The setting of Buber’s early childhood was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a multiethnic conglomerate whose dissolution in 1918 effectively ended the millennial rule of Catholic princes in Europe.…
Given the synthetic character of Reid’s thought, it is natural to ask how best to enter into it. A promising avenue involves noting a pattern present in Reid’s work.…
The philosophical discipline of aesthetics did not receive its name until 1735, when the twenty-one year old Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduced it in his Halle master’s thesis to mean epistêmê aisthetikê, or the science of what is sensed and…
The terms “idealism” and “idealist” are by no means used only within philosophy; they are used in many everyday contexts as well. Optimists who believe that, in the long run, good will prevail are often called “idealists”.…
Lange was born on September 28, 1828 in Wald, near Solingen, Germany. He was the son of a protestant theologian, pastor and professor. Soon after Lange was born, the family moved to Langenberg near Elberfeld and then in 1832 to Duisburg.…
In the West, virtue ethics’ founding fathers are Plato and Aristotle, and in the East it can be traced back to Mencius and Confucius. It persisted as the dominant approach in Western moral philosophy until at least the Enlightenment, suffered a momentary…
The type/token distinction was introduced a little over a century ago by C.S. Peirce, though it has taken on a life of its own since Peirce’s introduction.…
There are significant challenges to the viability of the concept Africana philosophy as well as to an effort to map out an encyclopedic overview of the extended and still expanding range of endeavors covered by the concept.…
Loyalty is usually seen as a virtue, albeit a problematic one. It is constituted centrally by perseverance in an association to which a person has become intrinsically committed as a matter of his or her identity.…
Plato (429?–347 B.C.E.) is, by any reckoning, one of the most dazzling writers in the Western literary tradition and one of the most penetrating, wide-ranging, and influential authors in the history of philosophy.…
Spinoza’s epistemology and philosophy of mind are governed by some rather unintuitive commitments: first, a commitment to universal intelligibility, often described as Spinoza’s version of what, with Leibniz, came to be known as the Principle of…
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French historian and philosopher, associated with the structuralist and post-structuralist movements. He has had strong influence not only in philosophy but also in a wide range of humanistic and social scientific…
Aristotle was born in Stagira on the northern Aegean coast in 384 BCE. His father Nicomachus was physician to King Amyntas III of Macedon, and his mother Phaestis was of a wealthy family from the island of Euboea.…