bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Giles of Rome (c.1243/7–1316)
Authors: Del punta Francesco , Trifogli Cecilia 
Published: September 2018

Giles of Rome was one of the most eminent theologians and commentators on the works of Aristotle at the University of Paris in the second half of the thirteenth century. He was probably a pupil of Thomas Aquinas, who exerted a deep influence on Giles’ metaphysical and theological thought. Giles’ reception of Aquinas’ positions, however, was often critical and original.
For historians of medieval philosophy, Giles’ name is mainly associated with the doctrine of ‘the real distinction’ between essence (essentia) and existence (esse). According to this doctrine, essence and existence are two completely distinct things (res) of which the ontological structure of every created being is composed. On the issue of the relationship between essence and existence Giles took a firm position against his contemporary Henry of Ghent, who maintained that existence is a mere relation of the essence of a created being to its creator. Giles was also involved in the debate over the unity of the substantial form in composite substances, another burning issue in the thirteenth century. As a commentator on Aristotle’s works, Giles made original contributions to the tradition of Aristotelian natural philosophy, especially in his treatment of extension, place, time and motion in a vacuum.
Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64)
Authors: Hopkins Jasper 
Published: September 2018

Also called Nicolaus Cusanus, this German cardinal takes his distinguishing name from the city of his birth, Kues (or Cusa, in Latin), on the Moselle river between Koblenz and Trier. Nicholas was influenced by Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Ramon Llull, Ricoldo of Montecroce, Master Eckhart, Jean Gerson and Heimericus de Campo, as well as by more distant figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Proclus, Pseudo-Dionysius and John Scottus Eriugena. His eclectic system of thought pointed in the direction of a transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In his own day as in ours, Nicholas was most widely known for his early work De docta ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance). In it, he gives expression to his view that the human mind needs to discover its necessary ignorance of what the Divine Being is like, an ignorance that results from the infinite ontological and cognitive disproportion between Infinity itself (that is, God) and the finite human or angelic knower. Correlated with the doctrine of docta ignorantia is that of coincidentia oppositorum in deo, the coincidence of opposites in God. All things coincide in God in the sense that God, as undifferentiated being, is beyond all opposition, beyond all determination as this rather than that.
Nicholas is also known for his rudimentary cosmological speculation, his prefiguring of certain metaphysical and epistemological themes found later in Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, his ecclesiological teachings regarding the controversy over papal versus conciliar authority, his advocacy of a religious ecumenism of sorts, his interest in purely mathematical topics and his influence on the theologian Paul Tillich in the twentieth century. A striking tribute to Nicholas’ memory still stands today: the hospice for elderly, indigent men that he caused to be erected at Kues between 1452 and 1458 and that he both endowed financially and invested with his personal library. This small but splendid library, unravaged by the intervening wars and consisting of some three hundred volumes, includes manuscripts written in Nicholas’ own hand.
Platonism, Renaissance
Authors: Hankins James 
Published: September 2018

Though it never successfully challenged the dominance of Aristotelian school philosophy, the revival of Plato and Platonism was an important phenomenon in the philosophical life of the Renaissance and contributed much to the new, more pluralistic philosophical climate of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Medieval philosophers had had access only to a few works by Plato himself, and, while the indirect influence of the Platonic tradition was pervasive, few if any Western medieval philosophers identified themselves as Platonists. In the Renaissance, by contrast, Western thinkers had access to the complete corpus of Plato’s works as well as to the works of Plotinus and many late ancient Platonists; there was also a small but influential group of thinkers who identified themselves as Christian Platonists. In the fifteenth century, the most important of these were to be found in the circles of Cardinal Bessarion (1403–72) in Rome and of Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) in Florence. Platonic themes were also central to the philosophies of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), the two most powerful and original thinkers of the Quattrocento. While the dominant interpretation of the Platonic dialogues throughout the Renaissance remained Neoplatonic, there was also a minority tradition that revived the sceptical interpretation of the dialogues that had been characteristic of the early Hellenistic Academy.
In the sixteenth century Platonism became a kind of ‘countercultural’ phenomenon, and Plato came to be an important authority for scientists and cosmologists who wished to challenge the Aristotelian mainstream: men like Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Francesco Patrizi and Galileo. Nevertheless, the Platonic dialogues were rarely taught in the humanistic schools of fifteenth-century Italy. Plato was first established as an important school author in the sixteenth century, first at the University of Paris and later in German universities. In Italy chairs of Platonic philosophy began to be established for the first time in the 1570s. Though the hegemony of Aristotelianism was in the end broken by the new philosophy of the seventeenth century, Plato’s authority did much to loosen the grip of Aristotle on the teaching of natural philosophy in the universities of late Renaissance Europe.
Rabelais, François (c.1483–1553)
Authors: Duval Edwin M. 
Published: September 2018

Rabelais, a French humanist and comic writer of the Renaissance, is best known for his chronicles of Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which coarse popular humour, fine Lucianic irony and staggering erudition are uniquely blended, and which claim to reveal, first appearances notwithstanding, ‘certain very high sacraments and dread mysteries, concerning not only our religion, but also our public and private life’ ([1532–52] 1955: 38).
Rabelais has been subjected to the most contradictory interpretations and judgments. Like Erasmus, whom he admired, Rabelais was attacked in his own time by schismatic Protestants (most notably Calvin) and by reactionary Catholics (most notably the faculty of theology at Paris), as an obscene Lucianic atheist and a heretic. At the same time he was admired and supported by high-minded patrons including Francis I, the king’s devout sister Marguerite de Navarre, and Cardinal Jean Du Bellay. Even today Rabelais’ religion and philosophy are the subject of debate among scholars, while his work is known to non-specialists more for the ‘Rabelaisian’ ribaldry of a few pages than for the complex irony and profoundly humanistic design that characterize his works as a whole.
Bayle, Pierre (1647–1706)
Authors: Larmore Charles 
Published: September 2018

Bayle was one of the most profound sceptical thinkers of all time. He was also a champion of religious toleration, and an important moral philosopher. The fundamental aim of his scepticism was to curb the pretensions of reason in order to make room for faith. Human reason, he believed, suffers from two fundamental weaknesses: it has a limited capacity to motivate our actions, and it is more a negative than a positive faculty, better at uncovering the defects of various philosophical positions than at justifying any one of them. This conception of reason led Bayle to see, with an uncommon clarity, that the nature of the sceptic’s arguments must be to proceed by internal demolition, showing how claims to knowledge undermine themselves in their own terms.
Bayle’s moral thought is to be found essentially in his critique of attempts (such as that of Malebranche) to show how God, all-powerful and good, could have created a world in which there is evil. Such theodicies, he argued, rely on unacceptable models of moral rationality. Bayle’s arguments reveal a view of moral reasoning that is of considerable interest in its own right. Like Malebranche (and contrary to Leibniz, who attacked Bayle’s critique of theodicy), he believed that there are duties superior to that of bringing about the most good overall. But unlike Malebranche, Bayle saw these duties as lying not in what the rational agent owes himself but in what he owes to the inviolable individuality of others. This outlook had its psychological roots, no doubt, in Bayle’s own experience as a Huguenot victim of religious persecution.
Substance, mode, and accident in modern philosophy
Authors: Silverman Alex 
Published: September 2018

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries inherited, and were witness to, the decline of the metaphysics of substance, mode, and accident of the Aristotelian tradition. The causes of this decline can be gleaned from an investigation of various puzzles which arose during the period, and of the ways in which different philosophers reacted to these puzzles.
One such puzzle concerns independence. A substance is meant to be something that exists independently – but what meets this standard, other than God? Another puzzle concerns identity. A substance is meant to be something which in some sense supports (etymologically, stands under) its modes or accidents – but how can we penetrate to the nature, or identity, of the substance itself? A third puzzle concerns unity. A substance is meant to be unified in a way that a heap of stones is not – but what qualifies as a genuine unity?
The puzzles were initially raised by those, such as Descartes and Locke, who did not intend for them to radically modify our understanding of substance, mode, and accident. But radical changes followed shortly thereafter nonetheless. Spinoza maintained that God or Nature is the only substance, all other things being mere modes of God. Conway, Leibniz, and Berkeley argued that the world is fundamentally spiritual or mind-like. And eventually, Hume and Kant questioned whether the notions of substance, mode, and accident were, in some sense, unavoidably problematic.
As an investigation of this debate reveals, theories of substance, mode, and accident were intertwined with many other enduring philosophical themes, including the nature of reality, the mind–body relation, and the limits of human knowledge.
Burke, Edmund (1729–97)
Authors: Hampsher-monk Iain 
Published: September 2018

Edmund Burke’s philosophical importance lies in two fields, aesthetics and political theory. His early work on aesthetics, the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), explored the experiential sources of these two, as he claimed, fundamental responses, relating them respectively to terror at the fear of death and to the love of society.
Active in politics from 1759, and Member of Parliament from 1765, he wrote and delivered a number of famous political pamphlets and speeches, on party in politics – Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents (1770), on the crisis with the American colonies – On Conciliation with America (1775), on financial reform and on the reform of British India – Speech on Mr Fox’s East India Bill (1783). While clearly informed by a reflective political mind, these are, however, pièces d’occasion, not political philosophy, and their party political provenance has rendered them suspect to many commentators.
His most powerful and philosophically influential works were written in opposition to the ideas of the French Revolution, in particular Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which has come to be seen as a definitive articulation of anglophone political conservatism. Here Burke considered the sources and desirability of social continuity, locating these in a suspicion of abstract reason, a disposition to follow custom, and certain institutions – hereditary monarchy, inheritance of property, and social corporations such as an established Church. His Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) insisted on the distinction between the French and Britain’s revolution of 1688; while his final works, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795), urged an uncompromising crusade on behalf of European Christian civilization against its atheist, Jacobin antithesis.
Butler, Joseph (1692–1752)
Authors: Frey R.G. 
Published: September 2018

Joseph Butler the moral philosopher is in that long line of eighteenth-century thinkers who sought to answer Thomas Hobbes on human nature and moral motivation. Following the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, he rejects any purely egoistic conception of these. Instead, he analyses human nature into parts, of which he notices in detail appetites, affections, and passions on the one hand and the principles of self-love, benevolence and conscience on the other. His ethics consists in the main in showing the relation of these parts to each other. They form a hierarchy, ordered in terms of their natural authority, and while such authority can be usurped, as when the particular passions overwhelm self-love and conscience, the system that they constitute, or human nature, is rightly proportioned when each part occupies its rightful place in the ordered hierarchy. Virtue consists in acting in accordance with that ordered, rightly proportioned nature.
As a philosopher of religion, Butler addresses himself critically to the eighteenth-century flowering of deism in Britain. On the whole, the deists allowed that God the Creator existed but rejected the doctrines of natural and, especially, revealed religion. Butler’s central tactic against them is to argue, first, that the central theses associated with natural religion, such as a future life, are probable; and second, that the central theses associated with revealed religion, such as miracles, are as probable as those of natural religion. Much turns, therefore, on the success of Butler’s case in appealing to what is present in this world as evidence for a future life.
Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de (1715–80)
Authors: Johnson Paul F. 
Published: September 2018

One of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment period, Condillac is the author of three highly influential books, published between 1746 and 1754, in which he attempted to refine and expand the empirical method of inquiry so as to make it applicable to a broader range of studies than hitherto. In the half-century following the publication of Newton’s Principia Mathematica in 1687, intellectual life in Europe had been engaged upon a fierce debate between the partisans of Cartesian physics, who accepted Descartes’ principles of metaphysical dualism and God’s veracity as the hallmark of scientific truth, and those who accepted Newton’s demonstration that the natural order constituted a single system under laws which could be known through painstaking observation and experiment. By the mid-eighteenth century Newton had gained the ascendancy, and it was the guiding inspiration of the French thinkers, known collectively as the philosophes, to appropriate the methods by which Newton had achieved his awesome results and apply them across a broader range of inquiries in the hope of attaining a similar expansion of human knowledge. Condillac was at the centre of this campaign.
Condillac’s first book, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), bears the subtitle A Supplement to Mr. Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding. While Condillac is usually seen as merely a disciple and popularizer of Locke offering little of any genuine originality, and while he did indeed agree with Locke that experience is the sole source of human knowledge, he attempted to improve on Locke by arguing that sensation alone – and not sensation together with reflection – provided the foundation for knowledge. His most famous book, the Treatise on the Sensations (1754) is based upon the thought-experiment of a statue whose senses are activated one by one, beginning with the sense of smell, with the intention of showing how all the higher cognitive faculties of the mind can be shown to derive from the notice the mind takes of the primitive inputs of the sense organs. Condillac also went beyond Locke in his carefully argued claims regarding the extent to which language affects the growth and reliability of knowledge. His Treatise on Systems (1749) offers a detailed critique of how language had beguiled the great seventeenth-century systems-builders like Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza and led them into erroneous conceptions of the mind and human knowledge, the influence of which conceptions was as insidious as it was difficult to eradicate.
Diderot, Denis (1713–84)
Authors: Wokler Robert 
Published: September 2018

Chief editor of the great eighteenth-century Encyclopédie (1751–72), Diderot set out a philosophy of the arts and sciences which took the progress of civilization to be a measure of mankind’s moral improvement. He did not regard that progress as having produced universal benefits, however, and perceived the Christian religion which had accompanied it as morally harmful to those who subscribed to it and even more dangerous to societies thus far untouched by it. Religious dogmas tended to pervert the organic development of human passions, and secular education which presumed that all minds were equally receptive to instruction threatened to thwart the natural evolution of human faculties in other ways.
Like Rousseau, Diderot subscribed to a philosophy of education which encouraged curiosity rather than promoted truth. He stressed the need for the adaptability of moral rules to the physiological characteristics of the individuals to whom they applied, pointing to a connection between human cultures and biology in a manner that would influence fresh outlooks upon the sciences of man at the end of the Age of Enlightenment.
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat (1689–1755)
Authors: Hulliung Mark 
Published: September 2018

Montesquieu, one of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment, was famous in his own century both in France and in foreign lands, from Russia to the American colonies. Later generations of French philosophes took for granted his concern to reform the criminal laws, to replace the Inquisition with a reign of tolerance, and to repudiate the vicious conquests of the Spaniards in the Americas. They also accepted his finding that Protestant, commercial, and constitutionalist England and Holland represented all the best possibilities of Europe; whereas Catholic, economically backward, and politically absolutist Portugal and Spain represented the worst of the Western world and constituted a warning to the French.
Although the findings and specific reforms proposed by Montesquieu were repeated by many another figure of the French Enlightenment, his work in certain respects remained unique in the circles of the most advanced thinkers. In his efforts to think systematically about politics and to do so by employing the comparative method, he stands virtually alone in his age. Other thinkers sharing his commitments resorted to the universalizing language of natural rights when they ventured into the realm of political philosophy. Or, like Voltaire, they tied their thoughts about politics to a succession of specific issues, each essay bearing so indelibly the imprint of specific time and place that there was no room for theory in their writings. Finally, as is true of Diderot or D’Alembert, many of the philosophes were slow to recognize what Montesquieu knew from the outset, that if Enlightenment does not extend to politics it is futile.
Steeped in Montaigne’s scepticism, Montesquieu found that in the absence of absolutes there were good reasons to appreciate the ‘more than/less than’ and ‘better than/worse than’ judgments of comparative analysis. In his notebooks he commented that the flaw of most philosophers had been to ignore that the terms beautiful, good, noble, grand, and perfect are ‘relative to the beings who use them’. Only one absolute existed for Montesquieu and that was the evil of despotism, which must be avoided at all costs.
Montesquieu wrote three great works, each teaching lessons about despotism and freedom,The Persian Letters (1721), the Considerations of the Grandeur of the Romans and the Cause of Their Decline (1734), and The Spirit of the Laws (1748).
Price, Richard (1723–91)
Authors: Darwall Stephen 
Published: September 2018

Richard Price was a Welsh dissenting minister who contributed widely to philosophy and public life in latter-eighteenth-century Britain. The leading British ethical rationalist of the period, Price did much to establish intuitionistic and deontological traditions in ethics. He put forward searching criticisms of alternative empiricist conceptions, arguing that they could not account for morality’s necessity and that they lacked an adequate theory of moral agency. More constructively, he argued that, contrary to the empiricists, all knowledge depends on the contribution of reason, and that rationalistic moral knowledge is no more problematic in principle than ordinary empirical knowledge. He also articulated a normative ethics of integrity that stressed the duty diligently to search out moral truth and then to act on the truth as one sees it.
As a political philosopher, Price made fundamental contributions through his doctrine of liberty as self-determination. The moral duty individuals have to determine themselves by their best moral judgment, Price believed, ultimately grounds the values of political liberty, independence, and democracy as well. Price’s radicalism on these scores earned him the famous opposition of Edmund Burke. Nor was Price’s sponsorship of these ideas simply theoretical. He was an important friend of the American Revolution, and his pamphlets analysing and defending it were taken seriously by proponents and opponents alike.
Price also did important work on the mathematical theory of probability and in proposing and instituting various social and economic reforms and practices upon its basis. He was instrumental in making Thomas Bayes’ ideas about probability accessible to the learned world, and in making use of these and other probabilistic theories in developing insurance, self-help, and other financial schemes.
Engels, Friedrich (1820–95)
Authors: Carver Terrell 
Published: September 2018

Until the 1970s the most influential framework for understanding Marx’s career and ideas was the one established by Engels. This framework was crucially related to his understanding of philosophy and its supposed culmination in Hegel’s systematic and all-encompassing idealism.
Engels claimed that Marx had grounded Hegel’s insights in a materialism that was coincident with the physical and natural sciences of his day, and that Marx had identified a dialectical method applicable to nature, history and thought. With respect to history, Marx was said to have formed a ‘materialist conception’, from which his analysis of capitalist society and its ‘secret’ of surplus value were derived. Together these intellectual features were the core of the ‘scientific socialism’ which, Engels argued, should form the theory, and inform the practice, of the worldwide socialist or communist movement. This was to abolish the poverty and exploitation necessarily engendered, he claimed, by modern industrial production.
Philosophically the tenets of dialectical and historical materialism have been defended and modified by orthodox communists and non-party Marxists, and expounded and criticized by political and intellectual opponents. The three laws of dialectics, and the doctrine that history is determined by material factors in the last instance, have been attacked as tautologous and indeterminate. Engels’s view that scientific socialism is a defensible representation of Marx’s project has also been challenged by textual scholars and historians.