Illumination

By MacDonald, Scott

The most influential theories of illumination explain certain features of our knowledge by developing an analogy with ordinary sensory vision and the role played in it by light. ...

Illuminati

By Jacob, Margaret C.

Begun in 1776 in Bavaria, the Illuminati were an overtly political as well as morally orientated secret organization that imitated the forms of freemasonry. While masonic lodges forbade ...

Illuminationist philosophy

By Ziai, Hossein; Leaman, Oliver

Illuminationist philosophy started in twelfth-century Persia, and has been an important force in Islamic, especially Persian, philosophy right up to the present day. It presents a critique of ...

Twentieth-century philosophy

By Livingston, Paul M.

Although it is difficult to generalize, twentieth-century philosophy has a number of broadly characteristic and widely shared concerns. These include the ambition to clarify the nature and foundations ...

Mystical philosophy in Islam

By Nasr, Seyyed Hossein

Mystical philosophy has an intimate connection with the mainstream of Islamic philosophy. It consists of several main strands, ranging from Isma‘ili thought to the metaphysics of al-Ghazali and ...

Chinul (1158–1210)

By Buswell, Robert E.

Chinul was the founder of the Korean Chogye school of Buddhism. He sought to reconcile the bifurcation between Kyo (doctrinal) thought and Sôn (Zen) practice that rent the ...

Bonaventure (c.1217–74)

By Kent, Bonnie

Bonaventure (John of Fidanza) developed a synthesis of philosophy and theology in which Neoplatonic doctrines are transformed by a Christian framework. Though often remembered for his denunciations of ...

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 ...

al-Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din Yahya (1154–91)

By Cooper, John

Al-Suhrawardi, whose life spanned a period of less than forty years in the middle of the twelfth century ad, produced a series of highly assured works which ...

Henry of Ghent (early 13th century–1293)

By Marrone, Steven P.

Perhaps the most influential theologian between Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure in the third quarter of the thirteenth century and John Duns Scotus at the beginning of the fourteenth ...

Vision

Why do things look to us as they do? This question, formulated by psychologist Kurt Koffka, identifies the main problematic of vision science. Consider looking at a black ...

Islamic philosophy

By Leaman, Oliver

Islamic philosophy may be defined in a number of different ways, but the perspective taken here is that it represents the style of philosophy produced within the framework ...

Monism, Indian

By Phillips, Stephen H.

The prominent classical and modern Indian philosophy known as Advaita Vedānta, which insists on the single reality of Brahman (the Absolute), is often identified as Indian monism. But ...

Colour and qualia

By Levine, Joseph

There are two basic philosophical problems about colour. The first concerns the nature of colour itself. That is, what sort of property is it? When I say of ...

Patrizi da Cherso, Francesco (1529–97)

By Ashworth, E.J.

Francesco Patrizi was an Italian humanist and anti-Aristotelian who took up a newly-founded chair of Platonic philosophy at Ferrara in 1578, the first such chair in Europe. Through ...

Representation, political

By Reeve, Andrew

Political representation – the designation of a small group of politically active citizens to serve as representatives of the political community as a whole – is a central ...

Depiction

By Hopkins, Robert

How do pictures work? How are they able to represent what they do? A picture of a goat, for example, is a flat surface covered with marks, yet ...

Ibn Kammuna (d. 1284)

By Langermann, Y. Tzvi

Physician and man of letters, Ibn Kammuna left a number of writings on philosophy and religion. His treatise comparing Judaism, Christianity and Islam caused major rioting in Baghdad, ...

Colour and qualia

There are two basic philosophical problems about colour. The first concerns the nature of colour itself. That is, what sort of property is it? When I say of ...

Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi al-Din (1164–1240)

By Robinson, Neal

Ibn al-‘Arabi was a mystic who drew on the writings of Sufis, Islamic theologians and philosophers in order to elaborate a complex theosophical system akin to that of ...

Propositional attitudes

By Oppy, Graham

Examples of propositional attitudes include the belief that snow is white, the hope that Mt Rosea is twelve miles high, the desire that there should be snow at ...

Semantic paradoxes and theories of truth

By McGee, Vann

The Cretan philosopher Epimenides said that Cretans always lie. Assuming, for the sake of argument, the mendacity of all other statements by Cretans, we get a paradox: if ...

Attention

By Mole, Christopher

Attention is related to several puzzling phenomena. But its nature, and role in their explanation, is contentious. ...

Il’in, Ivan Aleksandrovich (1883–1954)

By Grier, Philip T.

Educated in law and philosophy in the first years of the twentieth century at Moscow University and several Western European universities, Il’in produced an important two-volume commentary on ...

Aesthetics and the philosophy of language

By Green, Mitchell

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