kurt
Published: September 2018

Karl Jaspers is generally known as an existentialist, but he also developed interesting conceptions in other fields of philosophy: in philosophy of religion, the concepts of Transcendence, cipher and philosophical faith; in philosophy of history, the thesis of an Axial Period in history; in political philosophy, the idea of a new, reasonable politics. His existentialism deals mainly with personal moral attitudes and private aspects of individual self-realization in boundary situations and intimate interpersonal communication. His political philosophy concentrates on controversial political affairs and some of the urgent problems of his age (for example, the possibility of extinguishing all life on earth by the atom bomb, or of establishing a world-wide totalitarian regime).
Lakatos, Imre (1922–74)
Authors: Worrall John
Published: September 2018

Imre Lakatos made important contributions to the philosophy of mathematics and of science. His ‘Proofs and Refutations’ (1963–4) develops a novel account of mathematical discovery. It shows that counterexamples (‘refutations’) play an important role in mathematics as well as in science and argues that both proofs and theorems are gradually improved by searching for counterexamples and by systematic ‘proof analysis’. His ‘methodology of scientific research programmes’ (which he presented as a ‘synthesis’ of the accounts of science given by Popper and by Kuhn) is based on the idea that science is best analysed, not in terms of single theories, but in terms of broader units called research programmes. Such programmes issue in particular theories, but in a way again governed by clear-cut heuristic principles. Lakatos claimed that his account supplies the sharp criteria of ‘progress’ and ‘degeneration’ missing from Kuhn’s account, and hence captures the ‘rationality’ of scientific development. Lakatos also articulated a ‘meta-methodology’ for appraising rival methodologies of science in terms of the ‘rational reconstructions’ of history they provide.
Nagel, Ernest (1901–85)
Authors: Levi Isaac
Published: September 2018

Ernest Nagel was arguably the pre-eminent American philosopher of science from the mid 1930s to the 1960s. He taught at Columbia University for virtually his entire career. Although he shared with Bertrand Russell and with members of the Vienna Circle a respect for and sensitivity to developments in mathematics and the natural sciences, he endorsed a strand in the thought of Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey that Nagel himself called ‘contextual naturalism’. Among the main features of contextual naturalism is its distrust of reductionist claims that are not the outcomes of scientific inquiries.

Nagel’s contextual naturalism infused his influential, detailed and informed essays on probability, explanation in the natural and social sciences, measurement, history of mathematics, and the philosophy of law. It is reflected, for example, in his trenchant critiques of Russell’s reconstruction of the external world and Russell’s epistemology as well as cognate views endorsed at one time or another by members of the Vienna Circle.
Prior, Arthur Norman (1914–69)
Authors: Williams C.J.F.
Published: September 2018

Prior is most often thought of as the creator of tense logic. (Tense logic examines operators such as ‘It will be the case that’ in the way that modal logic examines ‘It must be the case that’.) But his first book was on ethics, and his views on metaphysical topics such as determinism, thinking, intentionality, change, events, the nature of time, existence, identity and truth are of central importance to philosophy. Using methods akin to Russell’s in his Theory of Descriptions, he showed that times, events, facts, propositions and possible worlds were logical constructions. For example, we get rid of events by recognizing among other things that to say that the event of Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon took place later than the event of Caesar’s invading Britain is to say that it has been the case that both Caesar is crossing the Rubicon and it has been the case that Caesar is invading Britain. The title of the posthumous work, Worlds, Times and Selves (1977), indicates the breadth and depth of his thought. He is also fun to read. He died at the age of fifty-four, at the height of his powers.
Ricoeur, Paul (1913–2005)
Authors: Thompson John B. , Savage Roger
Published: September 2018

Paul Ricoeur was one of the leading thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century and in the later part of his life was considered by some to be France’s greatest living philosopher. Along with the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ricoeur was one of the main contemporary exponents of philosophical hermeneutics: that is, of a philosophical orientation that places particular emphasis on the nature and role of interpretation. While his early work was strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, he became increasingly concerned with problems of interpretation and developed – partly through detailed inquiries into psychoanalysis and structuralism – a distinctive hermeneutical approach. In some of his subsequent writings Ricoeur explored the role of imagination in metaphor, narrative, and social and political life. In his later work, Ricoeur turned his attention to a philosophical anthropology of the capable human being, which was the context for his explorations into the self’s ethical constitution, the role of memory and forgetting in history, and issues of justice and recognition.
Ryle, Gilbert (1900–76)
Authors: Lyons William
Published: September 2018

Alongside Wittgenstein and Austin, Ryle was one of the dominant figures in the movement 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 questions formulated as problems about 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 arises through the assimilation or misapplication of categorically different terms, and can 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.
Schlick, Friedrich Albert Moritz (1882–1936)
Authors: Oberdan Thomas
Published: September 2018

Moritz Schlick is usually remembered as the leader of the Vienna Circle, a group that flourished from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, and made an important contribution to the philosophical movement known as ‘logical empiricism’. Yet many of Schlick’s most original contributions to philosophy antedated the hey-day of the Circle, providing the foundations for much of its subsequent development. He started his academic career as a physicist, and his early contributions to philosophy include an influential conventionalist interpretation of general relativity and a new account of the definitions of the basic terms of theoretical science. In the debates that flourished within the Vienna Circle he is famous for his commitment to the Principle of Verifiability and his defence of a correspondence theory of truth. In addition, his works during the final years of the Vienna Circle represent some of the most sober reflections on the problems that vexed the early logical empiricists. Although few of the views identified with logical empiricism currently find favour among philosophers, their approach to philosophy, especially their identification of its central perplexities, still wields enormous influence among contemporary thinkers. Since Schlick contributed significantly to the form logical empiricism assumed during its period of dominance, there can be little doubt that his thought continues to inspire much philosophical thinking today.
Sellars, Wilfrid Stalker (1912–89)
Authors: Rosenberg Jay F.
Published: September 2018

Wilfrid Sellars was among the most systematic and innovative of post-war American philosophers. His critical destruction of the ‘Myth of the Given’ established him as a leading voice in the Anglo-American critique of ‘the Cartesian concept of mind’ and in the corresponding shift of attention from the categories of thought to public language. His own positive views were naturalistic, combining a robust scientific realism with a thoroughgoing nominalism which rejected both traditional abstract entities and ontologically primitive meanings. In their place, Sellars elucidated linguistic meaning and the content of thought in terms of a sophisticated theory of conceptual roles, instantiated in the linguistic conduct of speakers and transmitted by modes of cultural inheritance. He combined this theory with a form of ‘verbal behaviourism’ to produce the first version of functionalism in the contemporary philosophy of mind. Besides his profoundly original philosophical contributions, his long career as a distinguished teacher and influential editor earned him justified acclaim as one of the definitive figures of the post-war period.
Twardowski, Kazimierz (1866–1938)
Authors: Wolenski Jan
Published: September 2018

Twardowski, one of the most distinguished of Brentano’s students, became famous for his distinction between the content and object of presentations. Twardowski, after his appointment as a professor of philosophy at the University of Lwów (Lvov), considerably limited his own philosophical research for the sake of teaching activities. He set himself an ambitious task: to create a scientific philosophy in Poland. Twardowski fully realized his aim, giving the first step towards the so-called Lwów–Warsaw School, a group of philosophers working in analytic philosophy – in particular, logic, philosophy of science, and philosophy of language. In spite of his concentration on teaching, Twardowski also made remarkable contributions to philosophy after coming to Lwów.
Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel de (1864–1936)
Authors: Orringer Nelson R.
Published: September 2018

The Spanish philosopher-poet Miguel de Unamuno upheld a heterodoxical Catholicism, resembling much nineteenth-century Liberal Protestantism, which viewed reason and faith as antagonistic. By ‘reason’, he understood scientific induction and deduction; by ‘faith’, a sentiment varying with his readings and personal experiences. Adolescent scepticism led him to reconcile science with religion by grafting Spencer’s positivism onto various German idealisms, but a family tragedy brought this period of experimentation to an abrupt end. Obsessed with mortality, Unamuno achieved philosophical maturity with a blend of Liberal Protestant theology and the philosophies of James and Kierkegaard in his conception of the ‘tragic sense of life’ – the theme of his essays, novels, dramas, poetry and journalism. He acquired deep and intense insights into the quest for immortality. Unamuno was a professional in neither philosophy nor theology.
Weil, Simone (1909–43)
Authors: Williams Rowan
Published: September 2018

Simone Weil’s life and work represent an unusual mixture of political activism, religious mysticism and intense speculative work on a wide range of topics, including epistemology, ethics and social theory. Much of her most important writing survives in fragmentary form, in notebooks published after her untimely death. Though Jewish by family, her attitude to Judaism was largely hostile; and despite a deep commitment in the later part of her life to Christian ideas and symbols, she consistently refused to be baptized. Her religious views are eclectic in many ways, drawing on Plato and on Hindu sources. In everything she wrote, she was preoccupied with the dehumanizing effects of economic unfreedom and the servile labour required by industrial capitalism; but this is only one instance, for her, of the experience of ‘necessity’ or ‘gravity’ that dominates material transactions. The essence of moral and spiritual action is the complete renunciation of any privileged position for an ego outside the world of ‘necessity’. Such renunciation is the only escape from necessity, in fact: what she calls ‘decreation’ becomes our supremely creative act, since only in the ego’s absence is love, or an apprehension of non-self-oriented goods, possible. Marx, Kant and the gospels are all in evidence here.
Lukács, Georg (1885–1971)
Authors: Callinicos Alex
Published: September 2018

Lukács’ Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness) (1923) is, for both its intrinsic merits and its enormous influence, the most important work of Marxist philosophy to have appeared in the twentieth century. It sought to render explicit the dependence of Marx’s thought on Hegel’s dialectic as a means of elucidating both the distinctive character of historical materialism as a form of theoretical inquiry and its revolutionary rejection of the modes of thinking prevailing in capitalist society. Lukács’ general aim had been shared by the authors of the first philosophical reflections on Marx’s project – Engels and Plekhanov, for example, had stressed its debt to Hegel. Lukács, however, sought to draw Marx into that broad current of twentieth-century Continental thought which has drawn a sharp distinction between the methods of the physical sciences, suitable at best for analysing inanimate nature, and those of the human sciences, whose aim is to interpret human actions in the light of the thoughts which move them. Thus Lukács sees Marx as the theorist, not of the laws of the dialectic or of inevitable social transformation, but of revolutionary subjectivity, of the proletariat as ‘the identical subject–object’ of history. This was a version of Marxism which suited the times, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. As the revolutionary tides receded, Lukács found philosophical and political reasons for retreating to a more orthodox historical materialism which laid much greater stress on objective constraints and processes than his version of the early 1920s had. Yet the force of its overall argument and the quality of its individual analyses have made History and Class Consciousness a constant reference-point in subsequent discussions of Marxist theory.
Beauvoir, Simone de (1908–86)
Authors: Lundgren-Gothlin Eva
Published: September 2018

Simone de Beauvoir, a French novelist and philosopher belonging to the existentialist-phenomenological tradition, elaborated an anthropology and ethics inspired by Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre in Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) and Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (The Ethics of Ambiguity) (1947). In her comprehensive study of the situation of women, Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex) (1949), this anthropology and ethics was developed and combined with a philosophy of history inspired by Hegel and Marx. The most prominent feature of Beauvoir’s philosophy is its ethical orientation, together with an analysis of the subordination of women. Her concept of woman as the Other is central to twentieth-century feminist theory.
Polanyi, Michael (1891–1976)
Authors: Allen R.T.
Published: September 2018

Michael Polanyi was almost unique among philosophers in not only fully acknowledging but in arguing from the tacit dimensions of our knowledge which concern the many things which we know but cannot state nor even identify. He argued that our knowledge is a tacit, personal integration of subsidiary clues into a focal whole, and he elaborated this structure of knowing into a corresponding ontology and cosmology of a world of comprehensive entities and actions which are integrations of lower levels into higher ones. Polanyi used these accounts of knowing and being to argue against the ‘critical’ demands for impersonal, wholly objective and fully explicit knowledge, against reductionist attempts to explain higher levels in terms of lower ones, and to defend the freedom of scientific research and a free society generally.
Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz (1890–1963)
Authors: Wolenski Jan
Published: September 2018

Ajdukiewicz, like other typical members of the Lwów–Warsaw School, the main Polish analytic movement, was basically interested in logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, and philosophy of science. In the 1930s, he proposed a form of radical conventionalism, an extension of the conventionalism of Duhem and Poincaré. Later, he rejected this radical conventionalism in favour of a semantic epistemology. In the philosophy of science he tried to build a general theory of fallible inferences based on decision theory. Ajdukiewicz’s most important contribution to logic is his formal notation for syntactic categories.
Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret (1919–2001)
Authors: Thompson Michael
Published: September 2018

Elizabeth Anscombe has contributed to all principal areas of philosophy, most influentially to ethics and the philosophy of mind. She is the founder of contemporary action theory, and an important source of the revival of interest in virtue ethics. The chief influences on her thought are the work of her teacher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, much of which she has translated and of which she is an important interpreter, and the classical and medieval traditions, as found in Aristotle and Aquinas. She has also made a number of contributions to the defence of Roman Catholic religious belief.
Dennett, Daniel Clement (1942–)
Authors: Lycan William G.
Published: September 2018

A student of Gilbert Ryle and a connoisseur of cognitive psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, American philosopher Daniel Dennett has urged Rylean views in the philosophy of mind, especially on each title topic of his first book,Content and Consciousness (1969). He defends a broadly instrumentalist view of propositional attitudes (such as belief and desire) and their intentional contents; like Ryle and the behaviourists, Dennett rejects the idea of beliefs and desires as causally active inner states of people. Construing them in a more purely operational or instrumental fashion, he maintains instead that belief- and desire-ascriptions are merely calculational devices.

Dennett offers a severely deflationary account of consciousness, subjectivity and the phenomenal or qualitative character of sensory states. He maintains that those topics are conceptually posterior to that of propositional-attitude content: the qualitative features of which we are directly conscious in experience are merely the intentional contents of judgments.
Fodor, Jerry Alan (1935–)
Authors: Godfrey-Smith Peter
Published: September 2018

Jerry Fodor has been one of the most influential figures in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, and ‘cognitive science’ through the latter part of the twentieth century. His primary concern has been to argue (vigorously) for a certain view of the nature of thought. According to this view, thinking is information processing within ‘the language of thought’. The mind can be understood as a computer, which directs action with the aid of internal representations of the world.
Lewis, David Kellogg (1941–2001)
Authors: van Inwagen Peter
Published: September 2018

David Lewis has made extremely important and influential contributions to many topics in metaphysics, philosophical logic, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of probability, rational decision theory, and ethics and social philosophy. His work on counterfactuals and the philosophy of modality has been especially influential.
Nagel, Thomas (1937–)
Authors: Sedivy Sonia
Published: September 2018

The comprehensiveness of Thomas Nagel’s approach to philosophy sets him apart among late-twentieth-century analytic philosophers. Nagel develops a compelling analysis of the fundamental philosophical problems, showing how they result from our capacity to take up increasingly objective viewpoints that detach us from our individual subjective viewpoints as well as from the viewpoints of our community, nation and species. Our essentially dual nature, which allows us to occupy objective as well as subjective viewpoints, poses unsolvable problems for us because subjective and objective viewpoints reveal conflicting facts and values. Our ability to undertake increasingly detached viewpoints from which objective facts come into view indicates that we are contained in a world that transcends our minds; similarly, our ability to examine our values and reasons from a detached or impartial objective viewpoint implies that moral values are real in the sense that they transcend our personal motives and inclinations. Yet Nagel also holds that our capacity for objective thought is limited by the fact that we cannot detach ourselves completely from our own natures in our attempts either to know our world or to act morally. Subjective facts are equally a part of reality and our moral outlook is essentially the outlook of individual agents with personal and communal ties. Consequently, Nagel argues against any form of reductionism which holds that only objective facts and values are real or which attempts to explain subjective facts and values in terms of objective ones.
Taylor, Charles (1931–)
Authors: Calhoun Craig
Published: September 2018

Among the most influential of late twentieth-century philosophers, Taylor has written on human agency, identity and the self; language; the limits of epistemology; interpretation and explanation in social science; ethics; and democratic politics. His work is distinctive because of his innovative treatments of long-standing philosophical problems, especially those deriving from applications of Enlightenment epistemology to theories of language, the self and political action, and his unusually thorough integration of ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophical concerns and approaches.

Taylor’s work is shaped by the view that adequate understanding of philosophical arguments requires an appreciation of their origins, changing contexts and transformed meanings. Thus it often takes the form of historical reconstructions that seek to identify the paths by which particular theories and languages of understanding or evaluation have been developed. This reflects both Taylor’s sustained engagement with Hegel’s philosophy and his resistance to epistemological dichotomies such as ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ in favour of a notion of ‘epistemic gain’ influenced by H.G. Gadamer.
Williams, Bernard Arthur Owen (1929–2003)
Authors: Harrison Ross
Published: September 2018

Bernard Williams wrote on the philosophy of mind, especially personal identity, and political philosophy; but the larger and later part of his published work is on ethics. He is hostile to utilitarianism, and also attacks a view of morality associated in particular with Kant: people may only be properly blamed for what they do voluntarily, and what we should do is the same for all of us, and discoverable by reason. By contrast Williams holds that luck has an important role in our evaluation of ourselves and others; in the proper attribution of responsibility the voluntary is less central than the Kantian picture implies. Williams thinks shame a more important moral emotion than blame. Instead of there being an independent set of consistent moral truths, discoverable by reason, how we should live depends on the emotions and desires that we happen to have. These vary between people, and are typically plural and conflicting. Hence for Williams ethical judgment could not describe independent or real values – by contrast with the way in which he thinks that scientific judgment may describe a real independent world.
Williams, Bernard Arthur Owen (1929–2003)
Authors: Harrison Ross , Craig Edward
Published: September 2018

Bernard Williams wrote on the philosophy of mind, especially personal identity, and political philosophy, where his position is staunchly liberal; but the larger and later part of his published work is on ethics. He is hostile to utilitarianism, and also attacks a view of morality associated in particular with Kant: people may only be properly blamed for what they do voluntarily, and what we should do is the same for all of us, and discoverable by reason. By contrast Williams holds that luck has an important role in our evaluation of ourselves and others; in the proper attribution of responsibility the voluntary is less central than the Kantian picture implies. Williams thinks shame a more important moral emotion than blame. Instead of there being an independent set of consistent moral truths, discoverable by reason, how we should live depends on the emotions and desires that we happen to have. These vary between people, and are typically plural and conflicting. Hence for Williams ethical judgment could not describe independent or real values - by contrast with the way in which he thinks that scientific judgment may describe a real independent world.
Murray, Andrew Howson (1905–97)
Authors: Sweet William
Published: September 2018

One of the leading South African philosophers of the twentieth century, Murray was best known as a public intellectual and for his work in political thought. He was deeply influenced by the Calvinist tradition and by British idealism, finding in both the premises for what he called a liberal political pluralism. An opponent of communism and individualism, Murray was led by this pluralism to embrace a mitigated form of apartheid, which be believed would preserve cultural diversity and ensure authentic cultural development.
Okin, Susan Moller (1946–2004)
Authors: Satz Debra
Published: September 2018

Susan Moller Okin was a liberal theorist whose feminist perspective challenged contemporary liberal theory’s complacency about gender and the family. She insisted that liberalism, properly understood as a theory opposed to social hierarchies and supportive of individual freedom and equality, must provide the tools for criticizing the substantial inequalities between men and women in contemporary societies.