bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Stein, Edith (1891–1942)
Authors: Borden Sharkey Sarah 
Published: September 2018

Edith Stein was among the first women to earn a doctorate in philosophy in Germany, defending her dissertation in 1916. She worked as Edmund Husserl’s assistant and was deeply involved in the early phenomenological movement. Her later writings are marked by an interest in bringing phenomenology into conversation with contemporary science, classic medieval metaphysics and Carmelite spirituality. In her most mature philosophic works, Stein embraces the modern turn to the self, but argues that that turn, carried out fully, leads to classic metaphysical questions and classic categories, such as form, matter and transcendentals. These categories, for Stein, must nonetheless be reinterpreted in light of contemporary science and recent concerns for history and individuality.
Stein’s academic writings cover a large number of issues, including the nature of intersubjectivity, individuality and the state, women, educational theory, medieval metaphysics and figures such as Heidegger, Teresa of Avila and Pseudo-Dionysius. In addition to philosophic works, Stein also translated texts by Newman and Aquinas and wrote theological studies, short plays and an autobiography.
McDowell, John Henry (1942–)
Authors: Smith Nicholas H. 
Published: September 2018

McDowell taught philosophy at Oxford from 1967 to 1986, where he established himself as a key figure in analytic philosophy, mounting forceful arguments in favour of a realist stance in the theory of meaning, philosophy of mind and metaethics, and challenging a variety of noncognitivist and antirealist positions that had become orthodox in those fields. In 1986 he took up a position at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has worked since.
In his most highly acclaimed work, Mind and World (1994), McDowell sought to diagnose a transcendental anxiety, characteristic of modern philosophy, in which it seems mysterious that thought is answerable to reality at all. McDowell’s proposed cure for the anxiety turned on embracing the idea that there is no gap between reality and the reach of thought, no contact with reality that does not bring conceptual capacities into play, capacities that are acquired not by magic but naturally through education into a form of life. Much of McDowell’s work since Mind and World has been aimed at clarifying and refining the idea that conceptual capacities permeate the human life form. Increasingly, he has turned to Sellars, Kant and Hegel for guidance in pursuing that task.
Imagination – phenomenological approaches
Authors: Jansen Julia 
Published: September 2018

When phenomenologists investigate the imagination, they approach it by examining how objects are experienced when they are imagined (rather than, for example, perceived) and what the experience of imagining is like (as opposed to, for example, the experience of perceiving). Their inquiries into the imagination are thus part of the greater phenomenological project of clarifying the different modes in which we can experience, or be conscious of, the world (or some objects in the world) and the correlating modes in which the world (or some objects in it) can appear to us. Mostly, phenomenologists consider what is often called ‘sensory’ imagination, that is, the experience in some sensory mode (such as the visual or the aural) of something not actually present. In order to emphasize its sensory and embodied dimension, they typically distinguish imagining something from entertaining its possibility merely in thought, which in other discourses is often referred to as ‘propositional imagination’, or ‘imagining that’.
Of central importance, especially in post-Husserlian phenomenology, is the creativity of imagination. Moreover, the imagination is also seen to have an important cognitive and justificatory role insofar as it enables us to generate and consider hypothetical and alternative situations to those that we actually find ourselves in. Imagining is understood as an act (though not always voluntary or self-aware) of experiencing something as possible (rather than actual or necessary), which makes it central to questions of human freedom and to the phenomenological method itself.
Although we often imagine things that are absent or nonexistent, most phenomenologists still consider imagining intentional. They call our attention to the many different ways in which we commonly relate imaginatively to absent, nonexisting or merely possible objects, events, situations or states of affairs. It might seem that phenomenological approaches, since they allegedly consider (only) how things appear, cannot distinguish between what is real and what is (merely) imagined. However, this is not the case. Phenomenologists may, for example, investigate how our beliefs in the reality or unreality, or in the presence or absence, of things are themselves founded in different modes of experience (such as perception or imagination) and motivated by different ways in which things appear to us (that is, as perceived, as imagined, and so on).
Agamben, Giorgio (1942–)
Authors: Abbott Mathew 
Published: September 2018

Born in Rome in 1942, Giorgio Agamben is one of the most important and influential figures in contemporary continental philosophy. Profoundly influenced by both Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, he has been publishing books since L’uomo senza contenuto (The Man Without Content) was released in 1970. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.
He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.
Consisting of nine books, the Homo Sacer series begins by highlighting an aspect of Ancient Greek Agamben claims is crucial for understanding the trajectory of Western politics: the difference between zoē and bios, or natural and political life. Agamben argues this distinction was crucial for setting up the polis as a properly political space, because it excluded natural life from its sphere of concerns, confining it to the sphere of the oikos, or home. In a characteristic move, however, he claims that this act of exclusion, because it founds the polis, also implicates natural life in it.
Employing an original philosophical method drawn out of the work of Heidegger, Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, the series tracks the historical genesis and contemporary consequences of this failed attempt at exclusion, developing provocative accounts of politics and privacy, civil war and terrorism, the state of exception, economy, sovereignty, and work. Though he draws a grim picture of the violent and dominating tendencies inherent in the Western tradition, Agamben also works to find within its tensions and paradoxes the resources for living and thinking differently.
Deleuze, Gilles (1925–95)
Authors: Olkowski Dorothea E. 
Published: September 2018

Although grounded in the history of philosophy, Gilles Deleuze’s work does not begin with first principles but grasps the philosophical terrain ‘in the middle’. This method overthrows subject–object relations in order to initiate a philosophy of difference and chance that is not derived from static being; a philosophy of the event, not of the signifier-signified; a form of content that consists of a complex of forces that are not separable from their form of expression; the assemblage or body without organs, not the organized ego; time, intensity and duration instead of space; in short, a world in constant motion consisting of becomings and encounters with the ‘outside’ that such concepts do not grasp.
This radical philosophical project is rendered most clearly in Deleuze (and his collaborator Guattari’s concept of the ‘rhizome’). The rhizome is a multiplicity without any unity that could fix a subject or object. Any point of the rhizome can and must be connected to any other, though in no fixed order and with no homogeneity. It can break or rupture at any point, yet old connections will start up again or new connections will be made; the rhizome’s connections thus have the character of a map, not a structural or generative formation. The rhizome, then, is no model, but a ‘line of flight’ that opens up the route for encounters and makes philosophy into cartography.
Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004)
Authors: Cutrofello Andrew 
Published: September 2018

Jacques Derrida is a prolific French philosopher born in Algeria. His work can be understood in terms of his argument that it is necessary to interrogate the Western philosophical tradition from the standpoint of ‘deconstruction’. As an attempt to approach that which remains unthought in this tradition, deconstruction is concerned with the category of the ‘wholly other’.
Derrida has called into question the ‘metaphysics of presence’, a valuing of truth as self-identical immediacy which has been sustained by traditional attempts to demonstrate the ontological priority and superiority of speech over writing. Arguing that the distinction between speech and writing can be sustained only by way of a violent exclusion of otherness, Derrida has attempted to develop a radically different conception of language, one that would begin from the irreducibility of difference to identity and that would issue in a correspondingly different conception of ethical and political responsibility.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1924–1998)
Authors: Carroll David 
Published: September 2018

Jean-François Lyotard was a prominent French philosopher who is generally considered the leading theorist of postmodernism. His work constitutes an insistent critique of philosophical closure, historical totalization and political dogmatism and a re-evaluation of the nature of ethics, aesthetics and politics after the demise of totalizing metatheories.
In his early works, Lyotard confronts the limitations of dialectical philosophy and structuralist linguistics and analyses the disruptive, extradiscursive force of desire and the nonrepresentational or figurative dimensions of art and literature. In La Condition postmoderne (1979a) (The Postmodern Condition, 1984), he treats narrative pragmatics and language games as the bases for a critical approach to postmodern art and politics, as well as to the problem of justice. Recent texts insist on the obligation of philosophy, politics and writing to bear witness to heterogeneity and to what is repressed or forgotten in all representations of the past. His work questions the limits of philosophy, aesthetics and political theory in terms of problems linked to the irreducible complexities of art and literature and the nonrepresentational affects of historical-political events.
Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Gavrilovich (1828–89)
Authors: Walicki Andrzej 
Published: September 2018

Nikolai Chernyshevskii was the main theorist of the Russian democratic radicalism of ‘the 1860s’ or, more precisely, of the period of political ‘thaw’ and liberal reforms which followed Russian defeat in the Crimean War and the enthronement (in 1855) of Alexander II. He was also the best representative of the non-conformist elements among the raznochintsy, that is, the educated commoners, who at that time began to figure prominently in Russian intellectual and social life. As such, he exerted a powerful formative influence on the Russian intelligentsia.
In 1862 Chernyshevskii was arrested, brought to trial and, despite insufficient evidence, condemned to lifetime banishment in Siberia. In exile, preserving his integrity to the end, he stoutly refused to ask for clemency (as a result, he remained in a remote Siberian village until 1883). In prison, waiting for trial, he wrote the novel Chto Delat’ (What Is To Be Done?) in which he showed the ‘new men’ of Russia – ‘rational egoists’, devoted to the cause of progress, and even a type of ascetic, self-sacrificing revolutionist. Thanks to a strange oversight of the censor the novel was serialized in the journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary) and, despite lack of literary distinction, became a powerful source of inspiration for several generations of Russian progressive youth.
Chernyshevskii’s philosophical reputation was created by the Russian Marxists. The ‘father of Russian Marxism’, G.V. Plekhanov, greatly impressed by Chernyshevskii’s combination of Feuerbachian materialism and respect for Hegelian dialectics, described him as an important precursor of dialectical materialism. This view was taken up by Lenin who in Materialism and Empiriocriticism called Chernyshevskii ‘the great Russian Hegelian and materialist’, the only Russian philosopher before Marxism who was able to defend ‘integral materialism’ against the agnosticism and subjectivism of Neo-Kantians, positivists, Machists and ‘other muddleheads’. Soviet philosophers went even further: Chernyshevskii was treated by them not only as the greatest Russian philosopher before Marxism, but also as the greatest pre-Marxian philosopher of the world, founder of the highest form of pre-Marxian materialism. For several decades this was the obligatory dogma of the Soviet official ideology.
After the breakdown of the Soviet Union, interest in Chernyshevskii’s philosophy almost completely disappeared in Russia. It is impossible, however, to deny Chernyshevskii’s importance in Russian intellectual history. Hence the need of rethinking his philosophical legacy.
Frank, Semën Liudvigovich (1877–1950)
Authors: Swoboda Philip J. 
Published: September 2018

The philosophy of S.L. Frank was one product of the renewed interest in epistemology, speculative metaphysics and religion among educated Russians in the quarter-century preceding the Revolution of 1917. Frank published the first volume of his philosophical system in 1915, but most of his major works were written after the Revolution, in European exile.
Influenced by tendencies in turn-of-the-century European thought that criticized the exaggerated pretensions of scientific reason, Frank formed the conviction that abstract, conceptual thought was inherently incapable of mastering ultimate reality. A valid metaphysics was nevertheless possible, founded on our capacity for direct, intuitive apprehension of reality in its living concreteness.
In intuitive knowledge, reality discloses itself as a ‘total-unity’ – an all-embracing unity in which the dualities with which conceptual thought wrestles are overcome without being dissolved. Ultimate reality is itself grounded in, and embraced by, a principle Frank termed ‘Divinity’, one that manifests itself in religious experience as the personal God of Christian faith. The rootedness of the human person in this divine principle is the condition of possibility of all spiritual creativity – of art, science, morality and law, and religion.
Hessen, Sergei Iosifovich (1887–1950)
Authors: Walicki Andrzej 
Published: September 2018

Sergei Hessen, a disciple of Rickert, has been described as ’the most brilliant and philosophically gifted’ representative of Neo-Kantian transcendentalism in Russia on the eve of the Revolution. A co-editor of the St Petersburg-based philosophical journal Logos, he represented a distinctively Westernizing trend, critical in many respects of the openly metaphysical religious idealism of the ‘religious-philosophical renaissance’ in Russia. However, he readily acknowledged the existence of an ineradicable metaphysical need in human beings and stressed the metaphysical relevance of his philosophy of moral and cultural values. B.V. Iakovenko attributed to him a pronounced ‘ontological aspiration’ and Hessen’s philosophical evolution led him beyond ’pure anthropologism’, towards a religiously tinged Platonism.
Like many Russian philosophers, Hessen concentrated on philosophical problems which had direct relevance for practice. His main fields were philosophical pedagogy, which he defined as ’applied philosophy’, and political philosophy, with particular emphasis on philosophy of law. Like many other Russian philosophers, he was forced to emigrate, moving from one country to another, which did not help his professional career. Nevertheless, his work Osnovy pedagogiki (Foundations of Pedagogy) (published in Berlin, 1923) was translated into many languages and won him international recognition as the main author of the ‘pedagogy of culture’. His original conception of ‘rule-of-law socialism’ (which deserves to be regarded as the last link in the legal philosophy of Russian liberalism) was much less known, and the manuscripts of his two books on political philosophy perished in the Warsaw uprising of 1944. Still, the UNESCO Committee on the Philosophic Basis of Human Rights invited him to contribute to the preparation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. His article for UNESCO, together with his writings on political philosophy published posthumously in Italy, were a Russian contribution to the philosophy of human rights in modern, liberal democratic states.
Leont’ev, Konstantin Nikolaevich (1831–91)
Authors: Kline George L. 
Published: September 2018

One of the more original and provocative nineteenth-century Russian thinkers, Leont’ev directed a powerful intellectual attack at the dominant historical movement of his time: the process of modernization that was sweeping across Western Europe and making inroads into Russia. Leont’ev resisted the sociopolitical aspects of this process: the spread of democratic, egalitarian and constitutional principles. He also resisted its cultural and psychological aspects: the emergence of a standardized, homogenized mode of life and set of values.
Leont’ev defended the traditional values and institutions of monarchy, established Church, aristocracy and – especially – the distinctiveness and variety of national cultures. It was this distinctiveness, based on the isolation of nation states, that he saw as increasingly threatened by the advancing technologies of transport and communication.
Losev, Aleksei Fëdorovich (1893–1988)
Authors: Kline George L. 
Published: September 2018

A leading Russian philosopher, religious thinker and classical scholar of the twentieth century, Losev made important contributions to the theory of language, myth and symbol, as well as to the understanding of ancient Greek thought and culture. He strongly resisted central aspects of modernization, in particular the spread of what he saw as ’bourgeois’ and ’philistine’ secularism, positivism, materialism, atheism, selfish individualism and ’machine civilization’.
A scholar of staggering erudition with a lifelong passion for the ancient world, especially the thought of Plato, Losev could be a fierce, sometimes abusive polemicist. His relation to the Soviet regime ranged from open defiance in the late 1920s (which led to prison and the gulag for almost three years) to at least pro forma acceptance of certain key elements of Marxist ideology and philosophy in the period between 1953 and 1988.
Lossky, Nicholas Onufrievich (1870–1965)
Authors: Scanlan James P. 
Published: September 2018

In 1922, the Russian neo-Leibnizian idealist Nicholas Onufrievich Lossky, one of his country’s most distinguished professional philosophers, was banished from Russia along with more than a hundred other non-Marxist intellectuals whose influence the communist authorities feared. A prolific writer before his exile, Lossky continued to write and publish widely abroad, becoming not only the dean of the Russian émigré philosophical community but a thinker well known in Europe and the English-speaking world through many translations of his works.
The systematic structure and rationalistic tone of Lossky’s philosophizing set him apart from most of his fellow Russian idealists, but like them he proceeded in his thinking from a strong conviction of the truth of Christianity; he wrote of his commitment to ‘working out a system of metaphysics necessary for a Christian interpretation of the world’ (1951: 266). He adhered to a radical form of theism according to which the created natural order has nothing in common ontologically with the divine order that created it.
Lossky is best known for a set of interrelated views in epistemology and metaphysics connected with what he considered his fundamental philosophical insight – the principle that ‘everything is immanent in everything’. According to his doctrine of ‘intuitivism’ in epistemology, all cognition is intuitive; there is an ‘epistemological co-ordination’ of subject and object such that any object, whether sensory, intellectual or mystical, is immediately present in the mind of the knower. As the heir to a Leibnizian tradition in Russian metaphysics represented before him by Aleksei Kozlov and others, Lossky advanced a theory of ‘hierarchical personalism’ in which Leibniz’s monads became interacting ‘substantival agents’ existing at various levels of development; the choices of these ideal beings generate the material world (hence Lossky’s term ‘ideal realism’ for his ontology) and their reconfigurations and reincarnations move the cosmic process towards the perfection of the Kingdom of God. In his ‘ontological theory of values’ Lossky affirms a metaphysical basis for absolute values and attributes all evil – including diseases and natural disasters – to the misuse of free will by substantival agents, both human and subhuman.
Plekhanov, Georgii Valentinovich (1857–1918)
Authors: White James D. 
Published: September 2018

Known as ’the Father of Russian Marxism’, Plekhanov was the chief popularizer and interpreter of Marxism in Russia in the 1880s. His interest in the philosophical aspects of Marxism made him influential outside as well as inside Russia. He was a prolific writer, and dealt with several aspects of Marxist thought.
Plekhanov was an important figure in the Russian revolutionary movement. He was a founder member of the Russian Social Democratic Party, and a leading figure in its Menshevik wing after it split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903. As a politician, Plekhanov was constantly involved in polemics with political and ideological opponents. Most of his theoretical works are to some degree polemical, and it was the conflicts among Russian revolutionary groups that shaped Plekhanov’s interpretation of Marx’s thought.
A basic feature of this interpretation was that Russia’s historical development was like that of Western European countries, and would pass through a capitalist phase before progressing to socialism. Accordingly, Plekhanov gave prominence to those of Marx’s writings which could be presented in a deterministic way. Plekhanov insisted that Marxism was a materialist doctrine (as opposed to an idealist one) and as such recognized the primacy of matter in all spheres of existence.
Plekhanov was in many ways an innovator, being the writer who first coined the term ’dialectical materialism’, and who drew attention to the Hegelian origins of Marx’s system. His writings were quickly translated into several European languages. His interpretation of Marxism was much admired by Lenin, and was to form the basis of the official ideology of the Soviet Union. The conception of Marxism that Plekhanov propounded continues to exercise a profound influence on conceptions of Marxism throughout the world.