bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908–61)
Authors: Baldwin Thomas 
Published: September 2018

Merleau-Ponty belongs to the group of French philosophers who transformed French philosophy in the early post-war period by introducing the phenomenological methods of the German philosophers Husserl and Heidegger. His central concern was with ‘the phenomenology of perception’ (the title of his major book), and his originality lay in his account of the role of the bodily sense-organs in perception, which led him to develop a phenomenological treatment of the sub-personal perceptions that play a central role in bodily movements. This account of the sub-personal aspects of life enabled him to launch a famous critique of Sartre’s conception of freedom, which he regarded as an illusion engendered by excessive attention to consciousness. None the less, he and Sartre cooperated for many years in French political affairs, until Merleau-Ponty became exasperated by the orthodox Marxism-Leninism of the French Communist Party in a way in which Sartre, who remained a fellow-traveller, did not. As well as several substantial political essays, Merleau-Ponty wrote widely on art, anthropology and, especially, language. He died leaving some important work incomplete.
Although his work is still esteemed within the French academic establishment, his influence in France has waned, because of a tendency there to study his German forebears almost to the exclusion of all else. But elsewhere, and most notably in the USA, Merleau-Ponty’s work is widely studied, especially now that questions about the distinction between personal and sub-personal aspects of life have become so prominent.
Popper, Karl Raimund (1902–94)
Authors: Jarvie Ian C. 
Published: September 2018

Popper belongs to a generation of Central European émigré scholars that profoundly influenced thought in the English-speaking countries in this century. His greatest contributions are in philosophy of science and in political and social philosophy. Popper’s ‘falsificationism’ reverses the usual view that accumulated experience leads to scientific hypotheses; rather, freely conjectured hypotheses precede, and are tested against, experience. The hypotheses that survive the testing process constitute current scientific knowledge. His general epistemology, ‘critical rationalism’, commends the Socratic method of posing questions and critically discussing the answers offered to them. He considers knowledge in the traditional sense of certainty, or in the modern sense of justified true belief, to be unobtainable.
After the Anschluss, Popper was stimulated by the problem of why democracies had succumbed to totalitarianism and applied his critical rationalism to political philosophy. Since we have no infallible ways of getting or maintaining good government, Plato’s question ‘Who should rule?’ is misdirected. To advocate the rule of the best, the wise or the just invites tyranny disguised under those principles. By contrast, a prudently constructed open society constructs institutions to ensure that any regime can be ousted without violence, no matter what higher ends it proclaims itself to be seeking. Couched in the form of extended critiques of Plato and Platonism as well as of Marx and Marxism, Popper’s political philosophy has had considerable influence in post-war Europe, East and West.
Reichenbach, Hans (1891–1953)
Authors: Salmon Wesley C. 
Published: September 2018

Philosophy of science flourished in the twentieth century, partly as a result of extraordinary progress in the sciences themselves, but mainly because of the efforts of philosophers who were scientifically knowledgeable and who remained abreast of new scientific achievements. Hans Reichenbach was a pioneer in this philosophical development; he studied physics and mathematics in several of the great German scientific centres and later spent a number of years as a colleague of Einstein in Berlin. Early in his career he followed Kant, but later reacted against his philosophy, arguing that it was inconsistent with twentieth-century physics.
Reichenbach was not only a philosopher of science, but also a scientific philosopher. He insisted that philosophy should adhere to the same standards of precision and rigour as the natural sciences. He unconditionally rejected speculative metaphysics and theology because their claims could not be substantiated either a priori, on the basis of logic and mathematics, or a posteriori, on the basis of sense-experience. In this respect he agreed with the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, but because of other profound disagreements he was never actually a positivist. He was, instead, the leading member of the group of logical empiricists centred in Berlin.
Although his writings span many subjects Reichenbach is best known for his work in two main areas: induction and probability, and the philosophy of space and time. In the former he developed a theory of probability and induction that contained his answer to Hume’s problem of the justification of induction. Because of his view that all our knowledge of the world is probabilistic, this work had fundamental epistemological significance. In philosophy of physics he offered epoch-making contributions to the foundations of the theory of relativity, undermining space and time as Kantian synthetic a priori categories.
Ryle, Gilbert (1900–76)
Authors: Lyons William 
Published: September 2018

Alongside Wittgenstein and Austin, Ryle was one of the dominant figures in that middle period of twentieth-century English language philosophy which became known as ‘Linguistic Analysis’. His views in philosophy of mind led to his being described as a ‘logical behaviourist’ and his major work in that area, The Concept of Mind (1949), both by reason of its style and content, has become one of the modern classics of philosophy. In it Ryle attacked what he calls ‘Cartesian dualism’ or the myth of ‘the Ghost in the Machine’, arguing that philosophical troubles over the nature of mind and its relation with the body arose from a ‘category mistake’ which led erroneously to treating statements about mental phenomena in the same way as those about physical phenomena. For Ryle, to do something was not to perform two separate actions - one mental, one physical - but to behave in a certain way.
Much of Ryle’s work had a similar theme: philosophical confusion arose through the assimilation or misapplication of categorically different terms, and could only be cleared up by a careful analysis of the logic and use of language. He later became preoccupied with the nature of reflective thinking, since this stood as an example of an activity which seemed to evade the behaviouristic analysis that he recommended. Ryle was also a considerable Plato scholar, though his work in this area has been less influential.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80)
Authors: Howells Christina 
Published: September 2018

Sartre was a philosopher of paradox: an existentialist who attempted a reconciliation with Marxism, a theorist of freedom who explored the notion of predestination. From the mid-1930s to the late-1940s, Sartre was in his ‘classical’ period. He explored the history of theories of imagination leading up to that of Husserl, and developed his own phenomenological account of imagination as the key to the freedom of consciousness. He analysed human emotions, arguing that emotion is a freely chosen mode of relationship to the outside world. In his major philosophical work, L’Être et le Néant(Being and Nothingness) (1943a), Sartre distinguished between consciousness and all other beings: consciousness is always at least tacitly conscious of itself, hence it is essentially ‘for itself’ (pour-soi) – free, mobile and spontaneous. Everything else, lacking this self-consciousness, is just what it is ‘in-itself’ (en-soi); it is ‘solid’ and lacks freedom. Consciousness is always engaged in the world of which it is conscious, and in relationships with other consciousnesses. These relationships are conflictual: they involve a battle to maintain the position of subject and to make the other into an object. This battle is inescapable.
Although Sartre was indeed a philosopher of freedom, his conception of freedom is often misunderstood. Already in Being and Nothingness human freedom operates against a background of facticity and situation. My facticity is all the facts about myself which cannot be changed – my age, sex, class of origin, race and so on; my situation may be modified, but it still constitutes the starting point for change and roots consciousness firmly in the world. Freedom is not idealized by Sartre; it is always within a given set of circumstances, after a particular past, and against the expectations of both myself and others that I make my free choices. My personal history conditions the range of my options.
From the 1950s onwards Sartre became increasingly politicized and was drawn to attempt a reconciliation between existentialism and Marxism. This was the aim of the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason) (1960) which recognized more fully than before the effect of historical and material conditions on individual and collective choice. An attempt to explore this interplay in action underlies both his biography of Flaubert and his own autobiography.
Strawson, Peter Frederick (1919–2006)
Authors: Snowdon Paul F. 
Published: September 2018

Strawson taught at the University of Oxford from 1947, becoming Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1968, and retiring in 1987. A sequence of influential books and articles established him as one of the leading philosophers in Oxford during that period. He had a crucial role in the transition there from the dominance of Austin and linguistic philosophy in the 1950s to the more liberal and metaphysical approaches in the 1960s and later. The principal topics about which he has written are the philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology and the history of philosophy.
Strawson became famous with ‘On Referring’ (1950), in which he criticized Russell for misconstruing our ordinary use of definite descriptions. Strawson endorses the slogan ‘ordinary language has no exact logic’, a viewpoint which is explored in Introduction to Logical Theory (1952). He argues that the utility of formal logic in its application to ordinary speech does not imply that the meaning of ordinary language is captured by the semantics of standard formal systems.
In Individuals (1959), Strawson’s most discussed work, his task is descriptive metaphysics. He attempts to describe the referentially basic subject matter of our thought. They are relatively enduring, perceptible and reidentifiable bodies. The other element in the basic framework is what Strawson calls persons, enduring entities with both material and psychological features. In The Bounds of Sense (1966), Strawson continued the development of his metaphysical and epistemological ideas, by combining a critical study of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, with the defence of some transcendental claims similar to Kant’s. To think of oneself as an enduring subject of experience requires that one recognize objects which are independent of oneself. So the major epistemological problem in the empiricist tradition, of building up to the external world from private experiences, cannot arise.
Skepticism and Naturalism; Some Varieties (1985a) studies the conflicts between fundamental opinions which are natural to us, such as that we know things, and philosophical viewpoints claiming that these opinions are mistaken. Strawson argues that scepticism about these natural views can and should be resisted. Throughout his career, Strawson has tried to describe the basic content of our thoughts and experiences, to counter scepticism about or revisions of such thoughts, to illuminate them by making analytical connections between their basic elements, as well as investigating language, our vehicle for expressing these thoughts. He has linked his explorations to the insights of philosophers of the past, while engaging in critical debate with the period’s other leading philosophers, such as Austin, Quine, Davidson and Dummett.
Whitehead, Alfred North (1861–1947)
Authors: Bradley James 
Published: September 2018

Whitehead made fundamental contributions to modern logic and created one of the most controversial metaphysical systems of the twentieth century. He drew out what he took to be the revolutionary consequences for philosophy of the new discoveries in mathematics, logic and physics, developing these consequences first in logic and then in the philosophy of science and speculative metaphysics. His work constantly returns to the question: what is the place of the constructions of mathematics, science and philosophy in the nature of things?
Whitehead collaborated with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica (1910–13), which argues that all pure mathematics is derivable from a small number of logical principles. He went on in his philosophy of science to describe nature in terms of overlapping series of events and to argue that scientific explanations are constructed on that basis. He finally expanded and redefined his work by developing a new kind of speculative metaphysics. Stated chiefly in Process and Reality (1929), his metaphysics is both an extended reflection on the character of philosophical inquiry and an account of the nature of all things as a self-constructing ‘process’. On this view, reality is incomplete, a matter of the becoming of ‘occasions’ which are centres of activity in a multiplicity of serial processes whereby the antecedent occasions are taken up in the activities of successor occasions.
Phenomenological movement
Authors: Embree Lester 
Published: September 2018

The phenomenological movement is a century-old international movement in philosophy that has penetrated most of the cultural disciplines, especially psychiatry and sociology. It began in Germany with the early work of Edmund Husserl, and spread to the rest of Europe, the Americas and Asia. In contrast with a school, a movement does not have a body of doctrine to which all participants agree; rather, there is a broad approach that tends to be shared. The phenomenological approach has at least four components.
First, phenomenologists tend to oppose naturalism. Naturalism includes behaviourism in psychology and positivism in social sciences and philosophy, and is a worldview based on the methods of the natural sciences. In contrast, phenomenologists tend to focus on the socio-historical or cultural lifeworld and to oppose all kinds of reductionism. Second, they tend to oppose speculative thinking and preoccupation with language, urging instead knowledge based on ‘intuiting’ or the ‘seeing’ of the matters themselves that thought is about. Third, they urge a technique of reflecting on processes within conscious life (or human existence) that emphasizes how such processes are directed at (or ‘intentive to’) objects and, correlatively, upon these objects as they present themselves or, in other words, as they are intended to. And fourth, phenomenologists tend to use analysis or explication as well as the seeing of the matters reflected upon to produce descriptions or interpretations both in particular and in universal or ‘eidetic’ terms. In addition, phenomenologists also tend to debate the feasibility of Husserl’s procedure of transcendental epoché or ‘bracketing’ and the project of transcendental first philosophy it serves, most phenomenology not being transcendental.
Beyond these widely shared components of method, phenomenologists tend to belong to one or another of four intercommunicating and sometimes overlapping tendencies. These tendencies are ‘realistic phenomenology’, which emphasizes the seeing and describing of universal essences; ‘constitutive phenomenology’, which emphasizes accounting for objects in terms of the consciousness of them; ‘existential phenomenology’, which emphasizes aspects of human existence within the world; and ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’, which emphasizes the role of interpretation in all spheres of life. All tendencies go back to the early work of Husserl, but the existential and hermeneutical tendencies are also deeply influenced by the early work of Martin Heidegger. Other leading figures are Nicolai Hartmann, Roman Ingarden, Adolf Reinach and Max Scheler in realistic phenomenology, Dorion Cairns, Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schutz in constitutive phenomenology, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir in existential phenomenology, and Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur in hermeneutical phenomenology.
Dummett, Michael Anthony Eardley (1925–2011)
Authors: Taylor Barry 
Published: September 2018

For Michael Dummett, the core of philosophy lies in the theory of meaning. His exploration of meaning begins with the model proposed by Gottlob Frege, of whose work Dummett is a prime expositor. A central feature of that model is that the sense (content) of a sentence is given by a condition for its truth, displayed as deriving from its constituent structure. If sense so explicated is to explain linguistic practice, knowledge of these truth-conditions must be attributed to language users by identifying features of use in which it is manifested. Analysis of truth suggests we seek such manifestation in patterns of assertion. But scrutiny of those patterns shows that there is no distinction between use which manifests knowledge of classical truth-conditions, and use which manifests knowledge of a weaker kind of truth - for example, one which holds whenever we possess a potential warrant for a statement.
Such considerations motivate reconstruing sense as given by conditions for this weaker kind of truth. But rejigging Fregean semantics in line with such a conception is highly nontrivial. Mathematical intuitionism, properly construed, gives us models for doing so with mathematical language; Dummett’s programme is to extend such work to everyday discourses. Since he further argues that realism consists in defending the classical semantics for a discourse, this programme amounts to probing the viability of antirealism about such things as the material world, other minds and past events.
Kripke, Saul Aaron (1940–)
Authors: Jubien Michael 
Published: September 2018

Saul Kripke is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. He is also one of the leading mathematical logicians, having done seminal work in areas including modal logic, intuitionistic logic and set theory. Although much of his work in logic has philosophical significance, it will not be discussed here.
Kripke’s main contributions fall in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of logic and mathematics. He is particularly well known for his views on and discussions of the following topics: the concepts of necessity, identity and ‘possible worlds’; ‘essentialism’ – the idea that things have significant essential properties; the question of what determines the referent of an ordinary proper name and the related question of whether such names have meanings; the relations among the concepts of necessity, analyticity, and the a priori; the concept of belief and its problems; the concept of truth and its problems; and scepticism, the idea of following a rule, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘private language argument’. This entry will be confined to the topics of identity, proper names, necessity and essentialism.
Consciousness, phenomenology of
Authors: Jacobs Hanne 
Published: September 2018

Phenomenology is an approach to consciousness that originates at the beginning of the twentieth century in the work of Edmund Husserl. A phenomenological account of consciousness begins from a first-person reflection on consciousness that puts out of play our everyday or natural-scientific preconceptions about consciousness and the world and describes the structural features of our consciousness of the world. This project is carried on in the phenomenological works of authors such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, albeit with sometimes quite different emphases and aims.
Insofar as phenomenology describes the structures of consciousness by virtue of which there is a world for us, phenomenology is a form of transcendental philosophy. Specifically, phenomenologists describe how the structures of intentionality, self-awareness, temporality, attention, embodiment, and intersubjectivity make possible our consciousness of worldly things, situations, and events. According to them, the world is not just an objective nature comprised of spatiotemporally extended and causally connected things; it is also always an intersubjectively accessible world that is shot through with values and organized in light of practical projects, due to which the world appears with a significance that is variable across time and space.
Husserl maintains that phenomenological descriptions of the essential structures of consciousness that make possible the experience and knowledge of the world—that is, of transcendental consciousness—can also be taken as psychological descriptions of consciousness conceived as a natural event in the world. In this way, a number of contemporary philosophers draw on specific descriptive insights from the phenomenological tradition to address issues in contemporary philosophy of mind and drive the empirical investigation of consciousness forward (such as Gallagher and Schmicking 2010; Dahlstrom et al. 2015; Petitot et al. 1999; Thompson 2007; Zahavi and Gallagher 2012; Zahavi 2012). Alternatively, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty explicitly draw on insights from psychology and psychopathology to inform their phenomenology of consciousness, which is a strategy that has also been employed by some contemporary phenomenologists (see Zahavi 2000).
Latour, Bruno (1947–)
Authors: Harman Graham 
Published: September 2018

Bruno Latour is a French philosopher whose work and influence have been mainly in the social sciences, and he is one of the world’s most cited authors in this field. Along with Michel Callon and John Law he is considered one of the founders of actor-network theory (ANT), a method of avoiding abstract terms such as ‘society’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘the economy’ by focusing on the role of individual actors in building up any collective. ANT is thus a ‘flat ontology’ that places humans, nonhumans, concepts and fictional characters on the same footing. All entities are equally real, though not equally strong: neutrons simply have more or better allies attesting to their existence than Popeye, square circles or white ravens. Entities are termed ‘actors’ or ‘actants’, since they can be known and understood only by the effects they have on other things: there is no substance or thingly surplus hidden behind their concrete actions.
From the late 1990s Latour partly renounced ANT due to its inability to distinguish between the truth conditions of differing modes of reality, a problem he tried to address in his new ‘modes of existence’ project. Among the chief influences on his work are the semiotics of A.J. Greimas, the metaphysics of A.N. Whitehead, the pragmatism of William James, and the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.