Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900)

By Clark, Maudemarie

Appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel when he was just 24 years old, Nietzsche was expected to secure his reputation as a brilliant young ...

Russian philosophy

By Kelly, Aileen

Russian thought is best approached without fixed preconceptions about the nature and proper boundaries of philosophy. Conditions of extreme political oppression and economic backwardness are not conducive to ...

Asceticism

By Quinn, Philip L.

The term ‘asceticism’ is derived from the Greek word, askēsis, which referred originally to the sort of exercise, practice or training in which athletes engage. Asceticism may ...

Lebensphilosophie

By Gaiger, Jason

In its most general sense Lebensphilosophie denotes a philosophy which asks after the meaning, value and purpose of life, turning away from purely theoretical knowledge towards the ...

Honour

By Roberts, Julian

Honour consists in living up to the expectations of a group – in particular, in keeping faith, observing promises, and telling truth. This restriction to a particular group ...

Fascism

By Eatwell, Roger

‘Fascism’ is a term referring both to a political ideology and to a concrete set of political movements and regimes. Its most prominent examples were the Italian and ...

Callicles (late 5th century BC)

By Hobbs, Angela

Callicles, although known only as a character in Plato’s Gorgias (the dramatic date of which is somewhere between 430 and 405 bc), was probably an actual historical ...

Sorel, Georges (1847–1922)

By Jennings, Jeremy

The French social theorist Georges Sorel is best known for his controversial work Réflexions sur la violence (Reflections on Violence), first published in 1908. He here argued that ...

Pluralism

By Craig, Edward

‘Pluralism’ is a broad term, applicable to any doctrine which maintains that there are ultimately many things, or many kinds of thing; in both these senses it is ...

Dühring, Eugen Karl (1833–1921)

By Small, Robin

Versatile and prolific, Eugen Dühring constructed a metaphysical system uniting naturalism with a priori principles, such as a ‘law of definite number’ which asserts that everything countable must ...

Nishitani Keiji (1900–90)

By Parkes, Graham

Nishitani Keiji is generally regarded as the leading light of the ‘second generation’ Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. Influenced by Zen thinkers from Chinese and Japanese Buddhism ...

Bataille, Georges (1897–1962)

By Maskit, Jonathan

Georges Bataille was born in Billom, France, raised in Reims, and spent much of his adult life in Paris. Never formally trained as a philosopher, he worked from ...

Nancy, Jean-Luc (1940–)

By Fenves, Peter

Jean-Luc Nancy has disclosed significant political and social dimensions to the general project of deconstructing Western philosophy. Existence does not precede essence, according to Nancy; existence is without ...

Trubetskoi, Evgenii Nikolaevich (1863–1920)

By Grier, Philip T.

Prince Evgenii Nikolaevich Trubetskoi was a prominent philosopher of law known also for his works on Solov’ëv, Kant, Nietzsche, ethics and religion (including Russian Orthodox iconography). Personally and ...

Ivanov, Viacheslav Ivanovich (1866–1949)

By Bird, Robert

Viacheslav Ivanov was a leading theoretician of the symbolist literary movement and a prominent figure in the renaissance of religious thought in Russia at the turn of the ...

Cixous, Hélène (1937–)

Hélène Cixous, a prolific, internationally acclaimed French writer born in Algeria and now residing in Paris, works between poetry and continental philosophy. She belongs to a larger community ...

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe (1940–2007)

By Scibilia, Giovanni
Translated by Green, William Finley

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is Professor of Philosophy at the universities of Strasbourg and Berkeley. At the centre of his thought is philosophy’s ostracism of literature, which in his view ...

Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg) (1772–1801)

By Bowie, Andrew

Novalis (the name is a pseudonym adopted for his published writings) was, together with Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the leading philosophical thinker of ‘early German Romanticism’. Until ...

Scheler, Max (1874–1928)

Max Scheler (1874–1928) was an early and greatly influential pioneer in the development of the phenomenological tradition at the outset of the twenty-first century. Examined most extensively in ...