bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Staël-Holstein, Anne-Louise-Germaine, Mme de (1766–1817)
Authors: Leopold David
Published: September 2018

Staël was a French woman of letters, whose corpus includes novels, plays, memoirs, criticism and works of historical and sociological observation. As a novelist and critic, Staël is perhaps best known as a forerunner of the Romantic movement in French literature, and for her typology of European culture. However, her extensive body of work also included a perfectibilist philosophy of history; an account of German character and literature containing an influential survey of contemporary philosophy; and a liberal defence of the French Revolution, in which Staël had been an active participant.
German idealism
Authors: Franks Paul
Published: September 2018

From the late eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth, German philosophy was dominated by the movement known as German idealism, which began as an attempt to complete Kant’s revolutionary project: the derivation of the principles of knowledge and ethics from the spontaneity and autonomy of mind or spirit. However, German idealists produced systems whose relation to Kant is controversial, due to their emphasis on the absolute unity and historical development of reason.
Materialism
Authors: Stack George J.
Published: September 2018

Materialism is a set of related theories which hold that all entities and processes are composed of – or are reducible to – matter, material forces or physical processes. All events and facts are explainable, actually or in principle, in terms of body, material objects or dynamic material changes or movements. In general, the metaphysical theory of materialism entails the denial of the reality of spiritual beings, consciousness and mental or psychic states or processes, as ontologically distinct from, or independent of, material changes or processes. Since it denies the existence of spiritual beings or forces, materialism typically is allied with atheism or agnosticism.

The forms of materialism extend from the ancient Greek atomistic materialism through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientifically based theories, to recent sophisticated defences of various types of materialism.
Butler, Samuel (1835–1902)
Authors: Baker William
Published: September 2018

Butler, in common with so many of his contemporaries, is concerned with two fundamental issues: the problem of religion and that of evolution. Paradox and contradiction run through Butler’s writings. He committed himself neither to religious belief nor to evolution. Initially an exponent of Darwin and The Origin of Species (1859), he exposed what he regarded as Darwin’s limitations. He could never banish the idea of God, become an agnostic or atheist. Obsessed with clarity, a satirist exposing the disingenuous, he was an isolated figure. Concerned with the difference between mechanism and life, asking himself ‘What is a machine?’ and ‘What does it mean to be alive?’, he was preoccupied with the ‘unconscious’ and the ‘conscious’, with what humans inherit from the past, and with what memory reveals about past inheritance.
Lewes, George Henry (1817–78)
Authors: Baker William
Published: September 2018

Lewes was a philosophical historian and journalist, an exponent of the ideas of Auguste Comte, Goethe, Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel and Kant, and author of the five-volume Problems of Life and Mind. The intent of his first book, The Biographical History of Philosophy, was to remove metaphysics from philosophical investigation and focus instead on scientific positivism. Contemporaries such as Darwin, Huxley and John Stuart Mill recognized Lewes’s reputation as a philosopher and expositor of scientific work.
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–69)
Authors: Bernstein J.M.
Published: September 2018

Philosopher, musicologist and social theorist, Theodor Adorno was the philosophical architect of the first generation of Critical Theory emanating from the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Departing from the perspective of more orthodox Marxists, Adorno believed the twin dilemmas of modernity – injustice and nihilism – derived from the abstractive character of Enlightenment rationality. In consequence, he argued that the critique of political economy must give way to a critique of Enlightenment, instrumental reason.

Identity thinking, as Adorno termed instrumental rationality, abstracts from the sensory, linguistic and social mediations which connect knowing subjects to objects known. In so doing, it represses what is contingent, sensuous and particular in persons and nature. Adorno’s method of negative dialectics was designed to rescue these elements from the claims of instrumental reason. Adorno conceded, however, that all this method could demonstrate was that an abstract concept did not exhaust its object. For a model of an alternative grammar of reason and cognition Adorno turned to the accomplishments of artistic modernism. There, where each new work tests and transforms the very idea of something being a work of art, Adorno saw a model for the kind of dynamic interdependence between mind and its objects that was required for a renewed conception of knowing and acting.
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–69)
Authors: Bernstein J.M.
Published: September 2018

Philosopher, musicologist and social theorist, Theodor Adorno was the philosophical architect of the first generation of Critical Theory emanating from the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Departing from the perspective of more orthodox Marxists, Adorno believed the twin normative challenges of modernity – injustice and nihilism – derived from the abstractive character of Enlightenment rationality. In consequence, he argued that the critique of political economy must give way to a critique of Enlightenment, instrumental reason.

Identity thinking, as Adorno termed instrumental rationality, abstracts from the sensory, linguistic and social mediations which connect knowing subjects to objects known. In so doing, it represses what is contingent, sensuous and particular in persons and nature. Adorno’s method of negative dialectics was designed to rescue these elements from the claims of instrumental reason. Adorno conceded, however, that all this method could demonstrate was that an abstract concept did not exhaust its object. For a model of an alternative grammar of reason and cognition Adorno turned to the accomplishments of artistic modernism. There, where each new work tests and transforms the very idea of something being a work of art, Adorno saw a model for the kind of dynamic interdependence between mind and its objects that was required for a renewed conception of knowing and acting.
Austin, John Langshaw (1911–60)
Authors: Urmson J.O.
Published: September 2018

J.L. Austin was a leading figure in analytic philosophy in the fifteen years following the Second World War. He developed a method of close examination of nonphilosophical language designed to illuminate the distinctions we make in ordinary life. Professional philosophers tended to obscure these important and subtle distinctions with undesirable jargon which was too far removed from everyday usage. Austin thought that a problem should therefore be tackled by an examination of the way in which its vocabulary is used in ordinary situations. Such an approach would then expose the misuses of language on which many philosophical claims were based.

In ‘Other Minds’ ([1946] 1961), Austin attacked the simplistic division of utterances into the ‘descriptive’ and ‘evaluative’ using his notion of a performatory, or performative utterances. His notion was that certain utterances, in the appropriate circumstances, are neither descriptive nor evaluative, but count as actions. Thus to say ‘I promise’ is to make a promise, not to talk about one. Later, he was to develop the concepts of locutionary force (what an utterance says or refers to), illocutionary force (what is intended by saying it) and perlocutionary force (what effects it has on others).
Ayer, Alfred Jules (1910–89)
Authors: MacDonald Graham
Published: September 2018

A.J. Ayer made his name as a philosopher with the publication of Language, Truth and Logic in 1936, a book which established him as the leading English representative of logical positivism, a doctrine put forward by a group of philosophers known as members of the Vienna Circle. The major thesis of logical positivism defended by Ayer was that all literally meaningful propositions were either analytic (true or false in virtue of the meaning of the proposition alone) or verifiable by experience. This, the verificationist theory of meaning, was used by Ayer to deny the literal significance of any metaphysical propositions, including those that affirmed or denied the existence of God. Statements about physical objects were said to be translatable into sentences about our sensory experiences (the doctrine known as phenomenalism). Ayer further claimed that the propositions of logic and mathematics were analytic truths and that there was no natural necessity, necessity being a purely logical notion. Finally the assertion of an ethical proposition, such as ‘Stealing is wrong’, was analysed as an expression of emotion or attitude to an action, in this case the expression of a negative attitude to the act of stealing.

During the rest of his philosophical career Ayer remained faithful to most of these theses, but came to reject his early phenomenalism in favour of a sophisticated realism about physical objects. This still gives priority to our experiences, now called percepts, but the existence of physical objects is postulated to explain the coherence and consistency of our percepts. Ayer continued to deny that there were any natural necessities, analysing causation as consisting in law-like regularities. He used this analysis to defend a compatibilist position about free action, claiming that a free action is to be contrasted with one done under constraint or compulsion. Causation involves mere regularity, and so neither constrains nor compels.
Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859–1941)
Authors: Lacey A.R.
Published: September 2018

So far as he can be classified, Bergson would be called a ‘process philosopher’, emphasizing the primacy of process and change rather than of the conventional solid objects which undergo those changes. His central claim is that time, properly speaking and as we experience it (which he calls ‘duration’), cannot be analysed as a set of moments, but is essentially unitary. The same applies to movement, which must be distinguished from the trajectory it covers. This distinction, he claims, solves Zeno of Elea’s paradoxes of motion, and analogues of it apply elsewhere, for instance, in biology and ethics.

Bergson makes an important distinction between sensation and perception. He repudiates idealism, but claims that matter differs only in degree from our perceptions, which are always perfused by our memories. Perception free from all memory, or ‘pure’ perception, is an ideal limit and not really perception at all, but matter. Real perception is pragmatic: we perceive what is necessary for us to act, assisted by the brain which functions as a filter to ensure that we remember only what we need to remember. Humans differ from animals by developing intelligence rather than instinct, but our highest faculty is ‘intuition’, which fuses both. Bergson is not anti-intellectualist, though, for intuition (in one of its two senses) presupposes intelligence. He achieved popularity partly by developing a theory of evolution, using his élan vital, which seemed to allow a role for religion. In ethics he contrasted a ‘closed’ with a (more desirable) ‘open’ morality, and similarly contrasted ‘static’ with ‘dynamic’ religion, which culminates in mysticism.
Berlin, Isaiah (1909–97)
Authors: Williams Bernard
Published: September 2018

Berlin said that he decided about 1945 to give up philosophy, in which he had worked up to that time, in favour of the history of ideas. Some of his best-known work certainly belongs to the history of ideas, but he continued in fact both to write philosophy and to pursue philosophical questions in his historical work.

His main philosophical contributions are to political philosophy and specifically to the theory of liberalism. He emphasizes a distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ concepts of liberty: the former is a Hobbesian idea of absence of constraint or obstacle, while the latter is identified with a notion of moral self-government, expressed for instance in Rousseau, which Berlin finds politically threatening. His anti-utopian approach to politics is expressed also in his view that values necessarily conflict; this irreducible ‘value pluralism’ may be his most original contribution to philosophy, though advances it through example and historical illustration rather than in semantic or epistemological terms. He also expresses himself against necessitarian interpretations of history, and in favour of an anti-determinist conception of free will.
Collingwood, Robin George (1889–1943)
Authors: Blackburn Simon
Published: September 2018

Collingwood was the greatest British philosopher of history of the twentieth century. His experience as a practising historian of Roman Britain led him to believe that the besetting vice of philosophy is to abstract propositions away from the context of the practical problems and questions that gave rise to them. Until we know the practical context of problems and questions to which a proposition is supposed to be an answer, we do not know what it means. In this respect his concern with the living activities of language users parallels that of the later Wittgenstein. Collingwood also believed that the interpretation of others was not a scientific exercise of fitting their behaviour into a network of generalizations, but a matter of rethinking their thoughts for oneself. His conviction that this ability, which he identified with historical thinking, was the neglected and crucial component of all human thought stamped him as original, or even a maverick, during his own lifetime. He also shared with Wittgenstein the belief that quite apart from containing propositions that can be evaluated as true or false, systems of thought depend upon ‘absolute presuppositions’, or a framework or scaffolding of ideas that may change with time. The business of metaphysics is to reconstruct the framework that operated at particular periods of history. Collingwood had extensive moral and political interests, and his writings on art, religion and science confirm his stature as one of the greatest polymaths of twentieth-century British philosophy.
Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939)
Authors: Hopkins James
Published: September 2018

Freud developed the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, one of the most influential schools of psychology and psychotherapy of the twentieth century. He established a relationship with his patients which maximized information relevant to the interpretation of their behaviour, and this enabled him to find explanations of dreams, symptoms and many other phenomena not previously related to desire. In consequence he was able radically to extend our common-sense psychology of motive.

On Freud’s account everyday actions are determined by motives which are far more numerous and complex than people realize, or than common-sense understanding takes into account. The most basic and constant motives which influence our actions are unconscious, that is, difficult to acknowledge or avow. Such motives are residues of encounters with significant persons and situations from the past, often reaching back to early childhood; and they operate not to achieve realistic satisfaction, but rather to secure a form of pacification through representation. When we interpret what others say and do we apply these patterns of satisfaction and pacification to explain their behaviour; and in so far as we succeed in understanding others in this way we support the patterns as empirical generalization. While we recognize that pacification consequent on genuine satisfaction is deeper and more lasting than that effected by representation alone, we also know that human desire outruns opportunities for satisfaction to such an extent that pacification via imagination is common. This is a view which psychoanalysis radically extends.

This understanding of the mind enabled Freud to give psychological accounts of neurosis and psychosis, and to explicate how the past gives significance to the present in normal mental functioning. Past desires, even those of infancy, are not psychologically lost; rather they are continually re-articulated through symbolism, so as to direct action towards their representational pacification throughout life. In this Freud provides both a radically holistic account of the causation of action and a naturalistic description of the generation of meaning in life. New goals acquire significance as representatives of the unremembered objects of our earliest and most visceral passions; and the depth of satisfaction we feel in present accomplishments flows from their unacknowledged pacification of unknown desires from the distant past. Thus, paradoxically, significant desires can remain forever flexible, renewable and satisfiable in their expressions, precisely because they are immutable, frustrated and unrelenting at the root.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1900–2002)
Authors: Wright Kathleen
Published: September 2018

Hans-Georg Gadamer is best known for his philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer studied with Martin Heidegger during his preparation of Being and Time (1927). Like Heidegger, Gadamer rejects the idea of hermeneutics as merely a method for the human and historical sciences comparable to the method of the natural sciences. Philosophical hermeneutics is instead about a process of human understanding that is inevitably circular because we come to understand the whole through the parts and the parts through the whole. Understanding in this sense is not an ‘act’ that can be secured methodically and verified objectively. It is an ‘event’ or ‘experience’ that we undergo. It occurs paradigmatically in our experience of works of art and literature. But it also takes place in our disciplined and scholarly study of the works of other human beings in the humanities and social sciences. In each case, understanding brings self-understanding.

Philosophical hermeneutics advocates a mediated approach to self-understanding on the model of a conversation with the texts and works of others. The concept of dialogue employed here is one of question and answer and is taken from Plato. Such understanding never becomes absolute knowledge. It is finite because we remain conditioned by our historical situation, and partial because we are interested in the truth that we come to understand. By grounding understanding in language and dialogue as opposed to subjectivity, Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics avoids the danger of arbitrariness in interpreting the works of others.

Gadamer’s most important publication is Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method) (1960). He also published four volumes of short works, Kleine Schriften (1967–77), containing important hermeneutical studies of Plato, Hegel, and Paul Celan among others. His many books and essays are collected into ten volumes (Gesammelte Werke). Gadamer was widely known as a teacher who practised the dialogue which is at the core of his philosophical hermeneutics.
Hägerström, Axel Anders Theodor (1868–1939)
Authors: Dahlquist Thorild , Henschen-Dahlquist Ann-Mari
Published: September 2018

Hägerström was professor of philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden, from 1911 until 1933, and together with his pupil Adolf Phalén founded the Uppsala school of conceptual analysis. He first came to attention in 1902 with a study of Kant’s ethics, but his main claim to fame rests upon the anti-metaphysical and emotivist positions which he developed during the years 1905–39. Thus the two fundamental theses of his moral philosophy are that moral valuations are neither true nor false, and that the proper task of moral philosophy itself is only descriptive and not normative. In this connection he argued that the philosophical ideas of objective moral values and of absolute rights have created fanaticism and sharpened conflicts in human history. He is also well known for his work in jurisprudence as the founder of Scandinavian legal realism. Here again his thought is predominantly antimetaphysical, and he criticized many legal concepts for their metaphysical and magical elements.
Hempel, Carl Gustav (1905–1997)
Authors: Jeffrey R.
Published: September 2018

Hempel’s defence of Carnap’s and Neurath’s physicalism testifies to the presence of certain ‘postmodern’ themes in logical empiricism (or logical positivism): (1) a textualist turn to sentences from the facts or reality they are said to report; (2) a pragmatic turn from truth to inclusion in the text as the basic scientific concern; and (3) a descriptive turn from logic to empirical sociology of science.

Throughout his philosophical writings Hempel held that the question of what truth-claims mean should be replaced by the question of what criteria we use in deciding whether or not to call sentences true. Granted that ‘Whales are mammals’ is true if and only if whales are mammals, the question remains of how observation reports bear on whether or not to include a sentence in the text of current knowledge, and how received observation sentences may be dropped from it. For Hempel, then, the problem of analysing the concept of confirmation of sentences by sentences is either the heart of the problem of truth or the successor to that problem. Like Carnap, in 1945 he thought such an analysis necessary to connect the terms ‘logical’ and ‘empiricism’; but four decades later he would conclude that, after all, one must ‘leave the decision in matters of confirmation to the intuitive appraisal of the scientist’ (1945b: 98).
Ingarden, Roman Witold (1893–1970)
Authors: Stepien Antoni B.
Published: September 2018

Ingarden was a leading exponent of phenomenology and one of the most outstanding Polish philosophers. Representing an objectivist approach within phenomenology he stressed that phenomenology employs a variety of methods, according to the variety of objects, and aspires to achieve an original cognitive apprehension of these objects. Its aim is to reach the essence of an object by analysing the contents of appropriate ideas and to convey the results of this analysis in clear language. Ingarden applied his methods in many areas of philosophy. He developed a pluralist theory of being and an epistemology which makes it possible to practise this discipline in an undogmatic manner and to defend the value of human knowledge. In the theory of values he developed an inspiring approach to the analysis of traditionally problematic areas. He was best known for his work in aesthetics, in which he analysed the structure of various kinds of works of art, the nature of aesthetic experience, the cognition of works of art and the objective character of aesthetic values. In general, he gave phenomenology a lucid and precise shape.

In the interwar period Ingarden was the main opponent in Poland of the dominant Lwów–Warsaw School (Polish Analytic School), which had a minimalistic orientation. The main lines of his own investigations emerged largely as a result of his regular debates with Husserl, in particular those concerning Husserl’s transcendental idealism. Ingarden’s best-known work, Das literarische Kunstwerk (The Literary Work of Art) (1931a) has its origins in this debate.
Lonergan, Bernard Joseph Francis (1904–84)
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: September 2018

The Canadian philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan approached the problems of philosophy by inviting his readers to attend to the mental acts in which they engage when they come to know anything. He claimed that these acts are of three fundamental kinds: ‘experience’ of the data of sensation, feeling or mental activity; ‘understanding’ possible explanations of that experience; and ‘judgment’ that one such explanation is in each case certainly or probably so. Denial that we engage in these three types of mental activity is actually self-destructive, since we have to engage in them in the very act of justifying such denial. In getting to grips with what it is to come to know, we also gain a vital clue as to the overall nature of the world which is to be known; and light is thrown on the relation between the natural and the human sciences, and on the questions of ethics and religion.
Marcuse, Herbert (1898–1979)
Authors: Callinicos Alex
Published: September 2018

Herbert Marcuse endured a brief moment of notoriety in the 1960s, when his best-known book, One-Dimensional Man (1964), was taken up by the mass media as the Bible of the student revolts which shook most Western countries in that decade. Though Marcuse’s actual political influence was uneven, his public image was not wholly misleading. On the one hand, he popularized the critique of post-war capitalism that he, with the other theorists of the Frankfurt School, had helped develop: the Western liberal democracies were, they argued, ‘totally administered societies’ permeated by the values of consumerism, in which the manufacture and satisfaction of ‘false needs’ served to prevent the working class from gaining any genuine insight into their situation. On the other hand, Marcuse never fully subscribed to the highly pessimistic version of Marxism developed by the central figures of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer. He hoped that revolts by an underclass of ‘the outcasts and the outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colours, the unemployed and unemployable’ would stimulate a broader social transformation. Underlying this affirmation of revolutionary possibilities was a conception of Being as a state of rest in which all conflicts are overcome, where rational thought and sensual gratification are no longer at war with one another, and work merges into play. Intimations of this condition – which could only be fully realized after the overthrow of capitalism (and perhaps not even then) – were, Marcuse believed, offered in art, ‘the possible Form of a free society’. Imagination could thus show politics the way.
Moore, George Edward (1873–1958)
Authors: Baldwin Thomas
Published: September 2018

G.E. Moore was one of the most influential British philosophers of the twentieth century. His early writings are renowned for his rejection of idealist metaphysics and his insistence upon the irreducibility of ethical values, and his later work is equally famous for his defence of common sense and his conception of philosophical analysis. He spent most of his career in Cambridge, where he was a friend and colleague of Russell, Ramsey and Wittgenstein.

The best-known thesis of Moore’s early treatise on ethics,Principia Ethica (1903), is that there is a fallacy – the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ – in almost all previous ethical theories. The fallacy is supposed to arise from any attempt to provide a definition of ethical values. The validity of Moore’s arguments is much disputed, but many philosophers still hold that Moore was right to reject the possibility of a reductive definition of ethical values. The book is also renowned for Moore’s affirmation of the pre-eminence of the values of Art and Love.

Moore’s later writings concern the nature of the external world and the extent of our knowledge of it. In opposition to idealist doubts about its reality and sceptical doubts concerning our knowledge of it, Moore defends ‘common sense’ by emphasizing the depth of our commitment to our familiar beliefs and criticizing the arguments of those who question them. But although he insists upon the truth of our familiar beliefs, he is remarkably open-minded concerning their ‘analysis’, which is intended to clarify the facts in which their truth consists.
Prichard, Harold Arthur (1871–1947)
Authors: Macadam Jim
Published: September 2018

One of the most influential Oxford philosophers of the twentieth century, Prichard was White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy there from 1928 to 1937. His work combines epistemological realism and moral intuitionism. From 1906 onwards Prichard was active with the Oxford realists, who held, against idealists, that reality exists independently of mind, that knowledge is of reality, and that common-sense realism is correct. In ethics, he was the leader of the Oxford intuitionists who held, against utilitarianism, that common-sense morality is correct, its duties are known non-inferentially, and are an irreducible plurality of distinct kinds of act. His philosophical style displays concentration on specific problems, carefully using ordinary language to make precise distinctions in the absence of general theory. He influenced Oxford’s next generation of Austin, Ryle, Hart and Berlin, who attended his classes and, occasionally, his ‘philosophers’ teas’.
Ramsey, Frank Plumpton (1903–30)
Authors: Mellor D.H.
Published: September 2018

Before Ramsey died at the age of 26 he did an extraordinary amount of pioneering work, in economics and mathematics as well as in logic and philosophy. His major contributions to the latter are as follows. (1) He produced the definitive version of Bertrand Russell’s attempted reduction of mathematics to logic. (2) He produced the first quantitative theory of how we make decisions, for example about going to the station to catch a train. His theory shows how such decisions depend on the strengths of our beliefs (that the train will run) and desires (to catch it), and uses this dependence to define general measures of belief and desire. This theory also underpins his claim that what makes induction reasonable is its being a reliable way of forming true beliefs, and it underpins his equation of knowledge generally with reliably formed true beliefs. (3) He used the equivalence between believing a proposition and believing that it is true to define truth in terms of beliefs. These in turn he proposed to define by how they affect our actions and whether those actions fulfil our desires. (4) He produced two theories of laws of nature. On the first of these, laws are the generalizations that would be axioms and theorems in the simplest true theory of everything. On the second, they are generalizations that lack exceptions and would if known be used to support predictions (‘I’ll starve if I don’t eat’) and hence decisions (‘I’ll eat’). (5) He showed how established, for example optical, phenomena can be explained by theories using previously unknown terms, like ‘photon’, which they introduce. (6) He showed why no grammatical distinction between subjects like ‘Socrates’ and predicates like ‘is wise’ entails any intrinsic difference between particulars and universals.
Santayana, George (1863–1952)
Authors: Lachs John
Published: September 2018

George Santayana was a philosopher, essayist, novelist and poet. Born in Spain, he moved to America as a child and attended Harvard, studying under William James and Josiah Royce. The philosophical world first took note of Santayana for his work in aesthetics. The Sense of Beauty (1896), his attempt to give a naturalistic account of the beautiful, remains influential. He wrote exquisitely crafted essays on literature and religion, viewing both as articulating important symbolic truths about the human condition. His mature philosophical system is a classical edifice constructed out of positions adopted from Plato and Aristotle, which he modified in light of the naturalistic insights of his beloved Lucretius and Spinoza and steeped in pessimism reminiscent of Schopenhauer. Although in close touch with the philosophical developments of his day, he always viewed human life and its problems in a calming cosmic perspective.
Searle, John (1932–)
Authors: Lepore Ernie
Published: September 2018

John Searle was a pupil of J.L. Austin at Oxford in the 1950s. He is the Mills Professor of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught philosophy since 1959. According to Searle, the primary objects of analysis in the philosophy of language are not expressions but the production of expressions, speech acts, in accordance with rules. Learning a language involves (often unconsciously) internalizing rules that govern the performance of speech acts in that language. Speech-act theory aims to discover these rules and is itself a part of action theory, which concerns intentional states directed at or about something. It follows that speech-act theory is part of a more comprehensive theory of intentionality.
Taylor, Charles (1931–)
Authors: Calhoun Craig , Abbey Ruth
Published: September 2018

Among the most influential of twentieth-century philosophers, Taylor writes on human agency, identity and the self; language; epistemology; interpretation and explanation in social science; ethics; multiculturalism, and democratic politics. Most recently his attention has turned to the place of religion in modernity.

Taylor did an undergraduate degree in History at McGill University in his native Montreal, Canada and then a second bachelor’s degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford. He remained at Oxford for a PhD in Philosophy. Most of Taylor’s academic career was spent at McGill University in Canada or at Oxford, where he held the Chichele Professorship of Social and Political Theory. In tandem with his successful academic career, Taylor has been a public intellectual and politically active in Canada. He was a member of the New Democratic Party and ran a number of times as one of its candidates for federal parliament. He served on the Quebec Government’s French Language Council and from 2007-2008 co-chaired a public inquiry into the future of cultural and religious differences in that province.

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
Analytical philosophy
Authors: Baldwin Thomas
Published: September 2018

Philosophical analysis is a method of inquiry in which one seeks to assess complex systems of thought by ‘analysing’ them into simpler elements whose relationships are thereby brought into focus. This method has a long history, but became especially prominent at the start of the twentieth century and, by becoming integrated into Russell’s development of logical theory, acquired a greater degree of sophistication than before. The logical positivists developed the method further during the 1930s and, in the context of their anti-metaphysical programme, held that analysis was the only legitimate philosophical inquiry. Thus for them philosophy could only be ‘analytical philosophy’.

After 1945 those philosophers who wanted to expand philosophical inquiries beyond the limits prescribed by the positivists extended the understanding of analysis to include accounts of the general structures of language and thought without the earlier commitment to the identification of ‘simple’ elements of thought. Hence there developed a more relaxed conception of ‘linguistic analysis’ and the understanding of ‘analytical philosophy’ was modified in such a way that a critical concern with language and meaning was taken to be central to it, leading, indeed, to a retrospective re-evaluation of the role of Frege as a founder of analytical philosophy. At the same time, however, Quine propounded influential arguments which suggest that methods of analysis can have no deep significance because there is no determinate structure to systems of thought or language for the analytical philosopher to analyse and assess. Hence some contemporary philosophers proclaim that we have now reached ‘the end of analytical philosophy’. But others, who find Quine’s arguments unpersuasive, hold that analytical philosophy has virtues quite sufficient to ensure it a role as a central philosophical method for the foreseeable future.
Cavell, Stanley (1926–)
Authors: Mulhall Stephen
Published: September 2018

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Stanley Cavell held the Walter M. Cabot Chair in Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University from 1963 until his retirement in 1997. 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 ‘Continental’ philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, together with his attempts to revitalize the tradition of Emersonian Transcendentalism, has 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.
Apel, Karl-Otto (1922–)
Authors: Kettner Matthias
Published: September 2018

The German philosopher Karl-Otto Apel is best known for his wide-ranging ‘transcendental pragmatic’ approach to a gamut of issues in theoretical and practical philosophy. This approach accords ‘argumentative discourse’ and its essential normative presuppositions a foundational role within all other philosophical inquiries for which justifiable validity claims are raised, for example epistemology, normative theories of rationality, Critical Theory and ethics. If there are such presuppositions then any interlocutor’s communicative intention to waive them will clash with the construal of that debate as rationally meaningful, since it involves the interlocutor in a kind of inconsistency that Apel (like Habermas), drawing on speech-act theory, conceptualizes as a ‘performative self-contradiction’. Apel (unlike Habermas) develops this concept into the doctrine of rationally definitive justification (Letztbegründung). Apel deserves to be better known as the originator of discourse ethics (Diskursethik), whose central contention (that some presuppositions of discourse have universally valid moral content) he developed in the mid-1960s.
Wisdom, Arthur John Terence Dibben (1904–93)
Authors: Lyon Ardon
Published: September 2018

John Wisdom worked first at the University of St Andrews and then at Cambridge, where he later held the Professorship of Philosophy. At the beginning of his career he was an analytic philosopher much in the style of Russell, Moore and the early Wittgenstein. But when he moved to Cambridge the encounter with the Wittgenstein of the 1930s brought about deep changes in his approach to philosophical problems. Although greatly influenced by Wittgenstein he remained highly individual, indeed rejecting what was arguably the ‘later’ Wittgenstein’s most central claim, namely that metaphysical statements are the result of a misunderstanding of the workings of language.
Stein, Edith (1891–1942)
Authors: Borden Sharkey Sarah
Published: September 2018

Edith Stein was among the first women to earn a doctorate in philosophy in Germany, defending her dissertation in 1916. She worked as Edmund Husserl’s assistant and was deeply involved in the early phenomenological movement. Her later writings are marked by an interest in bringing phenomenology into conversation with contemporary science, classic medieval metaphysics and Carmelite spirituality. In her most mature philosophic works, Stein embraces the modern turn to the self, but argues that that turn, carried out fully, leads to classic metaphysical questions and classic categories, such as form, matter and transcendentals. These categories, for Stein, must nonetheless be reinterpreted in light of contemporary science and recent concerns for history and individuality.

Stein’s academic writings cover a large number of issues, including the nature of intersubjectivity, individuality and the state, women, educational theory, medieval metaphysics and figures such as Heidegger, Teresa of Avila and Pseudo-Dionysius. In addition to philosophic works, Stein also translated texts by Newman and Aquinas and wrote theological studies, short plays and an autobiography.
McDowell, John Henry (1942–)
Authors: Smith Nicholas H.
Published: September 2018

McDowell taught philosophy at Oxford from 1967 to 1986, where he established himself as a key figure in analytic philosophy, mounting forceful arguments in favour of a realist stance in the theory of meaning, philosophy of mind and metaethics, and challenging a variety of noncognitivist and antirealist positions that had become orthodox in those fields. In 1986 he took up a position at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has worked since.

In his most highly acclaimed work, Mind and World (1994), McDowell sought to diagnose a transcendental anxiety, characteristic of modern philosophy, in which it seems mysterious that thought is answerable to reality at all. McDowell’s proposed cure for the anxiety turned on embracing the idea that there is no gap between reality and the reach of thought, no contact with reality that does not bring conceptual capacities into play, capacities that are acquired not by magic but naturally through education into a form of life. Much of McDowell’s work since Mind and World has been aimed at clarifying and refining the idea that conceptual capacities permeate the human life form. Increasingly, he has turned to Sellars, Kant and Hegel for guidance in pursuing that task.
Imagination – phenomenological approaches
Authors: Jansen Julia
Published: September 2018

When phenomenologists investigate the imagination, they approach it by examining how objects are experienced when they are imagined (rather than, for example, perceived) and what the experience of imagining is like (as opposed to, for example, the experience of perceiving). Their inquiries into the imagination are thus part of the greater phenomenological project of clarifying the different modes in which we can experience, or be conscious of, the world (or some objects in the world) and the correlating modes in which the world (or some objects in it) can appear to us. Mostly, phenomenologists consider what is often called ‘sensory’ imagination, that is, the experience in some sensory mode (such as the visual or the aural) of something not actually present. In order to emphasize its sensory and embodied dimension, they typically distinguish imagining something from entertaining its possibility merely in thought, which in other discourses is often referred to as ‘propositional imagination’, or ‘imagining that’.

Of central importance, especially in post-Husserlian phenomenology, is the creativity of imagination. Moreover, the imagination is also seen to have an important cognitive and justificatory role insofar as it enables us to generate and consider hypothetical and alternative situations to those that we actually find ourselves in. Imagining is understood as an act (though not always voluntary or self-aware) of experiencing something as possible (rather than actual or necessary), which makes it central to questions of human freedom and to the phenomenological method itself.

Although we often imagine things that are absent or nonexistent, most phenomenologists still consider imagining intentional. They call our attention to the many different ways in which we commonly relate imaginatively to absent, nonexisting or merely possible objects, events, situations or states of affairs. It might seem that phenomenological approaches, since they allegedly consider (only) how things appear, cannot distinguish between what is real and what is (merely) imagined. However, this is not the case. Phenomenologists may, for example, investigate how our beliefs in the reality or unreality, or in the presence or absence, of things are themselves founded in different modes of experience (such as perception or imagination) and motivated by different ways in which things appear to us (that is, as perceived, as imagined, and so on).
Foot, Philippa (1920–2010)
Authors: Lillehammer Hallvard
Published: September 2018

Philippa Foot was a British moral philosopher based primarily at Oxford University, where she was a Fellow of Somerville College from 1950; and at University of California, Los Angeles, where she was Professor of Philosophy from 1976. Deeply influenced by Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as her contemporaries Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach, Foot made lasting contributions to the study of moral belief and argument, moral virtue and goodness, reasons for action and practical rationality, and the nature of moral dilemmas. In Natural Goodness she defended an Aristotelian account of value focused on the ‘natural goodness and defects’ of living things (Foot 2001). Foot also made contributions to the study of John Locke, David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Agamben, Giorgio (1942–)
Authors: Abbott Mathew
Published: September 2018

Born in Rome in 1942, Giorgio Agamben is one of the most important and influential figures in contemporary continental philosophy. Profoundly influenced by both Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, he has been publishing books since L’uomo senza contenuto (The Man Without Content) was released in 1970. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.

He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.

Consisting of nine books, the Homo Sacer series begins by highlighting an aspect of Ancient Greek Agamben claims is crucial for understanding the trajectory of Western politics: the difference between zoē and bios, or natural and political life. Agamben argues this distinction was crucial for setting up the polis as a properly political space, because it excluded natural life from its sphere of concerns, confining it to the sphere of the oikos, or home. In a characteristic move, however, he claims that this act of exclusion, because it founds the polis, also implicates natural life in it.

Employing an original philosophical method drawn out of the work of Heidegger, Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, the series tracks the historical genesis and contemporary consequences of this failed attempt at exclusion, developing provocative accounts of politics and privacy, civil war and terrorism, the state of exception, economy, sovereignty, and work. Though he draws a grim picture of the violent and dominating tendencies inherent in the Western tradition, Agamben also works to find within its tensions and paradoxes the resources for living and thinking differently.
Baudrillard, Jean (1929–2007)
Authors: Poster Mark
Published: September 2018

Jean Baudrillard taught for most of his career at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris in the Department of Sociology. He began writing as a neo-Marxist in the tradition of Henri Lefebvre and Herbert Marcuse but very quickly developed his distinctive style of social and cultural criticism. He may be understood generally as a post-structuralist who focused on the importance of language in society and invented novel concepts and terms to understand the most advanced features of electronic communications. He has been hailed as the guru of postmodernity and berated as faddish trend follower. He wrote polemical pieces like Oublier Foucault (1977) (Forget Foucault, 1987) and controversial ones such as La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991b) (The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 1995).