Mind and body in early modern philosophy

By Duncan, Stewart

European philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proposed a wide range of views about the nature of the mind and its relation to the body. ...

Japanese philosophy

By Kasulis, Thomas P.

The most distinctive characteristic of Japanese philosophy is how it has assimilated and adapted foreign philosophies to its native worldview. As an isolated island nation, Japan successfully resisted ...

Sport, philosophy of

By Hyland, Drew A.

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 ...

Foucher, Simon (1644–96)

By Nadler, Steven

Simon Foucher, Canon of Dijon, was a sceptical thinker, active in intellectual circles in Paris. His main philosophical project was the revival of Academic scepticism, and he emerged ...

Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803)

By Beiser, Frederick

Herder was a central figure in the German intellectual renaissance of the late eighteenth century. His achievement spanned virtually every domain of philosophy, and his influence, especially upon ...

Occasionalism

By Hasker, William

Occasionalism is often thought of primarily as a rather desperate solution to the problem of mind–body interaction. Mind and body, it maintains, do not in fact causally affect ...

Descartes, René (1596–1650)

By Garber, Daniel

René Descartes, often called the father of modern philosophy, attempted to break with the philosophical traditions of his day and start philosophy anew. Rejecting the Aristotelian philosophy of ...

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716)

By Garber, Daniel

Leibniz was one of the central figures of seventeenth-century philosophy, indeed, one of the central intellectual figures of his age. Born and educated in Germany, he travelled to ...

Occasionalism

By Schmaltz, Tad

Occasionalism was a theory of causation that played an important role in early modern metaphysics. In its most radical form, this theory holds that God is the only ...

Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859–1941)

By Lacey, A.R.

So far as he can be classified, Bergson would be called a ‘process philosopher’, emphasizing the primacy of process and change rather than of the conventional solid objects ...

Broad, Charlie Dunbar (1887–1971)

By Smith, Peter

A Cambridge contemporary of Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, C.D. Broad wrote on an exceptional range of topics, including causation, perception, the philosophy of space and time, probability and ...

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 ...

Nirvāṇa

By Cousins, L.S.

The aim of the spiritual life was already described as nirvāṇa before the rise of Buddhism around the fifth century bc, but it is in the ...

Cudworth, Ralph (1617–88)

By Hutton, Sarah

Ralph Cudworth was the leading philosopher of the group known as the Cambridge Platonists. In his lifetime he published only one work of philosophy, his True Intellectual System ...

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908–61)

By Baldwin, Thomas

Merleau-Ponty belongs to the group of French philosophers who transformed French philosophy in the early post-war period by introducing the phenomenological methods of the German philosophers Husserl and ...

Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich (1759–1805)

By Reed, T.J.

Schiller was an artist first – a major poet and the leading dramatist of eighteenth-century Germany – and an aesthetician second. At the height of his involvement in ...

La Forge, Louis de (1632–66)

By Nadler, Steven

Louis de la Forge, a medical doctor by profession, was an important champion of Cartesian philosophy in mid-seventeenth century France. Through his work on the first published edition ...

Putnam, Hilary (1926–2016)

Putnam’s work spans a broad spectrum of philosophical interests, yet nonetheless reflects thematic unity in its concern over the question of realism. The dynamic nature of Putnam's thought ...

Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret (1919–2001)

G.E.M. Anscombe (1919–2001) is recognized as one of the most brilliant philosophers of the twentieth century. She is also well known as the translator and editor of Wittgenstein’s ...

Theravāda Buddhist philosophy

The Theravāda Buddhist tradition understands itself as preserving the teachings of the historical Buddha. All of these teachings are said to fit within the four noble truths: the ...

Clauberg, Johannes (1622–65)

By Garber, Daniel

Johannes Clauberg was a member of the Cartesian school in the years immediately following Descartes’ death, and is extremely important as an early expositor of Descartes and a ...

Spinoza, Benedict de (1632–77)

By Allison, Henry E.

A Dutch philosopher of Jewish origin, Spinoza was born Baruch de Spinoza in Amsterdam. Initially given a traditional Talmudic education, he was encouraged by some of his teachers ...

Huet, Pierre-Daniel (1630–1721)

By Floridi, Luciano

Huet was a French Catholic bishop who wrote important works in theology, philology and literary criticism. In philosophy, he defended an apologetic interpretation of scepticism and opposed Cartesianism, ...

Davidson, Donald (1917–2003)

Donald Davidson is a central figure in twentieth-century American philosophy. Of the five volumes that make up Davidson’s collected essays, the best known are the first two, ...

Psychology, theories of

By Wetherick, N.E.

The object of study in psychology is the experience and behaviour of organisms, particularly human organisms. Psychology resembles the other sciences in employing methods appropriate to material phenomena ...