Postcolonialism

By Quayson, Ato

The term ‘postcolonialism’ is sometimes spelled with a hyphen – post-colonial – and sometimes without. There is no strict general practice, but the hyphenated version is often used ...

Postcolonial philosophy of science

By Harding, Sandra G.

Are there laws of nature that today’s modern sciences are ill-designed to discover? Does the universal use of these modern sciences require their value-neutrality, or are their social ...

Political philosophy, Indian

By Inayatullah, Sohail

While Western political theory has been framed as the struggle between the state and the individual, Indian political philosophy has been more concerned with issues of self-liberation, morality ...

South Africa, philosophy in

By Duvenage, Pieter

Although it is incorrect to refer to an independent South African philosophical tradition, South Africa is nevertheless the location of an interesting history of philosophical institutionalization. This institutionalization ...

African philosophy

By Appiah, K. Anthony

In order to indicate the range of some of the kinds of material that must be included in a discussion of philosophy in Africa, it is as well ...

Ethical systems, African

By Appiah, K. Anthony

Ethical thought in sub-Saharan Africa grows largely out of traditions that are communalistic, not based in individual consent, anti-universalizing, naturalistic, and humanist. Within such thought, the general vocabulary ...

African feminism

By Chioma Steady, Filomina

The distinctiveness of African feminism lies in its social and humanistic thrust, which recognizes that unequal power relations can be based not only on gender, but also on ...

Ethnophilosophy, African

By Karp, Ivan; Masolo, D.A.

Ethnophilosophy refers to bodies of belief and knowledge that have philosophical relevance and which can be redescribed in terms drawn from academic philosophy, but which have not been ...

Tragedy

Article Summary ...

Political philosophy

By Miller, David

Political philosophy can be defined as philosophical reflection on how best to arrange our collective life - our political institutions and our social practices, such as our economic ...

Address and the politics of aesthetics

By Roelofs, Monique

Major accounts of the aesthetic field and its relation to politics employ the notion of address in an implicit or explicit manner. This essay explores the central functions ...

African philosophy, Francophone

By Irele, F. Abiola

The imaginative and intellectual writings that have come out of French-speaking Africa have tended to be associated exclusively with the négritude movement and its global postulation of ...

Modernism

By Ross, Stephen

The term modernism denotes an explosion of aesthetic innovation in Europe, Britain, Ireland and America from roughly 1880 to 1950. It embraces a hugely diverse group of works ...

Science and values

The relationship between science and values is a complex one, with values having the potential to influence science either positively or negatively (see Values). On the positive side, ...

Social epistemology

By Schmitt, Frederick F.

Social epistemology is the conceptual and normative study of the relevance to knowledge of social relations, interests and institutions. It is thus to be distinguished from the sociology ...

Feminist literary criticism

By Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty

Feminist literary criticism looks at literature assuming its production from a male-dominated perspective. It re-examines canonical works to show how gender stereotypes are involved in their functioning. It ...

Liberation philosophy

By Cerutti-Guldberg, Horacio

Philosophy of liberation emerged in Argentina early in the 1970s with the explicit intention of proposing a liberating alternative to the diagnosis of structural dependence offered by the ...

African traditional religions

By Appiah, K. Anthony

Religion has been at the centre of recent philosophical debate in Africa for two major reasons. The first is that the answers to many central canonical philosophical questions ...

Feminist epistemology

By Code, Lorraine

The impact of feminism on epistemology has been to move the question ‘Whose knowledge are we talking about?’ to a central place in epistemological inquiry. Hence feminist epistemologists ...

Zoroastrianism

By Williams, Alan

Zarathushtra, better known to the Classical and modern world in the Greek form of his name ‘Zoroaster’, revealed his vision of truth, wisdom and justice in the verse ...

Science, philosophy of

By Worrall, John

Science grew out of philosophy; and, even after recognizable, if flexible, interdisciplinary boundaries developed, the most fruitful philosophical investigations have often been made in close connection with science ...

Gender and science

By Harding, Sandra G.

Gender-based analyses of philosophies of science have arisen at the conjunction of two other movements. First, in the 1960s it became increasingly the accepted position that scientific claims ...

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 ...

The Kyoto School

The Kyoto School is a group of modern Japanese philosophers whose original thinking derives from bringing East Asian traditions – especially Zen and Pure Land Buddhism – into ...

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 ...