History, philosophy of

By Graham, Gordon

Philosophy of history is the application of philosophical conceptions and analysis to history in both senses, the study of the past and the past itself. Like most branches ...

Mexico, philosophy in

By Cerutti-Guldberg, Horacio

Philosophy has been practised in Mexico for centuries, beginning with Nahuatl thought. Such thinking was rediscovered through laborious translation of surviving fragments of a document of exceptional value ...

Augustine (AD 354–430)

By Matthews, Gareth B.

Augustine was the first of the great Christian philosophers. For well over eight centuries following his death, in fact until the ascendancy of Thomas Aquinas at the end ...

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is one of the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth century. His thought had a profound impact on later philosophers, social theorists and theologians, ...

The Bildung tradition

By Herdt, Jennifer A.

Bildung was a central concept in the ethical and aesthetic thought of many late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century German thinkers associated with Weimar classicism, romanticism, and idealism, notably Johann ...

Collingwood, Robin George (1889–1943)

By Blackburn, Simon

Collingwood was the greatest British philosopher of history of the twentieth century. His experience as a practising historian of Roman Britain led him to believe that the besetting ...

Theology, Rabbinic

By Botwinick, Aryeh

The Talmud, a shelf of folio volumes built up out of the expansive reflections of generations of scholar/thinkers whose discourse formed a commentary or complement (Gemara) to the ...

Abravanel, Isaac (1437–1509)

By Leaman, Oliver

Abravanel is often seen as having a unique position in Jewish philosophy, between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. His ideas point ...

Cousin, Victor (1792–1867)

Victor Cousin’s intention was to institute a ‘twofold reform in philosophy’ ([1828] 1991: 349) – namely, a spiritualist reform in psychology and an eclectic reform in the history ...

Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman (1332–1406)

By Issawi, Charles; Leaman, Oliver

Ibn Khaldun’s work on the philosophy of history is a landmark of social thought. Many historians – Greek, Roman, Muslim and other – had written valuable historiography, but ...

Russian philosophy of history

By Walicki, Andrzej

In his classic book The Russian Idea Nikolai Berdiaev pointed out that ‘independent Russian thought was awakened by the problem of the philosophy of history’. It was because ...

Krochmal, Nachman (1785–1840)

By Harris, Jay M.

Nachman Krochmal was leader of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah in Galicia, eastern Europe. An astute observer of the German philosophical environment, Krochmal provided one of the first ...

Social sciences, philosophy of

By Ruben, David-Hillel

Although some of the topics and issues treated in the philosophy of social science are as old as philosophy itself (for example, the contrast between nature and convention ...

Cieszkowski, August von (1814–94)

By Stepelevich, Lawrence S.

Cieszkowski is perhaps best known for being the first to revise Hegel’s philosophy of history into a basis for future social reform. His introduction of the idea of ...

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 ...

Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat (1689–1755)

By Hulliung, Mark

Montesquieu, one of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment, was famous in his own century both in France and in foreign lands, from Russia to the American colonies. ...

Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de (1760–1825)

By Leopold, David

An influential French social theorist, Saint-Simon propounded a philosophy of history and an account of the future organization of industrial society. He predicted a ‘golden age’, where harmony ...

Xunzi (fl. 298–238 BC)

By Cua, A.S.

Xunzi is one of the most brilliant Confucian thinkers of ancient China. His works display wide-ranging interest in such topics as the relation between morality and human nature, ...

Eschatology

By Davis, Stephen T.

Eschatology is the study of or doctrine about the end of history or the last things. Eschatology is a branch of Christian theology, and the term still finds ...

Croce, Benedetto (1866–1952)

By Bellamy, Richard

The leading Italian philosopher of his day, Croce presented his philosophy as a humanist alternative to the consolations of religion. A Hegelian idealist, he argued that all human ...

Narrative

By Currie, Gregory

Narrative, in its broadest sense, is the means by which a story is told, whether fictional or not, and regardless of medium. Novels, plays, films, historical texts, diaries ...

Toynbee, Arnold Joseph (1889–1975)

By Burke, U.P.

Arnold Toynbee’s controversial reputation rests on the multi-volume A Study of History that he published between 1934 and 1961. Rejected by some scholars as overly schematic, this wide-ranging ...

Historicism

By Thornhill, Christopher

Historicism, defined as ‘the affirmation that life and reality are history alone’ by Benedetto Croce (1938: 65), is understood to mean various traditions of historiographical thinking which developed ...

Joachim of Fiore (c.1135–1202)

By Murphy, Sean Eisen

Joachim was a charismatic monastic reformer and inventive scriptural exegete whose study of the Bible led him to propound complex theories of history. Especially interested in the Apocalypse ...

Kojève, Alexandre (1902–68)

By Roth, Michael S.

Alexandre Kojève developed an idiosyncratic and widely influential reading of G.W.F. Hegel in a seminar in Paris from 1933 to 1939. Kojève read Hegel as having discovered that ...