A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Persons

American Concise Encyclopedia

Merriam-Webster Reference Library

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Copyright 2000 by

Zane Publishing and Merriam-Webster Inc.

A posteriori Knowledge that comes "after," or only through, experience. Our knowledge of the details of the external world is taken to be a posteriori. A priori Knowledge that comes "prior to," or independently of experience. Mathematical and logical knowledge are often taken to be a priori. Absolutism The doctrine that truth or values are objective or absolute rather than merely relative or subjective. Academy Plato's school of philosophy, so named after the grove where he lectured. The teachings of Plato's successors are conventionally divided into the Old Academy, which clove closely to Plato's positions, and the New Academy, begun by Arcesilaus in the 3rd century B.C., which was characterized by Skepticism. See Plato; Skepticism. Aesthetics That branch of philosophy dedicated to the study of art and artistic values. "An aesthetics" is also used to designate a particular theory of art or a particular approach to artistic values. Agape A Greek word originally meaning "love." Among the early Christians, it came to be applied to the "love feast," a ritual where the faithful commemorated the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples. From this, it took on connotations of brotherly love (for fellow Christians), filial love (for God), and charity. Agent In ethics, a term used to designate a person who is acting in a certain situation or who is contemplating action in a certain situation.

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Al-Farabi (ca. 873-950) Islamic philosopher of Turkish origin. He studied with Christian Aristotelians in Baghdad. Following their teachings, his system asserted a unity between Platonic and Aristotelian writings. He introduced Aristotelian logic to the Islamic world, distinguished philosophy from theology, attempted proofs of the existence of God using Aristotle's Metaphysics, based his political philosophy on Plato's Republic and Laws, explained creation as a process of emanation along Neoplatonic lines, and subordinated revelation to reason. Such was his fame that he was called "the second Aristotle." Alienation (estrangement) Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx were the first thinkers to discuss alienation explicitly and shaped current discussions. According to them, the things man produces become alien to him, they are other than him, thus every act of production is an instance of alienation. Since for these thinkers man is what he does, by being alienated from what he produces, man is also alienated from his producing and thus from himself. In coming to know himself as what he does, however, man overcomes his alienation from himself and comes to recognize himself in his products. Today "alienation" is often used in psychology to refer to a state of mind in which one feels like an alien in the world. Some say that alienation is more than just a feeling -- that it is an objective fact. See also Psychology. Althusser, Louis (1918-1986) French structuralist or analytical Marxist of the 1960s. Rejected Marx's early writings as humanistic, ideological, and Hegelian. Also rejected Hegelian readings of Marx. He focused instead on Marx's later work, especially Capital, which he saw as very different from the early work and from which he believed he could develop a truly scientific Marxism, one untainted by the "ideological" conceptions that he believed characterized the early Marx. In rejecting Marx's humanism, he saw the human individual as no more than a location and function within the structure of the relations of production. Altruism Action for the sake of others; the opposite of egoism. In some contexts (for example, sociobiology) altruism has come to be used for other -regarding action of all types, whether ultimately arising from a genuine concern for others or from more selfish motives. Analytic philosophy The dominant tradition of philosophy in England, America, and parts of Europe. Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, W. V. O. Quine, and Saul Kripke are prominent representatives. Although historically the tradition has emphasized linguistic or conceptual analysis, it is best characterized in terms of a general concern with clarity and precision rather than by any specific methods or theses that all analytic philosophers are bound to accept. Analytic proposition A proposition or statement necessarily true by virtue of the meaning of its terms. "All bachelors are unmarried" is the common example. Anarchism A political philosophy that holds that freedom is the highest political value and that hierarchy is anathema. More narrowly, anarchism is identified with the position that all government is tyrannical and that people can arrange their lives cooperatively. Some anarchists have been individualists (e.g., Max Stirner), some socialists (e.g., Michael Bakunin), some communists (e.g., Emma Goldman). Anselm (ca. 1033-1109) Scholastic philosopher, born at Aosta in Italy. A Benedictine monk, he was abbot at Le Bec in Normandy, and became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. Anselm is most famous for his formulation of the

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ontological argument for the existence of God. In his wider theological interests, he followed Augustine in asserting the harmony of revelation and reason. His works include the Proslogion and the Monologion. See Ontological argument, The. Antecedent The "if" clause in a conditional or "if-then" statement. Symbolically expressed, P is the antecedent of the conditional "if P then Q." Antirealism The view that science or other bodies of belief do not represent or correspond to an independent reality -- "the world" -- or that there is no such reality to which science or other bodies of belief can correspond. Antithesis In German Idealism, the second moment of the dialectic. The antithesis appears in opposition to the thesis. Out of this opposition emerges the synthesis, which is to be the supersession of the thesis and antithesis and of their opposition, but which, at the same time, is to contain this opposition within itself. Apodictic knowledge Knowledge of matters of necessity, as opposed to matters of contingency; knowledge of what must be the case, as opposed to what simply happens to be the case. Apollonian One of the two spirits distinguished by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, the other being the Dionysian. The Apollonian is the spirit of rationality, intelligence, harmoniousness, restraint and moderation. It harnesses and tries to keep control of the irrational Dionysian spirit. See Nietzsche. Apology A spoken or written defense. Plato's Apology is written as a presentation of Socrates' defense of himself against charges of corrupting the youth of Athens and believing in gods other than those recognized by the state. Appeal to authority A fallacy in which one attempts to support a claim not by rational argument in its behalf but merely by citing some expert or renowned text as holding it. Aquinas, Thomas See Thomas Aquinas.

Arendt, Hannah (1906-1975) German political and social theorist. Studied with Heidegger and Jaspers. Fled from the Nazis first to Paris and then to the United States, where she settled in New York. She lectured at a number of universities, finally taking a permanent position as a professor of political philosophy at the New School for Social Research in 1948. Author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem, On Violence, and The Human Condition, she theorized about public versus private space, totalitarianism, and the "banality of evil." Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) Greek philosopher, born at Stagira in Macedon. The son of a physician, he came to Athens to study with Plato. In 342 B.C., he joined the court of Phillip II of Macedon, where he taught Phillip's heir, later known as Alexander the Great. He returned to Athens in 335 B.C. and founded his own school in a peripatos (covered walk) at the Lyceum in Athens; thus, his followers were called Peripatetics. His work encompasses not only areas we would associate with philosophy, such as logic, metaphysics, and ethics, but also physics, astronomy, biology, and psychology. Aristotle divides knowledge into the theoretical (knowledge for its own sake), the practical (knowledge for the sake of action), and the productive (knowledge for the sake

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of producing something). The theoretical includes such knowledge as metaphysics (the study of being) and physics (the study of motion). The practical includes ethics and politics, which describe happiness and how to attain it. Analytics, or logic, is a preliminary to all knowledge; Aristotle's major contribution to logic is the syllogism. Aristotle's influence on these and other matters was immense among the ancients and especially among medieval Islamic and Christian philosophers. See also Categories; Cause; Essence and existence; Faculty; Form; Metaphysics; Prime Mover; Substance and attribute; Summum bonum; Syllogism; Teleology; Universals. Asceticism The practice of self-denial for spiritual good. Such practices are common to many of the world's religions; in Buddhism and Christianity, they are connected to a monastic tradition. Among philosophers, the Cynics argued that asceticism was the means to a virtuous life, and Schopenhauer held that asceticism was a means of quieting the will and thus ending pain. Atomism The view that nature is composed of simple units, or atoms. The Pre -Socratic philosophers Leucippus and Democritus (5th century B.C.) held that atoms differ only in size and shape, are indivisible, and are so small as to be imperceptible. Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Epicurus hold similar positions. Attribute A property. The attributes of a thing are the properties it has. For example, sweetness is an attribute of sugar. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) Christian theologian, born at Tagaste in what is now Tunisia. Augustine's life was characterized by the Roman world's final transition from paganism to Christianity. Although raised a Christian, he became first a Manichaean and later a Sceptic. He returned to Christianity in 386 and became bishop of Hippo in 396. Augustine's philosophy was a Platonism in the service of Christianity. His Platonism manifests itself in various ways: His belief that understanding can lead us to faith, and that faith can lead us to understand, recalls Plato's dialectic; his argument that we can discover the nature of the Trinity through examination of our own nature recalls the theory of forms. His works include his autobiographical Confessions, The City of God, and On the Trinity. Aurelius, Marcus See Marcus Aurelius.

Autonomy Self-determination in choice and action, independent of external coercion or constraint. In ethics, the principle of autonomy is that people's own choices regarding their own lives should take priority. As such, a principle of autonomy is opposed to paternalism. Averroes (Arabic Ibn Rushd) (ca. 1126-ca. 1198) Islamic commentator on Aristotle, born at Cordoba. He came from a family of judges and lawyers; tradition holds that he studied law, theology, medicine, and philosophy. He became associated with the caliphate in Marrakesh, which commissioned his commentaries. His own philosophy was largely Aristotelian. Averroes' commentaries had tremedous influence on later medieval Christian Aristotelianism. Avicenna (Arabic Ibn S-in-a) (980-1037) Islamic physician and philosopher of Persian origin, born in Bukhara. Avicenna's reputation as a philosopher in the Islamic world was so great that he was called "the third Aristotle" (al-F-ar-ab -i being the second). He wrote a comprehensive system that was primarily Aristotelian. He distinguished between necessary and contingent being, and in so doing first elaborated the distinction between essence and existence. He had

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a great influence upon the Scholastics. Bacon, Francis (1561-1626) English statesman and philosopher of science, known for his repudiation of traditional speculative philosophy and his insistence on the acquisition of knowledge by means of induction. Bacon's outline of induction stressed empirical observation, inference, and verification through repeated observation and experiment. The obstacles to such a route to knowledge and to rationality generally, Bacon termed "idols": "the Idols of the Tribe," common to people in general and including the mistaken notion that sense -perception affords direct access to reality; "the Idols of the Den," including the tendency of each individual to interpret data according to his own "peculiar and singular disposition"; "the Idols of the Marketplace," including dangers to rationality from ambiguous and ill-defined language; and "the Idols of the Theater," including errors based on the dogmas of traditional philosophical systems. Beauvoir, Simone de (1908-1986) French existentialist and feminist philosopher. Founded the review Les Temps Modernes with Jean-Paul Sartre, her life-long companion, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Best known for her seminal work in feminist philosophy, The Second Sex (1949), which discusses the facts and myths of women's lives, examining both the problems they face and the possibilities open to them. She argued that women's subjectivity has been conceived as the "other" of male subjectivity, which has been taken to be subjectivity in general. De Beauvoir's work has been influential on several generations of feminists and continues to shape feminist thought today. Begging the question A fallacious pattern of reasoning in which one argues for a position only by in some way presupposing or assuming that very position as given. See also Circular argument. Behaviorism In psychology, behaviorism is the view that psychology as a science need deal only with behavior, as opposed, for example, to the data of introspection. In philosophy, analytical behaviorism is the view that "mental" terms (think, believe, imagine, remember) refer ultimately only to behavior. Being and Becoming For the Greeks, something that is, or has Being, is permanent and unchanging; something that becomes is impermanent and changes. Sometimes Being is contrasted with Not-Being, and change is seen as an effect of Not-Being. Reconciling Being and Becoming or Not-Being was a problem for Greek philosophy. For Parmenides, Being is real and Not-Being an illusion; for Heraclitus, Becoming is regulated by a permanent principle; for Plato, Becoming is a pale reflection of Being; for Aristotle, Becoming is real and manifests itself in the change from potentiality to actuality. Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832) English thinker best known as a utilitarian. His followers, known as Benthamites, became a powerful political force in England and included James Mill and his son, John Stuart Mill. Bentham saw British law as chaotic and illogical and hoped to introduce legal reforms based on utilitarian principles. He considered the existing penal code and civil laws to be based on "moral laws" that did not take the consequences of actions into account. His most famous contribution to utilitarian theory was the "hedonic calculus" which gave a way to judge between courses of action based on their consequences for the pleasure and pain of all the people affected. Every pain and pleasure is assigned a certain number of units, allowing one to judge which is the better action -- which produces the lowest pain and/or the highest pleasure.

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Bergson, Henri (1851-1941) French philosopher of science, especially of biological evolution. His most famous work is Creative Evolution, in which he puts forth a theory that there was an "original impetus of life" that pervades the whole evolutionary process. This elan vital, or vital impetus, is a "current of consciousness" that has penetrated matter, thus giving rise to living bodies, and that is carried from one generation to the next through reproduction. For Bergson, man (or beings "of the same essence" as man) is the goal of evolution. He considers creative evolution to be a cosmic process, occurring on many planets besides Earth. Bergson also considered intuition to provide knowledge of the real while the intellect only provides knowledge of appearance. Berkeley, George (1685-1763) Irish philosopher and Anglican bishop. Considered to be the founder of "idealism," though he preferred to call his position "immaterialism." He denied the possibility of material substance. In order for something to exist, it must either be perceived or be a perceiver. Thus there is no material world independent of the mind. All apparently material things are, in fact, passive ideas that God causes to exist in our minds and that he sustains when no one is perceiving them. Thus for Berkeley there are only two kinds of thing in the universe: passive ideas and active minds or spirits. Boethius (ca. 475-524) Roman statesman and philosopher, born at Rome. In 510, Boethius rose to the post of consul under Theodoric. He was imprisoned for treason in 523, a charge he denied. He was executed in 524. His most famous work is the Consolation of Philosophy, in which the imprisoned Boethius is visited by Philosophy personified, who argues that temporal pleasure is fleeting and true happiness is found in God. The text contains Neoplatonic, Stoic, and Aristotelian elements. Boethius, who was a Christian, is sometimes called the first Scholastic; he was also a translator of Greek texts into Latin, a commentator, and a logician. Buddhism A philosophy originating in the teachings of the Gautama Buddha (India, ca. 563-ca. 483 B.C.). "Buddha" means "enlightened one"; Buddhism is thus the seeking of enlightenment. According to Buddhism, life is characterized by suffering, which has its origin in desire; desire can be quenched, suffering ended, and enlightenment achieved through the Buddha's teaching. This release from suffering, and ultimately from the cycle of rebirth, is called nirvana. Various Buddhist schools advocate different paths to enlightenment. The Theravada school, located in Sri Lanka and southeast Asia, teaches that enlightenment is achieved through solitary meditation. The Mahayana school, found in China, Korea, and Japan, emphasizes good works and compassion for others. Vajrayana Buddhism, centered in Tibet, has a highly developed metaphysic and accompanying rituals that are necessary for the good progress of the soul. See also Religion. Carnap, Rudolf (1891-1970) Born and educated in Germany, Carnap became an active member of the Vienna Circle but emigrated to the United States with the rise of Naziism. A prominent logical positivist and later logical empiricist, Carnap is known particularly for work in logic and his attempts to outline the logical framework of a scientific understanding of the world. His major works include Logische Aufbau der Welt and Logische Syntax der Sprache. Categorical Imperative The moral law that admits of no exceptions, proposed by Kant. It is formulated in Kant's work in a number of different ways that are supposed to be equivalent, but the simplest is, "Act only in such a way that the maxim of your act should become a universal law." In other words, do not do anything that you cannot, without contradiction, will everyone to do. For

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example, it would be a violation of the categorical imperative to tell a lie because if everyone lied, truth would have no meaning and no one would believe anyone. The whole point of a lie is that everyone think that you are telling the truth, thus lying is contradictory. Categories For Aristotle, the various ways a thing can be named or described. He posits 10 categories. For Kant, the various ways a thing can be thought or conceived a priori. Kant postulates 12 such pure concepts of the understanding. Cause In contemporary contexts, a cause is that event which produces another as its effect. Much philosophical work has made it clear that whether an event c causes an event e is not to be identified either with mere correlation or with the simple question of whether e would not have occurred had c not occurred. For Aristotle, a cause is a principle of explanation. He distinguishes between four causes: the efficient cause, that which makes, or begins, or moves a thing; the material cause, its physical substrate; the formal cause, that which gives a thing its structure or essence; and the final cause, the end to which it strives or the purpose for which it is made. Thus, the efficient cause of a statue is the sculptor; the material cause, the bronze from which it is made; the formal cause, the shape it has; and the final cause, the happiness a thing of beauty brings. The contemporary sense of cause would thus belong among Aristotle's efficient causes. Cicero (Latin Marcus Tullius Cicero) (106-43 B.C.) Roman orator, statesman, and philosopher, born at Arpinum. He was educated in philosophy and law at Rome, Athens, and Rhodes; he then entered upon a public life. He opposed both Julius Caesar and Marc Antony; he was executed at Antony's request when Octavian, later Augustus, took Rome. He is the most renowned of the Roman orators. In philosophy, Cicero was openly eclectic; believing that the Greeks had explored all philosophical possibilities, he presented them to a Roman audience. He inclined variously to Scepticism, Stoicism, and Peripatetic teachings, but rejected Epicureanism. Circular argument A fallacious pattern of reasoning in which one argues in a circle by arguing for a position only by assuming or presupposing that very position. Begging the question is form of circular argument. Cognitive Science The study of human intelligence from perception to language and reasoning. The field has grown enormously in recent years due to Chomsky's theoretical innovations in linguistics and to computer science. Cognitive science brings together people from disciplines as diverse as neurophysiology, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and anthropology. Coherence theory of truth The theory that the truth of a claim or belief consists merely in its coherence with an entire body of claims or beliefs. Communism A social system in which property is held by the community rather than the individual. Modern Communists advocate the abolition of the state, which they consider, as Lenin put it, "the means by which one class oppresses another." (State and Revolution) Lenin considered communism to be the final goal of revolution and characterized it with the slogan, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." (Ibid.) Marx, considered by many to be the father of communism, said that communism is "not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself," but rather is "the real movement that abolishes the present state of things." (German Ideology)

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Comte, Auguste (1798-1857) French positivist philosopher and mathematician. Comte did a historical study of the progress of the human mind, by which he meant the progress of the sciences. For Comte, the history of the sciences could be seen to pass through three stages: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive, which is characterized by the study of laws "of relations of succession and resemblance." This final stage is one that we are always approaching but that we can never reach. Comte also attempted to show that each science is dependent on a previous one -- physics on astronomy, biology on chemistry. Comte believed that the mind can only be understood in terms of what it has done -- a position fundamentally different from that of Descartes and his followers. Conditional Any "if-then" statement. For example, "If this is copper, then it conducts electricity." Confucianism An ethical and political philosophy originating in the teachings of the Chinese thinker K'ung Fu-tzu, or Confucius (551-479 B.C.). Confucianism proper, as set forth in the aphoristic Analects, describes the path to a harmonious society through good government and ultimately through the virtuous character of the individual. Neo-Confucianism (960-1912) broadened the movement's traditional realm to include metaphysics and cosmogony. See also Religion. Consciousness Used in a number of different ways, it can mean self-knowledge, self-awareness, or introspection. Consciousness is, then, an awareness of thinking, believing, doubting, perceiving, etc. The term consciousness can also be used to refer to any mental state regardless of whether or not one is aware of it. Consequent The "then" clause in a conditional or "if-then" statement. Symbolically expressed, Q is the consequent of the conditional "if P then Q." Continental philosophy Philosophy based on traditions coming from continental Europe, particularly France and Germany, in the 19th and 20th centuries, including phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, hermeneutics, critical theory, deconstruction, and post-modernism. The term "continental philosophy" is usually opposed to "Anglo-American" or "analytic" philosophy. It is usually considered to have begun with Kant and Hegel. Contingent Possible but not necessary. A contingent event is one that could occur but could also fail to occur. A contingent proposition is one that is possibly true but not necessarily true. In the work of Leibniz, and in contemporary semantics for modal logic, a contingent proposition is one true in some possible world and not true in some other. Contradiction An explicit contradiction is a proposition of the form "P and not-P," which involves both the assertion and denial of the same proposition P. The Law of Non-Contradiction is the principle that no contradiction can be true. Contrary Two statements are contraries if both cannot be true but both can be false. "All people are likeable" and "No people are likeable" are contraries. Correspondence theory of truth The theory that the truth of a claim or belief consists in its correspondence to reality or to the facts. Cosmological argument An argument attempting to prove the existence of God

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from the existence of the world. In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas presents several forms of the cosmological argument. In one, he argues that all phenomena have an efficient cause; nothing causes itself, and an infinite regress of causes is impossible; therefore, there must be a first efficient cause, which is God. Others to put forward cosmological arguments include Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Locke. Cosmology The branch of philosophy devoted to the study of the universe and its origins. Cosmology traditionally includes questions of whether the universe is infinite in space and time, for example, as well as questions of whether all things can be contingent or whether there must in some sense be an initial necessary cause or "first mover." Why is there something rather than nothing? is perhaps the ultimate cosmological question. Counterfactuals Conditional statements with false antecedents: "Had this dime been made of copper, it would have conducted electricity," "Had Nixon not resigned, he would have been impeached." Important contemporary work has been stimulated by the fact that it is easy to find both true and false counterfactuals, although all material conditionals with false antecedents are counted as true in classical logic. Critical theory The views of the Frankfurt School, which began with the Institute for Social Research founded in Frankfurt in 1923. Since most of the Institute's members left Nazi Germany before the war, it was reestablished in New York in 1936. Max Horkheimer took over the school in 1930 and gave it its theoretical definition. Under him members of the school reexamined Marxism from a Hegelian perspective and in light of their disillusionment with both the West and the Soviet Union. They also attempted to integrate Marxism and psychoanalysis, doing a great deal of work on the authoritarian personality (the title of a book by Adorno). They did not emphasize revolution but instead emphasized tolerance. They also focused attention on the role and function of the family in bourgeois society. Critical Theory is also very influential in the philosophy of art and aesthetics. It particularly addresses the phenomenon of mass culture in the United States and compares it to fascism, particularly in its erasure of the distinction between public and private and the fact that it was not created by the people but was forced upon them and dominates them. A contemporary critical theorist is Jurgen Habermas. Cynicism A movement in Greek philosophy from the 4th century B.C. to the 6th century A.D. The Cynics held that happiness was to be found in the virtuous life, which was the natural life. They viewed Greek social conventions as unnatural and preached asceticism and self-sufficiency. The Cynics proceeded less by argument than by practice, diatribe, and satire; thus, the Cynic Diogenes of Sinope is said to have searched by daylight with a lamp for a human being. Other Cynics included Antisthenes, Crates, and Hipparchia. Cynicism had a great influence on Stoicism. Dasein German word literally meaning "there-being." It is used by Hegel to refer to a determinate being rather than being in general. It is also used, particularly by Heidegger, to refer to man or human being in the sense that man is already a being active in his world before we bring philosophical reflection to bear upon him. Deconstruction An anti-institutional philosophical practice, first undertaken by Jacques Derrida, which calls into question the basic ideas and beliefs that give legitimacy to current forms of knowledge, particularly in philosophy. It emphasizes what has been marginalized, bringing what is on the margins of

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philosophy to the center. Deduction A pattern of inference from premises to conclusion in which, if the premises be true, it is impossible for the conclusion to be false. Definition In contemporary use, a definition is taken as giving the meaning of a term or necessary and sufficient conditions for its application. In Aristotle and other traditional works, definition is taken as giving the essence of a thing. Deism Broadly, the belief in a God who is impersonal, transcendent, and not involved in the world -- that is, in a God who is an "absentee landlord." More narrowly, a strain in 17th and 18th century philosophy in England and France that held that reason proves the existence of God, and there need be no recourse to revelation. Deism is conventionally contrasted with theism. Deontology Literally, "the science of duty." Deontological ethics holds that some acts are morally obligatory regardless of their consequences. Kant's categorical imperative is a deontological principle -- the morally good action is the one done out of respect for the moral law, and the consequences of such action are immaterial to its moral goodness. For such a deonotologist, it is the reason for an action and not its consequences that we must judge either good or bad. Derivation In formal logic, an ordered list of formulae or set of steps, each of which is either an axiom of the system at issue or follows from previous steps by a rule of inference of the system. Derivations are often called "proofs." Derrida, Jacques (b. 1930) French philosopher, Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Founder of deconstruction. Influenced by and has written on Hegel, Nietzsche, Saussure, Freud, and Husserl. Received his doctorate only in 1980, based on his many publications including Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, and Of Grammatology. Derrida is highly critical of the western philosophical tradition, its institutional nature and its exclusivity. He is considered by many to be a literary theorist rather than a philosopher. His work remains far more influential in the United States than in France. Descartes, Rene (1596-1650) French philosopher, considered to be the founder of modern philosophy. He was concerned with the question of what we can know with certainty. In order to answer this question he developed a "method of doubt" whereby he attempted to doubt the truth of everything he did not know clearly and distinctly. In his most famous work, the Meditations on First Philosophy, this method of doubt left him with the knowledge of only one thing -- his own existence. He could not doubt that because even in doing so someone had to be doubting, hence his famous dictum from Discourse on Method: "I think, therefore I am." (Cogito ergo sum.) From this one thing that he finds he knows clearly and distinctly, he attempts, using the laws of reason, to deduce the truth of everything he doubted. Descartes equates "I" with the "thing that thinks" or the mind and says that it is a distinct substance from the body. This mind/body dualism pervades modern philosophy. For Descartes the most troubling question to which this gives rise is that of how these two separate substances interact. He concludes that it must be through the pineal gland, but he is unsure exactly how. This dualism also leads to the conclusion that mind and body exist independently of each other. Without the mind or soul the body is, for Descartes, a mechanical system. Since animals have no souls or minds

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they are, for Descartes, mere machines. Determinism The doctrine that all events, including all human choices, necessitated; that none happens by chance, and none could possibly have to occur as it did. Most familiarly, causal determinism is the doctrine all events are necessitated by earlier causes; given those causes, they not have failed to occur. are failed that could

Dewey, John (1859-1952) American philosopher, especially of education. Dewey focused on experience as fundamental to life. Knowledge is only one type of experience. Human experience is one of the kinds of transactions that constitute nature, the others being the physicochemical and psychophysical. People are involved in constant transactions with the whole of nature, and they can come to understand nature through systematic inquiry. For Dewey, knowledge requires experimentation rather than contemplation. He developed an "instrumental" or "experimental" logic, the function of which was to study the ways in which we are most successful in gaining knowledge. There are no first principles. Rather, knowledge is rational because it proceeds by a self -corrective process -- we must constantly test our claims and check them with others. He was critical of the approach to education in late 19th century America, which treated the child as a passive recipient of information, but he was equally critical of theories of education that said that children should be allowed to choose what they want to learn -- such an approach ignores the immaturity of children's experience. Dewey saw children as naturally curious and explorative and thus thought that a child should "learn by doing." Dialectic For Socrates, argument by means of question and answer, with the goal of displaying the weaknesses of the argument of the person questioned. For Plato, rational discourse, which attempts to apprehend the essence of things, and ultimately, the idea of the Good. For Aristotle, a form of reasoning whose premises are based on generally accepted opinion. The modern notion of dialectic as the triad of thesis, antithesis, synthesis was first introduced by the German philosopher Fichte in 1794. The Hegelian dialectic, however, is not mechanical in this way but is organic and involves concepts passing over into their opposites and the achievement of a higher unity in this opposition. For Hegel, dialectic is not simply a process of thought but a world process -- one through which history and the universe as a whole proceeds. While Marx used this Hegelian notion of dialectic, Engels and many later Marxists reverted to the mechanical movement of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Dionysian One of the two spirits distinguished by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, the other being the Apollonian. The Dionysian is the spirit of irrationality, absurdity, ecstasy, and excess. Dionysian festivals are associated with drunkenness and debauchery and sometimes with frenzied insanity. The Dionysian spirit in man is that of his irrational and animal instincts, and must be harnessed and channeled by the rational, Apollonian spirit. Dogma Originally, a Greek term meaning "opinion" and "public decree." For the Greeks, it came to mean the teachings of the philosophical schools. For the Christians, it meant the teaching of the church. For Kant, dogmatism is the position that reason is able to proceed from concepts alone, without reference to the sensibility or to experience. Following Kant, dogma has taken on the pejorative meaning of a rigidly held belief based on authority, not on reason or experience. Dualism Any doctrine that asserts a pair of irreducible categories. Plato's

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distinction between the sensible and intelligible worlds is a form of dualism, as is Manicheanism's opposition of the principles of light and darkness. Similarly, Descartes's distinction between mind and body is a dualism of substance. Kant posits an epistemological dualism between the activity of the understanding and the passivity of the sensibility. Dualism is often contrasted with monism. Egalitarianism The doctrine that all people are equal, and so should be given equal rights, opportunities, liberties, etc. Egoism Psychological egoism is the theory that people in fact seek only their own good or pleasure. Ethical egoism is the theory that people ought to seek only their own good or pleasure. Emotivism The theory that all ethical language is merely emotive; that it serves only to express likes and dislikes, rather than to describe any ethical state of affairs. A simple form of emotivism appears in A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic. A more sophisticated form appears in Charles Stevenson's Ethics and Language. Empiricism A philosophical position that holds that sense experience rather than reason is the source of all knowledge. It is opposed to rationalism and is exemplified in modern philosophy by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Kant is also considered by many to be an empiricist in that he believes that experience is necessary to knowledge. Enlightenment In general, the term may be used for any cultural period that celebrates reason as a central human virtue and attempts to expand human horizons by rational human efforts alone. The Enlightenment is often used to designate a particular period of this sort in 17th and 18th-century European history, fostered particularly by English, Dutch, French, and German philosophers. Epicureanism A school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in 306 B.C. in Athens by Epicurus (341-270 B.C.). It survived at least until the second century A.D. Epicureanism held that knowledge originates through the senses; that all things, including the soul, are composed of atoms; and that happiness consists in pleasure, especially peace of mind. Although Epicureanism is often associated with debauchery, the school in fact emphasized peace of mind to an extent that resembled asceticism. Besides Epicurus, the most famous member of the school is Lucretius. Epistemology The branch of philosophy that concentrates on knowledge and knowing, including questions of what knowledge is (or what various types of knowledge are), and how we come to know, and the relation between knowledge and certainty. Essence and existence For Aristotle, essence is the nature of a thing, or what it is. Following Aristotle, Aquinas holds that essence is the nature of a thing, and existence is the being of a thing. God bestows existence on essence to create corporeal things. God's essence, on the other hand, is existence: otherwise put, it is his nature to be. Essential property In contemporary use, an object has an essential property if that object could not have existed and failed to have that property. The color this table is painted is not an essential property of it: This table could have existed and been painted another color. Arguably, this table's being made of

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wood is an essential property: nothing could have been this table and not have been made of wood. Essentialism The doctrine that some properties of things are essential to them. In contemporary usage, essentialism is taken as coextensive with the view that there are de re necessities, or real necessities in the things themselves, rather than merely linguistic necessities based on how they are described. Ethical relativism The doctrine that ethical values are relative to cultures or individuals, rather than objective or absolute. Descriptive relativism is the anthropological theory that ethical beliefs vary with time and culture. Ethical relativism proper is the theory that the truth of ethical claims varies with time and culture; in an extreme form, that there are no ethical claims truly applicable independent of culture and time. Ethics The branch of philosophy that concentrates on moral questions: questions of right and wrong, good and bad action, virtues and vices, and rights and obligations. Descriptive ethics in a psychological, sociological, or anthropological attempt to characterize what it is that people happen to believe about right and wrong, virtues and vices, and the like. Normative ethics, in contrast, is a more properly philosophical discipline in which the attempt is to find out the truth about right and wrong, virtues and vices, and rights and obligations. Excluded Middle The Law of Excluded Middle is the principle that every proposition must be either true or false; that there is no middle value. The Law of Excluded Middle is the defining principle of bivalent logic. See Logic. Existentialism A philosophical movement usually considered to have been founded by Kierkegaard. Heidegger and Sartre are the best-known 20th-century existentialists. The movement is perhaps best characterized by the slogan "existence precedes essence," which means that there is no self before action, that we are what we do and no more. Existentialists also hold that reality cannot be fully comprehended, that the universe does not make sense, and that there is no underlying rationality. In existentialism there is no answer to the question "Why are things as they are and not otherwise?" Faculty A power, ability, or part of the mind or soul. The theory of such abilities is called faculty psychology. For Aristotle, each living thing has a soul, and the soul's faculties include self-nutrition, sensation, locomotion, and the power of thought. For Kant, the powers of the mind include sensibility, imagination, understanding, and reason. Fallacy Any generally flawed or unreliable step of reasoning, especially one that is commonly used to draw illegitimate conclusions or that has a deceptive appearance of validity. Feminism In philosophy, a position and method of critique that holds that women have been left out of philosophy, and that when male philosophers spoke of the Human Subject and Mankind they were actually speaking about men. Many of these traditional philosophers have even asserted that women are not rational (or are at least less rational than men), are weak-minded, overly emotional, and childlike. Feminist philosophy is concerned to point out the male -centeredness of the western philosophical tradition and to discuss women's experience, subjectivity, and their role in the world. It is also concerned with the nature and meaning of gender, particularly with whether it is an essential category or is socially constructed, and with the differences between

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women (e.g. class, race, and sexual orientation). Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her Vindication of the Rights of Women in the 18th century, but it was not until Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex (1949) that feminism became a philosophical rather than solely a political and social endeavor. It is only since the 1980s that the philosophical establishment has begun to accept, or at least tolerate, feminist philosophy as genuine philosophy. Final Cause See Cause.

Form For Plato, an idea perceived by the intellect, as distinguished from an object perceived by the senses. We merely have opinions about sensible objects, because they change; we know forms because they are eternal and unchanging. Just as sensible objects belong to the sensible world, forms belong to an intelligible world. The intelligible world, because it is eternal, unchanging, and knowable, is the ultimate reality; the sensible world is merely an ephemeral image, sensible things merely inadequate copies of forms. The relation between a sensible object and a form is called participation. For example, a beautiful thing participates in the idea of beauty. For Aristotle, form is the pattern or structure of a thing, to be distinguished from matter, or its physical substrate. Foucault, Michel (1926-1984) French structuralist philosopher and psychopathologist. Died of AIDS. Foucault saw human history as a series of epistemes or world views that determined everything, including what is true, within it. Within any given episteme there are things that cannot be known because they are not caught by the conceptual web or framework that makes sense of the world. In this way an episteme could be compared to Thomas Kuhn's notion of "paradigm." Foucault puts forth this view in The Order of Things. His other works include The Archaeology of Knowledge, The History of Sexuality, Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Clinic, and Madness and Civilization. Free will Doctrine opposed to determinism that holds that our actions are freely chosen and not determined by anything other than our own act of choosing. Frege, Gottlob (1848-1925) Regarded as a major founder of contemporary logic and a continuing influence in philosophy of language. Frege's logical work introduced the predicate calculus using rules of inference in much their modern form, as well as the standard quantifiers and propositional functions crucial to Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica and later work. In philosophy of language Frege distinguished between Sinn and Bedeutung -- at least roughly, the sense and reference of a term. Frege maintained that two names may have the same reference though a different sense, as, for example, in "The Morning Star is the Evening Star." Frege's major works are the Begriffsschrift, Grundlagen der Arithmetik, and Grundgesetze der Arithmetik. Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939) Austrian psychiatrist and founder of psychoanalysis, a theory which has had an immense impact on contemporary continental philosophy, particularly in France. Freud theorized the distinction between the id or irrational desires, the ego, and the superego or moral/social norms that create guilt. He also theorized the unconscious, which is a much larger psychic space than consciousness and is responsible for dreams, hysterical symptoms, phobias, and neuroses. Freud also discussed the sexuality of infants, which was revolutionary because previously children were not thought to have sexual urges until puberty. Among his other important discussions are those about the roles of repression, the Oedipus complex (the desire for one's mother and the hatred and fear of one's father), the death

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instinct, inhibition, aggression, and the reality principle in psychic life. Gnosis A Greek word meaning "knowledge." In Plato's Republic, it denotes knowledge of the intelligible realm, in opposition to opinion (doxa) of the sensible. For the Gnostic movement, which began in the first and second centuries, it came to mean direct knowledge of the divine. The Gnostics were radical dualists: They held that matter is intrinsically evil and that through individual revelation we can attain gnosis of the true God, who is alien to this world. This gnosis can be either a return to an original unity with God, as in Valentinianism, or release from an original dualism, as in Manichaeanism. Godel's Theorem Kurt Godel (1906-1978) Godel's first theorem (in semantic form) is that any formal system adequate for number theory, if sound, will be incomplete: if all theorems of that system are true on interpretation, there will be some formula that expresses a truth on interpretation and yet does not appear as a theorem. Godel's second theorem is that no consistent formal system adequate for number theory can contain as a theorem a statement expressing the consistency of that system in a certain straightforward sense. Good, the For Plato, the highest and best of the ideas, desired for its own sake, through which all other ideas are beneficial, useful, knowable, and possible. In the Republic, Plato argues that the Good is to the intelligible world as the sun is to the sensible world: The Good makes the forms knowable, just as the sun makes objects visible. Later Platonists identify the Good with the Beautiful and the One. Greatest Happiness Principle The central principle of classical utilitarianism: That act is right that produces the greatest amount of pleasure for the greatest number of people. In other forms of utilitarianism, it may be rules or institutions that are evaluated rather than acts, and happiness or pleasure may be replaced by more complicated notions of the good. Habermas, JUrgen (b. 1929) German philosopher and well-known critical theorist, best known for his work on "communicative ethics." For him society can only be rational if its policies are subject to public control, which occurs within a framework of open discourse, free from manipulation and domination. Major works: Theory of Communicative Action, Legitimation Crisis. Hedonism From the Greek word hedone, which means pleasure. There are two forms of hedonism, ethical and psychological. Ethical hedonism holds that pleasure is the highest good, and pain is intrinsically undesirable. Epicurean and Utilitarian ethics can be considered hedonist; the former focuses on the pleasure of the individual, the latter on collective or universal pleasure. Psychological hedonism holds that pleasure is the end of all action, whether good or evil. Ethical and psychological hedonism thus differ in that the former is prescriptive and the latter descriptive. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831) German philosopher, often wrongly considered to be an apologist for the Prussian state and a totalitarian. Hegel was, in fact, an absolute idealist who considered Mind/Spirit (Geist) to be the world. According to Hegel, human knowing is Mind coming to know itself while nature is Mind becoming other, a necessary moment in coming to know itself. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit shows the progression of human consciousness from the standpoint of immediacy to that of being in a position to know itself as the actualization of Spirit in a community of people in a relation of mutual recognition, a community of individuals characterized by being a "we that is 'I' and an 'I' that is we." Hegel's other works include Philosophy of Right,

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Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and Science of Logic. Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976) German philosopher, phenomenologist, and existentialist. Also a Nazi collaborator. Heidegger was concerned with the nature of being (What is it to be?). In his most famous work, Being and Time, Heidegger undertakes an analysis of man or Dasein because only man asks about the nature of being. Man is always already active in the world when he starts to ask about his being. He is also projecting himself into the future so, in an important sense, his being consists in what he is not yet. In his everyday life, man is bound up with the public and occupied with petty concerns. He is therefore alienated from his authentic self most of the time. This is what Heidegger calls inauthentic existence, as opposed to authentic existence, which is characterized by dread (Angst), brought about by realizing that he will die. Death and the relation to it is authentic because it is the only event in a man's life that is his own and no one else's. Hempel, Carl (b. 1905) Best known for work in philosophy of science, particularly in theory of explanation and theory of confirmation. Hempel is known for the Nomological-Deductive model of scientific explanation, according to which a set of statements (the explanans) offer a scientific explanation of another statement (the explanandum) just in case the statements of the explanans have empirical content and are true, entail the explanandum, and contain at least one general law actually used in the entailment. Hempel's major papers are collected in Aspects of Scientific Explanation. Heraclitus (6th-5th centuries B.C.) Pre-Socratic philosopher, from Ephesus in what is now Turkey. Heraclitus held that the world is in constant flux, that this flux takes place through a unity and interchange of opposites, and that it is regulated by a principle alternately identified as reason or fire. Hermeneutics Traditionally a term associated with Biblical interpretation, within philosophy the term is applied to the art and/or science of interpretation generally. In recent continental philosophy, the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has been the best-known theorist. It is most influential in philosophy of art and philosophy of literature. Hermeticism The teachings of the legendary Hermes Trismegistos (Greek, Thrice -great Hermes), often identified as an Egyptian priest. These teachings supposedly form the Hermetica, a collection of pagan, magical, Platonic, and Gnostic texts written in Greek and compiled between the 1st and 3rd centuries A.D. The term "hermeticism" came to be associated with any magically inclined Platonism, especially that of the Renaissance. Hinduism English term for the majority religion of India. Hinduism is amazingly diverse, and easily accommodates conflicting theological and philosophical viewpoints. The minimum standard of Hindu orthodoxy is acceptance of the Vedas, the most ancient Hindu texts. Popular Hinduism can be further characterized by polytheism, a belief in reincarnation, and the caste system. Traditionally, there are six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy. Yoga is theistic and concerns the discipline of the self. Samkhya, although atheistic, treats the metaphysical underpinnings of Yoga. Mimams-a is concerned with the systematic exegesis of Veda Ved-anta, which is actually a collection of schools, supplies a theologi-cal framework for Veda The Ny-aya school deals with logic. Vai'sesika doctrine is atomistic. Hobbes, Thomas (1558-1679) English empiricist philosopher. Hobbes had an extreme fear of anarchy and civil war, which motivated his political theory. He

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insisted on a strong state to guarantee the security of its citizens, even at the expense of their liberty. He distinguished between two kinds of person -natural and artificial. The natural person is the one whose words and actions are his own. The artificial person is one whose words and actions are another person's. The state is an artificial person -- the sovereign or Leviathan (after which Hobbes' book The Leviathan is named). Natural persons give up their right to govern themselves and allow an artificial person, the sovereign, to govern them. This involves a contract both between the natural persons, whereby they agree to accept governance by the sovereign, and between them and the sovereign, whereby the sovereign guarantees their security. This arrangement is called a commonwealth. Hobbes considered his political theory to be continuous with his materialism; he wanted to produce a unified science in which political institutions would be deduced from facts about human nature. Humanism Any view that emphasizes human flourishing and human happiness on earth as a primary good to be pursued, as opposed, for example, to goals of serving God or seeking rewards in an afterlife. In contemporary usage, the term is also used to designate an explicitly atheistic view that considers the good of all earth's humanity as the supreme ethical goal and emphasizes methods of science, reason, and democratic decision making. Hume, David (1711-1776) Scottish empiricist philosopher. Hume was troubled by the existence of concepts that do not seem to be derivable from experience, like God and causation. His work was an attempt to resolve this problem. His empiricism is often summed up by the slogan "No ideas without impressions," which means that there can be no mental contents without sense experience. For Hume, ideas are, in fact, faded impressions. So, for example, the idea of a sound is the faded impression of a sound. Since the imagination consists in the manipulation of ideas, which are faded impressions, it is more limited than we usually think. Even a concept like "God" is really just an exaggeration of empirical ideas of certain human powers. Our idea of causation comes from repeated experience of B following A so that it becomes a habit to expect B to follow A. The idea of causation, then, is the impression of expectation that B will follow A. Hume's most famous works are Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Treatise on Human Nature. Husserl, Edmund (1859-1938) German philosopher, considered the founder of phenomenology. Searched for the foundation of human knowledge, which he called the Archimedean point. His work was a constant search for a beginning -- both of knowledge and of his work itself -- so he abandoned his earlier views on several occasions to begin again in order to be sure that he was beginning correctly. Husserl considered the self to be the source of all knowing acts. He considered philosophy to be a nonempirical science, which he called phenomenology. According to Husserl, once we adopt a reflective attitude to the world, which he called the phenomenological reduction, we discover the "transcendental ego" or "pure consciousness." Everything in the world is only an object for this pure consciousness. The transcendental ego is the Archimedean point from which all study can begin. Hypatia (ca. 370-415) Neoplatonic philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer, born at Alexandria. She became head of the Neoplatonic school at Alexandria at an early age. A pagan, she was murdered by a band of Christian monks. She is said to have lectured on both Plato and Aristotle in addition to mathematics, geometry, and astronomy. Idealism The philosophical position that ideas rather than matter are what is fundamental or real in the universe. Leibniz and Berkeley are considered

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idealists in this sense. Kant's idealism, which he called "formal," "critical," or "transcendental," is somewhat different. For Kant, we cannot know the world through rational thought alone, but neither can we know it only through sense experience. Perception requires organization by the intuitions of space and time and by the categories of the understanding. German philosophers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel developed Absolute Idealism out of Kant's idealism. Fichte believed that the starting point of philosophy must be a free intelligent ego rather than space, time, and the categories of the understanding with which Kant had started. Schelling considered the mind, unlike everything else, to be undetermined and absolute. The most influential absolute idealist was Hegel. According to Hegel, "The finite is not genuinely real." Mind or the Absolute Idea, which is infinite, is what is genuinely real. The tradition of absolute idealism was continued by the "neo-Hegelians" or "British Idealists," particularly W. T. Harris, T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, Josiah Royce, and John McTaggart in the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century in the United States and Great Britain. Ideology A word first used by Destutt de Tracy in 1796 to refer to his program of reductive semantic analysis, which would lead to institutional reforms in France. Napolean opposed the ideologistes, dismissed them, and persecuted them, ridiculing them with the name ideologues. Marx adopted this contemptuous view of ideology but did not consider it to be ineffective. He considered ideology to be a mystification of nature and society with institutional causes used as a means to keep certain groups in power. For Marx, ideology is an all -encompassing power from which it is very difficult to escape. Iff A common abbreviation for "if and only if." See Logic.

Indexical A term the referent of which depends on the person, time, place, etc., of its use. If two different people both say "I am sick," the term "I" has a different referent in each case. "Here" and "now" are other common examples of indexicals. Induction The process of coming to a generalization regarding all things of some larger class on the basis of a smaller sample. The standard scientific practice of confirming universal generalizations such as "All white male cats are deaf" on the basis of a finite and limited sample of white male cats is considered induction. Innate Ideas Ideas that are in some way genetic, "hard-wired" into the mind, and that do not need to be learned. At various times it has been proposed that God, immortality, space, time, and basic forms of linguistic structure are innate ideas. Intuitionism Associated most strongly with the work of W. D. Ross, ethical intuitionism is the view that ethical rightness or wrongness is based on inherent ethical qualities, rights, obligations, etc., which can be directly intuited. More broadly, intuitionism is any view that grounds knowledge in certain basic intuitions. James, William (1842-1910) American philosopher and psychologist, founder of pragmatism, and older brother of novelist Henry James. Perhaps most often quoted for his assertion that without language to order our experiences, the world would be a "bloomin', buzzin' confusion." His major work is usually considered to be Principles of Psychology, although Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking and The Varieties of Religious Experience are also quite famous.

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Kabbalah The mystical tradition of Judaism, especially the school of esotericism and theosophy that originated in the Middle Ages. The latter is founded largely on the Sefer ha-Zohar, or Book of Splendor, a 12th-century compilation of texts, the largest part of which are mystical exegeses of the Torah. Kabbalism's method is the elaboration of the attributes of the deity; its goal is contemplation of (and rarely, union with) God. The sources of medieval Kabbalah include not only Judaism, but Zoroastrianism, Neoplatonism, Christianity, and Gnosticism. Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804) German philosopher. Kant lived his entire life in Kanigsberg, where he taught at the university for many years. He credited Hume with having awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers. Kant is considered to have been responsible for the Copernican Revolution in philosophy. In his Critique of Pure Reason, he set out to find the proper limits of reason. He wanted to know just what reason could and could not do. This meant that he needed to find the conditions for the possibility of knowledge. He combined the positions of the empiricists and the rationalists by insisting that sense experience and the categories of the understanding are both necessary for knowledge. For Kant, we can never know what things are apart from our understanding of them. His moral philosophy, as put forth in the Critique of Practical Reason and Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, is founded upon an absolute moral law, the binding force of which we cannot understand but which we can nonetheless feel. We must believe our wills to be free, the soul to be immortal, and God to exist in order to act, but we cannot know these things as they are part of the realm of things-in-themselves. Kant's third critique, Critique of Judgment, contains his aesthetic theory and a discussion of teleology. These three critiques constitute the Kantian system, called critical or transcendental idealism. Kierkegaard, Soren (1813-1855) Danish philosopher and religious thinker, regarded as a founder of Existentialism. Several of Kierkegaard's works are written as if by other authors, representing opposing characters in his overall view of man's relation to rationality and religion. One prominent Kierkegaardian theme is the "leap of faith" required to transcend the aesthetic and ethical stages into truly religious existence. Another is the claim that truth is subjectivity. Major works include Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and Sickness Unto Death. Kripke, Saul (b. 1941) McCosh Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Kripke developed the semantics for modal logic based on Leibniz's notion of "possible worlds" while still in high school. His best-known book work is Naming and Necessity, in which he argues that reference rather than description gives proper names their meaning. He has also argued against the materialist idea that mental states are identical with brain states. Kuhn, Thomas S. (b. 1922) Philosopher and historian of science at MIT. His landmark The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he describes how science moves from one world view or paradigm to another, has changed the philosophy of science and social science enormously since its publication in 1962. Kuhn argues that science is not a steady accumulation of knowledge but is rather a process of relatively stable periods of knowledge advancement and revolutionary periods during which the entire world view changes, as for example with the Copernican revolution, when the Earth came to be seen as revolving around the sun, or when quantum physics replaced Newtonian physics. Lacan, Jacques (1901-1981) French psychoanalyst in the Freudian tradition who focused on language. For Lacan, castration is not just sexual, as it is for

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Freud, but linguistic -- we can only signify ourselves in a symbolic system that we do not command but that commands us. For Freud, only women are castrated; for Lacan, everyone is. Lacan's emphasis on the phallocentrism of language has made him influential among some feminists. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716) German philosopher, scientist, mathematician, historian, and diplomat. A rationalist, Leibniz is best known for his Monadology, in which he proposes that the fundamental stuff of the universe is monads. Monads are unitary forces that are not in space and time and thus not material. Leibniz was also the first philosopher to talk about possible worlds. He considered the actual world to be "the best of all possible worlds," because God, being all good, could not have made anything less than the best world actual. Locke, John (1632-1704) English empiricist philosopher. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke inquired into "the origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion and assent." In doing this he put forth a number of ideas, including the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are inseparable from the thing that has them -- for example, extension, solidity, figure, and mobility. These qualities really exist in the thing itself. Secondary qualities are the powers a thing has to produce certain sensations in us -- for example, color, odor, sound, warmth, and smell. These qualities do not exist in the thing but are rather produced in us by the thing. Locke is perhaps best known, however, as a political thinker. His Two Treatises On Government were written, at least in part, to justify England's Glorious Revolution of 1688, resulting in the ascension to the throne of Mary and William of Orange. In the second treatise, Locke theorized that all men are originally in a state of nature and come together to form a social contract to create a body politic. It is important that this contract is between free and equal men. The purpose of the contract is to preserve the life, freedom, and property of everyone. This idea heavily influenced the American Declaration of Independence and the foundation of the United States of America. Logic The study of patterns of reasoning and argument, particularly with an eye to deductively valid patterns of reasoning and argument. Traditional logic, starting with Aristotle and continuing through the Middle Ages, is based on categorizations of arguments in terms of valid and invalid syllogisms. Contemporary formal or symbolic logic includes as its simplest form the propositional or sentential calculus, which attempts to formalize axiomatically the logical relations represented by English connectives "and," "or," "not," "if-then," and "if and only if." Predicate calculus attempts to expand this formal treatment to the quantifiers "all" and "none." Various systems of modal logic attempt to handle "necessary" and "possible" (alethic modal logic) and "permissible" and "obligatory" (deontic modal logic). Classical logics of all of these forms share (a) an assumption of bivalence -- that sentences or propositions have only one of two values, true or false -- and (b) a certain treatment of the conditional, taken as representing "if-then" sentences. Logical positivism A set of views associated with the Ernst Mach Society or Vienna Circle of the 1920s, which included prominently Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and A. J. Ayer as an informal English spokesman. The general tone of logical positivism is antimetaphysical and proscientific, in one form rejecting as literally meaningless all propositions that are neither (a) a priori propositions of logic and pure mathematics, nor (b) propositions capable of empirical verification. Under the influence of logical positivism, metaphysics became a derogatory term for idle and meaningless mental confusion,

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with philosophy taken as a therapeutic attempt to dispel such confusion. Because the model of knowledge was scientific knowledge, important attempts were made to characterize scientific knowledge precisely. Lucretius (Latin Titus Lucretius Carus) (99-55 B.C.) Epicurean philosopher of Roman origin. His poem, On the Nature of Things, is an exposition of Epicurean philosophy. According to Jerome, a love potion drove Lucretius mad and he composed the poem during periods of sanity. Lukacs, Georg (1885-1971) Hungarian Marxist philosopher. Considered a Hegelian Marxist, Lukacs was very critical of the emphasis on natural necessity and the "dialectics of nature" propounded by Engels and his followers, such as Lenin. Major work: History and Class Consciousness. Lyotard, Jean-Francois (b. 1924) French philosopher, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine. Considered a postmodernist, he is concerned with "pagan" ethics, with how we treat those who are different and how we can have a society that includes them without doing violence to their difference. His best-known work is Postmodern Condition. Machiavelli, Niccolo (1469-1527) Italian statesman and author, born at Florence. Born to a prominent family, he held office under the Florentine republic. He was dismissed when the Medici returned to power and lived out his life on a country estate. In The Prince, he gives practical advice on how a monarch might best keep power. He argues that a prince should rule with little regard for virtue or vice because at times virtue can work against, and vice for, his interests. In the Discourses, he describes how a republican form of government may improve itself. MacIntyre, Alasdair (b. 1929) A contemporary philosopher known for critical and historical studies in ethics and social philosophy. One strand of MacIntyre's work involves the claim that current ethical debate results in irresolvable conflicts because we have inherited conflicting fragments of ethical intuition from earlier traditions, torn from the social contexts in which they once made sense. Major works include Against the Self-Images of the Age, After Virtue, and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Maimonides (Hebrew Moses ben Maimon) (1135-1204) Medieval Jewish philosopher, commentator, and physician, born at Cordoba. His family fled Spain after the conquest of the Islamic Alhmohads, and eventually settled in Cairo, where he became court physician to the vizier of Saladin and head of the Egyptian Jewish community. His main philosophical work is the Guide of the Perplexed; in it, he attempts to reconcile Judaism and Aristotelianism. He held that no positive attribute can be predicated of God; and that where reason and scripture seem to be in contradiction, either ambiguous scripture must be understood as allegory or inconclusive philosophical arguments must give way to scripture. Maimonides also produced a commentary on the Mishnah; the Mishneh Torah, a codification of Jewish oral law; some medical treatises; and a work on logic. Manichaeanism A form of Gnosticism, founded by the Persian prophet and martyr Mani (ca. 216-ca. 276). It posits two coeternal principles: one of darkness, matter, and evil; the other of light, soul, and good. These two principles are at war, and this war results in the mixture of principles that is our universe. Our bodies are of the darkness, and our souls of the light; the path from darkness to light is gnosis, or knowledge of the divine, which was revealed first by Zoroaster, then Buddha, then Jesus, and finally Mani. Today the term

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Manichaeanism is used to attack positions perceived as dualistic. Marcus Aurelius (Latin Marcus Aurelius Antoninus) (121-180) Roman emperor and late Stoic philosopher. His aphoristic Meditations were written in Greek while the emperor was at war. His views are less concerned with logic and physics, and more disposed to a kindly providence, than earlier forms of Stoicism. Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1981) German philosopher who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s. Marcuse was the most famous exponent of critical theory and the most revolutionary. He undertook a detailed study of Hegel, which resulted in his first major work, Reason and Revolution. He was a Hegelian Marxist who tried to reconcile Freud and Marx in his Eros and Civilization, in which he discussed psychological categories that had become political categories. Marcuse's most influential work was One-Dimensional Man, in which he claimed that advanced industrial society is totalitarian because it manipulates needs. In the 1960s Marcuse became known as the ideologue of campus revolutions in the United States and Europe. Marx, Karl (1818-1883) German philosopher, social and economic theorist. The father of communism, Marx spent his life in exile, first in Paris, then in Brussels, and finally in London. He was heavily influenced by Hegel, whose dialectical method he used throughout his work. Most famous for his criticism of capitalism and bourgeois society, Marx worked with Friedrich Engels to produce the Communist Manifesto in 1848, which was to become one of the most influential works for world politics. It is an analysis of capitalism and a call to revolution -- a call that Lenin, Mao, and Che Guevara, among others, heard. Among Marx's most influential works was his enormous analysis of capitalism, Das Kapital or Capital. Marxism A philosophical/political/social theory based on the work of Karl Marx. Marxism comes in two distinct varieties, but what both have in common is a critique of capitalism. The first of the two main kinds of Marxism is Hegelian Marxism, which focuses a great deal of attention on Marx's early work and his links with Hegel. Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are all considered Hegelian Marxists. The other main form is orthodox Marxism, which actually begins with Engels rather than with Marx. Orthodox Marxism focuses on causal and deterministic laws that drive history and is critical of Hegelianism, dismissing the early Marx as dangerously influenced by Hegel. Lenin and Stalin are well-known orthodox Marxists. It is important to remember that Marx himself claimed that he was not a Marxist. Materialism The metaphysical view that all that ultimately exists is physical or material; that anything apparently mental, spiritual, or abstract is ultimately reducible to the purely physical or material. Nineteenth-and twentieth-century science are often accused, rightly or wrongly, of presupposing a materialist metaphysics. Mead, George Herbert (1863-1931) American pragmatist philosopher and social behaviorist. Professor of philosophy at University of Chicago from 1892, Mead published very little during his lifetime. His lectures and notes were edited by friends and students and published posthumously. In his best-known work, Mind, Self and Society, Mead was concerned with the emergence of mind and self out of social activity. Mead's social behaviorism was an attempt to account for introspection within an essentially behavioristic framework. Meinong, Alexius (1853-1920) Known for the view that there literally are things that don't exist, such as unicorns, round squares, and the (imaginary)

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golden mountain. Meinong held that objects may either "exist" or "subsist," with the latter category reserved for nonexistent items such as unicorns and round squares. Meinong also held that certain entailment relations must hold, however, so that the round square must be both round and square. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908-1961) French philosopher, existentialist, and phenomenologist. He believed that the body is that through which we live, as opposed to Sartre, who saw the body as something other than the self. For Merleau-Ponty, we cannot have disembodied experience of the world. All of our experiences are through our senses and are thus sensuous. The French word sens means both sense and meaning. Meaning then is always sensuous, which is why Merleau-Ponty says, "We are condemned to meaning." Metaphysics The study of being as such, that is, of what it means for something to be. For Aristotle, metaphysics is primarily the study of substance, because substance is that which is; everything else that is said to be is an attribute or determination of substance. Aristotle called this discipline first philosophy and theology; it received its popular name because it comes after (Greek meta) the Physics in the Aristotelian corpus. After Aristotle, the term came to be used for any theory of the nature and structure of reality, at times including ontology, cosmology, and theology. Mill, John Stuart (1806-1873) English philosopher, administrator for the East India Company, and Member of Parliament. Mill was rigorously educated by his father, who started teaching him Greek at the age of three and Latin at eight. By the time he was 14, he had read most of the Greek and Latin classics, studied history extensively, and worked intensively in logic and mathematics. At 15 he read Jeremy Bentham's Traite de legislation, which made him decide to become a world reformer. At 20 he suffered a nervous breakdown and spent the next few years tempering his analytic training with the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge -- what he considered an education of the feelings to balance his education of the intellect. Mill was an empiricist who held that all inference is ultimately induction. He formulated five methods of induction in his System of Logic (the method of agreement, of difference, of agreement and difference, of concomitant variation, and of residues). His Utilitarianism has been one of the most influential works in ethics. Mill is also well known for his On Liberty, which focused especially on freedom of thought and discussion. Mill was also an advocate of women's rights and was heavily influenced by his friend and wife, Harriet Taylor. Mind-Body Problem The recurring problem in philosophy of how the mind and the body are related. Answers have varied from Descartes's mysterious connection through the pineal gland to the denial of any mind apart from brain processes, and from Berkeley's denial of the existence of material substance to Leibniz's idea of a preestablished harmony such that mind and body appear to be linked even though they are in fact independent. The mind-body problem continues to interest and trouble philosophers today. Monism Any doctrine that asserts unity. Monism can be the simple assertion that only unity is conceivable, as with Parmenides. It can maintain that plurality is derivable from unity, as with Plotinus. It can claim that mind and matter are the manifestations of a single substance, as with Spinoza, or a single process, as with Hegel. Monism is often contrasted with dualism. More, Thomas (1478-1535) English statesman and author, born in London. Culminating a distinguished career as a statesman, More was lord chancellor to Henry VIII from 1529-1532. He was imprisoned in 1534 and later beheaded for

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refusing to acknowledge Henry as head of the Church of England. He is most remembered as a thinker for Utopia (1516), a work written in Latin that purports to chronicle a visit to an ideal republic. As is typical with Renaissance philosophers, More draws heavily on the ancients, including Plato, Cicero, and Epicurus. Mysticism A diverse group of doctrines calling for direct knowledge or experience of, or union with, the ultimate reality. Stereotypically, mysticism is theistic, other-worldly, and antirational; this is not necessarily the case, however. Mysticism can be theistic (Pseudo-Dionysios) or atheistic (Therav-ada Buddhism); it can be otherworldly (Teresa of Avila) or involved with the world (Mah-ay-ana Buddhism); and in various forms of mysticism, intellect either can know the ultimate reality (Gnosticism) or it cannot (Plotinus). Natural Law The doctrine that some or all standards for human conduct can be derived from human nature. Thus, Stoicism draws its ethics from natural human rationality. Thomas Aquinas argues that there is a natural law imprinted by the Creator on all people, Christian and Gentile; this natural law is supplemented by human and especially divine law. Natural law is often contrasted to convention and to positive law. Necessary A necessary event is one that cannot but occur; a necessary proposition is one that cannot but be true. It is impossible for a necessary event not to occur, and impossible for a necessary proposition not to be true. In the work of Leibniz and in contemporary semantics for modal logic, a necessary proposition is one true in all possible worlds. In theology, a necessary being is one the existence of which is necessary. Negation The negation of a sentence that asserts that p is the case is a sentence that asserts that p is not the case. Neoplatonism A philosophical movement in late antiquity, lasting from approximately the 3rd to the 6th centuries A.D. Neoplatonism is a modern term; the Neoplatonists considered themselves to be propounding the true doctrine of Plato. It is characterized by monism and the doctrine of emanation. Plotinus, often called its founder, held that all reality is an emanation of the One, which he identified with the Platonic form of the Good. Our task is to turn from the sensible world and achieve union with the One, which is not possible through the intellect. Iamblichus (3rd-4th centuries) is most known for his view that theurgy, or magical practice, is a path to the One. Representative of Athenian Neoplatonism is Proclus (ca. 410-485), who elaborated the theory of emanation into an extremely complex and subtle system. Alexandrian Neoplatonism, which included Hypatia, was focused on scholarship. The movement largely ended in 529, when Justinian closed the pagan schools of learning. Neoplatonism underwent a revival in the Renaissance. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900) German philosopher. In his first work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), he distinguished between the Apollonian and Dionysian spirits. Nietzsche is also well known for his discussion of the Superman (Ubermensch), a human being who has ordered his passions and affirms life, that is, who has his act together and gets things done. The Superman sees perfection as a task and sets about to achieve it. Another important conception in Nietzsche's philosophy is the will to power, which is man's basic motive and can be found in all living things. All people want power as embodied in self -possession, fearlessness, and an ability to change the lives of those around them. Nietzsche is falsely considered by some to have been a proto-Nazi as a result of his sister's creative editing of some of his writings during his

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illness and after his death. Plagued by bad health, poor eyesight, and frequent migraines, Nietzsche went mad in 1889. Nietzsche's works include Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and Genealogy of Morals. Nihilism A general term for negative or pessimistic views regarding existence, meaning, and value. In an extreme form, nihilism is the view that nothing exists. In a more common ethical form, nihilism is the view that nothing has any genuine value or meaning. Nirvana A Sanskrit word meaning "extinguishing," as of the flame of a lamp. In Buddhism, it is the state of enlightenment. We are endlessly reborn to lives of suffering because of desire; each life is likened to a lamp, desire to its fuel, and we pass from life to life as a flame passes from lamp to lamp. Nirvana is attained by the elimination of desire so that suffering and rebirth may end, just as the absence of fuel extinguishes the flame. Desire is eliminated by following the Buddha's teachings, especially that of contemplation. Noesis and Noema In Husserl, noesis is an intending act while noema is the intended meaning or sense. For example, the act of wishing that the house were on the hill is the noesis, while the wished-for house (as wished for) is the noema. Non-Contradiction, Law of The principle that no contradiction can be true; that any sentence of the form "P and not P" must be false. Noumenon In Kant, anything that cannot be known by experience -- any object as it is in itself independent of our experience of it, as opposed to phenomenon. Ockham's Razor The principle that plurality is not to be posited without necessity, associated with the English scholastic William of Ockham (ca. 1285 -1359). In other words, an explanation with fewer assumptions is preferable to one with more, where possible. It is also known as the principle of economy and of parsimony. Ontological argument, The An argument attempting to prove the existence of God from his essential nature. It was first put forward by Anselm in his Proslogion. Anselm argues that God is that than which nothing greater can be thought; that than which nothing greater can be thought must include existence, for if it did not, something greater could be thought; therefore, God necessarily exists. Duns Scotus, Descartes, and Leibniz also put forth forms of the ontological argument. See also Anselm. Ontology The theory of being. Ontology is often used as a synonym for metaphysics. Pantheism The doctrine that God is the cosmos and the cosmos, God. Hinduism has a pantheistic moment in the Vedic concept of Brahman, the unity behind all illusory plurality. Spinoza can be considered a pantheist in identifying substance with God and reducing thought and extension to attributes of substance. On some readings, the Hegelian Absolute Idea is a pantheist conception. Pantheism is often contrasted with the narrow sense of theism. Paradigm A word used by Thomas Kuhn to refer to a scientific world view. It can be used to refer to any set of laws and principles that form a coherent view. A paradigm can also be a model, as a blueprint is a paradigm for a building, or can be an exemplary case, as one could say that a particularly

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bright, hard-working student is a paradigm of what all students should be. Paradox In general, a paradox consists of two contrary propositions with apparently compelling arguments for each, or an unacceptable proposition for which there appears to be a compelling argument. Perhaps the oldest paradox is the paradox of the Liar, consisting of the following sentence: This statement is false. Is the exhibited sentence true, or false? If true, it must be false, since it says it's false. If false, on the other hand, it must be true, since that's was it says it is. It appears that the sentence must be either true or false, but either assumption leads to contradiction. Other classical paradoxes include the Sorites, or paradox of the heap, and Zeno's paradoxes of motion. Among paradoxes important for the development of twentieth-century set theory are Russell's paradox of the set of all sets which are not members of itself (is it a member of itself, or not?), Cantor's paradox of the set of all sets, and Burali-Forti's paradox of the greatest cardinal number. Parmenides (6th-5th centuries B.C.) Pre-Socratic philosopher, lived at Elea in Italy. For Parmenides, being is one, and change and multiplicity are illusions. In his poem, The Way of Truth, he argues the following: that which is thought must have being, for that which is not cannot be thought; being is changeless, for change requires not-being; and being is one, for multiplicity requires not -being. Parmenides founded the Eleatic school; the most famous of his students was Zeno of Elea. Particulars Individual things, often understood as instances of general concepts, or universals. Pascal, Blaise (1623-1662) French philosopher, mathematician, physicist, and inventor. Pascal invented an early calculating machine, made contributions to number theory, probability, and geometry, and conducted experiments on air pressure and the vacuum. His later religious and philosophical writings have overshadowed these achievements, however, and he is most widely remembered today for his reflections on human existence and God in his Pensees. Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839-1914) American philosopher and mathematician, one of the founders of pragmatism. Peirce is remembered best for seminal work in logic and philosophy of science, though these were always for him part of larger philosophical systems. Perception sensing. A general term for seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, or otherwise

Personal identity The character of being the same person, which an individual retains through various mental and bodily changes. The problem of personal identity is that of specifying what conditions are required in order for an individual at one point and an individual at another to be the same person. Phenomena In Kant, things as they are for human experience as opposed to how they are in themselves. Phenomenalism A view according to which statements about the world are ultimately only statements about actual and potential perceptions, phenomena, or appearances, or the view that all that exists is ultimately composed of such phenomena or appearances. In a weaker sense, phenomenalism is the view that at any rate the only knowledge possible is knowledge about actual and potential perceptions, phenomena, or appearances, rather than about things in themselves.

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Phenomenology The study or science of phenomena. The term was first used by German philosopher Johan Heinrich Lambert in 1764. Hegel was the first to make the term well known in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Here he shows that by coming to know Mind or Spirit as it appears, we come to know it as it is. Husserl made phenomenology into a method of philosophy, which is usually what people consider phenomenology to be today. Phenomenology in this sense is a method of description whereby one describes phenomena by means of direct awareness. The phenomenologists' slogan is "Return to the things themselves," by which they mean that philosophers should get back to philosophy and describe things as phenomena rather playing around with language and logic. Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty all considered themselves to be phenomenologists, though they used the term somewhat differently from Husserl and from each other. Philosopher-king Plato writes in the Republic that a just state is impossible unless kings are philosophers and philosophers are kings. He then elaborates a system of education that will create these philosopher-kings, and thus a just state. This education culminates in dialectic, which prepares the rulers to know the idea of the Good. Philosophy From a Greek term meaning "love of wisdom." Broadly, philosophy involves theoretical or conceptual examination, often of questions that arise in other contexts or disciplines. This definition may seem overly broad, since philosophy so defined would apparently include aspects of science and art as well. Traditionally, however, much of what was considered philosophy also qualifies as art (Plato's dialogues, for example) or natural science (parts of the Aristotelian corpus). At present, philosophy appears as a university discipline that deals with past and present systematic theorizing. As such, it includes as subfields logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics, and philosophy of language. Philosophy of language A branch of philosophy concentrating on questions regarding language: What is meaning? What is reference? Is a perfect language possible? Is necessity purely linguistic? An even more focused subbranch is philosophy of linguistics. Philosophy of law A branch of philosophy that concentrates on questions about the nature and function of law and legal systems: What is required for a legal system? Does the law have ethical force? Under what conditions is civil disobedience justified? Is the death penalty justifiable? In many instances philosophy of law merges with theoretical jurisprudence. Philosophy of religion A branch of philosophy that concentrates on questions about theology and religion: Is there a God? Is belief in a God rational? Is the existence of a God consistent with the existence of evil? Philosophy of science A branch of philosophy that concentrates on questions about the character of scientific knowledge: What is a theory? Under what conditions is a hypothesis confirmed? What constitutes a scientific explanation? What is the difference between science and pseudoscience? Plato (ca. 427-ca. 347 B.C.) Greek philosopher, born at Athens. The son of an aristocratic family, he was a follower of Socrates. In 388 B.C. he traveled to the court of the tyrant of Syracuse, hoping to put his theories into practice; he made two more visits later in life. He founded his school, the Academy, after his first such visit. Among his students was Aristotle. It is difficult

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to make generalizations about Plato's work, given its literary character; however, provisional remarks about its form and content are possible. Plato's chosen literary form was the dialogue, usually a dramatic account of a philosophical conversation. The main character is often Socrates. A striking feature of many dialogues is that the characters regard the conversation as inconclusive. Among the dialogues are the Apology, Republic, Symposium, and Timaeus. The literary form of the dialogue is a reflection of Plato's method: rational discourse that attempts to apprehend the essence of things. Plato's doctrine is referred to as the theory of forms. He argues that ideas alone are real, and that sensible objects are mere images of ideas; true knowledge is of the intelligible world, and the good man and the good state act in accord with the idea of the Good. His work predates later distinctions among disciplines within philosophy; thus, the theory of forms is simultaneously ethics, politics, ontology, logic, and epistemology. See also Academy; Dialectic; Form; Good, the. Plotinus (ca. 205-270) Neoplatonic philosopher, born in Egypt, studied at Alexandria. After an aborted attempt to travel east to study Persian and Indian philosophy, Plotinus settled at Rome. He is generally considered the founder of Neoplatonism. His position is characterized by monism and the theory of emanation and is set forth in the Enneads, which were edited by his student Porphyry. Disagreeing with Gnostic dualism, Plotinus held that all reality is an emanation of the One, which he identified with the form of the Good. Emanation undergoes several stages, termed hypostases. The first of these is the One; the second, Intellect; the third, Soul. The sensible world, although a result of the process of emanation, is not considered a separate hypostasis. Our task is to seek union with the One. This is achieved by turning away from the sensible world and the body, and turning first to Soul, then Intellect, and finally the One. Although Plotinus' system is rational, final union with the One is beyond Intellect or reason. Political Philosophy The branch of philosophy that deals with political life, especially with the essence, origin, and value of the state. Popper, Karl (b. 1902) In philosophy of science, known for the falsifiability criterion, according to which a theory qualifies as scientific not if it is verifiable but if it is falsifiable -- that is, if it is incompatible with certain possible results of observation. Popper's main work is Logic of Scientific Discovery. Pragmatic theory of truth Associated with the work of Charles S. Peirce and (more clearly) William James. In a simple form, it is the theory that the truth of a claim or belief consists in whether it works in practice. Pragmatism A philosophical movement founded by C. S. Peirce and William James. "The pragmatic method tries to interpret each notion by tracing its practical consequences." (James, Pragmatism.). The consequences of any idea are its meaning. Premise In an argument, one of the propositions of the set from which a conclusion is drawn. Pre-Socratics A group of Greek thinkers who lived in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. and are united by an interest in the constituent principles of nature. Although their name implies that they lived and taught before Socrates, some were his contemporaries. See also Atomism; Heraclitus; Parmenides; Pythagoras; Thales; Zeno of Elea.

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Prime Mover The unmoved source of all movement, or God. In the Physics, Aristotle argues that all movement has a cause; since an infinite regress of causes is unthinkable, there must be an original, unmoved source of movement, or Prime Mover; since movement is continuous and eternal, this Prime Mover must be one and eternal. Nor does it have magnitude: eternal movement requires infinite force, infinite force cannot reside in a finite magnitude, and infinite magnitude cannot exist. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle argues that the Prime Mover is the source of change in that it is the primary object of desire and of thought; it is the final cause of the universe, alive, actual, and good; it is immaterial; it is thought thinking itself; it is, in fact, God. Property Any characteristic of an object; some attribute that it has. The color, size, and shape of an object are all properties it has. Proposition A statement, or that which is expressed by a declarative sentence. Sometimes it is said that it is propositions expressed by sentences, rather than sentences themselves, that are true or false. Propositions are also taken to be what is believed or known. Psychoanalysis Psychological/philosophical theory/practice developed by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis emphasizes achieving self-knowledge through conversation with an analyst. It is a method of investigation that consists in bringing out the unconscious meaning of a person's words, actions, and the products of imagination using free association. It is also a method of psychotherapy that brings things repressed in the unconscious to consciousness, allowing the patient to work through them and thus curing the patient of the physical and/or psychological symptoms they cause. Pythagoras (6th century B.C.) Pre-Socratic philosopher, lived at Croton in Italy. He was founder of the school of Pythagoreanism. The teachings of the school had both philosophical and religious aspects. These included the doctrines that the universe is based on number and arranged according to mathematical ratio and musical harmony; that number itself is based on a fundamental mathematical and moral dualism between the limited and the unlimited; that the soul is immortal and undergoes reincarnation; and that one should observe certain taboos (e.g., abstention from beans). The Pythagoreans had a great influence on mathematics, hence the geometrical theorem that bears their name. Quine, W.V.O. (b. 1908) American philosopher and logician, professor of philosophy at Harvard. Quine is sceptical of the distinction between analytic truths, which are true by definition (like "all bachelors are unmarried men"), and synthetic truths, which are true as matters of fact (like "Albany is the capital of New York"). Quine was also concerned with problems of translation, encapsulated in the "indeterminacy of translation": it is possible to compile incompatible manuals for translating one language into another, all of which seem to work, and therefore none of which can be called the one right manual. Quine's most famous work is his Word and Object. Rationalism An approach to philosophy that takes reason alone, unaided by experience, to be primary in the search for truth. Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza are paradigmatic rationalists, all of whom attempted to reconstruct philosophical thought on a mathematical model. Rawls, John (b. 1921) A contemporary political philosopher known for a theory of justice with affinities to social contract theory, sometimes interpreted as

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a defense of liberalism. On Rawls's theory, roughly, a policy is just if it is in accord with principles that would be agreed to by a group of free and rational individuals in an "original position," in which under "a veil of ignorance" they do not yet know what position they will take in a society. His major works are "Justice As Fairness," and A Theory of Justice. Realism In the most common contemporary sense, realism is the view that science and similar bodies of belief do represent or correspond to an independent reality -- the world -- against which they are judged and which they can more or less adequately mirror. Realism has also been used to label the view that atoms, quarks, the weak force, and other things apparently designated by nonobservational or theoretical terms are nonetheless real. In one traditional sense, realism is the view that universals are real -- that general categories exist in their own right, rather than merely the individual things that belong to those categories. Reason The power of thought. It is sometimes conceived of as thinking abstractly, thinking logically, or thinking dialectically. Reason is variously opposed to appetite (the power of desire) and sensation (the power of sensing objects). The conclusions of reason are sometimes contrasted to the conclusions of intuition, of revelation, and of faith. Relativism The doctrine that truth or value is relative to cultures or individuals, rather than objective or absolute. In an extreme form, relativism is the view that there is no truth, there are only views held by one or another group. Renaissance A term from French meaning "rebirth." It is applied to a period in Western European history from approximately the 14th to the 17th centuries and is often considered a rebirth of intellectual and aesthetic culture after the Middle Ages. Renaissance thought is characterized both by a return to the ancients and by humanism. Part of the age's rebirth was the rediscovery of ancient Latin and Greek texts: Aristotle's writings, which the medievals knew through commentators, were available in a more complete form; Plato's writings, which the medievals knew through the attacks of the commentators, were available for the first time. Thus, a Renaissance Aristotelianism arose (e.g., Pomponazzi), and more importantly, a Renaissance Platonism (e.g., Ficino and Pico). Renaissance humanism was a turning from a focus on God and the next world to human beings and this world. It was therefore openly antagonistic to Scholasticism. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778) Swiss-born philosopher best known for his book on education, Emile, and his book on political theory, Social Contract. Rousseau considered man to be a free and rational being by nature and thought that his participation in society must be consistent with that fundamental nature. A political society must be the result of a social contract -- a free association of intelligent people. Because they have chosen to form this society, its members owe it their allegiance. This society must, however, be one that leaves its members free, obeying not another person, but the general will, which is always directed toward the general good. Only in obeying the general will are individuals truly free because only then are they obeying a law that they have given to themselves. This democratic notion of society was very influential in the formation of the United States. Russell, Bertrand (1872-1970) Known primarily for work in logic and the foundations of mathematics, culminating in Principles of Mathematics and Principia Mathematica (with Alfred North Whitehead). Russell later did work in

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epistemology, including Our Knowledge of the External World and An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, as well as authoring a range of popular works in ethics, politics, and education. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-1980) French existentialist philosopher and writer. Founded the journal Les Temps Modernes with Simone de Beauvoir, his lifelong companion, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Sartre was heavily influenced by Hegel, Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger. He was interested in human beings and sought to describe their mode of being. His fundamental definition of the self could be summed up "You are what you do." His most famous philosophical works are Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason. He is also well known for his play No Exit, for his novel Nausea, and for his collection of stories, The Wall. Skepticism The position that knowledge is limited or impossible. The many historical forms of skepticism include Academic, Pyrrhonian, Cartesian, and Humean skepticism. Academic skepticism (3rd to 1st centuries B.C.), associated with the New Academy, argued that certainty is impossible because the senses are fallible and the most we can hope for is probability. Pyrrhonian scepticism (1st to 3rd centuries A.D.) argued that we should suspend judgment about all that is not immediate in appearance, such as logical or causal connection, because there is no way of ascertaining its certainty. Rene Descartes' method of universal doubt can be called skeptical, although it is ultimately in the service of certainty and rationalism. David Hume advocated a mitigated form of skepticism. He argued that the excesses of Pyrrhonian skepticism had to be corrected by common sense and reflection, and our enquiries limited to the capabilities of the human understanding. Scholasticism A movement in medieval Christian thought. It lasted from the 11th to 15th centuries, although anticipations exist as early as the 6th century and survivals as late as the 18th. Scholasticism can be characterized in four ways. First and foremost, scholasticism was Christian. Its overriding concerns were theological, and it sought to systematize the truths of faith and relate them to the truths of philosophy. Second, it was rational. In the service of faith, it made use of non-Christian philosophy. These sources included not only Greek philosophy generally and Aristotle in particular but also Islamic philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes. Third, it was systematic. This manifested itself in forbidding technical language, in voluminous commentary, in precise logical disputation, and especially in great systematic works called summae. Fourth, scholasticism was associated with universities, or "schools"; hence the name of the movement. See also Anselm; Cosmological argument; Essence and existence; Natural Law; Ontological argument, The; Thomas Aquinas; Universals. Semantics In a general sense, the study of the meaning of linguistic signs or symbols. In logic, the semantics for a formal system provides a model or set of models that afford a valuation, usually in terms of "true" and "false," for the formulae of the system. As a subdiscipline of logic, formal semantics is that branch of logic involving the study of interpretations or valuations for formal languages, and is roughly coextensive with model theory. Semiotics Also known as semiology. The science of signs. Semiotics appears in the work of C. S. Peirce at the end of the nineteenth century and semiology in Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, in his Course on General Linguistics (1910-1913). For Saussure, linguistics is only a part of semiology -- all human behavior and production is significant and can be studied as such by semiotics. Roland Barthes further developed semiotics in his Elements of Semiology (1964).

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For him, however, all significant behavior is already language, thus all questions about significance are already questions about language. For Saussure, the sign is the relation of signifier and signified. A sign is not just a word but the word and the concept that goes with it. Umberto Eco is perhaps the best-known semiotician today. Social contract An original agreement whereby people existing in a "state of nature" agree to build a society together or to establish mutual social relations. The idea of a social contract is central to the social philosophy of Hobbes and Locke, but appears also in Rousseau, Kant, and in a contemporary form in the work of John Rawls. Typically, the role of such an idea, which need not be held to reflect an actual historical event, it to gauge the justice of certain social structures or governmental policies by seeing if they would accord with the rational decisions made in a social contract. Socialism A social and political position, originating with Robert Owen in 1827, to the effect that existing society is unjust and corrupt because of an unequal distribution of wealth and property and that a better society can be created, which will improve mankind instead of corrupting it. This society would be characterized by equality. After Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, socialism changed. They dismissed previous socialists as utopians and advocated a "scientific" socialism. Lenin said that socialism would be just a step on the way to communism, a step that could be characterized by the slogan "From each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution," and by the gradual withering away of the state. Socrates (ca. 470-399 B.C.) Greek philosopher, born at Athens. Socrates himself wrote nothing; what we know of him comes through Plato, his student, and Xenophon, his apologist. Excepting time spent at war, he lived his entire life at Athens. He spent his days in philosophical disputation, and in so doing attracted a number of followers and made a number of enemies. In 399, he was charged with corrupting the youth and disbelieving in the gods of the state. His defense, or apology, is reported by both Plato and Xenophon. He was convicted and sentenced to death, which he carried out by drinking hemlock. Plato wrote a number of dialogues in which Socrates is the chief character; it is therefore difficult to separate Socrates's position from the one Plato attributes to him. Plato and Xenophon agree, however, on what has been called the Socratic method, or dialectic: disputation by means of question and answer, especially to show weaknesses in the answerer's position. Socrates has been taken as the seminal figure in Greek philosophy; thus, all philosophy prior to his is characterized as "Pre-Socratic." Solipsism The doctrine that the only things that exist are aspects of "my" consciousness; that reality does not extend beyond what I perceive, and that there are no other selves or beings apart from me and my consciousness. Sophist Originally, a Greek term meaning "wise man," in the 5th and 4th centuries it came to mean "teacher," especially one hired to teach young Athenian male citizens. The course of study included rhetoric at the very least. The goal of the Sophist was to prepare the young man for a political life. According to Plato, the sophist's means to this was to teach him to argue for or against any position whatsoever, often to destructive effect. Following the criticisms of Plato and others, the reputation of the Sophists suffered, and the term became a synonym for quibbler and intellectual cheat. Sound An argument is sound where it both is valid and has true premises.

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Spinoza, Baruch or Benedict (1632-1677) Known for a philosophical system presented in an axiomatic deductive style and concluding that the universe is a single deterministic entity, with infinite attributes, that can be thought of as either Nature or God. As a Jew living in Holland, Spinoza had little contact with his Dutch neighbors. Because he had been expelled from the synagogue for unorthodox opinions, moreover, he had little contact with the rest of the Jewish community. Spinoza earned his living as a lens grinder, refusing the chair in philosophy at Heidelberg in 1673 because he thought it would cost him his independence and tranquility of mind. Major work: Ethics. State of nature The state of humanity as it would be if there had never been any social or political institutions. The idea of a state of nature is used by a number of political philosophers, most notably Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes. In Locke and Rousseau, the state of nature is used as an argument for basic rights, including rights to liberty. In Hobbes, a quite different conception of the state of nature is used to argue for the necessity of a government with virtually unlimited powers over the individual. Stoicism A school of Hellenistic philosophy, founded by Zeno of Citium (ca. 336-ca. 265 B.C.), which flourished from the third century B.C. to the second century A.D. It derives its name from the painted porch, or stoa poikile, in Athens, where Zeno taught. The Stoics conceived of nature as a rational whole. In line with this, they developed a propositional logic. In ethics, they held that the path of virtue is the path of nature, that is, of reason. By eschewing conventional goods for the rational, natural life, one can avoid both pain and pleasure and attain peace of mind. In addition to Zeno, Stoic philosophers include Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Structuralism A philosophical standpoint of the continental tradition. It had its origins in the linguistic studies of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobsen, who investigated the structure underlying language. Its basic premise is that in order to understand society, one has to understand the implicit structure that all human activity presupposes. Anthropologist Claude Levi -Strauss used this concept of structure in his analysis of primitive societies, as did Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault in psychology and epistemology. Subject, the The self, the "I." All self-conscious human beings who act, speak, and know themselves are subjects. Subjective idealism A philosophical position that rests on the assumption that the object of perception is part of the mind. Fichte was considered a subjective idealist in that he considered the ego to be the source of all things. See Idealism. Subjectivism In ethics, the view that ethical values are merely a matter of the subjective impressions and preferences of individuals and have no objective or independent status apart from the subjective states of individuals. Linguistically expressed, the view is that ethical statements are merely statements about subjective impressions and preferences. Substance and attribute The distinction between substance and attribute comes from Aristotle. In the simplest case, a substance is an individual thing -- for instance, Socrates. Wisdom, on the other hand, is an attribute we predicate of Socrates in saying "Socrates is wise." Aristotle and later thinkers also offer more complicated accounts of substance and attribute, however. Summum bonum A Latin phrase meaning "the greatest good." In ethics, it is the

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good that is valued as an end in itself, not as a means to another end. As such, it forms the foundation of various systems of ethics. Thus, for Aristotle, happiness is the greatest good; for the Epicurean, pleasure; for the Stoic, peace of mind. Kant calls the good will the highest good; Mill, the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Syllogism A form of valid deductive argument that consists of two premises and a conclusion. The argument "All Greeks are wise; Socrates is a Greek; therefore, Socrates is wise" is a syllogism. First formulated by Aristotle, the syllogism dominated Western logic until the 19th century. Syntax In logic, the syntax of a system is defined by a grammar that specifies certain strings of symbols as well-formed formulae, or wffs. Syntax is also taken as the study of properties of formal systems dependent only on the form of its formulae, independent of interpretation. In this broader sense, the study of syntax is roughly correlate to proof theory. Synthetic proposition A proposition that, if true, is true as a matter of fact or because of the way the world is, rather than solely in virtue of the meaning of its terms. Tarski, Alfred (b. 1902) Polish-American logician known for his work in formal semantics, the notion of metalanguages, and truth. Tarski is well known for his T-schema. Although actually developed in a formal context, the T-schema is widely interpreted informally as specifying, given a sentence P and name "P" for that sentence, that "P" is true if and only if P. Tarski's theorem is that the notion of arithmetical truth is not arithmetically definable; i.e., that within any consistent formal system adequate for arithmetic there can be no formula f such that it is a theorem for all and only those formulae taken as true on the standard interpretation that formula f applies to them. Tautology Informally, a definitional or analytic truth. In logic, a compound sentence true regardless of what truth values are assigned to its components: "If P then P," for example. More generally, the term is used to designate any similarly trivial truth, such as "Either Bill will win class president or he won't." Teleology A doctrine that seeks to explain phenomena through ends, goals, or purposes. Through the concept of final causality, Aristotle argued that not only is human activity purposive, but that all things in nature have a purpose or end (e.g., the purpose of teeth is to chew, the goal of a seed is the mature plant). In fact, he argues, all things have a common goal in their desire for the Prime Mover, or God. Hegel argues that the goal of history is the realization of freedom and reason. Teleology is often contrasted with mechanism, which seeks to explain all phenomena through efficient causality. Thales (6th century B.C.) Pre-Socratic philosopher from Miletos in what is now Turkey. Tradition holds not only that he was the founder of the Ionian school of philosophy, but also that he was the first Western philosopher. He was also a mathematician and astronomer. None of his work survives. Many of the Ionians attempted to explain the workings of nature through recourse to a single principle, and Aristotle reports that Thales held that water is the persisting substrate of all things. Theism Broadly, the position that there is a God. This view can be based on reason, on revelation, or both. Variants include monotheism (that there is one God), polytheism (that there are many Gods), and pantheism (that the whole is

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God). More narrowly, theism is the belief in a God who is personal, transcendent, and active in the world. In this latter sense it is contrasted with pantheism and deism. Theology The systematic study of the truths of religion, sometimes limited to the study of God's nature, attributes, and relation to the world. Theology as a discipline originated in late antiquity, when Jewish and Christian intellectuals attempted to explain and understand their religions through philosophy. Medieval theologians -- Islamic, Jewish, and Christian -- were concerned with the relation of theology (and its realm, revealed truth) to philosophy (and its realm, truth found by reason). Theorem In logic, a provable formula, or one that appears as the last line of some derivation. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) Scholastic philosopher, born at Roccasecca near Naples. The youngest son of a noble family, Aquinas was educated by Benedictines and eventually became a Dominican. He studied theology at Paris and taught at the university there; he also he spent time at the papal court. Aquinas was the creator of a synthesis of Aristotelianism and Catholicism. He held that, although separate, theology and philosophy are at harmony, with faith supplementing and correcting reason; that reason can know nature, for the senses perceive particulars, from which the intellect abstracts universals; that the intellect cannot know God positively in this life, but only negatively and by analogy; and that things are a combination of essence and existence. His works include the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologiae (often incorrectly called the Summa Theologica). Thomism, as his position is called, is the dominant philosophy in the Roman Catholic Church. Thoreau, Henry David (1817-1862) American essayist and philosopher, one of the Concord transcendentalists. Thoreau is best remembered for his eloquent and outspoken individualism. Major works: On Civil Disobedience, Walden. Transcendentalism An American intellectual movement centered around Concord, Massachusetts, and flourishing from about 1836 to 1860. The roots of transcendentalism are many and various, though it draws most strongly from the romanticism of Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle. For the most part it constitutes a moralistic theme rather than a philosophical position -- a theme of idealistic striving beyond the bonds of provincial conservatism. Foremost among the transcendentalists were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, and George Ripley. Truth See Coherence theory of truth; Correspondence theory of truth; Pragmatic theory of truth. Universals General concepts or ideas. Universals are often contrasted with particulars. The origin and nature of universals is a long-standing debate in philosophy. Among the ancients, Plato held that ideas had objective reality apart from sensuous things, while Aristotle argued that universals exist only as common properties of particulars. The problem of universals, however, is most commonly known as a Scholastic debate. There were three basic positions in this debate: Nominalism, Conceptualism, and Realism. Nominalism held that universals were arbitrary names given to particulars. William of Ockham is often read as a Nominalist. Conceptualism held that although universals exist only as concepts of the mind, they are not arbitrary, but follow on similarities in the world. Peter Abelard was of this school. The moderate Realism of Thomas Aquinas held that universals exist only in particular things,

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from which they are abstractions. Utilitarianism Classical utilitarianism (as in the work of Jeremy Bentham) is the view that an act is right if it produces the greatest amount of pleasure for the greatest number of people. In other forms of utilitarianism (including John Stuart Mill, G. E. Moore, and contemporary authors), it may be rules or institutions that are evaluated rather than acts, and happiness or pleasure may be replaced by more complicated notions of the good. Utopia A neologism from Greek that means either "good place" (eutopia) or "no place" (outopia). It was coined by Thomas More for his book Utopia (1516), which purported to chronicle a visit to an ideal republic. The term has come to mean any ideal social structure. Utopian literature became a powerful tool for social criticism in the Renaissance and modern periods; the term is sometimes applied to certain ancient arguments as well (e.g., Plato's Republic). Valid A deductively valid argument is one in which it is impossible for all of its premises to be true and its conclusion to be false; if its premises are true, its conclusion must be true. More generally, an argument is said to be valid if its conclusion legitimately follows from its premises. Virtue Greek theories of virtue are based on the term arete, which means "goodness," "excellence," and "virtue." The goodness or virtue of a thing is that by which it performs its function well. Thus, the function of a knife is to cut; a good, or "virtuous," knife cuts well. Plato argues in the Republic that when reason rules the soul, as is its function, the soul is virtuous; as such, it possesses wisdom, bravery, temperance, and justice. For Aristotle, the ethically virtuous soul habitually chooses its path of action according to a rational mean between two vices. Thus, when faced with a fearful situation, it chooses the mean, which is courage, rather than wallow in an excess of fear, which is a vice called cowardice, or proceed heedlessly and fearlessly, which is rashness. Weber, Max (1864-1920) German sociologist. Against Karl Marx, Weber denied that any form of social activity could be purely economic, though he did think that all activities have an economic aspect. His most famous work was The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he argued that capitalism is largely the result of the ascetic secular morality associated with Calvinism. Whitehead, Alfred North (1861-1947) British mathematician and philosopher known for work in the foundations of mathematics with Bertrand Russell (Principia Mathematica) and for later work in metaphysics, most notably in Process and Reality. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889-1951) Austro-English philosopher. The two major periods of Wittgenstein's philosophical life are marked by the Tractatus Logico -Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations. The Tractatus is an attempt to lay out the structure of any language that mirrors the world, with implications drawn regarding what can be said and what can only be shown. The Philosophical Investigations is a posthumously published and much looser collection of ideas centering on the social nature and function of language, with attention to implications for both the content and proper practice of philosophy. Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797) Educator and first major philosophical feminist. Born and raised in a poor farming family in rural England, she was self-educated and worked as a governess and then as a freelance writer and

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translator. She was condemned by many for her Bohemian lifestyle, which included being independent, living with a man, and giving birth to a child out of wedlock. She married William Godwin only a few months before her death from complications following childbirth. The child she had with William Godwin was her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who eventually married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein. Mary Wollstonecraft was concerned with women's education and with the fact that middle class and aristocratic women are expected and trained to be useless, feeble, and weak-minded. Wollstonecraft's arguments for women's emancipation, put forth most famously in her Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), earned her the admiration of some and the hostility of many, who called her such things as "a hyena in petticoats" and "a philosophizing serpent." Wollstonecraft was also a supporter of the French Revolution and was highly critical of social systems based on the assumption that some people are born better than others. Mary Wollstonecraft's life and work continue to inspire feminists today. Yoga A Sanskrit word meaning "yoking," given both to a set of Indian practices and to a school of Hindu philoso-phy. Broadly, Yoga is an ascetic and contemplative discipline whose goal is enlightenment. In this sense, it is current in Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. More narrowly, Yoga is one of the six schools of Hindu philosophy. It was first elaborated in Patanjali's Yoga-s -utras, perhaps in the 2nd century B.C. It argues that liberation from suffering comes about through yogic discipline, which includes regularized breathing and physical postures; liberation itself, unlike that of Buddhism, consists in the pure isolation of the eternal self. The physical forms of Yoga are considered preliminaries to the mental discipline of meditation, the goal of which is to reach a state in which not only awareness of one's surroundings but the awareness of being in that state is removed. Reaching this state consists in a progression of stages of emptying the mind. Zen A term meaning "contemplation," given to a Japanese form of Mahayana Buddhism. It was introduced to Japan from China in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Zen emphasizes meditation and discipline, often as a means to sudden enlightenment. The object of meditation is the koan, a question meant to transcend intellectual distinctions. Zeno of Elea (ca. 490-ca. 430 B.C.) Pre-Socratic philosopher. A student of Parmenides, he is most famous for a series of paradoxes of motion. In one, Zeno argues that a runner cannot traverse the length of a stadium: In order to reach the finish line, a runner must pass over an infinite number of points; it is impossible to pass over an infinite number of points in a finite time; thus, the runner cannot reach the finish line. He is not to be confused with Zeno of Citium, founder of Stoicism.

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