bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Comedy
Authors: Morreall John
Published: September 2018

In the narrowest sense, comedy is drama that makes us laugh and has a happy ending. In a wider sense it is also humorous narrative literature with a happy ending. In the widest sense, comedy includes any literary or graphic work, performance or other art intended to amuse us. This entry will leave aside theories of humour and concentrate on comedy as a dramatic and literary form.

Comedy began at about the same time as tragedy, and because they represent alternative attitudes toward basic issues in life, it is useful to consider them together. Unfortunately, several traditional prejudices discriminate against comedy and in favour of tragedy. There are four standard charges against comedy: it emphasizes the animal aspects of human life, encourages disrespect for leaders and institutions, is based on malice, and endangers our morality. These charges are easily answered, for none picks out something that is both essential to comedy and inherently vicious. In fact, once we get past traditional prejudices, several of the differences between comedy and tragedy can be seen as advantages. While tragedy tends to be idealistic and elitist, for example, comedy tends to be pragmatic and egalitarian. While tragedy values honour, even above life itself, comedy puts little stock in honour and instead emphasizes survival. Tragic heroes preserve their dignity but die in the process; comic characters lose their dignity but live to tell the tale. Most generally, comedy celebrates mental flexibility and a realistic acceptance of the limitations of human life. The comic vision of life, in short, embodies a good deal of wisdom.
Dance, aesthetics of
Authors: McFee Graham
Published: September 2018

The aesthetics of dance is the philosophical investigation of the nature of dance, of our interest in it, especially as an art form, and of the variety of aesthetic judgments we make about it – judgments of beauty, grace, line and other aesthetic qualities. Most philosophical issues concerning dance result from considering philosophical questions that arise in other areas: another art form, art in general, or human action. Sometimes the issue for dance can usefully be seen as a combination of issues from other areas. Often, one’s response to such issues gives a possible direction for one’s thoughts about dance.

A selection of such questions can be taken from the characteristics of dance. Since some dances are works of art, is there a kind of judgment characteristic of an interest in art, and, if so, what are its features? In particular, and in parallel with questions for other arts, does knowledge of the choreographer’s intention have any role in understanding the dance? What follows for the understanding of dance from the fact that dance is a multiple art: that a particular dance (like a particular piece of music) can be performed in London at the same time as it is performed in New York? What follows from dance’s status as a performing art (like music)? Is any special role for the understanding of dance to be assigned to a notated score in a dance notation? (If so, does this differ from music?) How is the special place of the dancer to fit into accounts of understanding dance? As some dances are regularly thought to be communicative, how does dance differ (if at all) from so-called ‘nonverbal communication’? More generally, dance study must address far-reaching philosophical issues: the place of dance as human action; the ‘role’ of dance, for example, in ritual; the relevance of the history and traditions of dance-forms to the understanding of those forms.
Depiction
Authors: Hopkins Robert
Published: September 2018

How do pictures work? How are they able to represent what they do? A picture of a goat, for example, is a flat surface covered with marks, yet it depicts a goat, chewing straw, while standing on a hillock. The puzzle of depiction is to understand how the flat marks can do this.

Language poses a similar problem. A written description of a goat will also be a collection of marks on a flat surface, which none the less represent that animal. In the case of language the solution clearly has something to do with the arbitrary way we use those marks. The word ‘leg’, for example, is applied to legs, but any other mark would do as well, providing we all use it in the same way. In the case of pictures, however, something different seems to be going on. There is not the same freedom in producing a picture of a goat on a hillock chewing straw – the surface must be marked in the right way, a way we are not free to choose. So what is the right way?

A helpful thought is that the surface must be marked so as to let us experience it in a special way. With the description, we merely need to know what the words it contains are used to stand for. With the picture, we must instead be able to see a goat in it. However, although this does seem right, it is difficult to make clear. After all, we do not see a goat in the same way that we see a horse in a view from a window. For one thing, there is no goat there to be seen. For another, it is not even true that looking at the picture is like looking at a goat. It is partly because of the differences that, as we look at the picture, we are always aware that it is merely a collection of marks on a flat surface. So what is this special experience, seeing a goat in the picture? This is the question that a philosophical account of depiction must try to answer.
Erotic art
Authors: Levinson Jerrold
Published: September 2018

Erotic art is art with a sexual content, which may be more or less overt. The presence of sexual content, however, is not sufficient for a work of art to be considered erotic. Although there is more than one sense in which a work can be said to be erotic, an erotic work of art must aim at and to some extent succeed in evoking sexual thoughts, feeling or desires in the spectator, in virtue of the nature of the sexual scene it represents and the manner in which it represents it. This aim, definitive of erotic art, may be a work’s principal aim, but need not be. Erotic art often tends to express the artist’s interest in and attitude towards sexuality; and whether or not it does, seeing it as expressing the artist’s sexuality is likely to contribute towards the spectator’s sexual arousal. An erotic work of art has an intended audience of a more or less specific kind, most frequently men. Erotic art is distinguished from pornography in at least two ways. First, pornography lacks any artistic intent. Second, its main aim is not only to stimulate the spectator sexually but to degrade, dominate and depersonalize its subject, usually women. This article is restricted in scope in at least two ways. First, it concerns exclusively the visual arts. Second, its focus is Western art, and primarily art from the Renaissance onwards.
Formalism in art
Authors: Budd Malcolm
Published: September 2018

Formalism in art is the doctrine that the artistic value of a work of art is determined solely by the work’s form. The concept of artistic form is multiply ambiguous, however, and the precise meaning of formalism depends upon which sense of form it operates with. There are two main possibilities. The first understands form as the structure of a work’s elements, the second as the manner in which it renders its ‘content’. If form is understood as structure, formalism is still ambiguous: understood one way, it has never been denied; understood another way, it is untenable. If form is understood as manner, formalism is false.
Gurney, Edmund (1847–88)
Authors: Levinson Jerrold
Published: September 2018

Edmund Gurney was an English psychologist and musician. His major work, The Power of Sound, is a vast treatise on musical aesthetics, ranging from issues in the physiology of hearing to the question of the relation of music to morality, but is mostly devoted to central questions of form, expression and value in music. It is the most significant work of its kind in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Commentators often couple Gurney with Hanslick as a supporter of musical formalism, but his views on the expressive dimension of music are neither as restrictive nor as doctrinaire as Hanslick’s. Hanslick insisted on denying specific emotional content to music, allowing it only to convey dynamic features, which emotions, among other things, might exhibit. Gurney, on the other hand, grants that some music possesses fairly definite emotional expression, and discusses at length the grounds of such expression; he is primarily concerned to deny that musical impressiveness, or beauty, is either the same as or depends on musical expressiveness.

Gurney maintains that overall form in music is not of primary relevance to the appreciation of music. This is because the central feature of musical comprehension is the grasping of individual parts as they occur, and the grasping of connections to immediately neighbouring parts, whatever the overarching form of a piece might be. The value of a piece is directly a function of the pleasurableness of its individual parts and the cogency of sequence exhibited at the transitions between them, not a function of its global architecture.
Humour
Authors: Levinson Jerrold
Published: September 2018

What is meant by saying that something is humorous or funny? It is clear that humorousness must be elucidated in terms of the characteristic response to humour, namely humorous amusement, or mirth. It is plausible to define humour in this way: for something to be humorous is for it to be disposed to elicit mirth in appropriate people through their awareness or cognition of it, and not for ulterior reasons. But this invites the question, ‘What is mirth?’ The three leading ideas in philosophical theories of humour are those of incongruity, superiority and relief or release. Although the perception of incongruity is often involved in finding something funny, and the resolution of a perceived incongruity plays an important role in good humour, none of these, in themselves or combined with others, is capable of capturing the concept of mirth. Mirth is not identical with the pleasurable perception of an incongruity, pleasure in feeling superior, the relief of tension or release of accumulated mental energy, or any combination of these elements. A better account of mirth is that it is a certain kind of pleasurable reaction which tends to issue in laughter if the reaction is sufficiently intense. So something is funny if it in itself pleases appropriate people through being grasped, where the pleasure is of the sort that leads, though not inevitably, to laughter.
Artistic interpretation
Authors: Goldman Alan H.
Published: September 2018

Interpretation aims to advance understanding by providing explanations of various kinds. In art, it should aim to maximize our understanding and appreciation of a work, and enable us to grasp its artistic values. When we interpret an art work we may explain why its elements are placed in their contexts, for example, to convey a certain meaning or express a certain feeling. In the case of literature we explain why words and passages are placed where they are, why characters and events are described as they are, and so on. When we interpret whole works, we explain how they fit into broader explanatory frameworks (for instance, Freudian or Marxist) or how they relate to various traditions so as to serve (or reject) the values emphasized in those traditions.

The distinction between description, or the presentation of the fundamental data constituting a work of art, and interpretation, which involves explaining why those elements exist in a work, what values they serve, may be used to justify claims that interpretations can never be known to be true, while descriptions are obviously true or false. While this is reinforced by the fact that a work may generate conflicting interpretations, the distinction does not imply that interpretations cannot be known to be correct.

In a related debate, many see the artist’s intention in creating their work as the key to a valid interpretation. Since, however, many people find value in works in ways unintended by the artist, the onus is on the intentionalist to demonstrate the primacy of the value that the artist intended the work to have.

Ultimately, contending interpretations may not present as great a problem to a theory of interpretation as at first seems inevitable. Interpretations give priority in different ways to different artistic values; the choice of these values is simply a matter of artistic taste, not truth, and may not threaten the validity of any reasonably grounded interpretation.
Art, performing
Authors: Davies Stephen
Published: September 2018

Some works, such as plays and pieces of classical music, are created as instructions (either notated or implicit in an exemplar) for performers; performances of such pieces arise from the appropriate execution of those instructions. Because the instructions do not specify all features possessed by an accurate performance, performers inevitably contribute something to the performance; even ideally accurate performances differ in the interpretations they offer. Some such works serve primarily to highlight the performer’s talents. Even where this is not so, some awareness of what is involved in rendering a piece is necessary to appreciate a work written for performance, since the skills and techniques of performance are the artistic media through which the work’s contents are presented. Performances are evaluated for the life, integrity and interest of their interpretations, as well as for their accuracy. The desirability of one performance over another relates partly to the knowledge and experience of the intended audience.

Other works, such as films, involve performance in their creation rather than in their transmission. If these works are multiple, they are so because copies are cloned from a master. When completed, such pieces are not performed or interpreted; they are shown or displayed.

Free improvisation might stand as performance in its own right, being neither the creation of a work nor an instance of one. The criteria in terms of which improvisations are evaluated differ from those involved in the creation or transmission of works, taking into account the fact that the improviser’s efforts involve the risks, as well as the delights, of spontaneity.
Art, performing
Authors: Davies Stephen
Published: September 2018

Some works, such as plays and pieces of classical music, are created as instructions (either notated or implicit in an exemplar) for performers; performances of such pieces arise from the appropriate execution of those instructions. Because the instructions do not specify all features possessed by an accurate performance, performers inevitably contribute something to the performance; even ideally accurate performances differ in the interpretations they offer. Some such works serve primarily to highlight the performer’s talents. Even where this is not so, some awareness of what is involved in rendering a piece is necessary to appreciate a work written for performance, since the skills and techniques of performance are the artistic media through which the work’s contents are presented. Performances are evaluated for the life, integrity and interest of their interpretations, as well as for their accuracy. The desirability of one performance over another relates partly to the knowledge and experience of the intended audience.

Other works, such as films, involve performance in their creation rather than in their transmission. If these works are multiple, they are so because copies are cloned from a master. When completed, such pieces are not performed or interpreted; they are shown or displayed.

Free improvisation might stand as performance in its own right, being neither the creation of a work nor an instance of one. The criteria in terms of which improvisations are evaluated differ from those involved in the creation or transmission of works, taking into account the fact that the improviser’s efforts involve the risks, as well as the delights, of spontaneity.

Performance art is a movement that reacted against many traditional assumptions about art and favoured multimedia, ephemeral, unscripted events or conceptual artworks.
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich (1759–1805)
Authors: Reed T.J.
Published: September 2018

Schiller was an artist first – a major poet and the leading dramatist of eighteenth-century Germany – and an aesthetician second. At the height of his involvement in aesthetics, he calls the philosopher ‘a caricature’ beside ‘the poet, the only true human being’. But reflection had deep roots in his nature, to the point where he felt it inhibited his creativity, yet would also have to be the means to restore it. He eventually came to terms with this paradox by devising a typology of ‘naïve’ and ‘reflective’ artists that explained his problem – and incidentally the evolution of modern European literature (On Naïve and Reflective Poetry, 1796). Schiller was also driven by a passionate belief in the humanizing and social function of art. His early speech The Effect of Theatre on the People (1784; later title The Stage considered as a Moral Institution) celebrated the one meeting-place where our full humanity could be restored. In the mature essays of the 1790s, an immensely more complex argument cannot hide the ultimate simplicity of his faith in art, even and especially in the midst of historical crisis: his culminating statement on beauty, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) is at the same time a considered response to events in France, where a ‘rational’ Revolution had turned into a Reign of Terror. Schiller proposes an education for humane balance as the only sufficiently radical answer to the violent excesses of impulse, and argues that art is its only possible agent. Schiller’s ideas are imaginative, generous and intuitively appealing as an account of what art is and might do. With the authority of his poetic standing and the high eloquence of his prose, they are powerful cultural criticism. Arguably they could have been more effective still and less vulnerable if he had not tried to make them something else by giving them a systematic quasi-Kantian form, as a result of which philosophical commentators have often patronized him while the Common Reader has been scared off.
Structuralism in literary theory
Authors: Margolis Joseph
Published: September 2018

‘Structuralism’ is a term embracing a family of theories that between them address all phenomena of the human world – notably language, literature, cookery, kinship relations, dress, human self-perception. In all these domains, structuralists claim, the observable, apparently separate elements are rightly understood only when seen as positions in a structure or system of relations.

The linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is generally recognized as the founder of the structuralist movement. For him semiology – the science of the meaning of natural languages – consists in determining the formal place of any signe within the inclusive system of signs that is language (langue), that is, to see it as a ‘difference’ among the system of inseparably linked ‘differences’. Literary significance is treated in a similar way. But both in linguistic and literary studies the existence of a complete and closed system has been largely anticipated, presupposed rather than confirmed, where no more than fragments of the supposed system could ever really be collected.

This itself is a point of serious contention: for one thing, the meaning of any fragment of a would-be system seems, on the structuralist view, not to be defined if the full system is not accessible; for another, there is no way to approximate to the inclusive system to which apparent fragments belong. But if that is so, it is asked, then can structuralism – whether applied to literature or to language in general – be a science at all?
Artistic style
Authors: Robinson Jenefer M.
Published: September 2018

Artistic style is a problematic notion in several ways. Sometimes the term refers to style in general, as it does in ‘Good style requires good diction’. Sometimes it refers to style as a particular, as in ‘Van Gogh’s style’ or ‘the Baroque style’. In antiquity, style was a rhetorical concept referring to diction and syntax; consequently style is very often identified with the formal elements of a work of art as opposed to the content. However, the kind of subject matter an artist chooses may itself be a significant feature of style. One way of thinking about style is as a set of recurrent features of works of art that identify them as the product of a particular person, period or place. This may be adequate for some purposes, but it ignores the fact that a style has a unified ‘physiognomy’ or expressive character. The relation between style and expression is complex. A period style is often thought to express the cultural attitudes of the period, but it cannot do so in a very direct way. What a style expresses is a function of where it occurs in the history of style. Similarly, a work of art in an artist’s individual style will be expressive only in the context of the possibilities of that style. According to the Romantic tradition, individual style is a genuine expression of the artist’s self. But according to others, style is simply a construction by readers, viewers and listeners.
Sublime, the
Authors: Crowther Paul
Published: September 2018

The origin of the term ‘the sublime’ is found in ancient philosophy, where, for example, Longinus linked it with a lofty and elevated use of literary language. In the eighteenth century, the term came into much broader use, when it was applied not only to literature but also to the experience of nature, whereafter it became one of the most hotly debated subjects in the cultural discourse of that age.

The theories of Addison, Burke and Kant are especially significant. Addison developed and extended the Longinian view of the sublime as a mode of elevated self-transcendence, while Burke extended John Dennis’s insight concerning sublimity’s connection with terror and a sense of self-preservation. While Addison and Burke encompassed both art and nature in their approaches, Kant confined the experience of the sublime to our encounters with nature. In his theory, the sublime is defined as a pleasure in the way that nature’s capacity to overwhelm our powers of perception and imagination is contained by and serves to vivify our powers of rational comprehension. It is a distinctive aesthetic experience.

In the 1980s and 1990s Kant’s and (to a much lesser extent) Burke’s theories of the sublime became the objects of a massive revival of interest, in the immediate context of a more general discussion of postmodern society. Kant’s theory, for example, has been used by J.-F. Lyotard and others to explain the sensibility – orientated towards the enjoyment of complexity, rapid change and a breakdown of categories – that seems to characterize that society.
Langer, Susanne Katherina Knauth (1895–1985)
Authors: Brand Peg
Published: September 2018

With roots in logic, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, Susanne Langer sought to explicate the meaning and cognitive import of art works by developing a theory of symbolism that located works of art at the centre of a network of relations based firmly on semantic theory. Art works were non-discursive, presentational symbols that expressed an artist’s ‘life of feeling’, by which observers, through a process of immediate apprehension (or intuition) came to acquire knowledge.
Goodman, Nelson (1906–98)
Authors: Elgin Catherine Z.
Published: September 2018

Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher who wrote important works in metaphysics, aesthetics and epistemology. Throughout his work runs a concern with the ways that the symbols we construct inform the facts that we find, and structure our understanding of them. Different symbol systems yield irreconcilable structures. So there is no one way things really are. There are, he concludes, many worlds if any. Moreover, worlds are made rather than found, for the categories we construct fix the criteria of identity for the individuals and kinds we recognize. Thus they determine what objects and kinds constitute a world.

Goodman argues that the arts as well as the sciences make and reveal worlds. Aesthetics as he construes it is a branch of epistemology. He analyses a variety of modes of symbolization, literal and metaphorical, and shows how they contribute in the arts and elsewhere to the advancement of understanding.

Goodman’s ‘new riddle of induction’ reveals that the problem of induction runs deeper than philosophers had thought. He defines the predicate ‘grue’ as ‘examined before future time t and found to be green or not so examined and blue.’ All emeralds examined to date have been both green and grue. What justifies our expecting future emeralds to be green rather than grue? Inductive validity, the new riddle shows, turns not only on the constitution of an evidence class, but also on its characterization. The question then is what favours one characterization over its rivals. The fact that ‘green’ has been used far more often than ‘grue’ in induction, Goodman contends, provides the answer – not because it increases our odds of being right, but because of its pragmatic advantages.
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. Its development 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 broadened the scope of environmental aesthetics beyond that of traditional aesthetics, and both helped to set the central philosophical issue of the field, which is 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 basic questions, such as ‘what’ and ‘how’ to appreciate. These questions have generated a number of different philosophical positions, two of which are the engagement and the cognitive approaches. The first holds that appreciators must transcend traditional dichotomies, such as subject/object, and diminish the distance between themselves and objects of appreciation, aiming at multi-sensory immersion of the former within the latter. By contrast, the second contends that appreciation must be guided by the nature of objects of appreciation and that knowledge about their origins, types and properties is necessary for serious, appropriate aesthetic appreciation. Each approach has certain strengths and weaknesses. However, 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, shows just how rewarding such appreciation can be.
Absolute, the
Authors: Sprigge T.L.S.
Published: September 2018

The expression ‘the Absolute’ stands for that (supposed) unconditioned reality which is either the spiritual ground of all being or the whole of things considered as a spiritual unity. This use derives especially from F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel, prefigured by J.G. Fichte’s talk of an absolute self which lives its life through all finite persons. In English-language philosophy it is associated with the monistic idealism of such thinkers as F.H. Bradley and Josiah Royce, the first distinguishing the Absolute from God, the second identifying them.
Categories
Authors: Wardy Robert
Published: September 2018

Categories are hard to describe, and even harder to define. This is in part a consequence of their complicated history, and in part because category theory must grapple with vexed questions concerning the relation between linguistic or conceptual categories on the one hand, and objective reality on the other. In the mid-fourth century bc,Aristotle initiates discussion of categories as a central enterprise of philosophy. In the Categories he presents an ‘ontological’ scheme which classifies all being into ten ultimate types, but in the Topics introduces the categories as different kinds of predication, that is, of items such as ‘goodness’ or ‘length of a tennis court’ or ‘red’, which can be ‘predicated of’ subjects. He nowhere attempts either to justify what he includes in his list of categories or to establish its completeness, and relies throughout on the unargued conviction that language faithfully represents the most basic features of reality. In the twentieth century, a test for category membership was recommended by Ryle, that of absurdity: concepts or expressions differ in logical type when their combination produces sentences which are palpable nonsense.Kant, working in the eighteenth century, derives his categories from a consideration of aspects of judgments, hoping in this manner to ensure that his scheme will consist exclusively of a priori concepts which might constitute an objective world. The Sinologist Graham argues that the categories familiar in the West mirror Indo-European linguistic structure, and that an experimental Chinese scheme exhibits suggestively different properties, but his relativism is highly contentious.
Czech Republic, philosophy in
Authors: Zumr Josef
Published: September 2018

The foundation of the University of Prague in 1348 contributed significantly to establishing Bohemia as a centre of philosophical thought. The main philosophers and theologians from the University favoured the Platonic tradition, and from this position they criticised corruption in the Church. The most important representative of this trend was Jan Hus who followed the teaching of John Wyclif in the spirit of rationalism and humanism. His ideas became an ideological base for the anti-feudal Hussite Revolution in the fifteenth century and the later Czech Reformation. Theoreticians on the extreme wing of the Revolution held a natural worldview, opposing the notion of transcendence. Social thinking in this era found expression in Petr Chelčický, who preached a strict pacifism and a classless society. The Revolution broke the power of the Church’s ideological monopoly, and had a positive impact on the development of Czech society for the following two centuries. The atmosphere of relative tolerance allowed Renaissance thinking and Czech Reformation rationalism and humanism to enrich each other. This tradition culminated in the work of Jan Amos Comenius, who aimed to improve social relations through rational enlightenment and education, promoting harmony and justice for the development of all humankind.

After 1620, Czech spiritual life was paralysed for many centuries by a forced anti-Reformation and the emigration of many of the country’s leading intellectuals. A revival started only at the end of the eighteenth century. František Palacký, inspired by the neohumanism of his era and by the Czech Reformation, formed a new philosophy of Czech history. B. Bolzano achieved impressive results in philosophy of science and logic, while A. Smetana created an independent variant of the philosophy of identity. In the second half of the nineteenth century Herbartism became very influential, contributing to social psychology and aesthetics.

The most important representative of modern Czech thinking is T.G. Masaryk, creator of a philosophical concept of democracy understood in the context of a humanistic world view. Masaryk’s philosophy has been followed by many philosophers and theologians in the twentieth century. In the period between the wars, important concepts based on structuralism were created by J.L. Fischer (philosophy, sociology), J. Mukařovský (aesthetics), V. Příhoda (psychology, pedagogy), and many linguists. J. Patočka contributed to the development of phenomenology with his concept of the natural world. In opposition to ‘school’ philosophy L.Klíma preached extreme subjectivism and individualism. Non-dogmatic Marxists wrote internationally regarded works. Well known in analytical philosophy and modern logic are the achievements of L. Tondl, O. Weinberger, K. Teige, R.Kalivoda and K. Kosík and P. Tichý.
Deconstruction
Authors: Norris Christopher
Published: September 2018

Although the term is often used interchangeably (and loosely) alongside others like ‘post-structuralism’ and ‘postmodernism’, deconstruction differs from these other movements. Unlike post-structuralism, its sources lie squarely within the tradition of Western philosophical debate about truth, knowledge, logic, language and representation. Where post-structuralism follows the linguist Saussure – or its own version of Saussure – in espousing a radically conventionalist (hence sceptical and relativist) approach to these issues, deconstruction pursues a more complex and critical path, examining the texts of philosophy with an eye to their various blindspots and contradictions. Where postmodernism blithely declares an end to the typecast ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘modernist’ project of truth-seeking rational enquiry, deconstruction preserves the critical spirit of Enlightenment thought while questioning its more dogmatic or complacent habits of belief. It does so primarily through the close reading of philosophical and other texts and by drawing attention to the moments of ‘aporia’ (unresolved tension or conflict) that tend to be ignored by mainstream exegetes. Yet this is not to say (as its detractors often do) that deconstruction is a kind of all-licensing textualist ‘freeplay’ which abandons every last standard of interpretive fidelity, rigour or truth. At any rate it is a charge that finds no warrant in the writings of those – Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man chief among them – whose work is discussed below.
Dialectical materialism
Authors: Wood Allen W.
Published: September 2018

Dialectical materialism is the official name given to Marxist-Leninist philosophy by its proponents in the Soviet Union and their affiliates elsewhere. The term, never used by either Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels, was the invention of the Russian Marxist Georgii Plekhanov, who first used it in 1891. Engels, however, favourably contrasted ‘materialist dialectics’ with the ‘idealist dialectics’ of Hegel and the German idealist tradition, and the ‘dialectical’ outlook of Marxism with the ‘mechanistic’ or ‘metaphysical’ standpoint of other nineteenth-century materialists.

Dialectical materialism proclaims allegiance to the methods of empirical science and opposition to all forms of scepticism which deny that science can know the nature of reality. Dialectical materialists reject religious belief generally, denying the existence of non-material or supernatural entities (such as God or an immortal human soul). Unlike other forms of materialism, however, dialectical materialists maintain that the fundamental laws governing both matter and mind are dialectical in the sense in which that term is used in the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel.

Although dialectical materialism is supposed to constitute the philosophical underpinnings of Marxism, Marx’s only major contribution to it was his materialist conception of history. The more fundamental philosophical views of dialectical materialism have their main source in the writings of Engels, especially Anti-Dühring (1878), Dialectics of Nature (1875–82) and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886). To this last work Engels appended the eleven ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ written by Marx in 1845, which contrasted the ‘old’ or ‘contemplative’ materialism with the practically oriented materialism which was to be the basis of the proletarian movement. Further developments of dialectical materialism are found in writings by V.I. Lenin and subsequent Soviet writers. Lenin’s chief additions were his critique of ‘empirio-criticism’ (the empiricist phenomenalism of certain Russian followers of Ernst Mach, who argued that matter was to be reduced to sense data), and his conception of the ‘partisanship’ of all philosophical views.
Education, history of philosophy of
Authors: Curren Randall R.
Published: September 2018

The philosophy of education may be considered a branch of practical philosophy, aimed ultimately at the guidance of an important aspect of human affairs. Its questions thus arise more or less directly from the features of educational practice and the role of education in the promotion of individual and social wellbeing, however much its answers may be conditioned by the larger philosophical and historical settings in which they are posed. Philosophers have concerned themselves with what the aims of education should be, and through what forms of instruction, inquiry and practice those aims might be attained. This demands attention to the contents of instruction and who shall have authority over it. It demands attention to the nature of instruction itself, its epistemic dimensions and what is entailed by its reliance on language; the nature of learning and human development, both moral and intellectual; and how all of these are interrelated. The philosophy of education thus stands at the intersection of moral and political philosophy, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind and language, as they bear on the foundations of educational practice.

The philosophy of education began in classical antiquity with the challenges posed by Socrates to the educational claims of the sophists. Plato and Aristotle developed systematic theories of education guided by an ethic of justice and self-restraint, and by the goal of promoting social harmony and the happiness or wellbeing of all citizens. The Stoic descendants of Socrates were expelled from Rome and the oratorical model of higher education given official sanction, but Augustine re-established the philosophical model through a synthesis of Platonism and Christianity, and in his mature educational thought brought elements of the oratorical and Platonic models together in his account of the Christian teacher’s training.

The religious wars of the Reformation inspired several philosophical stances toward the relationships of Church, state, school and conscience. Hobbes argued for a consolidation of ecclesiastical and civil authority, with full sovereign authority over education; Locke for liberty, religious toleration, and private education aiming at self-governance in accordance with reason; and Rousseau not just for the free development and exercise of the full array of human faculties, but for the establishment of a civic religion limited to the core of shared Christian beliefs which Enlightenment figures from Descartes onward had thought evident to natural reason.

The Enlightenment’s embrace of science and reason yielded efforts towards the development of a science of learning and pedagogy in the nineteenth century, but Rousseau’s romantic reaction to it and defence of democracy were also powerful influences. In the twentieth century, Dewey produced a new synthesis of Enlightenment and Rousseauian themes, drawing on Hegel, the experimentalism of Mill, evolutionary theory and psychology, and aspects of the substance and intent of Rousseau’s pedagogy.
Facts
Authors: Oliver Alex
Published: September 2018

The existence and nature of facts is disputed. In ordinary language we often speak of facts (‘that’s a fact’) but it is hard to take such talk seriously since it can be paraphrased away. It is better to argue for the existence of facts on the basis of three connected theoretical roles for facts. First, facts as the referents of true sentences: ‘the cat sat on the mat’, if true, refers to the fact that the cat sat on the mat. Second, facts as the truth-makers of true sentences: the fact that the cat sat on the mat is what makes ‘the cat sat on the mat’ true. Third, facts as causal relata, related in such sentences as ‘Caesar died because Brutus stabbed him’. The so-called ‘slingshot’ argument aims to show that these roles are misconceived.
Feminism
Authors: James Susan
Published: September 2018

Feminism is grounded on the belief that women are oppressed or disadvantaged by comparison with men, and that their oppression is in some way illegitimate or unjustified. Under the umbrella of this general characterization there are, however, many interpretations of women and their oppression, so that it is a mistake to think of feminism as a single philosophical doctrine, or as implying an agreed political programme. Just as there are diverse images of liberation, so there are a number of feminist philosophies, yoked together not so much by their particular claims or prescriptions as by their interest in a common theme.

In the earlier phases of feminism, advocates focused largely on the reform of women’s social position, arguing that they should have access to education, work or civil rights. During the latter half of the twentieth century, however, feminists have become increasingly interested in the variety of social practices (including theoretical ones) through which our understandings of femininity and masculinity are created and maintained. As a result, the scope of feminist enquiry has broadened to include, for example, jurisprudence, epistemology and psychoanalysis.

Despite its diversity, this work characteristically draws on and grapples with a set of deeply-rooted historical attempts to explain the domination of women. Aristotle’s claim that they are mutilated males, together with the biblical account of the sin of Eve, gave rise to an authoritative tradition in which the weakness, irrationality and ineducability of women, the inconstancy, inability to control their emotions and lack of moral virtue, were all regularly cited and assumed as grounds for controlling them and excluding them from the public realm.
Feminist literary criticism
Authors: Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty
Published: September 2018

Feminist literary criticism looks at literature assuming its production from a male-dominated perspective. It re-examines canonical works to show how gender stereotypes are involved in their functioning. It examines (and often rediscovers) works by women for a possible alternative voice. A study of the social suppression and minimalization of women’s literature becomes necessary. These questions emerge: What is sexual difference and how has it been represented? How has the representation of woman relied on a presupposition of inequality between the sexes? Is there a feminine essence, biological or otherwise, that produces ‘women’s writing’? Feminists who believe that a ‘woman’ is culturally or socially constructed look for evidence of that process in literature. The socio-cultural and politico-economic construction of sexual difference is ‘gender.’ A study of the difference between sexual and gender difference can establish alliances with gay and lesbian studies. Feminist criticism sometimes relates to psychoanalysis and/or Marxism, criticizing their masculinism and using their resources. It expands into film/video as well as social-scientific or philosophical texts. Feminists sensitive to racism and imperialism demonstrate the culture-specificity of all of the above.
Humanism
Authors: Luik John C.
Published: September 2018

The philosophical term ‘humanism’ refers to a series of interrelated concepts about the nature, defining characteristics, powers, education and values of human persons. In one sense humanism is a coherent and recognizable philosophical system that advances substantive ontological, epistemological, anthropological, educational, aesthetic, ethical and political claims. In another sense humanism is understood more as a method and a series of loosely connected questions about the nature and character of human persons.

From the fourteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, humanism minimally meant: (1) an educational programme founded on the classical authors and concentrating on the study of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and moral philosophy; (2) a commitment to the perspective, interests and centrality of human persons; (3) a belief in reason and autonomy as foundational aspects of human existence; (4) a belief that reason, scepticism and the scientific method are the only appropriate instruments for discovering truth and structuring the human community; (5) a belief that the foundations for ethics and society are to be found in autonomy and moral equality. From the end of the nineteenth century, humanism has been defined, in addition to the above, by the way in which particular aspects of core humanist belief such as human uniqueness, scientific method, reason and autonomy have been utilized in such philosophical systems as existentialism, Marxism and pragmatism.
Hungary, philosophy in
Authors: Perecz Laszlo
Published: September 2018

The situation of Hungarian philosophy can be best illustrated by two sayings: ‘there are Hungarian philosophers, but there is no Hungarian philosophy’, and ‘a certain period of Hungarian philosophy stretches from Descartes to Kant’. The two ideas are closely connected. Thus on the one hand, there is such a thing as Hungarian philosophy: there are scientific-educational institutions in philosophical life and there are philosophers working in these institutions. On the other hand, there is no such thing as Hungarian philosophy: it is a history of adoption, largely consisting of attempts to introduce and embrace the great trends of Western thought.

After some preliminaries in the medieval and early-modern periods, Hungarian philosophy started to develop at the beginning of the nineteenth century. As a result of the reception of German idealism – the so-called Kant debate and Hegel debate – the problems of philosophy were formulated as independent problems for the first time, and a philosophical language began to evolve. After an attempt to create a ‘national philosophy’ – and after some outstanding individual achievements – the institutionalization of Hungarian philosophy accelerated at the end of the century. The early years of the twentieth century brought the first heyday of philosophy to Hungary, with the rapid reception of new idealist trends and notable original contributions. In the period between the two wars the development stopped: many philosophers were forced to emigrate, and Geistesgeschichte (the history of thought) became prevalent in philosophical life. Following the communist take-over, the institutions of ‘bourgeois’ philosophy were eliminated, and Marxism-Leninism, which legitimated political power, took a monopolistic position. During this period, the only significant works created were in the tradition of critical Marxism and philosophical opposition. The changes in 1989 regenerated the institutional system, and the articulation of international contemporary trends – analytic philosophy, hermeneutic tradition and postmodernism – came to the fore.

Besides some works by thinkers in exile, Hungarian philosophy has produced only one achievement which can be considered significant at an international level: the oeuvre of György (Georg) Lukács.