Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann (1889–1951)

By Heal, Jane

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889 and died in Cambridge on 29 April 1951. He spent his childhood and youth in Austria and Germany, ...

Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann (1889–1951)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889 and died in Cambridge on 29 April 1951. He spent his childhood and youth in Austria and Germany, ...

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 ...

Hertz, Heinrich Rudolf (1857–94)

By Barker, Peter

Heinrich Hertz demonstrated the existence of radio waves in research between 1887 and 1888, opening the way for Marconi to develop long-distance radio communication. Hertz’s results confirmed Maxwell’s ...

Hart, Herbert Lionel Adolphus (1907–93)

By MacCormick, Neil

H.L.A. Hart, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University, 1952–1968, is an outstanding representative of the analytical approach in jurisprudence and philosophy of law. He restated ‘legal positivism’ in ...

Predication

By Mulligan, Kevin

Some sentences have a very simple structure, consisting only of a part which serves to pick out a particular object and a part which says something about the ...

Moral particularism

By Crisp, Roger

Moral particularism is a broad set of views which play down the role of general moral principles in moral philosophy and practice. Particularists stress the role of examples ...

Psychology, personal and subpersonal

By Drayson, Zoe

Explanations in psychology are described as personal when they attribute psychological phenomena to the person, as when we attribute beliefs and thought processes to each other, for example. ...

Sellars, Wilfrid Stalker (1912–89)

Wilfrid Sellars was an original, systematic philosopher in post-Second World War America. At a time when many thought of philosophy as piecemeal puzzle-solving, Sellars sought to develop a ...

Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (Lewis Carroll) (1832–98)

By Heath, Peter

Dodgson, an Oxford teacher of mathematics, is best known under his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll. Although not an exceptional mathematician, his standing has risen somewhat in the light of ...

Johnson, Alexander Bryan (1786–1867)

By Fann, K.T.

Johnson was a self-taught philosophic genius who, completely alone, set out in the 1820s to analyse the nature and limits of language. He was the first thinker who ...

Hanson, Norwood Russell (1924–67)

By MacKinnon, Edward

Hanson was a philosopher of science who introduced novel ways of relating logical, historical and linguistic analyses. His best-known book, Patterns of Discovery, stressed the theory-ladeness of observational ...

Negative facts

By Oaklander, L. Nathan

If propositions are made true in virtue of corresponding to facts, then what are the truth-makers of true negative propositions such as ‘The apple is not red’? Russell ...

Neutral monism

By Griffin, Nicholas

Neutral monism is a theory of the relation of mind and matter. It holds that both are complex constructions out of more primitive elements that are ‘neutral’ in ...

Von Wright, Georg Henrik (1916–2003)

By Niiniluoto, Ilkka

G.H. von Wright was one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. Born in Helsinki, Finland, von Wright did his early work on logic, probability ...

Meaning and communication

By Blackburn, Simon

The two fundamental facts about language are that we use it to mean things and we use it to communicate. So the philosophy of language tries to explain ...

Theory and observation in social sciences

By Outhwaite, William

The concept of observation has received relatively little systematic attention in the social sciences, with the important exceptions of social psychology, social anthropology and some areas of sociological ...

Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002)

By Baert, Patrick

Critically assessing both hermeneutic and structuralist approaches, Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory aims at transcending the opposition between the individual and society. On the one hand, people exhibit practical ...

Apel, Karl-Otto (1922–)

By Kettner, Matthias

The German philosopher Karl-Otto Apel is best known for his wide-ranging ‘transcendental pragmatic’ approach to a gamut of issues in theoretical and practical philosophy. This approach accords ‘argumentative ...

Cognitive architecture

By Pylyshyn, Zenon W.

Cognitive architecture involves the properties of mental structures and mental mechanisms that do not vary when people have different goals, beliefs, precepts or other cognitive states. A serious ...

Praxeology

By Molander, Bengt

Praxeology belongs to the pragmatic tradition and thus emphasizes that concepts - and the world - must be understood through and elucidated in terms of human activities and ...

Freud and psychoanalytic aesthetics

By Clack, Brian R.

The contributions to aesthetics made by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and by other practitioners of psychoanalysis, focus principally on the origin and the function of the work of art. ...

Unity of science

By Cat, Jordi

How should our scientific knowledge be organized? Is scientific knowledge unified and, if so, does it mirror a unity of the world as a whole? Or is it ...

Cavell, Stanley (1926–)

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Stanley Cavell held the Walter M. Cabot Chair in Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University from 1963 until his retirement ...

Ryle, Gilbert (1900–76)

Alongside Wittgenstein and Austin, Ryle was one of the dominant figures in the movement of twentieth-century English language philosophy which became known as ‘Linguistic Analysis’. His views in ...