bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Bradley, Francis Herbert (1846–1924)
Authors: Candlish Stewart 
Published: September 2018

Bradley was the most famous and philosophically the most influential of the British Idealists, who had a marked impact on British philosophy in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. They looked for inspiration less to their British predecessors than to Kant and Hegel, though Bradley owed as much to lesser German philosophers such as R.H. Lotze, J.F. Herbart and C. Sigwart.
Bradley is most famous for his metaphysics. He argued that our ordinary conceptions of the world conceal contradictions. His radical alternative can be summarized as a combination of monism (that is, reality is one, there are no real separate things) and absolute idealism (that is, reality is idea, or consists of experience – but not the experience of any one individual, for this is forbidden by the monism). This metaphysics is said to have influenced the poetry of T.S. Eliot. But he also made notable contributions to philosophy of history, to ethics and to the philosophy of logic, especially of a critical kind. His critique of hedonism – the view that the goal of morality is the maximization of pleasure – is still one of the best available. Some of his views on logic, for instance, that the grammatical subject of a sentence may not be what the sentence is really about, became standard through their acceptance by Bertrand Russell, an acceptance which survived Russell’s repudiation of idealist logic and metaphysics around the turn of the century. Russell’s and G.E. Moore’s subsequent disparaging attacks on Bradley’s views signalled the return to dominance in England of pluralist (that is, non-monist) doctrines in the tradition of Hume and J.S. Mill, and, perhaps even more significantly, the replacement in philosophy of Bradley’s richly metaphorical literary style and of his confidence in the metaphysician’s right to adjudicate on the ultimate truth with something more like plain speaking and a renewed deference to science and mathematics.
Bradley’s contemporary reputation was that of the greatest English philosopher of his generation. This status did not long survive his death, and the relative dearth of serious discussion of his work until more general interest revived in the 1970s has meant that the incidental textbook references to some of his most characteristic and significant views, for example, on relations and on truth, are often based on hostile and misleading caricatures.
Cournot, Antoine Augustin (1801–77)
Authors: Mounce H.O. 
Published: September 2018

Cournot is best known for his work in applying mathematical techniques to economic and social affairs and is generally acknowledged to be the founder of econometrics. His work in philosophy, however, is at least as distinguished. His philosophy may be seen as a meditation on continuity and discontinuity, on law and brute empirical fact, which is unassimilable to law. Empiricism is exclusively preoccupied with the latter phenomenon, rationalism with the former. Cournot affirmed the reality of both. His philosophy thus mediates between empiricism (which, when it is consistent, leads on his view to scepticism) and rationalism (which, when it is consistent, loses contact with reality).
Continuity is real because the world is not a chaos; it is a network of events, forming various series, which reveal necessary and determinable relations. But discontinuity is also real, for the order we discern in the various events is not a single order. The series are independent and the points where they intersect cannot be predicted from within the series themselves. Brute contingency is therefore as real as law. Consequently, though the world may be known, it can never be reduced to a single scheme.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82)
Authors: Goodman Russell B. 
Published: September 2018

The American philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson developed a philosophy of flux or transitions in which the active human self plays a central role. At the core of his thought was a hierarchy of value or existence, and an unlimited aspiration for personal and social progress. ‘Man is the dwarf of himself’, he wrote in his first book Nature (1836). Emerson presented a dire portrait of humankind’s condition: ‘Men in the world of today are bugs or spawn, and are called "the mass" and "the herd"’. We are governed by moods which ‘do not believe in one another’, by necessities real or only imagined, but also, Emerson held, by opportunities for ‘untaught sallies of the spirit’ – those few real moments of life which may nevertheless alter the whole.
Emerson’s lectures drew large audiences throughout America and in England, and his works were widely read in his own time. He influenced the German philosophical tradition through Nietzsche – whose The Gay Science carries an epigraph from ‘History’ – and the Anglo-American tradition via William James and John Dewey. Emerson’s major works are essays, each with its own structure, but his sentences and paragraphs often stand on their own as expressions of his thought.
Hamilton, William (1788–1856)
Authors: Mounce H.O. 
Published: September 2018

Sir William Hamilton was a leading exponent of the Scottish philosophy of ‘common sense’. This philosophy had its origin in the works of Thomas Reid, but it was through Hamilton that it achieved its most subtle form and exerted its greatest influence.
‘Common-sense’ philosophy, on a superficial view, may seem to hold that philosophical problems should be settled by appealing to the commonly accepted opinions of ordinary people. But that is not what it holds. The ‘common sense’ to which it refers are certain powers and beliefs natural to the mind and therefore common alike to the learned and vulgar. Hamilton holds that these powers and beliefs can neither be doubted nor justified. They carry their own authority. This view derives its significance from a point which has often been overlooked. When we doubt or justify a belief, we stand outside that belief and compare it with the world. But the power to compare a belief with the world itself presupposes beliefs about the world. We cannot step outside all our beliefs. That is why, according to Hamilton, certain powers and beliefs must carry authority.
Reinhold, Karl Leonhard (1757–1823)
Authors: di Giovanni George 
Published: September 2018

A catalyst in the rise of post-Kantian idealism, Reinhold popularized Kant’s critical philosophy by systematizing it in the form of a theory of consciousness. Reinhold shifted from one position to another, however, each time declaring his latest philosophical creed as ultimate. For this he was ridiculed by his more famous contemporaries, including Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, and his historical reputation suffered accordingly. Recent re-evaluations, however, suggest that there was considerable coherence to his philosophical wanderings.
A sometime priest who converted to Protestantism, active freemason and popular teacher, Reinhold advocated political intervention in the promotion of enlightened practices. He steadfastly defended the French Revolution.
Thoreau, Henry David (1817–62)
Authors: Gould Timothy 
Published: September 2018

Thoreau was one of the founders of the new literature that emerged within the fledgling culture of the United States in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. He inherited an education in the classics and in the transcendentalism of his older friend and teacher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau forged a means of writing which was dedicated to recording particular events in all their transience but capable of rendering graphic the permanent laws of nature and conscience. His incorporation of both confidence and self-questioning into the texture of his writing forms the ground of his standpoint as an observer of human lives and other natural histories.
Thoreau’s relation to philosophy goes beyond his inheritance from Plato, Kant, Emerson and Eastern thought. Above all, his quest for philosophy is evident in the ways his writing seeks its own foundations. It is in the act of writing that Thoreau locates the perspectives within which to give an account of the humanness of a life. His project is to report sincerely and unselfconsciously a life of passion and simplicity, using himself as a representative of basic human needs and projects. Influenced by Plato’s Republic, Thoreau gives an account of some basic human needs, such as food, shelter and society. But also, like Plato, he shows that the particular institutions by which human needs are met are very far from being necessary. Tracing the relationship between need and necessity is one of the primary goals of Thoreau’s work.
Ruge, Arnold (1802–80)
Authors: Sass Hans-Martin 
Published: September 2018

Arnold Ruge was the most influential liberal writer and activist of the radical wing of Young Hegelianism. For him philosophy was a challenge to translate the humanist ideals of emancipation and self-determination into the realities of moral, cultural and political practice. As editor of powerful intellectual journals such as Hallesche und Deutsche Jahrbuecher (1838–43) with Theodor Echtermeyer, ‘Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publizistik’ (1843), ‘Deutsch-Franzoesische Jahrbuecher’ (1844) with Karl Marx, and ‘Die Akademie’ (1850), he became the leading promotor of liberal philosophy and civic emancipation in Germany. Ruge represented the citizens of Breslau in the Frankfurt Paulskirche parliament in 1848–9 and worked briefly with Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and Guizeppe Mazzini in establishing a short-lived ‘European Democratic Committee’ in London in 1849.
Ruge understood his critical educational, cultural and political activities as a direct calling from the heritage of European enlightenment and German idealism, thus transforming idealistic theory and vision into the realities of political practice and agitation. In this manner he promoted such radical figures as Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach.
American philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries
Authors: Goodman Russell B. 
Published: September 2018

Jonathan Edwards, the first great American philosopher, interpreted Calvinist theology within the newer framework of Newtonian physics and Lockean empiricism in his Freedom of the Will (1754). However, he was all but forgotten by the end of the eighteenth century, when political rather than theological issues held centre stage. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the moral sense theory of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Lockean liberalism and classical republican theory all contributed to the thought of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and others who saw themselves as parties to a contract with a monarch, defenders of the rights of humans, and members of a new and virtuous republic.
In the early nineteenth century, Scottish common sense realism prevailed in the universities, but the most original and influential philosophical writing came from the communities of the transcendentalists. Emerson and Thoreau developed philosophies of life, language, knowledge and being in writings drawing on the Greek and Roman classics, English and German Romanticism, Christianity, and non-Western thought. After the Civil War (1861–5), a series of clubs in the East and Midwest, and the new Journal of Speculative Philosophy made Hegel more accessible to Americans; while in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the ‘Metaphysical Club’ of William James, Charles Peirce, Chauncey Wright and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr became the birthplace of pragmatism.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the professionalization of American philosophy: new graduate departments at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, professional journals, and state-supported universities in the Midwest building non-denominational departments of philosophy. By the end of the century, James had published his vast Principles of Psychology (1890) and enunciated a version of pragmatism; Peirce had produced an outpouring of writing on pragmatism, scientific method, logic, semiotics and metaphysics; and Josiah Royce and John Dewey were launched on influential academic careers.
Anderson, John (1893–1962)
Authors: Baker A.J. 
Published: September 2018

Arguing against metaphysical ‘ultimates’ (that is, supposed unconditioned conditions of things), relative truth, appeals to subjective experience, and opposing some of the main tendencies of twentieth-century philosophy, Anderson developed a wide-ranging realist and empiricist philosophy. Highly critical of religion, he was much concerned with other cultural values and advanced views (influential in Australia) on freedom of thought, education, ethics and aesthetics. In ethics, for example, his view is that objective good is not good because it is approved of by certain people; rather those who approve of good (or have other relations to it) do so because it is good. He carefully distinguished questions about the intrinsic character of good from those about relations social groups may have to it, and goes on to develop an account of intrinsic goods as certain socio-mental activities: enterprise or freedom, objective inquiry, artistic production and appreciation, love and courage.
Similarly, in aesthetics he distinguishes characteristics of works of art from possible relations between artists, works, appreciators and critics, such as a work’s relation to a writer’s intentions. In Anderson’s view the character and structure of the work itself alone provides an aesthetic criterion for assessing the merit of works of art.
Cassirer, Ernst (1874–1945)
Authors: Verene Donald Phillip 
Published: September 2018

Cassirer is one of the major figures in the development of philosophical idealism in the first half of the twentieth century. He is known for his philosophy of culture based on his conception of ‘symbolic form’, for his historical studies of the problem of knowledge in the rise of modern philosophy and science and for his works on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Cassirer expanded Kant’s critique of reason to a critique of culture by regarding the symbol as the common denominator of all forms of human thought, imagination and experience. He delineates symbolic forms of myth, religion, language, art, history and science and defines the human being as the ‘symbolizing animal’. All human experience occurs through systems of symbols. Language is only one such system; the images of myth, religion and art and the mathematical structures of science are others.
Being of Jewish faith, Cassirer left Germany in 1933 with the rise of Nazism, going first to Oxford, then to university positions in Sweden and the USA. In the last period of his career he applied his philosophy of culture generally and his conception of myth specifically to a critique of political myths and to the study of irrational forces in the state.
Dewey, John (1859–1952)
Authors: Gouinlock James 
Published: September 2018

The philosophy of John Dewey is original and comprehensive. His extensive writings contend systematically with problems in metaphysics, epistemology, logic, aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and education, and philosophical anthropology. Although his work is widely read, it is not widely understood.
Dewey had a distinctive conception of philosophy, and the key to understanding and benefiting from his work is to keep this conception in mind. A worthwhile philosophy, he urged, must be practical. Philosophic inquiry, that is, ought to take its point of departure from the aspirations and problems characteristic of the various sorts of human activity, and an effective philosophy would develop ideas responsive to those conditions. Any system of ideas that has the effect of making common experience less intelligible than we find it to be is on that account a failure. Dewey’s theory of inquiry, for example, does not entertain a conception of knowledge that makes it problematic whether we can know anything at all. Inasmuch as scientists have made extraordinary advances in knowledge, it behoves the philosopher to find out exactly what scientists do, rather than to question whether they do anything of real consequence.
Moral philosophy, likewise, should not address the consternations of philosophers as such, but the characteristic urgencies and aspirations of common life; and it should attempt to identify the resources and limitations of human nature and the environment with which it interacts. Human beings might then contend effectively with the typical perplexities and promises of mortal existence. To this end, Dewey formulated an exceptionally innovative and far-reaching philosophy of morality and democracy.
The subject matter of philosophy is not philosophy, Dewey liked to say, but ‘problems of men’. All too often, he found, the theories of philosophers made the primary subject matter more obscure rather than less so. The tendency of thinkers is to become bewitched by inherited philosophic puzzles, when the persistence of the puzzle is a consequence of failing to consider the assumptions that created it. Dewey was gifted in discerning and discarding the philosophic premises that create needless mysteries. Rather than fret, for instance, about the question of how immaterial mental substance can possibly interact with material substance, he went to the root of the problem by challenging the notion of substance itself.
Indeed, Dewey’s dissatisfaction with the so-called classic tradition in philosophy, stemming at least from Plato if not from Parmenides, led him to reconstruct the entire inheritance of the Western tradition in philosophy. The result is one of the most seminal and fruitful philosophies of the twentieth century.
Gentile, Giovanni (1875–1944)
Authors: Bellamy Richard 
Published: September 2018

Best known as the self-styled philosopher of Fascism, Gentile, along with Benedetto Croce, was responsible for the ascendance of Hegelian idealism in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. His ‘actual’ idealism or ‘actualism’ was a radical attempt to integrate our consciousness of experience with its creation in the ‘pure act of thought’, thereby abolishing the distinction between theory and practice. He held an extreme subjectivist version of idealism, and rejected both empirical and transcendental arguments as forms of ‘realism’ that posited the existence of a reality outside thought.
His thesis developed through a radicalization of Hegel’s critique of Kant that drew on the work of the nineteenth-century Neapolitan Hegelian Bertrando Spaventa. He argued that it represented both the natural conclusion of the whole tradition of Western philosophy, and had a basis in the concrete experience of each individual. He illustrated these arguments in detailed writings on the history of Italian philosophy and the philosophy of education respectively. He joined the Fascist Party in 1923 and thereafter placed his philosophy at the service of the regime. He contended that Fascism was best understood in terms of his reworking of the Hegelian idea of the ethical state, a view that occasionally proved useful for ideological purposes but which had little practical influence.
Kotarbiński, Tadeusz (1886–1981)
Authors: Stanosz B. 
Published: September 2018

Kotarbiński was one of the founders and main representatives of the Polish philosophical school known as the Lwów–Warsaw School and akin to, though independent of (and less radical than), the Vienna Circle; an anti-metaphysical, pro-scientific, rationalistic school of philosophy, which was very active and influential between the First and the Second World Wars.
Kotarbiński’s programme for philosophy was a minimalistic and a practical one: he stressed the need to purify the field of philosophy of questions and concepts that lack factual content or logical coherence. According to him, the term ‘philosophy’ should be used, if at all, to denote only logic (understood as the philosophy of cognitive thought) and the philosophy of action, including moral philosophy. His numerous (more than 500) works are devoted to logic and philosophy of action in this broad sense. One of his main original ideas is the doctrine of reism or concretism, a special version of nominalism.
Kotarbiński was admired by several generations of his pupils for his unusual pedagogical gifts, his integrity and his moral courage.
Lorenzen, Paul (1915–95)
Authors: Roberts Julian 
Published: September 2018

Paul Lorenzen, German philosopher of mathematics and sciences, programmatically set about implementing mathematical constructivism in wider philosophical contexts. Trained as a mathematician, he spent the greater part of his teaching career at the University of Erlangen, Germany. Here he assembled what came to be known as the ‘Erlangen school’, which included Wilhelm Kamlah, Kuno Lorenz, Jürgen Mittelstraß, Peter Janich, Oswald Schwemmer and others. In its heyday, the school also influenced work at the universities of Konstanz and Marburg, and was one of the main alternatives to ‘traditional’ philosophies such as hermeneutics.
The school’s interests embraced mathematical logic, the major thinkers of the idealist and hermeneutic traditions (though not Heidegger), and a high level of philological expertise in classical philosophy. Regrettably, though, its encyclopedic initiative has remained incomplete, and the school has largely disbanded in the face of increasing polarization between straight analytical philosophy and a tougher response by existing traditions. To some extent, Lorenzen’s own express interest in left-wing political traditions became a liability in view of the sobriety and retrenchment that characterized the 1980s.
McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis (1866–1925)
Authors: Baldwin Thomas 
Published: September 2018

McTaggart was one of the last of the ‘British Idealists’, the group of British philosophers, such as B. Bosanquet and F.H. Bradley, who took their inspiration from Hegel. In his early writings from the 1890s, McTaggart gave a critical exposition of themes from Hegel’s logic before advancing his own distinctive idealist positions concerning time, the mind, and reality in general. But in his writings from 1910 he developed an independent account of the structure of existence from which he then argued for the same idealist positions as before.
The thesis for which McTaggart is now most famous is that of the unreality of time; what is even more difficult to come to terms with is his thesis that the ultimate reality of the world comprises a community of selves wholly constituted by their loving perceptions of each other. This thesis is a manifestation of a mysticism that is an essential element in McTaggart’s philosophy; yet this mysticism is combined with a rationalist determination, reminiscent of Spinoza, to vindicate mystical insights by the light of pure reason alone.