bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Emotions, philosophy of
Authors: Solomon Robert C. 
Published: September 2018

Emotions have always played a role in philosophy, even if philosophers have usually denied them centre stage. Because philosophy has so often been described as first and foremost a discipline of reason, the emotions have often been neglected or attacked as primitive, dangerous or irrational. Socrates reprimanded his pupil Crito, advising that we should not give in to our emotions, and some of the ancient Stoic philosophers urged a life of reason free from the enslavement of the emotions, a life of apatheia (apathy). In Buddhism, too, much attention has been given to the emotions, which are treated as ‘agitations’ or klesas. Buddhist ‘liberation’, like the Stoic apatheia, becomes a philosophical ideal, freedom from the emotions.
Philosophers have not always downgraded the emotions, however. Aristotle defended the view that human beings are essentially rational animals, but he also stressed the importance of having the right emotions. David Hume, the eighteenth-century empiricist, insisted that ‘reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions’. In the nineteenth century, although Hegel described the history of philosophy as the development of reason he also argued that ‘nothing great is ever done without passion’. Much of the history of philosophy can be told in terms of the shifting relationship between the emotions (or ‘passions’) and reason, which are often at odds, at times seem to be at war, but ideally should be in harmony. Thus Plato painted a picture of the soul as a chariot with three horses, reason leading the appetites and ‘the spirited part’, working together. Nietzsche, at the end of the nineteenth century, suggested that ‘every passion contains its own quantum of reason’.
Nietzsche’s suggestion, that emotion and reason are not really opposites but complementary or commingled, has been at the heart of much of the debate about emotions since ancient times. Are emotions intelligent, or are they simply physical reactions? Are they mere ‘feelings’, or do they play a vital role in philosophy and in our lives?
Events
Authors: Mellor D.H. 
Published: September 2018

Events are entities like collisions and speeches, as opposed to things like planets and people. Many are changes, for example things being first hot and then cold. All lack a thing’s full identity over time: either they are instantaneous, or they have temporal parts, like a speech’s words, which stop them being wholly present at an instant; whereas things, which lack temporal parts, are wholly present throughout their lives.
Events may be identified with two types of entity: facts, like the fact that David Hume dies, corresponding to truths like ‘Hume dies’; or particulars which, like things, correspond to names, for example ‘Hume’s death’. Which one they are taken to be affects the content of many metaphysical theories: such as that all particulars are things; that times, or causes and effects, or actions, are events; or that mental events are physical.
Idealism
Authors: Sprigge T.L.S. 
Published: September 2018

Idealism is now usually understood in philosophy as the view that mind is the most basic reality and that the physical world exists only as an appearance to or expression of mind, or as somehow mental in its inner essence. However, a philosophy which makes the physical world dependent upon mind is usually also called idealist even if it postulates some further hidden, more basic reality behind the mental and physical scenes (for example, Kant’s things-in-themselves). There is also a certain tendency to restrict the term ‘idealism’ to systems for which what is basic is mind of a somewhat lofty nature, so that ‘spiritual values’ are the ultimate shapers of reality. (An older and broader use counts as idealist any view for which the physical world is somehow unreal compared with some more ultimate, not necessarily mental, reality conceived as the source of value, for example Platonic forms.)
The founding fathers of idealism in Western thought are Berkeley (theistic idealism), Kant (transcendental idealism) and Hegel (absolute idealism). Although the precise sense in which Hegel was an idealist is problematic, his influence on subsequent absolute or monistic idealism was enormous. In the US and the UK idealism, especially of the absolute kind, was the dominating philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, receiving its most forceful expression with F.H. Bradley. It declined, without dying, under the influence of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and later of the logical positivists. Not a few philosophers believe, however, that it has a future.
Italy, philosophy in
Authors: Chiurazzi Gaetano 
Published: September 2018

Since the Renaissance, Italian philosophy has been rooted in the humanist and historical tradition, stemming from the rediscovery of Greek philosophy in the fifteenth century and the resumption of classical studies at that time. However, the momentous cultural and religious transformations of sixteenth-century Europe caused a reaction which greatly restrained the innovative impact of Renaissance thought. Living through these two periods, Bruno, Campanella and Galileo experienced all the conflicts of the Counter-Reformation, when philosophy especially felt the weight of the Roman Catholic Church which exercised a tight control on the culture of the time. The best traditions of the Renaissance were inherited and maintained solely by Vico, the most important figure of this latter period.
As the spirit of the Counter-Reformation declined, Italian philosophy acquired a new vigour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This occurred especially in the north of the country where contacts with modern European culture influenced a political situation dominated by the question of national unity (a problem debated since the time of Machiavelli). Philosophical thought during this period tended to be strongly political (as in the philosophy of Cattaneo), although it also assumed a deeply religious tone (for example, Mazzini and Gioberti). These themes were united in Hegelian Idealism, promoted by Spaventa among others. The neo-Idealists of the early twentieth century, such as Croce and Gentile, distinguished themselves by assuming a political role and by opposing empiricism and positivism, philosophical heirs of the Enlightenment which were traditionally considered alien although popular at that time.
The aftermath of the Second World War brought to gradual dissolution both philosophical and political neo-Idealism, a movement which was rooted especially at the universities of Rome and Naples; it also saw the rise of Marxist thought (Gramsci) and Existentialism, especially at the universities of Bologna, Milan and Turin. Among the most important figures in contemporary Italian philosophy we find Bobbio (political philosophy), Pareyson, Vattimo and Eco. While both French and German philosophy still play a major role in the philosophical debate, in recent years increasing attention has been paid to Anglo-Saxon philosophy.
Particulars
Authors: Bigelow John C. 
Published: September 2018

Particulars are to be understood by contrasting them with universals, that term being used to comprise both properties and relations. Often the term ‘individuals’ is used interchangeably with ‘particulars’, though some restrict the term ‘individuals’ to those particulars whose existence has more than momentary duration.
It is sometimes taken as a distinctive feature of particulars that they cannot be in more than one place at a time, whereas universals are capable of being wholly present in more than one place at a given time: if you have a white thing here and a white thing there, then you have two particulars but only one property. This way of distinguishing between particulars and universals may help us to focus on apt paradigm cases of each, but arguably this does not get us to the heart of the matter. On the one hand, some think it is possible, at least in principle, for a magician, or Pythagoras, or a time traveller, or a subatomic particle to be in two places at once, even though each is a particular. On the other hand, some think that there are properties which could not possibly be manifested in two different places at the same time, and yet which nonetheless are universals: think, for instance, of the divine property of absolute perfection, or of the conjunction of all intrinsic properties of a Leibnizian monad (or possible world); or of Judas’ property of simply being Judas.
Particulars are things which have properties and which stand in relations – particulars ‘instantiate’ properties and relations. By itself, however, this does not distinguish particulars from universals since universals, too, are naturally thought to have properties and to stand in relations. What distinguishes particulars is the fact that, while a particular instantiates properties and relations, nothing instantiates a particular. Universals both ‘have’ (properties and relations) and are ‘had’; particulars ‘have’ but are not ‘had’. Since a particular is not instantiated by another thing, it is sometimes said to exist ‘in itself’, whereas a universal exists ‘in’ something else. For this reason, the term ‘particular’ is related to the term ‘substance’, which is traditionally used to mean something capable of independent existence.
Post-structuralism
Authors: Gutting Gary 
Published: September 2018

Post-structuralism is a late-twentieth-century development in philosophy and literary theory, particularly associated with the work of Jacques Derrida and his followers. It originated as a reaction against structuralism, which first emerged in Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on linguistics. By the 1950s structuralism had been adapted in anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Lacan) and literary theory (Barthes), and there were hopes that it could provide the framework for rigorous accounts in all areas of the human sciences.
Although structuralism was never formulated as a philosophical theory in its own right, its implicit theoretical basis was a kind of Cartesianism, but without the emphasis on subjectivity. It aimed, like Descartes, at a logically rigorous system of knowledge based on sharp explicit definitions of fundamental concepts. The difference was that, for structuralism, the system itself was absolute, with no grounding in subjectivity. Post-structuralist critiques of structuralism typically challenge the assumption that systems are self-sufficient structures and question the possibility of the precise definitions on which systems of knowledge must be based.
Derrida carries out his critique of structuralist systems by the technique of deconstruction. This is the process of showing, through close textual and conceptual analysis, how definitions of fundamental concepts (for example, presence versus absence, true versus false) are undermined by the very effort to formulate and employ them. Derrida’s approach has particularly influenced literary theory and criticism in the USA. In addition, Richard Rorty, developing themes from pragmatism and recent analytic philosophy, has put forward a distinctively American version of post-structuralism.
Sport, philosophy of
Authors: Hyland Drew A. 
Published: September 2018

The philosophy of sport as a separate area of philosophy is largely a phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century, although previous philosophers, back to the ancient Greeks, occasionally made reference to sport or used it as an example in a larger point. Within the philosophy of sport, a number of sub-areas have emerged as important: sport and ethics, questions concerning sport and society, the issue of self-knowledge in sport, the mind–body problem as it relates to sport, sport and art, and the controversy over the possibility of defining certain key terms within sport, such as sport, game, play and athletics.
Within the area of sport and society, several major debates have arisen. The first is about whether sport teaches values and, if so, whether the values taught are desirable or not. Second, considerable attention has been paid to how certain societal problems, such as sexism and racism, have manifested themselves in sport, and how they might be addressed within sport. Third, attention has been directed to the phenomenon of the athlete as cultural hero.
The relevance to sport of the age-old philosophical issue of self-knowledge is manifest, with a number of different construals of what counts as self-knowledge emerging as important. Attention has been paid to self-knowledge in the psychological sense, self-knowledge as manifested in Zen thought and self-knowledge in the Socratic sense, among others. The mind–body problem, also an old philosophic issue, has clear relevance within the domain of sport. Dualism, physicalism and phenomenological accounts have all been represented, the latter being the most dominant and persuasive so far.
Substance
Authors: Ayers Michael 
Published: September 2018

For Aristotle, ‘substances’ are the things which exist in their own right, both the logically ultimate subjects of predication and the ultimate objects of scientific inquiry. They are the unified material objects, as well as the natural stuffs, identifiable in sense-experience, each taken to be a member of a natural species with its ‘form’ and functional essence. Entities in other categories – qualities, actions, relations and so forth – are treated as dependent on, if not just abstracted aspects of, these independent realities.
With the rise of mechanistic physics in the seventeenth century, the Aristotelian multiplicity of substances was reduced to universal matter mechanically differentiated. This move sharpened the issue of the relation of mind to the physical world. The consequent variety of ways in which the notion of substance was manipulated by materialists, dualists, immaterialists and anti-dogmatists encouraged later scepticism about the distinction between independent realities and human abstractions, and so idealism.
Twentieth-century conceptualism, like some earlier versions of idealism, rejects the distinction altogether, commonly ascribing the logical priority of material things in natural language to the utility of a folk physics, as if they were the theoretical entities of everyday life. As such, their identity and existence are determined only through applications of a theory outdated by modern science. Yet this ‘top-down’, holistic philosophy of language is belied by the detailed insights of traditional logic, which point clearly to a ‘bottom-up’ account of classification and identity, that is an account which recognizes the possibility of perceptually picking out material objects prior to knowledge of their kind or nature, and of subsequently classifying them. The idea that material things are theoretical entities, and that their individuation is accordingly kind-dependent, is a hangover from an atomistic approach to perception which calls on theory to tie sensory information together. A more accurate understanding of sensation as the already integrated presentation of bodies in spatial relations to one another and to the perceiver is consonant with the possibility denied by the idealist– namely, that, with respect to its primitive referents, language and thought are shaped around reality itself, the independent objects given in active sense-experience. That the coherence or discrete unity of material objects has a physical explanation does not mean that physics explains it away.
Primary–secondary distinction
Authors: Smith A.D. 
Published: September 2018

The terminology of ‘primary and secondary qualities’ is taken from the writings of John Locke. It has come to express a position on the nature of sensory qualities – those which we attribute to physical objects as a result of the sensuous character of sensations they produce when they are perceived correctly by us. Since our senses can be differentiated from each other by the type of sensations they produce, sensory qualities are what Aristotle called ‘proper sensibles’ – those perceptible by one sense only. Colours, sounds, scents and tastes are always regarded as proper to their respective senses. What are the proper sensibles of touch, and whether there is similarly a single family of them, is a matter of controversy; but temperature at least is standardly regarded as proper to this sense. It is such sensory qualities that are candidates for being given the status of secondary qualities.
To regard sensory qualities as secondary is to hold that an object’s possession of one is simply a matter of its being disposed to occasion a certain type of sensation when perceived; the object in itself possesses no sensuous character. Primary qualities, by contrast, are those which characterize the fundamental nature of the physical world as it is in itself. They are always taken to include geometrical attributes, and often some space-occupying feature; Locke’s candidate for this latter was solidity. Although the terminology dates from the seventeenth century, this general doctrine goes back to the Greek atomists.
Abstract objects
Authors: Hale Bob 
Published: September 2018

The central philosophical question about abstract objects is: Are there any? An affirmative answer – given by Platonists or Realists – draws support from the fact that while much of our talk and thought concerns concrete (roughly, spatiotemporally extended) objects, significant parts of it appear to be about objects which lie outside space and time, and are therefore incapable of figuring in causal relationships. The suggestion that there really are such further non-spatial, atemporal and acausal objects as numbers and sets often strikes Nominalist opponents as contrary to common sense. But precisely because our apparent talk and thought of abstracta encompasses much – including virtually the whole of mathematics – that seems indispensable to our best attempts to make scientific sense of the world, it cannot be simply dismissed as confused gibberish. For this reason Nominalists have commonly adopted a programme of reductive paraphrase, aimed at eliminating all apparent reference to and quantification over abstract objects. In spite of impressively ingenious efforts, the programme appears to run into insuperable obstacles.
The simplicity of our initial question is deceptive. Understanding and progress are unlikely without further clarification of the relations between ontological questions and questions about the logical analysis of language, and of the key distinction between abstract and concrete objects. There are both affinities and, more importantly, contrasts between traditional approaches to ontological questions and more recent discussions shaped by ground-breaking work in the philosophy of language initiated by Frege. The importance of Frege’s work lies principally in two insights: first, that questions about what kinds of entity there are cannot sensibly be tackled independently of the logical analysis of language; and second, that the question whether or not certain expressions should be taken to have reference cannot properly be separated from the question whether complete sentences in which those expressions occur are true or false.
Slovakia, philosophy in
Authors: Zumr Josef 
Published: September 2018

Until as late as 1918, social and national circumstances were not favourable to the development of philosophy in Slovakia. The enforced retardation of the country had an obviously negative impact on intellectual and cultural life, and stood in the way of the possibility of diversity. That is why the first important Slovak philosophers such as Bayer and Caban emerged only as recently as the seventeenth century. Following this, philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Karlovský, Laurentzy, Steigel and Feješ started to criticize the anti-scientific ideas which still survived. In the first phase of the National Revival Movement, Jan Kollár created a new philosophy of history by postulating the cultural unity of the Slavs. A specific contribution to this theory came from L. Štúr and his followers (Hurban, Hodža, Kellner) who applied it to practical conditions and stressed the necessity of national emancipation for the Slovak nation. Their influence is evident in all further developments of the national movement and its philosophy.
The end of the nineteenth century saw the replacement of this idea by the philosophy of Thomas Masaryk. Slovak cultural life and philosophy, however, only began to develop fully in the context of an independent Czechoslovak Republic after 1918. The mainstream philosophy of the time was rationalistic, evident in the thought of such thinkers as Sv. Štúr, Koreň and Osuský. Philosophy after 1945 was marked by the achievements of Hrušovský, his students and colleagues, whose initial form of neopositivism took on a Marxist dialectical structurology. The importance of Marxism has recently been gradually declining and the Slovak philosophic scene is independently evolving in an atmosphere more in line with other European countries, particularly since the formation of the Slovak Republic in 1993.
Causation, further themes
Authors: Menzies Peter 
Published: September 2018

The traditional focus of philosophical interest in causation has been token causation: the kind of causation that relates particular dated events. There has been controversy in recent times over the nature of such events. Donald Davidson proposed that events are concrete particulars: like objects, they have spatio-temporal locations, identity conditions, and can be described in many different ways. However, most philosophers espouse one or other property-based conception of events in order to capture the idea that causation relates events in virtue of properties associated with those events.
More generally, philosophers have usually been concerned to provide a priori analyses of the concept of causation, though recently some have attempted to provide empirical analyses by investigating what physics says about the processes underlying causal relations. A recent much-discussed conceptual analysis of causation is David Lewis’s counterfactual theory. This theory ingeniously elaborates the idea that an event c causes an event e just when it is true that if c had not occurred e would not have occurred. However, the theory encounters difficulty explaining examples of pre-emption in which there are several possible causal pathways leading to some effect, only one of which goes through to completion.
Such examples highlight the centrality of the idea of a process to the concept of causation. A recent functionalist theory attempts to capture this fact by defining causation as the intrinsic relation that typically accompanies a counterfactual dependence of one event on a distinct event. Such a theory takes the existence of a counterfactual dependence to be a defeasible marker of the presence of the structural feature of reality that is the causal relation. While it has some success explaining examples of pre-emption, this functionalist theory has been criticised on the grounds that causation is not a relation at all, as evidenced by causal statements involving absences and omissions as causes or effects. The question whether it is possible to give a full conceptual analysis of causation is the subject of a currently vigorous philosophical debate.