bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.