Humour

By Levinson, Jerrold

What is meant by saying that something is humorous or funny? It is clear that humorousness must be elucidated in terms of the characteristic response to humour, namely ...

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 ...

Comedy

By Morreall, John

In the narrowest sense, comedy is drama that makes us laugh and has a happy ending. In a wider sense it is also humorous narrative literature with a ...

Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) (1493–1541)

By Ashworth, E.J.

Paracelsus (pseudonym of Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) was an itinerant Swiss surgeon and physician who formulated a new philosophy of medicine based on a combination of chemistry, Neoplatonism ...

Comedy

In the narrowest sense, comedy is drama that makes us laugh and has a happy ending. In a wider sense it is also humorous narrative literature with a ...

Galen (AD 129–c.210)

By Hankinson, R.J.

Galen was the most influential doctor of late Greco-Roman antiquity. But he was also a notable philosopher, who desired to effect a synthesis of what was best in ...

Freud and psychoanalytic aesthetics

By Clack, Brian R.

The contributions to aesthetics made by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and by other practitioners of psychoanalysis, focus principally on the origin and the function of the work of art. ...

Realism and antirealism

By Craig, Edward

The basic idea of realism is that the kinds of thing which exist, and what they are like, are independent of us and the way in which we ...

Ibn Tzaddik, Joseph ben Jacob (d. 1149)

By Rudavsky, Tamar

Joseph ibn Tzaddik was a thinker firmly within the Neoplatonic tradition of Jewish philosophy. He argued that through knowledge of our own body we understand the natural world, ...

Pyrrhonism

By Hankinson, R.J.

Pyrrhonism was the name given by the Greeks to one particular brand of scepticism, that identified (albeit tenuously) with Pyrrho of Elis, who was said (by his disciple ...

Rabelais, François (c.1483–1553)

By Duval, Edwin M.

Rabelais, a French humanist and comic writer of the Renaissance, is best known for his chronicles of Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which coarse popular humour, fine Lucianic irony ...

Vives, Juan Luis (1493–1540)

By Guerlac, Rita

Vives, Spanish humanist and educational reformer, was an eclectic but independent thinker, blending Aristotelianism and Stoicism with Christianity. He wrote on philosophy and psychology, religion and social concerns, ...

Aesthetics

By Budd, Malcolm

Aesthetics owes its name to Alexander Baumgarten who derived it from the Greek aisthanomai, which means perception by means of the senses (see Baumgarten, A.G.). As the ...

Ibn Gabirol, Solomon (1021/2–57/8)

By Frank, Daniel H.

Ibn Gabirol was an outstanding exemplar of the Judaeo–Arabic symbiosis of medieval Muslim Spain, a poet as well as the author of prose works in both Hebrew and ...

Pan-Slavism

By Riasanovsky, Nicholas V.

In B.H. Sumner’s words: ’Since Pan-Slavism was in general not so much an organized policy, or even a creed, but rather an attitude of mind and feeling, it ...

Schiller, Ferdinand Canning Scott (1864–1937)

By Abel, Reuben

F.C.S. Schiller was the outstanding exponent of pragmatism in Britain. His views, which he referred to at various times as humanism, voluntarism and personalism, as well as pragmatism, ...

Malebranche, Nicolas (1638–1715)

Nicolas Malebranche, a French Catholic theologian, was the most important Cartesian philosopher of the second half of the seventeenth century. His philosophical system was a grand synthesis of ...

Aesthetics and the philosophy of language

By Green, Mitchell

Article Summary ...

Chinese philosophy

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

Any attempt to survey an intellectual tradition which encompasses more than four thousand years would be a daunting task even if it could be presumed that the reader ...

Collins, Anthony (1676–1729)

By Winkler, Kenneth P.

Anthony Collins was an English freethinker, best-known to philosophers for his reconciliation of liberty and necessity, and his criticisms of Samuel Clarke’s arguments for the immateriality and immortality ...

Erotic art

By Levinson, Jerrold

Erotic art is art with a sexual content, which may be more or less overt. The presence of sexual content, however, is not sufficient for a work of ...

Hippocratic medicine

By Hankinson, R.J.

The Hippocratic corpus is a disparate group of texts relating primarily to medical matters composed between c.450 and c.250 bc and dealing with physiology, therapy, ...

Jewish philosophy

By Goodman, L.E.

Jewish philosophy is philosophical inquiry informed by the texts, traditions and experiences of the Jewish people. Its concerns range from the farthest reaches of cosmological speculation to the ...

Language and gender

By McConnell-Ginet, Sally

How do language and gender interact? This can be interpreted as asking about sexual difference in relation to language-use. How do the sexes speak, how do we speak ...

Daoist philosophy

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

Early Daoist philosophy has had an incalculable influence on the development of Chinese philosophy and culture. Philosophical Daoism is often called ‘Lao–Zhuang’ philosophy, referring directly to the two ...