Pneuma

By Stead, Christopher

Pneuma, ‘spirit’, derives from the Greek verb pneo, which indicates blowing or breathing. Since breathing is necessary for life and consciousness, pneuma came to denote not ...

Strato (d. c.269 BC)

By Sharples, R.W.

The third head of Aristotle’s school, from c.287 to c.269 bc, Strato has been regarded as substituting materialism for Aristotelian metaphysics, mechanism for teleology, atheism ...

Stoicism

By Sedley, David

Stoicism is the Greek philosophical system founded by Zeno of Citium c.300 bc and developed by him and his successors into the most influential philosophy of ...

Stoicism

Stoicism is the Greek philosophical system founded by Zeno of Citium c.300 bc and developed by him and his successors into the most influential philosophy of ...

Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–80)

By Inwood, Brad

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Emperor of Rome, was the author of a book of philosophical reflections written in Greek and known as the Meditations. These reflections are based primarily ...

Qi

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

A difficult term to contextualize within Western conceptual frameworks, qi is variously rendered as ‘hylozoistic vapours’, ‘psychophysical stuff’, ‘the activating fluids in the atmosphere and body’, and, ...

Hellenistic medical epistemology

By Hankinson, R.J.

During the Hellenistic period (323–31 bc), there arose, largely in Alexandria, a profound debate in medical methodology. The main participants were the Empiricists, committed to an anti-theoretical, ...

Boyle, Robert (1627–91)

By Sargent, Rose-Mary

Boyle is often remembered for the contributions that he made to the sciences of chemistry and pneumatics. Like other natural philosophers in seventeenth-century England, however, he was a ...

Logos

By Stead, Christopher

The noun logos derives from the Greek verb legein, meaning ‘to say’ something significant. Logos developed a wide variety of senses, including ‘description’, ‘theory’ (sometimes ...

Psychē

By Long, A.A.

Conventionally translated ‘soul’, psychē is the standard word in classical Greek for the centre of an animal’s, and especially a human being’s, ‘life’. In its earliest usage ...

Beattie, James (1735–1803)

By Wood, Paul

James Beattie was famed as a moralist and poet in the late eighteenth century, and helped to popularize Scottish common-sense philosophy. At Marischal College, Aberdeen, Beattie cultivated a ...

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 ...

Jewish philosophy in the early 19th century

By Seeskin, Kenneth

Although Jewish philosophy flourished in the Middle Ages, it underwent a serious decline in 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain. The period following Kant and Mendelssohn ...

Philo of Alexandria (c.15 BC–c. AD 50)

By Runia, David T.

Philo of Alexandria is the leading representative of Hellenistic-Jewish thought. Despite an unwavering loyalty to the religious and cultural traditions of his Jewish community, he was also strongly ...

Ancient philosophy

By Sedley, David

The philosophy of the Greco-Roman world from the sixth century bc to the sixth century ad laid the foundations for all subsequent Western philosophy. Its greatest ...

Wolff, Christian (1679–1754)

By Corr, Charles A.

Christian Wolff was a rationalistic school philosopher in the German Enlightenment. During the period between the death of Leibniz (1714) and the publication of Kant’s critical writings (1780s), ...

Priestley, Joseph (1733–1804)

By Schofield, Robert E.

A major figure of the British Enlightenment, Joseph Priestley is best known as a scientist and for his discovery of oxygen, though he was by profession a theologian, ...

Alchemy

By Pereira, Michela

Alchemy is the quest for an agent of material perfection, produced through a creative activity (opus), in which humans and nature collaborate. It exists in many cultures (China, ...

Crusius, Christian August (1715–75)

By Seidler, Michael J.

Crusius was a pivotal figure in the middle period of the German Enlightenment, linking Pufendorf and Thomasius with Kant. Though sometimes wrongly characterized (for example, by Hegel) as ...

Slavophilism

By Walicki, Andrzej

In the Slav countries outside Russia the term ’Slavophilism’ is a generic name for all advocates of the ’Slav idea’, irrespective of their philosophical views and political commitments. ...

Diogenes of Apollonia (5th century BC)

By Schofield, Malcolm

Diogenes was the last of the early Greek physicists. He claimed that interactions between things would be impossible unless all were forms of one basic substance. Adapting ideas ...

Cleanthes (331–232 BC)

By Sedley, David

The Greek philosopher Cleanthes of Assos played a leading role in the formation of Stoicism. He was at once the most physicalist and the most religious of the ...

Locke, John (1632–1704)

John Locke was the leading English philosopher of the late seventeenth century. His two major works, An Essay concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of ...

Hutcheson, Francis (1694–1746)

By Maurer, Christian

Francis Hutcheson was an Irish–Scottish moral philosopher. He is best known for his epistemological claim that a disinterested moral sense is the source of our ideas of moral ...

Amo, Anton Wilhelm (c.1703–56)

By Wright, John S.

The first European-trained African philosopher, Amo pursued a scholarly career in jurisprudence and then in rationalist psychology, logic, and metaphysics. He trained at Halle, Wittenberg and Jena universities, ...