Semiotics

By Watt, W.C.

As the study of signification, semiotics takes as its central task that of describing how one thing can mean another. Alternatively, since this philosophical problem is also a ...

Kristeva, Julia (1941–)

By Chanter, Tina

Born in Bulgaria, Kristeva entered the Parisian scene of avant-garde intellectuals in the 1960s. Her earliest work in linguistics was shaped by the post-Stalinist communism of eastern Europe, ...

Comte, Isidore-Auguste-Marie-François-Xavier (1798–1857)

By Kremer-marietti, Angele
Translated by Pickering, Mary

The French philosopher and social theorist Auguste Comte is known as the originator of sociology and ‘positivism’, a philosophical system by which he aimed to discover and perfect ...

Moscow-Tartu School

By Todd, William Mills

The Moscow-Tartu School of semiotics (theory of signs) was formed when a diverse group of scholars joined informally from the 1950s to 1980s to provide alternatives to the ...

Kristeva, Julia (1941–)

By McAfee, Noëlle

Born in Bulgaria in 1941 and an emigré to Paris in 1965, Julia Kristeva is a world-renowned philosopher, novelist and practising psychoanalyst. Author of more than 30 books ...

Shpet, Gustav Gustavovich (1879–1937)

By Haardt, Alexander

Gustav Shpet was the first Russian philosopher to take up Edmund Husserl’s idea of pure phenomenology as prima philosophia and develop it in several directions. Thus, in ...

Structuralism

By Culler, Jonathan

The term ‘structuralism’ can be applied to any analysis that emphasizes structures and relations, but it usually designates a twentieth-century European (especially French) school of thought that applies ...

Baudrillard, Jean (1929–2007)

By Poster, Mark

Jean Baudrillard taught for most of his career at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris in the Department of Sociology. He began writing as a neo-Marxist ...

John of St Thomas (1589–1644)

By Doyle, John P.

The seventeenth-century Portuguese Dominican, John of St Thomas or John Poinsot, was a major figure in late scholastic philosophy and theology. Educated at Coimbra and Louvain, he taught ...

Tel Quel School

By Heath, Stephen

Tel Quel was a review published in Paris from 1960 to 1982. Under the direction of Philippe Sollers, it became a key source of avant-garde work in literature ...

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895–1975)

By Morson, Gary Saul

Bakhtin is generally regarded as the most influential twentieth-century Russian literary theorist. His writings on literature, language, ethics, authorship, carnival, time and the theory of culture have shaped ...

Language, philosophy of

By Crimmins, Mark

Philosophical interest in language, while ancient and enduring (see Language, ancient philosophy of; Language, medieval theories of; Language, Renaissance philosophy of; Language, early modern philosophy of), has blossomed ...

Film, aesthetics of

By Currie, Gregory

Film aesthetics has been dominated by issues of realism. Three kinds of realism attributable to film may be distinguished: (1) the realism inherent in film because of its ...

Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839–1914)

By Hookway, Christopher

Peirce was an American philosopher, probably best known as the founder of pragmatism and for his influence upon later pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey. Personal ...

Structuralism in social science

By Schatzki, Theodore R.

Any school of thought in the social sciences that stresses the priority of order over action is ‘structural’. In the twentieth century, however, ‘structuralism’ has been used to ...

Native American philosophy

By Whiteley, Peter M.

Native American philosophies are multiple and multiply different, though with some palpable commonalities. Cosmologically, Native American thought posits phased differentiations of form from a primordial void. Form is ...

Russian literary Formalism

By Any, Carol

Russian literary Formalism, an active movement in Russian literary criticism from about 1915 to 1929, approached the literary work as a self-referential, formed artefact rather than as an ...

Kotarbiński, Tadeusz (1886–1981)

By Stanosz, B.

Kotarbiński was one of the founders and main representatives of the Polish philosophical school known as the Lwów–Warsaw School and akin to, though independent of (and less radical ...

Logic in the 17th and 18th centuries

By Capozzi, Mirella

Logic in the seventeenth century was characterized by attempts to reconcile older viewpoints, such as those of Ramus and Melanchthon, and by criticism of the nature and scope ...

Semantics

By Crimmins, Mark

Semantics is the systematic study of meaning. Current work in this field builds on the work of logicians and linguists as well as of philosophers. Philosophers are interested ...

Latour, Bruno (1947–)

By Harman, Graham

Bruno Latour is a French philosopher whose work and influence have been mainly in the social sciences, and he is one of the world’s most cited authors in ...

Deleuze, Gilles (1925–95)

By Olkowski, Dorothea E.

Although grounded in the history of philosophy, Gilles Deleuze’s work does not begin with first principles but grasps the philosophical terrain ‘in the middle’. This method overthrows subject–object ...

Hermeneutics, biblical

By Thiselton, Anthony C.

Hermeneutics has traditionally been defined as the theory of interpretation. Biblical hermeneutics concerns the interpretation of biblical texts. But ‘interpretation’ tends to reflect the nature of the discipline ...

Postmodernism

The term ‘postmodernism’ appears in a range of contexts, from academic essays to clothing advertisements in the New York Times. Its meaning differs with context to such ...

Russian aesthetics

By Terras, Victor

Aesthetics as a branch of philosophy, or in the sense of an explicitly stated theory of art, appeared in Russia no earlier than the seventeenth century, under the ...