bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Logic, Renaissance
Authors: Ashworth E.J. 
Published: September 2018

Renaissance logic is often identified with humanist logic, which is in some ways closer to rhetoric than to the study of formal argumentation. This is a mistake, for although changes did take place, a hard core of logical teaching remained the same throughout the medieval and Renaissance periods and into the eighteenth century. Logic was embedded in the educational system as the main study of beginning undergraduates, and although institutional changes had an effect on the presentation and use of logic texts, the study of valid arguments was always central.
There are two obvious differences between medieval texts and their sixteenth-century successors. The first is a new emphasis on following the order and material of Aristotle’s Organon, with the consequent emphasis on the categorical syllogism as the central type of argument. Such medieval material as survived was strictly subordinated to this end; and even though the humanist logicians Agricola and Ramus had tried to ignore Aristotelian syllogistic and the doctrines propaedeutic to it (such as conversion and opposition), their omissions were rapidly remedied by subsequent textbook writers.
The second difference has to do with language and style. Medieval writers treated Latin as a technical, almost artificial language. They were deeply concerned with the effects that different word-orders and the addition of extra logical particles had on both meaning and reference, and they made heavy use of sophismata, deliberately constructed problematic or puzzling sentences. Although Latin remained the language of instruction, the approach of a Renaissance logician, whether humanist or Aristotelian, commentator or textbook writer, is totally different. Sophismata have completely disappeared, and so too has any attempt to treat Latin as a technical language in which different word-orders represent different logical structures. The propositions used for such operations as syllogistic conversion are presented in an already fully standardized form, and they are always relatively simple.
Why these changes came about is a difficult question. Humanism coexisted too long with medieval logic for humanism to be the sole explanation, and the fact that Renaissance logicians returned to the commentaries of Averroes and Aquinas on the Organon shows that mere revolt against anything medieval is not a sufficient explanation either. Changes in grammar teaching, changes in the relation of logic to the study of natural science, and changes in other parts of the university curriculum presumably have a good deal to do with the appearance of a new style of logic. In particular, the humanist emphasis on logic as a tool for analysing discourse focused attention on the use of logic in literature, history and biblical studies, and demanded a combination of simplicity and literary elegance, rather than any genuine formal innovation. There was no concurrent move to relate logic to the new developments in mathematics, and logic was not to be seen as a formal system linked with other formal systems until the nineteenth century.
Molina, Luis de (1535–1600)
Authors: Freddoso Alfred J. 
Published: September 2018

A leading figure in sixteenth-century Iberian scholasticism, Molina was one of the most controversial thinkers in the history of Catholic thought. In keeping with the strongly libertarian account of human free choice that marked the early Jesuit theologians, Molina held that God’s causal influence on free human acts does not by its intrinsic nature uniquely determine what those acts will be or whether they will be good or evil. Because of this, Molina asserted against his Dominican rivals that God’s comprehensive providential plan for the created world and infallible foreknowledge of future contingents do not derive just from the combination of his antecedent ‘natural’ knowledge of metaphysically necessary truths and his ‘free’ knowledge of the causal influence – both natural (general concurrence) and supernatural (grace) – by which he wills to cooperate with free human acts. Rather, in addition to God’s natural knowledge, Molina posited a distinct kind of antecedent divine knowledge, dubbed ‘middle knowledge’, by which God knows pre-volitionally, that is, prior to any free decree of his own will regarding contingent beings, how any possible rational creature would in fact freely choose to act in any possible circumstances in which it had the power to act freely. And on this basis Molina proceeded to forge his controversial reconciliation of free choice with the Catholic doctrines of grace, divine foreknowledge, providence and predestination.
In addition to his work in dogmatic theology, Molina was also an accomplished moral and political philosopher who wrote extensive and empirically well-informed tracts on political authority, slavery, war and economics.
Vives, Juan Luis (1493–1540)
Authors: Guerlac Rita 
Published: September 2018

Vives, Spanish humanist and educational reformer, was an eclectic but independent thinker, blending Aristotelianism and Stoicism with Christianity. He wrote on philosophy and psychology, religion and social concerns, and a wide range of subjects related to education. He was known by his contemporaries both for his lively attack on scholastic logic and for his practical judgment, or common sense. Familiar with classical, Christian and contemporary literature, he believed, with the Stoics, that learning should be applied for the common good. His original contributions are associated with an empirical approach to the sciences and the observation of nature, and his interest in the practical arts and inventions.
His social concerns included international politics (in which he is always a pacifist), and the relief of the poor in cities. His most scholarly work was an edition, with commentaries, of Augustine’s De civitate Dei (The City of God) (1522), but he is best known for his pioneer work on psychology and educational reform. De anima et vita (On the Soul and Life) (1538) offers the first empirical study of the emotions and their relations with the body, based on Galen’s theory of humours, and enriched with insights from Vives’ lifelong observation of human nature and conduct. De disciplinis (On Instruction) (1531), the outstanding work on education in the sixteenth century, is nothing less than a programme for education from infancy to old age, with due emphasis on moral training and, in the case of the study of nature, reverence for its creator.
Cambridge Platonism
Authors: Beiser Frederick 
Published: September 2018

Cambridge Platonism was an intellectual movement broadly inspired by the Platonic tradition, centred in Cambridge from the 1630s to the 1680s. Its hallmark was a devotion to reason in metaphysics, religion and ethics. The Cambridge Platonists made reason rather than tradition and inspiration their ultimate criterion of knowledge. Their central aim was to reconcile the realms of reason and faith, the new natural philosophy and Christian revelation. Although loyal to the methods and naturalism of the new sciences, they opposed its mechanical model of explanation because it seemed to leave no room for spirit, God and life.
In epistemology the Cambridge Platonists were critics of empiricism and stressed the role of reason in knowledge; they also criticized conventionalism and held that there are essential or natural distinctions between things. In metaphysics they attempted to establish the existence of spirit, God and life in a manner consistent with the naturalism and method of the new sciences. And in ethics the Cambridge Platonists defended moral realism and freedom of the will against the voluntarism and determinism of Hobbes and Calvin. Cambridge Platonism was profoundly influential in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was the inspiration behind latitudinarianism and ethical rationalism, and many of its ideas were developed by Samuel Clarke, Isaac Newton and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury.
Imagination, in modern philosophy
Authors: Cottrell Jonathan 
Published: September 2018

In the modern philosophical period, the imagination (sometimes called the ‘fancy’) is standardly seen as a faculty for having mental images, and for making non-rational, associative transitions among such images. This standard view forms a common core of many modern philosophers’ theories of the imagination. Different philosophers elaborate upon it in different ways: for example, some add that there is a close connection between the imagination and the brain; some, that the imagination interacts with the passions in important ways; and some, that the imagination plays a crucial role in explaining how we create artworks and how we appreciate the aesthetic properties of things.
The modern period saw several important controversies among philosophers who share the standard view of the imagination. Perhaps most importantly, Descartes, Arnauld and Nicole, Spinoza, and Leibniz argue that in addition to the faculty of the imagination, we have a faculty of pure intellect or pure understanding, while Hobbes, Gassendi, and Hume deny this. Other important controversies concern the relationship between imagination and reasoning, and the role of the imagination – if any – as a source of modal knowledge, that is, knowledge of what is possible rather than merely actual.
Late in the eighteenth century, Reid and Kant criticized the standard view. Reid claims to disagree with his predecessors about the association of ideas and about the nature of mental images. (However, it is unclear whether he interprets his predecessors correctly; some of his objections may miss their mark.) For his part, Kant agrees with the standard view that the imagination is a faculty for having and associating mental images. But he argues that these reproductive functions of the imagination take place in the human mind thanks to different, productive functions of the imagination that earlier philosophers did not recognize. His account of these productive functions of the imagination plays a central role in his epistemology and aesthetics.
Cabanis, Pierre-Jean (1757–1808)
Authors: Moore F.C.T. 
Published: September 2018

Cabanis believed in the possibility of a ‘science of man’, having its basis in medicine. He tried to show how a materialist conception of the human organism can throw light on our mental and moral life. The properties of living matter were derived from physical laws, but had their own peculiarities. In particular, the property of sensibility (being able to have sensations) and the property of motility (involving the experience of effort and of resistance to it) were the keys to understanding human nature.
Though the thrust of Cabanis’ thought is materialistic, his emphasis on medical science distinguishes him both from the mechanistic tradition as represented by La Mettrie, and from the intellectualist tradition represented by Condillac, in which sensations are taken as given mental items, from which the rest of our mental life is constructed by operations of reasoning or association.
Crusius, Christian August (1715–75)
Authors: Seidler Michael J. 
Published: September 2018

Crusius was a pivotal figure in the middle period of the German Enlightenment, linking Pufendorf and Thomasius with Kant. Though sometimes wrongly characterized (for example, by Hegel) as a Wolffian, he was instead an important critic of that position. His system reflected a new alliance between Pietism and Lutheran orthodoxy, offering a comprehensive antirationalist, realist, and voluntarist alternative to the neoscholastic tradition as renovated by Leibniz. Crusius was important in Kant’s development and helps us understand the latter’s philosophical Protestantism.
Born a pastor’s son in Leuna bei Merseburg, in Saxony, Crusius was educated at Leipzig and much influenced there by the Thomasian professor A.F. Hoffmann (1703–41). Interested in both philosophy and theology throughout his career, he accepted a chair as extraordinary professor of philosophy at Leipzig in 1744. In 1750, however, he became ordinary professor of theology, also retaining his teaching post in philosophy until his death. His reputation as a philosopher peaked in Germany during the 1750s and 1760s, mainly on the basis of four scholastic manuals published in German during 1744–9. His greater theological reputation as founder of a ‘biblico-prophetic’ school emphasizing the inspirational unity of Scripture lasted well into the mid-nineteenth century.
Lange, Friedrich Albert (1828–75)
Authors: Stack George J. 
Published: September 2018

A German philosopher, social scientist and political activist, Lange was best known for his study of the history of materialism. He was a leading proponent of Neo-Kantianism, a critic of speculative metaphysics, and a defender of the view that philosophy should incorporate the findings of the exact sciences. As a social scientist, Lange described the emergence of a social Darwinian ‘struggle for existence’ in modern times due to the rapid advancement of industrialization and a growing conflict of interest among social classes.
Cognizant of the scientific trends of his time, Lange anticipated some of the central ideas of pragmatism and adopted a form of conventionalism in regard to scientific principles and concepts. Although sympathetic to materialism, Lange also saw the inevitability of an idealist element in interpretations of natural phenomena and insisted on the importance of projecting ethical, social and aesthetic ideals.
Mach, Ernst (1838–1916)
Authors: Hamilton Andy 
Published: September 2018

Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher. Though not one of the great philosophers, he was tremendously influential in the development of ‘scientific philosophy’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A vigorous opponent of ‘metaphysics’, he was celebrated as a progenitor of logical positivism. His work is regarded as a limiting case of pure empiricism; he stands between the empiricism of Hume and J.S. Mill, and that of the Vienna Circle.
Mach’s positivist conception of science saw its aims as descriptive and predictive; explanation is downgraded. Scientific laws and theories are economical means of describing phenomena. Theories that refer to unobservable entities – including atomic theory – may impede inquiry. They should be eliminated where possible in favour of theories involving ‘direct descriptions’ of phenomena. Mach claimed to be a scientist, not a philosopher, but the ‘Machian philosophy’ was ‘neutral monism’. Close to phenomenalism, it saw the world as functionally related complexes of sensations, and aspired to anti-metaphysical neutrality.
Naturphilosophie
Authors: Heidelberger Michael 
Published: September 2018

Naturphilosophie refers to the philosophy of nature prevalent especially in German philosophy, science and literary movements from around 1790 to about 1830. It pleaded for an organic and dynamic worldview as an alternative to the atomist and mechanist outlook of modern science. Against the Cartesian dualism of matter and mind which had given way to the mechanist materialism of the French Encyclopedists, Spinoza’s dual aspect theory of mind and matter as two modes of a single substance was favoured. The sources of this heterogeneous movement lie in the philosophy of German idealism as well as in late classicism and Romanticism. The leading figure, Schelling, assimilated and stimulated the major trends and ideas through his work.
After the death of Hegel (1831) and of Goethe (1832), Naturphilosophie quickly disappeared from the mainstream. Yet it survived in various different forms, especially as an undercurrent of German culture and science, until the twentieth century.
Bachelard, Gaston (1884–1962)
Authors: Tiles Mary 
Published: September 2018

One indication of the originality of Bachelard’s work is that he was famous for his writings both in the philosophy of science and on the poetic imagination. His work demonstrates his belief that the life of the masculine, work-day consciousness (animus), striving towards scientific objectivity through reasoning and the rectification of concepts, must be complemented by the life of a nocturnal, feminine consciousness (anima), seeking an expanded poetic subjectivity, as, in reverie, it creates the imaginary.
In common with other scientist-philosophers writing in the first half of the twentieth century, Bachelard reflected on the upheavals wrought by the introduction of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The views at which he arrived were, however, unlike those of his contemporaries; he argued that the new science required a new, non-Cartesian epistemology, one which accommodated discontinuities (epistemological breaks) in the development of science. It was only after he had established himself as one of France’s leading philosophers of science, by succeeding Abel Rey in the chair of history and philosophy of science at the Sorbonne, that Bachelard began to publish works on the poetic imagination. Here his trenchantly anti-theoretical stance was provocative. He rejected the role of literary critic and criticized literary criticism, focusing instead on reading images and on the creative imagination.
Croce, Benedetto (1866–1952)
Authors: Bellamy Richard 
Published: September 2018

The leading Italian philosopher of his day, Croce presented his philosophy as a humanist alternative to the consolations of religion. A Hegelian idealist, he argued that all human activity was orientated towards either the Beautiful, the True, the Useful or the Good. These ideals were the four aspects of what, following Hegel, he termed spirit or human consciousness. The first two corresponded to the theoretical dimensions of spirit, namely intuition and logic respectively, the last two to spirit’s practical aspects of economic and ethical willing. He contended that the four eternal ideals were ‘pure concepts’ whose content derived from human thought and action. Spirit or consciousness progressively unfolded through human history as our ideas of beauty, truth, usefulness and morality were steadily reworked and developed.
Croce insisted that his idealism was a form of ‘absolute historicism’, since it involved the claim that all meaning and value evolved immanently through the historical process. He strenuously denied that spirit could be regarded as some form of transcendent puppet-master that existed apart from the human beings through which it expressed itself. He accused Hegel of making this mistake. He also maintained that Hegel’s conception of the dialectic as a synthesis of opposites had paid insufficient attention to the need to retain the distinct moments of spirit. He argued that the Beautiful, the True, the Useful and the Good, though linked, ought never to be confused, and he criticized aestheticism and utilitarianism accordingly.
Croce developed his thesis both in philosophical works devoted to aesthetics, ethics, politics and the philosophy of history, and in detailed historical studies of Italian and European literature, culture, politics and society. Opposition to the Fascist regime led him to identify his philosophy with liberalism on the grounds that it emphasized the creativity and autonomy of the individual. In practical politics, however, he was a conservative.
Nagel, Ernest (1901–85)
Authors: Levi Isaac 
Published: September 2018

Ernest Nagel was arguably the pre-eminent American philosopher of science from the mid 1930s to the 1960s. He taught at Columbia University for virtually his entire career. Although he shared with Bertrand Russell and with members of the Vienna Circle a respect for and sensitivity to developments in mathematics and the natural sciences, he endorsed a strand in the thought of Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey that Nagel himself called ‘contextual naturalism’. Among the main features of contextual naturalism is its distrust of reductionist claims that are not the outcomes of scientific inquiries.
Nagel’s contextual naturalism infused his influential, detailed and informed essays on probability, explanation in the natural and social sciences, measurement, history of mathematics, and the philosophy of law. It is reflected, for example, in his trenchant critiques of Russell’s reconstruction of the external world and Russell’s epistemology as well as cognate views endorsed at one time or another by members of the Vienna Circle.
Ryle, Gilbert (1900–76)
Authors: Lyons William 
Published: September 2018

Alongside Wittgenstein and Austin, Ryle was one of the dominant figures in the movement 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 questions formulated as problems about 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 arises through the assimilation or misapplication of categorically different terms, and can 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.
Dennett, Daniel Clement (1942–)
Authors: Lycan William G. 
Published: September 2018

A student of Gilbert Ryle and a connoisseur of cognitive psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, American philosopher Daniel Dennett has urged Rylean views in the philosophy of mind, especially on each title topic of his first book,Content and Consciousness (1969). He defends a broadly instrumentalist view of propositional attitudes (such as belief and desire) and their intentional contents; like Ryle and the behaviourists, Dennett rejects the idea of beliefs and desires as causally active inner states of people. Construing them in a more purely operational or instrumental fashion, he maintains instead that belief- and desire-ascriptions are merely calculational devices.
Dennett offers a severely deflationary account of consciousness, subjectivity and the phenomenal or qualitative character of sensory states. He maintains that those topics are conceptually posterior to that of propositional-attitude content: the qualitative features of which we are directly conscious in experience are merely the intentional contents of judgments.