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 ›
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 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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 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 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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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