‘Philosophy’ Archives
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Swiss-born philosopher, author, political scientist, musicologist and one of the most influential minds in the so-called Age of Enlightenment. In the field of education, his novel Emile, ou l’Education (1762) was one of the most influential documents in 18th- and 19th-century education, offering a new [...]
Logical Positivism
Logical Positivism Logical positivism is a school of philosophy, originating in Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s, that claimed that “real” knowledge is based on logical consistency and empirical verifiability. If either condition is contravened, the claim to knowledge is spurious or “nonsense.” But if both conditions are met, truth [...]
Neo-Kantian Ethics
Neo-Kantian Ethics Neo-Kantian ethics refers to any philosophical work that derives from the work of Immanuel Kant. Contemporary scholars in this area seek to advance key insights of Kant with the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy while at the same time avoiding difficulties that may be found in some of Kant’s original arguments. Such [...]
Posthuman
Posthuman A term popularised in the 1980s, with reference to various conditions in which humans might have modified themselves so extensively by cyborgisation and genetic engineering as to liberate themselves from the traditionally recognised ‘‘human condition’’. A commonly encountered derivative is ‘‘posthumanism’’— a term [...]
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism An ideological trend widespread at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries advocating laws of human social and political development based on crude association with the laws of biological evolution theorized by Charles Darwin. Competition, natural selection, struggle for existence, and survival of [...]
Ideology
Ideology In 1796, an erstwhile cavalry officer-turned-philosopher named Destutt de Tracy (1784–1836) coined the word idéologie, meaning the science of ideas. A concise and accurate definition of ideology today is “a powerful system of ideas.” Ideologies and their impacts, both salient and subtle, manifest everywhere in geographic [...]
Individualism
Individualism The concept of individualism is a relatively recent addition to political and social philosophy. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau in the seventeenth and eighteenth century proposed influential interpretations of the role of the individual in the social context. Out of such appraisals came two major concepts that [...]
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch Murdoch, (Jean) Iris (1919-1999), British writer and philosopher, born in Dublin, Ireland, and educated at the University of Oxford. In 1948 she was appointed a fellow and tutor in philosophy at Oxford. Murdoch’s first published book, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953), is a study of French existentialism. Her other nonfiction [...]
Allan David Bloom
Allan David Bloom Bloom, Allan David (1930-1992), American philosopher and university professor, born in Indianapolis, Indiana. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1955. As an interdisciplinary graduate student Bloom began to explore the idea of “transcultural truth,” a concept that would continue to direct his [...]
Socrates
Socrates (470–399 B.C.) Greek philosopher who developed a method of teaching based on questioning rather than lecturing students. Called the Socratic method and still a fundamental element of Western pedagogy, Socrates feigned ignorance of a problem that he presented to his students. He thus stimulated a student discussion, which he then [...]
