Karel Capek (9 January 1890 – 25 December 1938) was concerned with the natural order of things, a theme that pervaded much of his work. His allegorical approach to expressionism linked his deep philosophical concerns to striking and often disturbing human… Read More ›
Philosophy
The Philosophy of Aristotle
Aristotle (384–322 bce) was born in Stagira. His father, Nicomachus, was a doctor at the court of Macedonia. The profession of medicine may well have influenced Aristotle’s interests, and his association with Macedon was lifelong: in 343 he became tutor… Read More ›
The Philosophy of George Berkeley
George Berkeley’s (1685–1753 ce) most lasting philosophical legacies are his immaterialism – the denial of the existence of matter – and his idealism, the positive doctrine that reality is constituted by spirits and their ideas. This is as Berkeley would… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Buddha
The person known as “the Buddha” (c.480–400 bce) was Siddhattha Gotama (in Pali; in Sanskrit Siddhartha Gautama). “Buddha” means “Awakened One” or “Enlightened One,” and is a descriptive title rather than a name. Gotama lived in north-east India at a… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Zhuangzi
Zhuangzi [Chuang Tzu or Chuang Chou] (c.360 bce) may have written up to seven chapters (The “Inner Chapters”) of The Zhuangzi collection. His technical mastery of ancient Chinese linguistic theory in some of these suggests that Zhuangzi studied and thought… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Xunzi
Xunzi [Hsün Tzu] or Xun Kuang [Hsün K’uang], who lived between from about 310 to after 230 bce, made unique contributions to Chinese philosophy in several important areas: the role of music and ritual in government and society; the concept… Read More ›
Key Theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was the leading analytical philosopher of the twentieth century. His two philosophical masterpieces, the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921) and the posthumous Philosophical Investigations (1953), changed the course of the subject. The first was the primary origin of the… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Baruch Spinoza
Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677 ce) has been a figure of some notoriety in the history of Western philosophy. Born in Amsterdam, into a community of Marrano Jews from Portugal, the young Spinoza had an uneasy relationship to both Christianity and… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Socrates
Socrates (470/469–399 bce), mentor of Plato and founder of moral philosophy, was the son of Sophroniscus (a statuary) and Phaenarete (a midwife). According to a late doxographical tradition, he followed for a time in his father’s footsteps – a claim… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was a model intellectual for the twentieth century. He was a multitalented thinker who not only created several philosophical systems but also wrote major novels and plays, essays on literary theory and art criticism, and some methodologically… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, third Earl Russell (1872–1970 ce), was born into an aristocratic English family with considerable political tradition and influence. Both his parents died before he turned four; he was brought up by his paternal grandmother, who seems… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty (1931– 2007) has stressed his adherence to antirepresentationalism, by which he means an account “which does not view knowledge as a matter of getting reality right, but rather as a matter of acquiring habits of action for coping… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was born in Poiters, France, the second child of Anne Malapert and Paul Foucault. It was expected that he, like his father, would study and practice medicine. The Second World War disrupted education in France, however, and… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), a leading figure in French post-structuralist philosophy, is renowned for having developed deconstruction. His prolific writings treat both philosophical and literary works, and do so in various ways, of which deconstruction is the most philosophically significant. The… Read More ›
Analysis of Karel Capek’s Novels
Karel Capek (9 January 1890 – 25 December 1938) was a philosophical writer par excellence regardless of the genre that he employed in a given work, but the form of long fiction in particular afforded him the amplitude to express complicated philosophical… Read More ›
Analysis of Albert Camus’s Novels
Two persistent themes animate all of Albert Camus’s writing and underlie his artistic vision: One is the enigma of the universe, which is breathtakingly beautiful yet indifferent to life; the other is the enigma of man, whose craving for happiness… Read More ›
Critical Theory
Critical Theory is, by and large, concerned with the critique of MODERNITY, MODERNIZATION, and the modern state. The first generation of critical theorists – Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm – came together in the early… Read More ›
Deconstruction Theory
Deconstruction emerged out of a tradition of French philosophical thought strongly influenced by the phenomenological projects of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The main concern of phenomenology is consciousness and essence. For Husserl, consciousness entailed an intention towards the essence… Read More ›
The Philosophy of St. Augustine
Augustine (AD 354-430) was born in Thagaste and died in Hippo, both places in North Africa. Intellectually he straddles the gap between the philosophers of ancient Greece and those of medieval Christian Europe; he lived through the decline of the… Read More ›
Slavoj Žižek and Film Theory
We need the excuse of a fiction to stage what we really are. (Slavoj Zizek, in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema [dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2005]) Would you allow this guy to take your daughter to a movie? Of course not…. Read More ›
Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life
I What is life, and what makes human life unique? With the rise of the life sciences and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection in the nineteenth century, new answers to these questions were proposed that were deeply at… Read More ›
Rupturing the Episteme: A Sartrean Interpretation of Protagonists in Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi, The Hunt and Behind the Bodice
Mahasweta Devi’s works can be categorised under the “literature of resistance” the purpose of which, according to Sartre, “was not the enjoyment of the reader but his torment. What it presented was not a world to be contemplated, but to… Read More ›
Key Theories of Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou (b. 1937) was born in Rabat, Morocco. With a father an agrégé, like himself, in philosophy, and a mother agre´ge´e in French, Badiou is also a product of the E´ cole Normale Superieure (ENS) (rue d’Ulm). It was… Read More ›
Key Theories of Michel Serres
Michel Serres (b.1930) was born in 1930 at Agen in France, son of a bargeman. In 1949, he went to naval college and subsequently, in 1952, to the E´ cole Normale Supe´rieure (rue d’Ulm). In 1955, he obtained an agre´gation… Read More ›
Literary Criticism and Theory in the Twentieth Century
Twentieth-century literary criticism and theory has comprised a broad range of tendencies and movements: a humanistic tradition, descended from nineteenth-century writers such as Matthew Arnold and continued into the twentieth century through figures such as Irving Babbitt and F. R…. Read More ›
The Philosophy of Henri Bergson
Schopenhauer’s thought impinges considerably not only on the thought of Nietzsche but also on Bergson’s philosophy and his theories of art and humor. Notwithstanding his self-dissociation from Schopenhauer,1 Bergson’s philosophy stands in direct line of descent. In fact, his student… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)– who is the most widely read philosopher in Germany today – offered an incisive critique of the bourgeois world: its vision of the present as alone real, its exaltation of a rationality answering merely to pragmatic needs,… Read More ›
Chaos Theory, Complexity Theory and Literary Criticism
Chaos theory and complexity theory challenge some of our most deeply held beliefs about the nature of reality. The former claims that natural systems (for example, the weather) are controlled by mysterious forces, called ‘strange attractors‘, such that they are… Read More ›
Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt
German born (although naturalised American) political philosopher, who contributed significantly to the analysis of totalitarianism, and the fate of Jewry in the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is perhaps best known for a single utterance, her response to the Nazi… Read More ›
Key Theories of Theodor Adorno
German philosopher, sociologist and musicologist who was a leading member (and eventually director) of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (the institutional basis of the Frankfurt School of German critical theory), Theodor Adorno’s (1903-1969) work may be understood as an… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Austrian-born philosopher. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) originally studied engineering. In 1912, he went to Cambridge and became a student of one of the founders of the analytic philosophy, Bertrand Russell (1872—1970). Wittgenstein served in the Austrian army during the First World… Read More ›
Key Theories of Jean-Paul Sartre
French philosopher, novelist and playwright, who was in many respects the model of a politically engaged intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was offered, but refused, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 . An indication of the esteem in which he was… Read More ›
Key Theories of Edward Said
American literary critic, postcolonial theorist and political commentator who was born in the Middle East. In 1963 Edward Said (1935- 2003) was made Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature, at Columbia University, New York, where he has remained to… Read More ›
The Social Philosophy of Gillian Rose
British social theorist, who through a profound reading of Hegel sought to navigate between the excesses and dangers of modernist absolutism and postmodernist relativism, Gillian Rose‘s (1947-1995) work draws upon philosophy (not least in a close knowledge of the German tradition),… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Richard Rorty
Although trained within the so-called ‘analytic’ tradition, Richard Rorty (1931-2007) espouses an approach to philosophy that is generally referred to as ‘neo-pragmatist’. Rorty draws heavily on the works of C. S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey, and also displays an… Read More ›
Moral and Political Philosophy of John Rawls
John Rawls (1921-2002) was an American philosopher, whose defence of liberalism was responsible for the revitalisation of English-language political philosophy from the late 1960s onwards. His philosophy, presented in A Theory of Justice (1972), draws its inspiration in large part… Read More ›
Karl Popper and the Philosophy of Science
Prior to Karl Popper (1902-1994), the philosophers of science had generally sought to explain how scientific theories could be proven to be true. Popper, building upon the doubts expressed in the eighteenth century by David Hume, rejected the possibility of… Read More ›
Key Theories of Michael Oakeshott
British philosopher and political theorist. Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) read for a history degree at Cambridge, but while doing so took courses in philosophy and political theory. In the 1920s he visited Germany, where he attended lectures in theology at Marburg… Read More ›
Key Concepts of John Stuart Mill
English philosopher, social critic, political economist, civil servant and liberal. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was educated by his father. As Mill notes in his Autobiography, the latter handled his son’s education by introducing him to a wide range of very… Read More ›
Key Theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
French philosopher and psychologist, who developed an approach to phenomenology that centred upon the embodied nature of human existence, Merleau-Ponty’s (1907-1961) work encompasses psychology (1963) and the attempt to articulate a humanist Marxism (1964a, 1973a) as well as the philosophies… Read More ›
Key Theories of Georg Lukacs
The Hungarian philosopher and literary critic Gyorgy (or Georg) Lukacs (1885-1971) had a major influence on the development of Western Marxism (that is to say, the largely Hegelian Marxism developed in Western Europe), while also being the most sophisticated literary… Read More ›
The Sociology of Emile Durkheim
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) French sociologist, regarded as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology. His early work developed a theory of society as a transcendent reality that constrained individuals, and proposed the methodology necessary to study that reality. His work… Read More ›
Cornelius Castoriadis: An Introduction
Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) was an Economist, Psychoanalyst, Philosopher and social thinker, a founding and leading member of the French revolutionary journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, and author of numerous books and articles. In his The Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis (1987)… Read More ›
Ernst Bloch and Utopian Marxist Philosophy
German Marxist philosopher, whose interest in Utopian thought has perhaps had as much, if not more, influence on theology (Moltmann 1967) than on philosophy or cultural theory. It is perhaps only a slight exaggeration to suggest that Ernst Bloch’s (1885-1977)… Read More ›
Key Theories of Friedrich Nietzsche
German philosopher whose work has exerted an important influence upon a wide range of philosophical, literary, cultural and political movements in the twentieth century. Nietzsche (1844-1900) was born near the city of Leipzig, attended the famous Pforta School and subsequently… Read More ›
Key Concepts of Georges Bataille
French philosopher, novelist, poet and essayist. Georges Bataille‘s (1897-1962) work is antisystematic and hence defies summary, but a number of important themes predominate within it. These themes include an obsessive concern with the erotic, myth, sacrifice, the nature of excess,… Read More ›
The Philosophical Concept of Rhizome
Rhizome comes from the Greek rhizoma . Rhizome is often taken as being synonymous with “root”; in botany, a rhizome is a plant structure that grows underground and has both roots (commonly, the part that grows down into the ground)… Read More ›
Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy, Photography and Film
Emmanuel Levinas is among the least obvious of twentieth-century philosophers to feature in a volume devoted to philosophy of film. From a philosophical grounding in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger that remained an important influence throughout his career,… Read More ›
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenological Approach to Films
Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote only one essay on film, yet his phenomenological approach informs problems of perception central to film. Taken up by some theorists as a welcome counterbalance to Marxist and psychoanalytic theories that tend to consider the film as… Read More ›
Key Theories of Paul Ricoeur
Two different traditions in the study of language and philosophy come together magisterially in Paul Ricoeur’s (1913–2005) study The Rule of Metaphor (1975; trans. 1977), with Anglo-American and ‘French’ approaches thereby brought into dialogue. While there is much talk of transdisciplinary… Read More ›
Key Theories of Michel Foucault
Over three decades after his death, Michel Foucault’s (1920–1984) legacy continues to impact upon the humanities. Key phrases and concepts drawn from Foucault’s historical work now form part of the everyday language of criticism and analysis. Foucault’s texts continue to resonate… Read More ›
Luce Irigaray and Psychoanalytic Feminism
In her works like Speculum of the Other Woman (translated 1985) and This Sex Which is Not One (1987), Luce Irigaray has argued that the woman has been constructed as the specular Other of man in all Western discourses. Combining Psychoanalysis,… Read More ›
The Political Theory of Carole Pateman
Carole Pateman‘s work has been in the realm of political theory. Pateman argues that for political theory to become more democratic it must develop a truly general theory of the political. This must necessarily avoid the trap of disqualifying certain… Read More ›
Foucault’s Influence on New Historicism
The anti-establishment ethos of New Historicism wasprofoundly influenced by Foucault‘s theories of Power/Knowledge and Discourse. Foucault observed that the discourse of an era brings into being concepts, oppositions and hierarchies, which are products and propagators of power, and these determine… Read More ›
Edward Said’s Orientalism
One of the prominent books of the Postmodern era, on par with Darwin‘s On the Origin of Species, Marx‘ Das Capital and Freud‘s Interpretation of Dreams, Edward Said‘s Orientalism (1978) inaugurated postcolonial theory. Appearing at the same time as the… Read More ›
Historiographic Metafiction
A term originally coined by Linda Hutcheon, in A Poetics of Postmodernism, historiographic metafiction includes those postmodern works, usually popular novels, which are “both intensely self-reflexive and paradoxically lay claim to historical events and personages”. This is categorically a postmodern… Read More ›
Historiography
The postmodern idea of history repudiates the humanist notion that it corresponds faithfully to reality and asserts that it is textual and mediated in order to validate power centres. Thus, while “history” deals with the past, “historiography” deals with the… Read More ›
Bakhtin’s Impact on Postmodern Sensibility
Although active in the debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language,… Read More ›
Foucault’s Concept of Power
Although the interrogation of power on a wider scale is implicit in Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism- the belief that language provides access to truth — the interest in power and its workings that dominates the poststructuraiist criticism of the 1980s… Read More ›
Foucault’s Influence on Postmodern Thought
Michel Foucault, best known for his critical studies of social institutions, such as psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison systems as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality, has been tremendously influential on… Read More ›
Existentialist Movement in Literature
Existentialism is a term applied to the work of a number of philosophers since the 19th century who, despite large differences in their positions, generally focused on the condition of human existence, and an individual’s emotions, actions, responsibilities, and thoughts,… Read More ›