Voluntarism with respect to humanity and divinity became a powerful current in medieval Jewish philosophy, partly in response to the Neoplatonic doctrine of eternal and necessary emanation, which ...
Power has always been a central category of political thought and theory; its counterparts, powerlessness or vulnerability, and more generally finitude, have seemingly been much less discussed. Yet ...
The war/peace dichotomy is a recurrent one in human thought and the range of experience it interprets is vast. Images of war and peace permeate religion, literature and ...
Max Weber, German economist, historian, sociologist, methodologist, and political thinker, is of philosophical significance for his attempted reconciliation of historical relativism with the possibility of a causal social ...
Notions of welfare occur widely in political philosophy and political argument. For example, utilitarianism is a social ethic that may be interpreted as giving a pre-eminent place to ...
An individual’s well-being – or, equivalently, their welfare or quality of life – is the extent to which their life is going well for them. ...
František (Franz) Weyr was Professor in Legal Philosophy and Public Law in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and a main author of the Czechoslovakian Constitution of 1920. His influence on Czechoslovakian ...
A whistleblower is someone who, in the course of her work, comes across wrongdoing in her organization and reports it with the aim of bringing a particular harmful ...
As traditionally conceived, the will is the faculty of choice or decision, by which we determine which actions we shall perform. As a faculty of decision, the will ...
In ancient times, wisdom was thought of as the type of knowledge needed to discern the good and live the good life. Philosophy takes its name from it ...
Although the strict ‘fact-value distinction’ of Wittgenstein’s early period has shaped much subsequent work on ethics, his most profound influence on the subject stems from the later Philosophical ...
Unlike play, work is activity that has to involve significant expenditure of effort and be directed toward some goal beyond enjoyment. The term ‘work’ is also used to ...
In the West, questions of the distinguishability of mind and matter and of rationality and emotion or sentiment are central issues within the philosophy of mind. Neither of ...
The earliest and basic sense of xin is ‘being true to one’s word’. While one’s words can be xin (that is, worthy of trust), in most ...
Xing is conventionally translated as ‘nature’ or ‘human nature’. Some read xing as meaning a heavenly endowed tendency, directionality, or potentiality of growth in the individual. On ...
The Yijing (Book of Changes) or Zhouyi (Changes of the Zhou) was originally a divination manual, which later gradually acquired the status of a book of wisdom. It ...
Yin and yang always describe the relationships that obtain among unique particulars. Originally these terms designated the shady side and the sunny side of a hill, and ...
The Yoruba of west Africa have articulated systematic criteria that are used to assign varying degrees of epistemic certainty to experience. What one views with one’s own eyes ...
In the Western metaphysical tradition, ‘being’ has most generally been thought to denote either a common property of things or a container which relates things by placing them ...
In classical Chinese philosophy, zhi, conventionally translated as ‘knowing’, is not so much a knowing ‘what’, which provides some understanding of the natural world, as it is ...
The Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean) has traditionally been ascribed to Zisi, the grandson of Confucius and the indirect teacher of Mencius. Although this ascription has been challenged ...
The Zhuangzi is a Daoist text usually associated with ‘Master Zhuang’ (fourth century bc), also known as Zhuang Zhou. Scholarly consensus regards the thirty-three chapters of this ...
Zionism, the idea of Jewish nationality in its modern form, emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century, several decades after nationalism had taken hold among most European ...
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 ...
The Egyptian reformer and Muslim apologist Muhammad ‘Abduh was a pupil and friend of al-Afghani. Although deeply influenced by him, ‘Abduh was less inclined to political activism and ...