bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Film, aesthetics of
Authors: Currie Gregory
Published: September 2018

Philosophical reflection during the first one hundred years of film has been dominated by theories of the medium, and by the supposed implications of these theories for film style, and for the film’s effect on its audience. Three ideas have dominated: (1) that film is realistic because of its use of the photographic method (realism of the medium); (2) that it is realistic because it allows for the use of a style of narration which approximates the normal conditions of perception (realism of style); (3) that it is realistic because it has the capacity to engender in the viewer an illusion of the reality and presentness of fictional characters and events (realism of effect). Some theorists have argued that realism of the medium requires us to avoid realist style, others that it requires us to adopt it. Most have agreed that realist style makes for realism of effect; they disagree about whether this is a desirable goal. It is argued here that these realisms are independent of one another, and that realism of effect is no part of normal film viewing. Realism of style suggests a way of making precise the claim that cinema is an art of time and of space, because this kind of realism exploits the representation of time by time and of space by space. Psychological theorizing about the cinema has been strongly connected with realism of effect, and with the idea that an illusion of the film’s reality is created by the identification of the viewer’s position with that of the camera. Another version of illusionism has it that the experience of film-watching is significantly similar to that of dreaming.

Philosophical interest in film has shifted recently from the nature of the medium to finer grained topics. Philosophers have investigated the nature of documentary cinema, the emotional dimension of film viewing, and the interpretation of particular films; they have also asked whether film might have a distinctive role in the development of philosophical ideas.
Artistic forgery
Authors: Currie Gregory
Published: September 2018

Forgery in art occurs when something is presented as a work of art with a history it does not actually have. Typically this involves a false claim about the producer’s identity. Forgeries are most usually works in the style of the artist whose work they falsely claim to be, while a forgery that is a copy of an existing work is a fake. Forgery is most common in the visual arts, but is also possible in other arts, such as literature and music.

The main aesthetic problem that forgery poses is that typically no deception is practised concerning what we might call the appearance of the forged object (generalizing from the pictorial case). Thus the forger does not deceive us about the disposition of colours on the canvas, the sequence of musical notes in the score, or the sequence of words in the text. If we adopt the widely held view that aesthetic value is a function of appearance alone, we shall conclude that something’s being a forgery is irrelevant to its aesthetic worth; whatever false beliefs the viewer might be induced to have about the work, those beliefs could not affect an honest judgment of its aesthetic value. But in the art world it is universal practice to condemn forgery. If that practice is to be justified as anything other than artistic snobbery and the protection of prices in the art market, it must be shown that the aesthetic interest of a work is not exhausted by its appearance alone. In fact it can be shown that the aesthetic features of a work often depend on its historical features as well as on its appearance, and that these historical features are likely to be obscured by the deception that forgery involves.
Hanslick, Eduard (1825–1904)
Authors: Kivy Peter
Published: September 2018

Eduard Hanslick, a music critic for the popular Viennese press, is principally known as the author of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854). This is probably the most widely read work in the aesthetics of music for both philosophers and musicians, and remains the starting point for any discussion either of the place of emotion in music, or of the doctrine usually referred to as ’musical purism’. On the former, Hanslick maintained what he calls the negative thesis, which ’first and foremost opposes the widespread view that music is supposed to represent the feelings’; on purism, he proposed the positive thesis or antithesis, ’that the beauty of a piece of music is specifically musical, that is, is inherent in the tonal relationships without reference to an extraneous, extra-musical context’.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81)
Authors: Townsend Dabney
Published: September 2018

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing occupies a central place in eighteenth-century European belles-lettres. He was a significant religious and theological thinker whose work puzzled his contemporaries and still provokes debate. He has been variously called a deist, a concealed theist, a Spinozist–pantheist, a panentheist, and an atheist. He was a significant dramatist whose major works include Minna von Barnhelm, known as the first modern German comedy, and Nathan the Wise, which places Lessing in the tradition of eighteenth-century toleration and humanism. He was an active promoter of the contemporary German theatre and an influential drama critic and theorist. He had broad classical and antiquarian interests. And he has some claims to being one of the early developers, if not a founding father, of the discipline of philosophical aesthetics.

Philosophically, Lessing belongs to the tradition of G.W. von Leibniz and Christian Wolff and was familiar with the post-Wolffian aesthetics being developed by Alexander Baumgarten and his follower Georg Friedrich Meier. Most importantly, perhaps, Lessing was acquainted with Moses Mendelssohn, to whose work his own philosophical writings bear many similarities and who read and commented on Lessing’s aesthetic writings. But Lessing cannot be identified with any of these philosophical sources and influences. His work retains many rationalist presuppositions, but Lessing also consciously sought a more inductive approach. He adhered to neoclassical standards with respect to beauty and the application of rules of art, but severely qualified those standards by justifying them empirically and appealing to emotional effects rather than to ideal forms or Cartesian clarity. Lessing’s aesthetics must be inferred from his work, particularly from his Laocoon, some of the numbers of the Hamburg Dramaturgy, and to a lesser extent from short works such as ‘How the Ancients Represented Death’ and the letter of 26 May 1769 to Friedrich Nikolai. What emerges is a sometimes inconsistent and fragmentary aesthetic, which one might describe as a critical rationalism.
Narrative
Authors: Currie Gregory
Published: September 2018

Narrative, in its broadest sense, is the means by which a story is told, whether fictional or not, and regardless of medium. Novels, plays, films, historical texts, diaries and newspaper articles focus, in their different ways, on particular people and events and their relations; they are all narratives in the above sense. Accounts of mathematical, physical, economic or legal principles are not. A narrower sense of narrative requires the presence of a narrator mediating between the audience and the action, and contrasts with imitative discourse wherein the action is presented directly, as in drama. The boundary between narration narrowly construed and imitation is disputed, some writers arguing that the imitative (or ‘mimetic’) mode is simply one way of storytelling, and hence counts as a kind of narrative.

Theorists of narrative have mostly concentrated on narratives of the fictional kind and have developed a complex taxonomy of the various narrative devices, some of which are discussed in more detail below. Pressure has been placed on the distinction between historical and fictional narrative by those who believe that history is nothing distinct from the various and conflicting narrative versions we have. It has also been argued that value accrues to an agent’s life and acts when those acts conform to a conception of that life as exemplifying narrative.
Nature, aesthetic appreciation of
Authors: Carlson Allen
Published: September 2018

In the Western world, aesthetic appreciation of nature and its philosophical investigation came to fruition in the eighteenth century. During that time, aestheticians made nature the ideal object of aesthetic experience and analysed that experience in terms of disinterestedness, thereby laying the groundwork for understanding the appreciation of nature in terms of the sublime and the picturesque. This philosophical tradition reached its zenith with Kant, while popular aesthetic appreciation of nature continued primarily in terms of the picturesque.

In the late twentieth century, renewed interest in the aesthetics of nature has produced various positions designed to avoid assimilating appreciation of nature with traditional models for aesthetic appreciation of art. Three are especially noteworthy. The first holds that the appreciation of nature is not in fact aesthetic; the second rejects the traditional analysis of aesthetic experience as disinterested, arguing instead that the aesthetic appreciation of nature involves engagement with nature; the third attempts to maintain the traditional analysis, while distinguishing aesthetic appreciation of nature by dependence on scientific knowledge.

These positions have a number of ramifications. In freeing aesthetic appreciation of nature from artistic models, they pave the way for a general environmental aesthetics comparable to other areas of philosophy, such as environmental ethics. Moreover, the significance given to scientific knowledge in the third position both explains the aesthetic appreciation associated with environmentalism and provides aesthetic appreciation of nature with a degree of objectivity that may make aesthetic considerations more effectual in environmental assessment.
Nature, aesthetic appreciation of
Authors: Carlson Allen
Published: September 2018

In the Western world, aesthetic appreciation of nature and its philosophical investigation came to maturity in the eighteenth century. During that time, aestheticians found in nature an ideal object of aesthetic experience and analysed that experience in terms of disinterestedness, thereby laying the groundwork for understanding the appreciation of nature in terms of the concepts of the sublime and the picturesque. This philosophical tradition culminated with Kant, while popular aesthetic appreciation of nature continued primarily under the influence of the idea of the picturesque.

In the late twentieth century, renewed interest in the aesthetics of nature has produced various positions designed to avoid assimilating appreciation of nature to traditional models for aesthetic appreciation of art. One extreme position holds that the appreciation of nature is not in fact aesthetic, while another rejects the traditional analysis of aesthetic experience as disinterested, arguing instead that the aesthetic appreciation of nature involves engagement with nature. Other positions attempt to maintain much of the traditional conception of the aesthetic, while distinguishing aesthetic appreciation of nature from that of art by appeal to the unique character of the object of appreciation, stressing dimensions such as nature’s capacity for emotional arousal, its mysterious qualities, the role of imagination in its appreciation, the freedom that its appreciation allows, or the dependence of its appreciation on scientific knowledge.

These positions have a number of ramifications. In freeing the aesthetic experience of nature from artistic models, they focus appreciation on the true character of the object of appreciation: nature itself and its properties. This significance given to the character of the object of appreciation secures connections with the appreciation of nature associated with environmentalism. In addition, some of these positions attempt to provide aesthetic appreciation of nature with a degree of objectivity that may make aesthetic considerations more effective in environmental assessment. Moreover, the contemporary work in the aesthetics of nature helps to pave the way for a general environmental aesthetics comparable to other areas of philosophy, such as environmental ethics.
Opera, aesthetics of
Authors: Tanner Michael
Published: September 2018

Opera, which may be defined as a dramatic action set in large part to music, is an inherently unstable art form, more so than any other. It has been characteristic of its practitioners and critics to call it periodically to order, in idioms which vary but carry much the same message: the music exists to further the drama. This has often been taken to be a matter of settling the priority of two elements: music and text. But in fact three are involved: music, text and plot (or action).

Opera began very abruptly in Northern Italy at the end of the sixteenth century, partly as the result of discussions about its possibility. To begin with, familiar Greek myths were employed, set in the vernacular, with simple accompaniments so that every word could be heard. This led to pre-eminence for the singers and for spectacle. After each wave of excess – vocal prowess, dance interludes, stilted plots and texts, then once again, in the nineteenth century, empty display, and later gargantuan orchestras – there was a movement of revolt. Philosophers rarely took part in these aesthetic disputes, most of them being uninterested in music, and possibly more relevantly, being uninterested in any subject which can only be studied in historical terms. But it is fruitless to think about opera apart from its manifestations; every great operatic composer makes his own treaty between the potentially warring elements, Wagner being the most passionate propagandist for his own conception. In the twentieth century the aesthetics of opera have become pluralistic, as has, to an unprecedented degree, the form itself. The perpetual danger is that opera should degenerate into entertainment, and it is always the same message that recalls it to its original function – one which most spectators and listeners are happy to ignore: opera is a form of drama.
Photography, aesthetics of
Authors: Currie Gregory
Published: September 2018

Claims that photography is aesthetically different from and, in many versions of the argument, inferior to the arts of painting and drawing have taken various forms: that photography is a mechanical process and therefore not an artistic medium; that it is severely limited in its capacity to express the thoughts and emotions of the artist; that its inability to register more than an instantaneous ‘slice’ of events restricts its representational capacity; that it is not a representational medium at all. Some of these arguments are thoroughly mistaken, while others have an interesting core of truth that will emerge only after some clarification. Central to this clarification is an account of the precise sense in which photography is mechanical, and an explication of our intuition that a photograph puts us ‘in touch with’ its subject in a way that a painting or drawing cannot. Both these ideas need to be separated from the mistaken view that it is the nature of photography to provide images that are superlatively faithful to the objects they represent. Throughout this entry we shall consider only the case of photographs of a relatively unmanipulated kind, ignoring darkroom techniques that blur the distinction between photography and painting.
Poetry
Authors: Shusterman Richard M.
Published: September 2018

Though poetry today seems a relatively marginal topic in philosophy, it was crucial for philosophy’s own initial self-definition. In ancient Greece, poetry was revered as the authoritative expression of sacred myth and traditional wisdom. With Socrates and Plato, philosophy began by distinguishing itself from poetry as a new, superior form of knowledge which could provide better guidance for life and even superior pleasure. Just as the sophists were attacked for relativism and deception, so were poets stridently criticized for irrationality and falsehood. For Plato, not only did poetry stem from and appeal to the emotional, unreasoning aspects of human nature; it was also far removed from truth, being only an imitation of our world of appearances which itself was but an imitation of the real world of ideas or forms. He therefore insisted that poets be banished from his ideal state because they threatened its proper governance by reason and philosophy.

Subsequent philosophy of poetry has been devoted to overcoming Plato’s condemnatory theory, while tending to confirm philosophy’s superiority. This task, begun by Aristotle, was for a long time pursued primarily under Plato’s general model of poetry (and indeed all art) as imitation or mimesis. The main strategy here was to argue that what poetry imitates or represents is more than mere superficial appearance, but rather general essences or the ideas themselves. For such theories, poetry’s relation to truth is crucial. Other theories were later developed that preferred to define and justify poetry in terms of formal properties or expression, or its distinctively beneficial effects on its audience. These strategies became increasingly influential from the time of Romanticism, but can be traced back to more ancient sources.

The vast majority of theories follow Plato in treating poetry as a distinct domain, separate from and subordinate to philosophy. But since Romanticism, some have argued for the essential unity of these two enterprises. Great philosophy is here seen as the poetic creation of new ways of thinking and new forms of language, while the role of poetry as uniting and gathering things together so that the truth and presence of being shines forth.
Artistic taste
Authors: Cohen Ted
Published: September 2018

Taste has been variously understood as (1) the capacity to take pleasure in certain artistic and natural objects, (2) the capacity to identify the constituent elements in such objects, and (3) the capacity to discern certain special properties. Taste in sense (1) has been a topic since the early eighteenth century, culminating in the work of Hume and Kant. This conception of taste is annexed to the idea that ‘beauty’ or ‘artistic excellence’ is not itself an objective property of things, but that it is recorded in judgments of beauty as a report of a certain kind of pleasure felt by the judge in the presence of these things. Taste in sense (2), which is an analogue of the notion of taste as the ability to discriminate with the tongue and taste buds, has also been a topic since the eighteenth century, articulated perhaps most clearly by Hume. A connection between sense (1) and sense (2) is intended by eighteenth-century authors, but the connection has not been formulated clearly. Taste in sense (3) is a conception originating in the mid-twentieth century, notably in the work of Frank Sibley. It is primarily the idea that beauty, elegance, gracefulness and other properties – collectively called ‘aesthetic properties’ – require a special capacity for their discernment, although these are truly objective properties located in the objects being judged.
Feminist aesthetics
Authors: Korsmeyer Carolyn
Published: September 2018

Feminist perspectives in aesthetics and philosophy of art have emerged not only from the discipline of philosophy but also from cognate fields such as literary theory, film studies and art history. Like other feminist philosophy, feminist aesthetics is founded upon critiques of fundamental assumptions that have traditionally governed this area of study. Such staple concepts as aesthetic value, disinterested attention, aesthetic perception and fine art have been analysed for biased perspectives that explicitly or covertly favour masculine gender.

Gender bias has been located, for example, in theories of aesthetic attention and appreciation. Feminist analyses have speculated that the traditional, ideal, ‘disinterested’ aesthetic perceiver covertly stands in a position of masculine privilege encouraging desire and control of the object of contemplation. Calling attention to the masculine position of the perceiver goes hand in hand with analyses of visual arts and literature that focus on their representations of gender – formalist interpretive methods that ignore the portrayal of women and sexuality have been especially criticized. The paucity of female artists on lists of acknowledged geniuses and the relative absence of their work from canons of art has occasioned speculation that the concept of art itself is biased in so far as it excludes the creations of most women.

Feminist analyses stress the social contexts within which theories develop. Not only do concepts basic to aesthetics manifest ideas about gender that derive from formative traditions, but notions of beauty and art are themselves influential components of culture and contribute to the shape and perpetuation of gender roles.
Environmental aesthetics
Authors: Carlson Allen
Published: September 2018

Environmental aesthetics is one of the major new areas of aesthetics to have emerged in the last part of the twentieth century. It focuses on philosophical issues concerning appreciation of the world at large as it is constituted not simply by particular objects but also by environments themselves. In this way environmental aesthetics goes beyond the appreciation of art to the aesthetic appreciation of both natural and human environments.

The development of environmental aesthetics has been influenced by eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics as well as by two recent factors: the exclusive focus of twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics on art and the public concern for the aesthetic condition of environments that developed in the second half of that century.

Both factors have broadened the scope of environmental aesthetics beyond that of traditional aesthetics, and both have helped to set the central philosophical issues of the field, which are due in large measure to the differences between the nature of the object of appreciation of environmental aesthetics, the world at large, and the nature of art. These differences are so marked that environmental aesthetics must begin with most basic questions, such as ‘what’ and ‘how’ to appreciate.

These questions have generated a number of different philosophical positions, which are typically classified as either noncognitive or cognitive approaches. Positions of the first type stress various kinds of emotional and feeling-related states and responses, which are taken to be the more noncognitive dimensions of aesthetic experience. By contrast, positions of the second type contend that appreciation must be guided by the nature of objects of appreciation and thus that knowledge about their origins, types and properties is necessary for serious, appropriate aesthetic appreciation.

Each of these two kinds of approach has certain strengths and weaknesses. However, recent work in environmental aesthetics, especially in the aesthetics of human environments and everyday life, demonstrates that although different in emphasis, they are not in direct conflict. When conjoined, they advocate bringing together feeling and knowing, which is the core of serious aesthetic experience and which, when achieved in aesthetic appreciation of different environments of the world at large, demonstrates just how rewarding such appreciation can be.
Painting, aesthetics of
Authors: Hopkins Robert
Published: September 2018

Why care about painting as an art? Does it offer to engage our aesthetic interest in ways that other art forms do not, or does it merely reproduce the aesthetic satisfactions they provide? Most paintings involve both marks on a surface, and something represented by those marks. Some attempts to say what is distinctive about painting concentrate on the former feature, understanding the art as an exploration of the two-dimensional picture plane. Others concentrate on the representational aspect, seeking to find something special about the things painting can represent, or the way in which it achieves this. The most promising approach acknowledges both aspects, and does so as essential elements in the experience we have of painting. If successful, this allows us to see painting as offering aesthetic values found elsewhere, but in a distinctive form. It also helps us to say something about a set of paintings we are otherwise in danger of ignoring – abstract works.
Painting, aesthetics of
Authors: Hopkins Robert
Published: September 2018

Why care about painting as an art? Does it offer to engage our aesthetic interest in ways that other art forms do not, or does it merely reproduce the aesthetic satisfactions they provide? Most paintings involve both marks on a surface, and something represented by those marks. Some attempts to say what is distinctive about painting concentrate on the former feature, understanding the art as an exploration of the two-dimensional picture plane. Others concentrate on the representational aspect, seeking to find something special about the things painting can represent, or the way in which it achieves this. The most promising approaches acknowledge both aspects, and do so as essential elements in the experiencewe have of painting. One such approach turns on the idea that the configurational aspect ‘inflects’ the representational, so that what we see in the picture itself somehow involves the marks from which the painting is composed. Another sees painting as offering aesthetic values found elsewhere, but in a distinctive form. Taking seriously the idea of our experience of painting also helps us to say something about a set of paintings we are otherwise in danger of ignoring - abstract works.
Wagner, Richard (1813–83)
Authors: Tanner Michael
Published: September 2018

Wagner has no stature as a writer on philosophical subjects independently of his music dramas. But since those dramas themselves deal with deep, often broadly philosophical issues, his prose writings at their best illuminate both the dramas and their subject-matter.
Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888–1965)
Authors: Casey John
Published: September 2018

Best known as a poet and writer of verse-drama, T.S. Eliot was also a significant critic and theorist of literature. His philosophical background in Bradleyan idealism is reflected in all his work in all of these genres. Thus his idea of tradition – the historical sense that is actually a sense of the contemporaneity of present and past – has connections with F.H. Bradley’s idea of ‘immediate experience’ and with Eliot’s own Bradleyan exploration of the concept of ‘point of view’ upon the world, including present and past. Another key concept for Eliot was ‘sensibility’, denoting the heightened awareness of immediate experience to be expected of poets, which he ascribed especially to the English Metaphysical Poets of the seventeenth century.
South Slavs, philosophy of
Authors: Lazovic Zivan , Pavkovic Aleksandar
Published: September 2018

Philosophy as a distinct intellectual activity emerged in the coastal towns of the Adriatic during the Renaissance. Philosophers from this area wrote in Latin and taught philosophy in Italy, Germany and Austria. The first popular philosophical works in the vernacular did not appear until late in the eighteenth century, and it was almost one hundred years later that the first chairs in logic and philosophy were founded in the universities. Academic philosophy, usually derived from German or British models, was thus brought into the intellectual life of South Slavs. Local academic philosophers, mostly educated in Germany, brought home a variety of philosophical approaches, and by the early twentieth century many schools of thought flourished: Neo-Kantianism flourished in Beograd, while Neo-Thomism was particularly strong in Ljubljana and Zagreb (until 1941 the Meinongian phenomenological approach also flourished in Ljubljana). In their quest for originality, local philosophers constructed various eclectic philosophical systems.

The Soviet Marxism-Leninism, imposed in all Yugoslav universities after 1945, was replaced in the late 1950s by a Neo-Marxist approach based on the concept of praxis. This was a concept of a purposeful human activity which, among other things, results in social change (for example, the development of socialism). These Neo-Marxists engaged in vigorous debates on the nature of truth and knowledge, on human freedom, alienation, socialism and humanism as well as on social and political issues. Their work reached an international audience through the international journal Praxis, published in Zagreb, and through their international summer school of philosophy at Korčula. As their support for the Yugoslav communist regime turned into open criticism, the regime halted the publication of Praxis and in 1974 forced the Beograd Neo-Marxists from their teaching posts.

The Neo-Marxist interest in non-Marxist philosophy facilitated the reception of various non-Marxist approaches. From the early 1960s, existentialism, structuralism, hermeneutics and phenomenology – in particular the philosophy of Heidegger – exerted considerable influence on Neo-Marxists as well as on philosophers who had gradually abandoned this approach. In the early 1970s, a younger generation of thinkers in Beograd, Zagreb, Ljubljana and Zadar developed an interest in analytic philosophy. Since that time no approach or trend in philosophy has emerged as the dominant one in any of the academic centres in the countries which were formerly part of Yugoslavia.
Being
Authors: Okrent Mark
Published: September 2018

Although ‘being’ has frequently been treated as a name for a property or special sort of entity, it is generally recognized that it is neither. Therefore, questions concerning being should not be understood as asking about the nature of some object or the character of some property. Rather, such questions raise a variety of problems concerning which sorts of entities there are, what one is saying when one says that some entity is, and the necessary conditions on thinking of an entity as something which is.

At least four distinct questions concerning being have emerged in the history of philosophy: (1) Which things are there? (2) What is it to be? (3) Is it ever appropriate to treat ‘is’ as a predicate, and, if not, how should it be understood? (alternatively, is existence a property?) (4) How is it possible to intend that something is? Twentieth-century discussions of being in the analytic tradition have focused on the first and third questions. Work in the German tradition, especially that of Martin Heidegger, has emphasized the fourth.
Communicative rationality
Authors: Dews Peter
Published: September 2018

The concept of ‘communicative rationality’ is primarily associated with the work of the philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas. According to Habermas, communication through language necessarily involves the raising of ‘validity-claims’ (distinguished as ‘truth’, ‘rightness’ and ‘sincerity’), the status of which, when contested, can ultimately only be resolved through discussion. Habermas further contends that speakers of a language possess an implicit knowledge of the conditions under which such discussion would produce an objectively correct result, and these he has spelled out in terms of the features of an egalitarian ‘ideal speech situation’. Communicative rationality refers to the capacity to engage in argumentation under conditions approximating to this ideal situation (‘discourse’, in Habermas’ terminology), with the aim of achieving consensus.

Habermas relies on the concept of communicative rationality to argue that democratic forms of social organization express more than simply the preferences of a particular cultural and political tradition. In his view, we cannot even understand a speech-act without taking a stance towards the validity-claim it raises, and this stance in turn anticipates the unconstrained discussion which would resolve the status of the claim. Social and political arrangements which inhibit such discussion can therefore be criticized from a standpoint which does not depend on any specific value-commitments, since for Habermas achieving agreement (Verständigung) is a ‘telos’ or goal which is internal to human language as such. A similar philosophical programme has also been developed by Karl-Otto Apel, who lays more stress on the ‘transcendental’ features of the argumentation involved.
Contingency
Authors: Walker Ralph C.S.
Published: September 2018

People are often puzzled about the apparent contingency of the world. To say that something happens contingently is to say that it might not have happened, and to think of the world as contingent is to think that it might not have existed. Is it contingent? Those who ask this are asking whether there might not have been a world at all, or none that was at all like ours. Usually they are not asking whether there could have been a world which differed from ours only in its details: for example, one in which free agents made slightly different choices. That is an important question too, but a separate one. Some people reject the question of the contingency of the world as meaningless because they do not see how any answer to it could be verified. But such verificationism is controversial, and even if there is something wrong with the question it is still worth asking why people find it compelling.
Emotions, philosophy of
Authors: Solomon Robert C.
Published: September 2018

Emotions have always played a role in philosophy, even if philosophers have usually denied them centre stage. Because philosophy has so often been described as first and foremost a discipline of reason, the emotions have often been neglected or attacked as primitive, dangerous or irrational. Socrates reprimanded his pupil Crito, advising that we should not give in to our emotions, and some of the ancient Stoic philosophers urged a life of reason free from the enslavement of the emotions, a life of apatheia (apathy). In Buddhism, too, much attention has been given to the emotions, which are treated as ‘agitations’ or klesas. Buddhist ‘liberation’, like the Stoic apatheia, becomes a philosophical ideal, freedom from the emotions.

Philosophers have not always downgraded the emotions, however. Aristotle defended the view that human beings are essentially rational animals, but he also stressed the importance of having the right emotions. David Hume, the eighteenth-century empiricist, insisted that ‘reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions’. In the nineteenth century, although Hegel described the history of philosophy as the development of reason he also argued that ‘nothing great is ever done without passion’. Much of the history of philosophy can be told in terms of the shifting relationship between the emotions (or ‘passions’) and reason, which are often at odds, at times seem to be at war, but ideally should be in harmony. Thus Plato painted a picture of the soul as a chariot with three horses, reason leading the appetites and ‘the spirited part’, working together. Nietzsche, at the end of the nineteenth century, suggested that ‘every passion contains its own quantum of reason’.

Nietzsche’s suggestion, that emotion and reason are not really opposites but complementary or commingled, has been at the heart of much of the debate about emotions since ancient times. Are emotions intelligent, or are they simply physical reactions? Are they mere ‘feelings’, or do they play a vital role in philosophy and in our lives?
Events
Authors: Mellor D.H.
Published: September 2018

Events are entities like collisions and speeches, as opposed to things like planets and people. Many are changes, for example things being first hot and then cold. All lack a thing’s full identity over time: either they are instantaneous, or they have temporal parts, like a speech’s words, which stop them being wholly present at an instant; whereas things, which lack temporal parts, are wholly present throughout their lives.

Events may be identified with two types of entity: facts, like the fact that David Hume dies, corresponding to truths like ‘Hume dies’; or particulars which, like things, correspond to names, for example ‘Hume’s death’. Which one they are taken to be affects the content of many metaphysical theories: such as that all particulars are things; that times, or causes and effects, or actions, are events; or that mental events are physical.
Idealism
Authors: Sprigge T.L.S.
Published: September 2018

Idealism is now usually understood in philosophy as the view that mind is the most basic reality and that the physical world exists only as an appearance to or expression of mind, or as somehow mental in its inner essence. However, a philosophy which makes the physical world dependent upon mind is usually also called idealist even if it postulates some further hidden, more basic reality behind the mental and physical scenes (for example, Kant’s things-in-themselves). There is also a certain tendency to restrict the term ‘idealism’ to systems for which what is basic is mind of a somewhat lofty nature, so that ‘spiritual values’ are the ultimate shapers of reality. (An older and broader use counts as idealist any view for which the physical world is somehow unreal compared with some more ultimate, not necessarily mental, reality conceived as the source of value, for example Platonic forms.)

The founding fathers of idealism in Western thought are Berkeley (theistic idealism), Kant (transcendental idealism) and Hegel (absolute idealism). Although the precise sense in which Hegel was an idealist is problematic, his influence on subsequent absolute or monistic idealism was enormous. In the US and the UK idealism, especially of the absolute kind, was the dominating philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, receiving its most forceful expression with F.H. Bradley. It declined, without dying, under the influence of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and later of the logical positivists. Not a few philosophers believe, however, that it has a future.
Italy, philosophy in
Authors: Chiurazzi Gaetano
Published: September 2018

Since the Renaissance, Italian philosophy has been rooted in the humanist and historical tradition, stemming from the rediscovery of Greek philosophy in the fifteenth century and the resumption of classical studies at that time. However, the momentous cultural and religious transformations of sixteenth-century Europe caused a reaction which greatly restrained the innovative impact of Renaissance thought. Living through these two periods, Bruno, Campanella and Galileo experienced all the conflicts of the Counter-Reformation, when philosophy especially felt the weight of the Roman Catholic Church which exercised a tight control on the culture of the time. The best traditions of the Renaissance were inherited and maintained solely by Vico, the most important figure of this latter period.

As the spirit of the Counter-Reformation declined, Italian philosophy acquired a new vigour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This occurred especially in the north of the country where contacts with modern European culture influenced a political situation dominated by the question of national unity (a problem debated since the time of Machiavelli). Philosophical thought during this period tended to be strongly political (as in the philosophy of Cattaneo), although it also assumed a deeply religious tone (for example, Mazzini and Gioberti). These themes were united in Hegelian Idealism, promoted by Spaventa among others. The neo-Idealists of the early twentieth century, such as Croce and Gentile, distinguished themselves by assuming a political role and by opposing empiricism and positivism, philosophical heirs of the Enlightenment which were traditionally considered alien although popular at that time.

The aftermath of the Second World War brought to gradual dissolution both philosophical and political neo-Idealism, a movement which was rooted especially at the universities of Rome and Naples; it also saw the rise of Marxist thought (Gramsci) and Existentialism, especially at the universities of Bologna, Milan and Turin. Among the most important figures in contemporary Italian philosophy we find Bobbio (political philosophy), Pareyson, Vattimo and Eco. While both French and German philosophy still play a major role in the philosophical debate, in recent years increasing attention has been paid to Anglo-Saxon philosophy.
Modernism
Authors: Vargish Thomas
Published: September 2018

As a period in cultural history, modernism usually denotes advanced or avant-garde European and American art and thought, though it has also been used to describe more general social conditions and attitudes. Most historians of literature and the plastic arts – the fields in which the term has most play – date it from the late 1880s to the Second World War. Modernism is thus distinguished from the ‘modern’ of ‘modern history’ (understood as anything since medieval history), ‘modern life’ (popular contemporary attitudes and difficulties), and other broad uses of the term ‘modern’. In fact, recognition of the ism in modernism is a key to understanding it – intense self-awareness being an essential characteristic or value, allied to modernism’s complex engagement with avant-garde status. Other values that consistently underpin modernism include a propensity to create ‘culture shock’ by abandoning traditional conventions of social behaviour, aesthetic representation, and scientific verification; the celebration of elitist or revolutionary aesthetic and ethical departures; and in general the derogation of the premise of a coherent, empirically accessible external reality (such as Nature or Providence) and the substitution of humanly devised structures or systems which are self-consciously arbitrary and transitory.
Particulars
Authors: Bigelow John C.
Published: September 2018

Particulars are to be understood by contrasting them with universals, that term being used to comprise both properties and relations. Often the term ‘individuals’ is used interchangeably with ‘particulars’, though some restrict the term ‘individuals’ to those particulars whose existence has more than momentary duration.

It is sometimes taken as a distinctive feature of particulars that they cannot be in more than one place at a time, whereas universals are capable of being wholly present in more than one place at a given time: if you have a white thing here and a white thing there, then you have two particulars but only one property. This way of distinguishing between particulars and universals may help us to focus on apt paradigm cases of each, but arguably this does not get us to the heart of the matter. On the one hand, some think it is possible, at least in principle, for a magician, or Pythagoras, or a time traveller, or a subatomic particle to be in two places at once, even though each is a particular. On the other hand, some think that there are properties which could not possibly be manifested in two different places at the same time, and yet which nonetheless are universals: think, for instance, of the divine property of absolute perfection, or of the conjunction of all intrinsic properties of a Leibnizian monad (or possible world); or of Judas’ property of simply being Judas.

Particulars are things which have properties and which stand in relations – particulars ‘instantiate’ properties and relations. By itself, however, this does not distinguish particulars from universals since universals, too, are naturally thought to have properties and to stand in relations. What distinguishes particulars is the fact that, while a particular instantiates properties and relations, nothing instantiates a particular. Universals both ‘have’ (properties and relations) and are ‘had’; particulars ‘have’ but are not ‘had’. Since a particular is not instantiated by another thing, it is sometimes said to exist ‘in itself’, whereas a universal exists ‘in’ something else. For this reason, the term ‘particular’ is related to the term ‘substance’, which is traditionally used to mean something capable of independent existence.
Persons
Authors: Garrett Brian
Published: September 2018

We are all persons. But what are persons? This question is central to philosophy and virtually every major philosopher has offered an answer to it. For two thousand years many philosophers in the Western tradition believed that we were immaterial souls or Egos, only contingently attached to our bodies. The most well-known advocates of this view were Plato and Descartes. Few philosophers accept this view now, largely because it is thought to face a number of intractable metaphysical and epistemological problems (for example: how can an immaterial soul or mind interact with the material world? How can I know that you have a soul?). The recoil from Cartesianism has been in three different directions. One direction (the animalist) emphasizes the fact that persons are human beings, evolved animals of a certain sort. A second direction (the reductionist) is represented by David Hume: the self or person is not a Cartesian entity, it is a ‘bundle of perceptions’. Finally, there is a theory of persons influenced by the views of John Locke, according to which persons are neither essentially animals nor reducible to their bodies or experiences.
Post-structuralism
Authors: Gutting Gary
Published: September 2018

Post-structuralism is a late-twentieth-century development in philosophy and literary theory, particularly associated with the work of Jacques Derrida and his followers. It originated as a reaction against structuralism, which first emerged in Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on linguistics. By the 1950s structuralism had been adapted in anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Lacan) and literary theory (Barthes), and there were hopes that it could provide the framework for rigorous accounts in all areas of the human sciences.

Although structuralism was never formulated as a philosophical theory in its own right, its implicit theoretical basis was a kind of Cartesianism, but without the emphasis on subjectivity. It aimed, like Descartes, at a logically rigorous system of knowledge based on sharp explicit definitions of fundamental concepts. The difference was that, for structuralism, the system itself was absolute, with no grounding in subjectivity. Post-structuralist critiques of structuralism typically challenge the assumption that systems are self-sufficient structures and question the possibility of the precise definitions on which systems of knowledge must be based.

Derrida carries out his critique of structuralist systems by the technique of deconstruction. This is the process of showing, through close textual and conceptual analysis, how definitions of fundamental concepts (for example, presence versus absence, true versus false) are undermined by the very effort to formulate and employ them. Derrida’s approach has particularly influenced literary theory and criticism in the USA. In addition, Richard Rorty, developing themes from pragmatism and recent analytic philosophy, has put forward a distinctively American version of post-structuralism.