Spinoza, Benedict de (1632–77)

By Allison, Henry E.

A Dutch philosopher of Jewish origin, Spinoza was born Baruch de Spinoza in Amsterdam. Initially given a traditional Talmudic education, he was encouraged by some of his teachers ...

Emotion

By Richardson, Louise

As befits the variety of roles that emotion plays in our lives, emotion is a topic of consideration in a variety of areas of philosophy and this is ...

Contingency

By Walker, Ralph C.S.

People are often puzzled about the apparent contingency of the world. To say that something happens contingently is to say that it might not have happened, and to ...

Clandestine literature

By McKenna, Antony

Clandestine philosophical (anti-Christian) literature of the seventeenth century circulated in manuscript form until its publication by the philosophes in the later eighteenth century. Since research began, the ...

Judgment and belief, in early modern philosophy

By Marušić, Jennifer

What is the difference between simply thinking about something and judging or believing that something is the case? ...

Boehme, Jakob (1575–1624)

By Seban, Jean-Loup

Boehme was a Lutheran mystic and pantheist. He held that God is the Abyss that is the ground of all things. The will of the Abyss to know ...

Knutzen, Martin (1713–51)

By Laywine, Alison

Martin Knutzen was a follower of Christian von Wolff. His work is the result of an effort to reconcile Wolff’s system, more persuasively than Wolff himself had, with ...

Hess, Moses (1812–75)

By Avineri, Shlomo

Hess was a socialist philosopher, closely connected with the Young Hegelians, who influenced the initial philosophical development of Karl Marx, and later articulated, in the context of a ...

Conway, Anne (c.1630–79)

By Hutton, Sarah

Anne Conway (née Finch) was the most important of the few English women who engaged in philosophy in the seventeenth century. Her reputation derives from one work published ...

Ibn Ezra, Abraham (1089–1164)

By Jospe, Raphael

The philosophy of Ibn Ezra attained broad influence in Jewish literature through his Bible commentaries, included to this day in rabbinic Bibles. Born in Tudela, Spain, he was ...

Tschirnhaus, Ehrenfried Walther von (1651–1708)

By Schonfeld, Martin

The natural philosopher E.W. von Tschirnhaus emphasized bodily and mental health, was a friend of Spinoza and correspondent of Leibniz. He perfected the construction of concave mirrors (used ...

Régis, Pierre-Sylvain (1632–1707)

By Lennon, Thomas M.

Régis helped to define and disseminate Cartesianism. He proselytized on its behalf, defended it against its critics and innovators, and wrote the systematic textbook for which Descartes had ...

Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772)

By Laywine, Alison

Swedenborg was an eighteenth-century Swedish dignitary of considerable learning who believed that he had the power to communicate with spirits and angels and that these beings would help ...

Ardigò, Roberto (1828–1920)

By Urbinati, Nadia

Roberto Ardigò was the most prominent Italian philosopher of the nineteenth century. A priest and an academic, he was subjected to an ecclesiastical trial for his naturalistic philosophy ...

Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772–1829)

By Beiser, Frederick

Schlegel was the major aesthetician of the Romantic movement in Germany during its first formative period (1797–1802). In these years he developed his influential concepts of Romantic poetry ...

Spaventa, Bertrando (1817–83)

By Henry, Barbara

Trained within the circle of Neapolitan Hegelians in the 1840s, Bertrando Spaventa was influenced by Antonio Tari and taught Kantian and socialist thought (for example, Proudhon) by Ottavio ...

German idealism

By Franks, Paul

From the late eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth, German philosophy was dominated by the movement known as German idealism, which began as an attempt to ...

Heine, Heinrich (1797–1856)

By Bowie, Andrew

Heinrich Heine was one of the most significant German literary and political figures during the period after the Napoleonic wars until the 1848 Revolution. He is associated with ...

Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859–1941)

Bergson’s thinking focuses on the major questions of philosophy: What is time? What is the nature of consciousness? What is the significance of evolution? What are the sources ...