Human nature

By Shapiro, Ian

Every political philosophy takes for granted a view of human nature, and every view of human nature is controversial. Political philosophers have responded to this conundrum in a ...

Human nature, science of, in the 18th century

By Berry, Christopher J.

Eighteenth-century speculation on human nature is distinguishable by its approach and underlying assumptions. Taking their cue from Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, many philosophers of the Enlightenment endeavoured ...

Buddhist philosophy, Indian

By Hayes, Richard P.

Buddhism was an important ingredient in the philosophical melange of the Indian subcontinent for over a millennium. From an inconspicuous beginning a few centuries before Christ, Buddhist scholasticism ...

Political philosophy

By Miller, David

Political philosophy can be defined as philosophical reflection on how best to arrange our collective life - our political institutions and our social practices, such as our economic ...

Scottish philosophy

By Harris, James

The place to begin is the article on Enlightenment, Scottish. It alerts you to the fact that there was rather more to Scottish philosophy in the eighteenth century ...

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64)

By Hopkins, Jasper

Also called Nicolaus Cusanus, this German cardinal takes his distinguishing name from the city of his birth, Kues (or Cusa, in Latin), on the Moselle river between Koblenz ...

Political philosophy, nature of

By Plant, Raymond

Political philosophy developed as a central aspect of philosophy generally in the world of ancient Greece, and the writings of Plato and Aristotle made a basic and still ...

Buddhist philosophy, Chinese

By Lusthaus, Dan

When Buddhism first entered China from India and Central Asia two thousand years ago, Chinese favourably disposed towards it tended to view it as a part or companion ...

Legalist philosophy, Chinese

By Chang, Leo S.

Legalist philosophy constitutes one of the three dominant streams of Chinese philosophy along with Confucian and Daoist philosophies. It aims to establish objective, impartial and impersonal standards for ...

La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de (1709–51)

By Wellman, Kathleen

La Mettrie is best known as the author of the eighteenth-century materialist manifesto, L’Homme machine (1747). His interest in philosophical issues grew out of his preoccupation with medicine, ...

Perfectionism

By Hurka, Thomas

Perfectionism is a moral theory according to which certain states or activities of human beings, such as knowledge, achievement and artistic creation, are good apart from any pleasure ...

Xing

By Hall, David L.; Ames, Roger T.

Xing is conventionally translated as ‘nature’ or ‘human nature’. Some read xing as meaning a heavenly endowed tendency, directionality, or potentiality of growth in the individual. On ...

Perfectionism

In philosophy, unlike in everyday English, ‘perfectionism’ does not refer to a concern to get every detail right. It is the name of an ethical theory with deep ...

Moralistes

By MacLean, Ian

The moralistes constitute a tradition of secular French writing about human nature and political and social behaviour principally in the context of the court and the salon. Their ...

Butler, Joseph (1692–1752)

By Frey, R.G.

Joseph Butler the moral philosopher is in that long line of eighteenth-century thinkers who sought to answer Thomas Hobbes on human nature and moral motivation. Following the Third ...

Ideals

By Rosati, Connie S.

Ideals are models of excellence. They can be moral or nonmoral, and either ‘substantive’ or ‘deliberative’. Substantive ideals present models of excellence against which things in a relevant ...

Well-being

An individual’s well-being – or, equivalently, their welfare or quality of life – is the extent to which their life is going well for them. ...

Berlin, Isaiah (1909–97)

By Williams, Bernard

Berlin said that he decided about 1945 to give up philosophy, in which he had worked up to that time, in favour of the history of ideas. Some ...

Pragmatism in ethics

By Tiles, J.E.

Two components of the pragmatist outlook shape its ethical philosophy. It rejects certainty as a legitimate intellectual goal; this generates a nondogmatic attitude to moral precepts and principles. ...

Hutcheson, Francis (1694–1746)

By Norton, David Fate

Francis Hutcheson is best known for his contributions to moral theory, but he also contributed to the development of aesthetics. Although his philosophy owes much to John Locke’s ...

Yangzhu (5th–4th century BC)

By Roth, H.D.

Yangzhu, detested by the Confucians, is important in the Chinese tradition for initiating the explicit discussion of human nature. He focuses on the thesis that human nature has ...

Mandeville, Bernard (1670–1733)

By Goldsmith, M.M.

Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714) scandalized contemporaries by arguing that the flourishing commercial society they valued depended on vices they denounced. It resulted not only from ...

Hutcheson, Francis (1694–1746)

By Maurer, Christian

Francis Hutcheson was an Irish–Scottish moral philosopher. He is best known for his epistemological claim that a disinterested moral sense is the source of our ideas of moral ...

Cambridge Platonism

By Beiser, Frederick

Cambridge Platonism was an intellectual movement broadly inspired by the Platonic tradition, centred in Cambridge from the 1630s to the 1680s. Its hallmark was a devotion to reason ...

Philo of Alexandria (c.15 BC–c. AD 50)

By Runia, David T.

Philo of Alexandria is the leading representative of Hellenistic-Jewish thought. Despite an unwavering loyalty to the religious and cultural traditions of his Jewish community, he was also strongly ...