Panpsychism

By Sprigge, T.L.S.

Panpsychism is the thesis that physical nature is composed of individuals each of which is to some degree sentient. It is somewhat akin to hylozoism, but in place ...

Panpsychism

By Goff, Philip

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the natural world. In a standard form of the view, the fundamental constituents of the ...

Idealism

By Sprigge, T.L.S.

Idealism is now usually understood in philosophy as the view that mind is the most basic reality and that the physical world exists only as an appearance to ...

Fechner, Gustav Theodor (1801–87)

By Robinson, Daniel N.

Fechner was a pioneer in experimental psychology and the founder of psychophysics, the speciality within psychology devoted to quantitative studies of perception. In his foundational Elemente der Psychophysik ...

Cavendish, Margaret Lucas (1623–73)

By O'Neill, Eileen

The only seventeenth-century woman to publish numerous books on natural philosophy, Cavendish presented her materialism in a wide range of literary forms. She abandoned her early commitment to ...

Hartshorne, Charles (1897–2000)

By Dombrowski, Daniel

Despite the fact that Hartshorne often criticized the metaphysics of substance found in medieval philosophy, he was like medieval thinkers in developing a philosophy that was theocentric. From ...

Kozlov, Aleksei Aleksandrovich (1831–1901)

By Poole, Randall A.

One of the forerunners of the idealist revival in Russian philosophy at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, Aleksei Kozlov was the founder ...

Nagel, Thomas (1937–)

Thomas Nagel offers a distinctive realist framework across metaphysics, theory of mind, epistemology, and moral theory that shows how fundamental philosophical problems in these areas result from our ...

Askol’dov (Alekseev), Sergei Alekseevich (1870–1945)

By Poole, Randall A.

A prominent philosopher of the Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance, Sergei Askol’dov was Aleksei Kozlov’s son and philosophical disciple. (Askol’dov was a pseudonym; his legal name was Alekseev, i.e., ‘son ...

Romanticism, German

By Beiser, Frederick

Because Romanticism has many meanings which vary according to time and place, it is best to examine the movement in a specific culture and period. Of all the ...

Romanticism, German

Because Romanticism has many meanings which vary according to time and place, it is best to examine the movement in a specific culture and period. Of all the ...

Campanella, Tommaso (1568–1639)

By Headley, John M.

Tommaso Campanella was a Counter-Reformation theologian, a Renaissance magus, a prophet, a poet and an astrologer, as well as a philosopher whose speculations assumed encyclopedic proportions. As a ...

Burthogge, Richard (c.1638–c.1704)

By Ayers, Michael

Richard Burthogge, perhaps the first but certainly not the least interesting modern idealist, was a minor philosopher who responded to a variety of English and Dutch influences. His ...

Self-cultivation in Chinese philosophy

By Wei-Ming, Tu

Chinese philosophy may be viewed as disciplined reflections on the insights of self-cultivation. Etienne Balazs asserted that all Chinese philosophy is social philosophy and that, even if Chinese ...

Process philosophy

By Griffin, David Ray

In the broad sense, the term ‘process philosophy’ refers to all worldviews holding that process or becoming is more fundamental than unchanging being. For example, an anthology titled ...

Consciousness

By Lormand, Eric

Philosophers have used the term ‘consciousness’ for four main topics: knowledge in general, intentionality, introspection (and the knowledge it specifically generates) and phenomenal experience. This entry discusses the ...

Ravaisson-Mollien, Jean-Gaspard Félix Lacher (1813–1900)

By Sinclair, Mark

Félix Ravaisson (1813–1900) was the most influential French philosopher in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was pivotal in the development of the French spiritualist tradition ...

Metaphysics

By Craig, Edward

Metaphysics is a broad area of philosophy marked out by two types of inquiry. The first aims to be the most general investigation possible into the nature of ...

James, William (1842–1910)

By Putnam, Ruth Anna

The American William James was motivated to philosophize by a desire to provide a philosophical ground for moral action. Moral effort presupposes that one has free will, that ...

Lossky, Nicholas Onufrievich (1870–1965)

By Scanlan, James P.

In 1922, the Russian neo-Leibnizian idealist Nicholas Onufrievich Lossky, one of his country’s most distinguished professional philosophers, was banished from Russia along with more than a hundred other ...

Thales (fl. c.585 BC)

By McKirahan, Richard

Known as the first Greek philosopher, Thales initiated a way of understanding the world that was based on reason and nature rather than tradition and mythology. He held ...

Absolute, the

By Sprigge, T.L.S.

The expression ‘the Absolute’ stands for that (supposed) unconditioned reality which is either the spiritual ground of all being or the whole of things considered as a spiritual ...

Telesio, Bernardino (1509–88)

By Kessler, Eckhard

Bernardino Telesio was a philosopher from southern Italy. He was one of the Renaissance philosophers who developed a new philosophy of nature: his most important book was called ...

Consciousness, Higher-Order Theories of

By Brown, Richard

Higher-order theories are theories of phenomenal consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is the property of there being something that it is like for one to have an experience. Something that ...

Knowledge argument

By Alter, Torin

The knowledge argument is an argument against physicalism, the view that the world is wholly physical. It was developed by Frank Jackson (1943–) and is based on the ...