No tradition of philosophical materialism existed in Russia until the years conventionally called ‘the 1860s’ – roughly, the period from the death of Tsar Nicholas I in 1855 ...
In his classic book The Russian Idea Nikolai Berdiaev pointed out that ‘independent Russian thought was awakened by the problem of the philosophy of history’. It was because ...
Russian thought is rarely associated with philosophy of law. The intellectuals of pre-revolutionary Russia are known rather for their uncompromising critique of legalism, passing sometimes into a genuine ...
The Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance was created by lay intellectuals who found rationalism, positivism and Marxism inadequate as explanations of the world or guides to life. They were deeply ...
The Christian theory of ‘sacraments’ underlies ideas of a general ‘sacramentality’ in the universe whereby ordinary things have religious significance by their own nature or by virtue of ...
For there to be such a thing as salvation, there must be someone to be saved, something from which they need to be saved, and some way in ...
Sanctification, the process of becoming holy, is closely connected to justification, although Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians differ on how closely. According to the Roman Catholic Church, sanctification ...
Considered one of the oldest classical Hindu schools by Indian tradition, Sāṅkhya is most famous in Indian philosophy for its atheism, its dualist model of puruṣa (passive, ...
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is a widely used label for the linguistic relativity hypothesis, that is, the proposal that the particular language we speak shapes the way we think ...
The three countries of Scandinavia – Sweden, Denmark and Norway – share much of their history and culture with Finland and Iceland, and it is natural to treat ...
Sceptical theists are theists who are sceptical of our abilities to discern whether the evils in our world constitute good evidence against the existence of God. According to ...
Simply put, scepticism is the view that we fail to know anything. More generally, the term ‘scepticism’ refers to a family of views, each of which denies that ...
Radical scepticism is the contention that little or no knowledge of one’s ‘external’ surroundings might be possible. Most modern forms of scepticism have their roots in René Descartes’ ...
Ancient Greek scepticism was revived during the Renaissance, and played an important role in the religious and philosophical controversies of the time. There is little evidence that ancient ...
Schelling’s philosophy, spread by German professors teaching at Russian universities and by Russians who had studied in Germany, some with Schelling himself, had an early and lasting influence ...
In the nineteenth century, science was organized, it tested and confirmed positive knowledge of the natural world and achieved remarkable theoretical development and hitherto unimagined practical application. Science ...
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, ...
Islam attempts to synthesize reason and revelation, knowledge and values, in its approach to the study of nature. Knowledge acquired through rational human efforts and through the Qur’an ...
The scientific imagination is a cognitive ability that is crucial to a number of scientific practices aimed at producing new knowledge of contingent features of the world. Philosophers ...
Procedures for attaining scientific knowledge are known as scientific methods. These methods include formulating theories and testing them against observation or experiment. Ancient and medieval thinkers called any ...
Traditionally, scientific realism asserts that the objects of scientific knowledge exist independently of the minds or acts of scientists and that scientific theories are true of that objective ...
A central issue in the philosophy of the social sciences is the possibility of naturalism: whether disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, economics and psychology can be ‘scientific’ in ...
Scope is a notion used by logicians and linguists in describing artificial and natural languages. It is best introduced in terms of the languages of formal logic. Consider ...
Secession occurs when a portion of a state breaks away either to form its own sovereign country or to join with another state. Because secessionist conflicts are essentially ...
In first-order predicate logic there are symbols for fixed individuals, relations and functions on a given universe of individuals and there are variables ranging over the individuals, with ...