bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Port-Royal
Authors: Pearce Kenneth L. 
Published: September 2018

Port-Royal-des-Champes was an abbey in France, initially located near Versailles, but later moved to Paris. Its importance to the history of philosophy is due primarily to a group of Augustinian-Cartesian thinkers who developed an influential theory of mental and linguistic representation. This theory is found in the 1660 Port-Royal Grammaire générale et raisonnée (General and Rational Grammar) by Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, and the 1662 Port-Royal La logique ou l’art de penserLogic (Logic or the Art of Thinking) by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole.
The aim of the Grammar is to identify the universal structures of thought underlying all languages, and thereby explain the similarities and differences among languages. The aim of the Logic is to understand the natural operations of the human mind in order that we might learn to employ our faculties better. A fundamental presupposition of both works is that words are signs used to indicate to others what is taking place in the speaker's mind. This leads the Port-Royalists to regard the structure of language as reflective of the structure of thought, and vice versa.
The most important aspect of this structure is the manner in which ideas are put together into propositions and words are put together into sentences. According to the Port-Royalists, a proposition is constructed by a special mental operation, which they call judging. It is this operation that gives rise to truth and falsity. Affirmation, or taking two ideas to belong together, is one species of judging; denial, or taking two ideas not to belong together, is another. These acts of judging are signified by verbs, while nouns signify ideas.
The Port-Royal theory had an enormous influence on Locke's approach to mind and language. It was also regarded by Chomsky as a predecessor to his own linguistic theories.
Monad
Authors: McDonough Jeffrey K. , Nguyen Tran (Jen) 
Published: September 2018

Monads serve as the metaphysical foundations of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s mature metaphysics. In doing so they play a metaphysical role similar to the metaphysical role of atoms in traditional atomist theories. Like traditional atoms, monads are true unities, naturally indestructible, and persist through changes in ordinary bodies. Unlike traditional atoms, monads are unextended, metaphysically prior to space, and immaterial.
Monads have perceptions, appetites and points of view. Leibniz distinguishes three kinds of monads on the basis of their representational capacities. The lowest kind of monad – ‘bare’ monads or ‘vegetative’ souls – only have perceptions so faint and confused that they are unable to enjoy distinct, conscious representations. Leibniz likens them to our minds when we are in a deep sleep or in a daze. The intermediate level of monad – sensitive monads or animal souls – have perceptions that allow them to enjoy conscious representations of distinct entities. The highest level of monad – minds or human souls – enjoy higher-order thoughts. In virtue of such higher-order thoughts, minds are able to think about their perceptions, themselves and necessary truths.
Aesthetics, in modern philosophy
Authors: Costelloe Timothy M. 
Published: September 2018

The term aesthetics is derived linguistically from the Greek term meaning sensitive or sentient. It is first used to designate a particular area of philosophical inquiry in mid-eighteenth-century Germany, though the intellectual origins of the discipline trace to earlier French and British writers, with the latter providing many founding texts of the emerging area of study. The new subject matter was distinguished by its rise coeval with the Continental Enlightenment and a focus on philosophical issues surrounding the fine arts and judgements of value captured by concepts of beauty, sublimity, and their relata.
In France, the seventeenth-century tradition of criticism divides into two strands of thought: one influenced directly by Cartesian rationalism, the other modified by principles drawn from British empiricism. German contributions to aesthetics develop within a rationalist framework derived from Leibnizian philosophy and marked an effort to systematize the newly articulated domain of knowledge. British writers follow primarily empiricist principles but fall into three groups depending on whether they emphasize an internal sense, the faculty of imagination, or psychological processes of association. The British aesthetic tradition is also distinguished by debates over the picturesque, an aesthetic drawn from landscape painting and inseparable from the history of English landscape gardening.
Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832)
Authors: Harrison Ross 
Published: September 2018

Jeremy Bentham held that all human and political action could be analysed in terms of pleasure and pain, and so made comprehensible. One such analysis is how people actually do behave; according to Bentham, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Another such analysis is of how they ought to behave. For Bentham, this is that they should maximize utility, which for him is the same as producing the greatest happiness of the greatest number, which, again, is the same for him as maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. His chief study was planning how there could be a good system of government and law; that is, how laws could be created so that people being as they actually are (seeking their own pleasure) might nevertheless do what they ought (seek the greatest pleasure of all). The instruments which government use in this task are punishment and reward, inducing action by threats and offers. For Bentham, punishment is done not for the sake of the offender, but to deter other people from doing the same kind of thing. Hence on his theory it is the apparent punishment which does all the good, the real punishment which does all the harm.
Bentham thought that the primary unit of significance was the sentence, not the word. He used this idea to produce profound analyses of the nature of law and legal terms, such as’ right’, ‘duty’ or ‘property’. These are what he calls names of fictions – terms which do not directly correspond to real entities. However, this does not mean that they are meaningless. Instead, meaning can be given to them by translating sentences in which they occur into sentences in which they do not occur. Thus legal rights are understood in terms of legal duties, because sentences involving the former can be understood in terms of sentences involving the latter; these in turn can be analysed in terms of threats of punishment or, again, pleasure and pain. This gives sense to legal rights, but sense cannot be given in the same way to natural rights. For Bentham, we have no natural rights and the rights that we do have, such as property rights, are created by government, whose chief task is to protect them. Bentham also worked out how people could be protected from government itself, designing an elaborate system of constitutional law in which representative democracy was a central element.
Bentham invented the word ‘international’, and when he died he had an international legal and political influence. His chief influence in philosophy has been as the most important historical exponent of a pure form of utilitarianism.
Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de (1743–94)
Authors: Williams David 
Published: September 2018

The Marquis de Condorcet belongs to the second generation of eighteenth-century French philosophes. He was by training and inclination a mathematician, and his work marks a major stage in the development of what is known today as the social sciences. He was held in high regard by contemporaries for his contributions to probability theory, and he published a number of seminal treatises on the theory and application of probabilism. He is best known today for the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795), his monumental, secularized historical analysis of the dynamics of man’s progress from the primitive state of nature to modernity.
Condorcet’s principal aim was to establish a science of man that would be as concise and certain in its methods and results as the natural and physical sciences. For Condorcet there could be no true basis to science without the model of mathematics, and there was no branch of human knowledge to which the mathematical approach was not relevant. He called the application of mathematics to human behaviour and organization ‘social arithmetic’.
The central epistemological assumption, upon which his philosophy was based, was that the truths of observation, whether in the context of the physical or the moral and social sciences, were nothing more than probabilities, but that their varying degrees of certainty could be measured by means of the calculus of probabilities. Condorcet was thus able, through mathematical logic, to counteract the negative implications of Pyrrhonic scepticism for the notions of truth and progress, the calculus providing not only the link between the different orders of knowledge but also the way out of the Pyrrhonic trap by demonstrating man’s capacity and freedom to understand and direct the march of progress in a rationally-ordered way.
In his Esquisse Condorcet set out to record not only the history of man’s progress through nine ‘epochs’, from the presocial state of nature to the societies of modern Europe, but in the tenth ‘epoch’ of this work he also held out the promise of continuing progress in the future. He saw the gradual emancipation of human society and the achievement of human happiness as the consequence of man having been endowed by nature with the capacity to learn from experience and of the cumulative, beneficial effects of the growth of knowledge and enlightenment. Condorcet’s Esquisse laid the basis for the positivism of the nineteenth century, and had a particularly significant impact on the work of Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814)
Authors: Breazeale Daniel 
Published: September 2018

Fichte developed Kant’s Critical philosophy into a system of his own, which he named ‘Theory of Science’ or Wissenschaftslehre. Though Fichte continued to revise this system until the end of his life, almost all of his best known and most influential philosophical works were written in first portion of his career, when he was a professor at the University of Jena.
The task of philosophy, as understood by Fichte, is to provide a transcendental explanation of ordinary consciousness and of everyday experience, from the standpoint of which philosophy must therefore abstract. Such an explanation can start either with the concept of free subjectivity (‘the I’) or with that of pure objectivity (the ‘thing in itself’), the former being the principle of idealism and the latter that of what Fichte called ‘dogmatism’ (or transcendental realism). Though neither of these first principles can be theoretically demonstrated, the principle of freedom possesses the advantage of being practically or morally certain. Moreover, according to Fichte, only transcendental idealism, which begins with the principle of subjective freedom and then proceeds to derive objectivity and limitation as conditions for the possibility of any selfhood whatsoever, can actually accomplish the task of philosophy.
One of the distinctive features of Fichte’s Jena system is its thoroughgoing integration of theoretical and practical reason, that is, its demonstration that there can be no (theoretical) cognition without (practical) striving, and vice versa. Another important feature is Fichte’s demonstration of the necessary finitude of all actual selfhood. The ‘absolute I’ with which the system seems to begin turns out to be only a practical ideal of total self-determination, an ideal toward which the finite I continuously strives but can never achieve. Also emphasized in Fichte’s Jena writings is the social or intersubjective character of all selfhood: an I is an I only in relationship to other finite rational subjects. This insight provides the basis for Fichte’s political philosophy or ‘theory of right’, which is one of the more original portions of the overall system of the Wissenschaftslehre, a system that also includes a foundational portion (or ‘first philosophy’), a philosophy of nature, an ethics and a philosophy of religion.
Godwin, William (1756–1836)
Authors: Philp Mark 
Published: September 2018

William Godwin is considered the founder of philosophical anarchism. His An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) contends that although government is a corrupt force in society, perpetuating dependence and ignorance, it will increasingly be rendered impotent by the gradual spread of knowledge. Politics will be displaced by an enlarged morality as truth conquers error and mind subordinates matter. He predicts the end to cooperative activities (which restrain individual freedom), the abandonment of marriage and private property, and increasing longevity and ultimate immortality.
Godwin’s moral theory is often described as utilitarian, but he understands pleasure to be inseparable from the development of truth and wisdom through the full and free exercise of private judgment and public discussion. As such, his position is better understood as perfectionist.
Hartley, David (1705–1757)
Authors: Allen Richard C. 
Published: September 2018

David Hartley’s Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749) offers an inclusive study of human beings, one that brings together neuro-physiology, cognitive and moral psychology, and theology. According to Hartley, the ‘frame’ of body and brain grounds consciousness, so that mind is not something separate from body. Experiences of happiness and suffering combine to shape a person’s evolving sense of self, and this self may grow into awareness of our duty to act always out of love. Expectations of one’s place in the vastness of time help bring this growth about, for these put into perspective the pleasures and pains of the present moment.
‘Association’ is the central principle unifying Hartley’s Observations on Man At the end of the first volume, Hartley makes a bold statement: if an organism ‘could be endued with the most simple kinds of sensation, [it] might also arrive at all that intelligence of which the human mind is possessed’ (17949, vol. 1: Conclusion). Just as association can account for the ‘mind’ of a jellyfish, so also can the theory account for the forms of intelligence that go into living complete human lives. Association first names the physiological processes that generate ideas, and then the psychological processes by which perceptions, emotions, and thoughts fuse or break apart. These processes involve mastering the skilled (‘decomplex’) actions that fill our daily lives, as well as the acts by which the self forms and transforms, as we grow in sympathy, ‘theopathy’ and the moral sense.
Helvétius, Claude-Adrien (1715–71)
Authors: Hulliung Mark 
Published: September 2018

Helvétius was one of the most noteworthy and notorious figures of the French Enlightenment. In common with his fellow philosophes, he asserted that all philosophical discussions should be based on the empiricism of Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (1689). But unlike Voltaire, d’Alembert, and the other members of ‘the party of humanity’, Helvétius took literally the notion that each person is a tabula rasa at birth – he boldly argued the case for unabashed environmental determinism. We are what our surroundings have made us, and nothing more.
Immediately after Helvétius published De l’Esprit in 1758, the Catholic authorities cited his book as definitive proof that the philosophes were out to destroy religion, throne, family, and all that is sacred. Only the struggle between court and parliament over control of censorship, along with his ties to Madame de Pompadour and the Duc de Choiseul, saved Helvétius. After suffering the indignity of three recantations, he decided upon posthumous publication of his second major work, De l’Homme (1773).
Not a single philosophe accepted Helvétius’ view that the mind is a completely passive recipient of data received through the senses; nor did any of his comrades second his constantly reiterated claim that all sensibility may be reduced to physical sensations. Some privately expressed their exasperation that Helvétius published so much that seemed to vindicate every charge the Church lodged against them: that they were materialists, advocates of free love, and champions of a scandalous hedonism. Nevertheless at least a few of the philosophes, after setting aside the philosophical suppositions of De l’Esprit, came to appreciate that the larger concern of Helvétius was with their own search for the social and political preconditions of an independent intelligentsia, the would-be agents of Enlightenment.
Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803)
Authors: Beiser Frederick 
Published: September 2018

Herder was a central figure in the German intellectual renaissance of the late eighteenth century. His achievement spanned virtually every domain of philosophy, and his influence, especially upon Romanticism and German idealism, was immense. In social and political philosophy he played a prominent role in the development of historicism and nationalism. In metaphysics he developed the doctrine of vitalist pantheism, which later became important for Goethe, Schelling and Hegel. In the philosophy of mind he formulated an organic theory of the mind-body relationship, which was crucial for Schelling and Hegel. And in aesthetics he was among the first to defend the value of ethnic poetry and the need for the internal and historical understanding of a text.
Herder’s main aim was to extend the powers of naturalistic explanation to the realm of culture, so that characteristic human activities, such as art, religion, law and language, could be included within the scientific worldview. But he also wanted to avoid reductivistic forms of explanation that viewed such activities as nothing more than matter-in-motion or stimulus-response mechanisms. He insisted that explanation in the cultural sphere had to be holistic and internal as well as mechanical and external. An action had to be understood in its historical context and according to the intention of the agent and not simply as another instance of a causal regularity between events. Herder’s programme, then, was to develop naturalistic yet non-reductivistic explanations for the realm of culture. He attempted to realize this programme in many spheres, especially language, history, religion and the mind.
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1743–1819)
Authors: di Giovanni George 
Published: September 2018

Polemicist and literary figure, Jacobi was an outspoken and effective defender of individualism. He accused philosophers of conceptualizing existence according to the requirements of explanation, thus allowing no room for individual freedom or for a personal God. In a series of polemics that influenced the reception of Kant, Jacobi applied his formula, ‘Consistent philosophy is Spinozist, hence pantheist, fatalist and atheist’, first to Enlightenment philosophy and then to idealism. Jacobi was not however opposed to reason; in ‘faith’ and ‘feeling’ he sought to recover the intuitive power of reason philosophers ignored.
Jacobi also criticized the literary movement spearheaded by the young Goethe, because of its latent fatalism. He dramatized in two novels the problem of reconciling individualism with social obligations. An exponent of British economic and political liberalism, Jacobi was an early critic of the French revolution which he considered the product of rationalism.
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) (1694–1778)
Authors: Williams David 
Published: September 2018

Voltaire remains the most celebrated representative of the reformers and free-thinkers whose writings define the movement of ideas in eighteenth-century France known as the Enlightenment. He was not, however, a systematic philosopher with an original, coherently argued world-view, but a philosophe who translated, interpreted and vulgarized the work of other philosophers. His own writings on philosophical matters were deeply influenced by English empiricism and deism. His thought is marked by a pragmatic rationalism that led him, even in his early years, to view the world of speculative theorizing with a scepticism that was often expressed most effectively in his short stories. As a young man, Voltaire was particularly interested in Locke and Newton, and it was largely through his publications in the 1730s and 1740s that knowledge of Lockean epistemology and Newtonian cosmology entered France and eventually ensured the eclipse of Cartesianism.
After his stay in England Voltaire became interested in philosophical optimism, and his thinking reflected closely Newton’s view of a divinely ordered human condition, to which Alexander Pope gave powerful poetic expression in the Essay on Man (1733–4). This was reinforced for the young Voltaire by Leibnizian optimism, which offered the view that the material world, being necessarily the perfect creation of an omnipotent and beneficent God, was the ‘best of all possible worlds’, that is to say the form of creation chosen by God as being that in which the optimum amount of good could be enjoyed at the cost of the least amount of evil.
Voltaire’s later dissatisfaction with optimistic theory brought with it a similar loss of faith in the notion of a meaningful order of nature, and his earlier acceptance of the reality of human freedom of decision-taking and action was replaced after 1748 with a growing conviction that such freedom was illusory. The 1750s witness Voltaire’s final abandonment of optimism and providentialism in favour of a more deterministically orientated position in which a much bleaker view of human life and destiny predominates. Pessimistic fatalism was a temporary phase in his thinking, however, and was replaced in turn by a melioristic view in which he asserted the possibilities of limited human action in the face of a hostile and godless condition.