23 résultats pour "this"

• Art criticism

  Art criticism To criticize a work of art is to make a judgment of its overall merit or demerit and to support that judgment by reference to features it possesses. This activity is of great antiquity; we find Aristotle, for example, relating the excellence of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to the excellence of its plot construction. Criticism became a topic in philosophy because reflection on the kinds of things said by critics generated various perplexities and in some cases encouraged a general sceptic...

• Benjamin, Walter

  Benjamin, Walter Walter Benjamin was one of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers of culture. His work combines formal analysis of art works with social theory to generate an approach which is historical, but is far more subtle than either materialism or conventional Geistesgeschichte (cultural and stylistic chronology). The ambiguous alignment of his work between Marxism and theology has made him a challenging and often controversial figure. 1 Life and works Benjamin was born into...

• Atheism

  Atheism Atheism is the position that affirms the nonexistence of God. It proposes positive disbelief rather than mere suspension of belief. Since many different gods have been objects of belief, one might be an atheist with respect to one god while believing in the existence of some other god. In the religions of the west - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - the dominant idea of God is of a purely spiritual, supernatural being who is the perfectly good, allpowerful, all-knowing creator of everyth...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Bentham and James Mill

  Bentham and James Mill Jeremy Bentham was born in 1748 in London; his prosperous father, a lawyer who became wealthy from property rather than the law, planned out for his son a brilliant legal career. After an early education at Westminster and Oxford he was called to the Bar in 1769. However, instead of mastering the complexities, technicalities, precedents and mysteries of the law in order to carve out a successful career, Bentham's response to such chaos and absurdity was to challenge the wh...

• ESSAY : Ayckbourn provides us with a snapshot of ruthlessness. How far would you agree with this view ?

  ESSAY : Ayckbourn provides us with a snapshot of ruthlessness. How far would you agree with this view ? Alan Ayckbourn’s humour is, in his own words, one that “hovers on the darkness, that walks in the shadow of something else”. His play Absurd Person Singular explores the middle classes and the themes of cruelty, selfishness and insensitivity. Ayckbourn’s style proves to be merciless, effective, and his characters flawed and unfeeling. However, the characters, while matching certain stere...

• Animals and ethics

  Animals and ethics Does morality require that we respect the lives and interests of nonhuman animals? The traditional doctrine was that animals were made for human use, and so we may dispose of them as we please. It has been argued, however, that this is a mere ‘speciesist' prejudice and that animals should be given more or less the same moral consideration as humans. If this is right, we may be morally required to be vegetarians; and it may turn out that laboratory research using animals, and m...

• Kant's Moral Philosophy

  Just as the first Critique set out critically the synthetic a priori principles of theoretical reason, the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) set out critically the synthetic a priori principles of practical reason. This is a brief and eloquent presentation of Kant's moral system. In morals, Kant's starting point is that the only thing which is good without qualification is a good will. Talents, character, self-control, and fortune can be used to bad ends; even happiness can be corrup...

• Anaximander

  Anaximander (c.610-after 546 BC) The Greek philosopher Anaximander of Miletus followed Thales in his philosophical and scientific interests. He wrote a book, of which one fragment survives, and is the first Presocratic philosopher about whom we have enough information to reconstruct his theories in any detail. He was principally concerned with the origin, structure and workings of the world, and attempted to account for them consistently, through a small number of principles and mechanisms. Like...

• THE MATERIAL WORLD - DESCARTES

  Descartes' Meditations brought him fame throughout Europe. He entered into correspondence and controversy with most of the learned men of his time, especially through the intermediary of a learned Franciscan, Marin Mersenne. Some of his friends began to teach his views in universities; and in the Principles of Philosophy he set out his metaphysics and his physics in the form of a textbook. Other professors, seeing their Aristotelian system threatened, subjected the new doctrines to violent attac...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Doubt and the Cogito - DESCARTES

  Descartes insisted that the first task in philosophy is to rid oneself of all prejudice by calling in doubt all that can be doubted. The second task of the philosopher, having raised these doubts, is to prevent them leading to scepticism. This strategy comes out clearly in Descartes' Meditations. As the title suggests, the work is not intended to be read as an academic treatise. It is meant to be followed in the frame of mind of a religious retreat, such as St Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exe...

• Buddha

  Buddha (6th-5th century B C ) The title of Buddha is usually given to the historical founder of the Buddhist religion, Siddhārtha Gautama, although it has been applied to other historical figures, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, and to many who may be mythological. The religion which he founded was enormously successful and for a long period was probably the most widespread world religion. It is sometimes argued that it is not so much a religion as a kind of philosophy. Indeed, Buddhism bears close c...

• Belief

  Belief We believe that there is coffee over there; we believe the special theory of relativity; we believe the Vice-Chancellor; and some of us believe in God. But plausibly what is fundamental is believing that something is the case - believing a proposition, as it is usually put. To believe a theory is to believe the propositions that make up the theory, to believe a person is to believe some proposition advanced by them; and to believe in God is to believe the proposition that God exists. Thus...

• Artistic expression

  Artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) tries to make computer systems (of various kinds) do what minds can do: interpreting a photograph as depicting a face; offering medical diagnoses; using and translating language; learning to do better next time. AI has two main aims. One is technological: to build useful tools, which can help humans in activities of various kinds, or perform the activities for them. The other is psychological: to help us understand human (and animal) minds, or...

• Aurobindo Ghose

  Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) Aurobindo Ghose was a leading Indian nationalist at the beginning of the twentieth century who became a yogin and spiritual leader as well as a prolific writer (in English) on mysticism, crafting a mystic philosophy of Brahman (the Absolute or God). Aurobindo fashioned an entire worldview, a system intended to reflect both science and religion and to integrate several concerns of philosophy - epistemology, ontology, psychology, ethics - into a single vision. Of partic...

• Aristotelianism, medieval

  Aristotelianism, medieval Although there are many possible definitions, 'medieval Aristotelianism' is here taken to mean explicit receptions of Aristotle's texts or teachings by Latin-speaking writers from about AD 500 to about AD 1450. This roundabout, material definition avoids several common mistakes. First, it does not assert that there was a unified Aristotelian doctrine across the centuries. There was no such unity, and much of the engagement with Aristotle during the Middle Ages took the...

• Categories

  Categories Categories are hard to describe, and even harder to define. This is in part a consequence of their complicated history, and in part because category theory must grapple with vexed questions concerning the relation between linguistic or conceptual categories on the one hand, and objective reality on the other. In the mid-fourth century BC,Aristotle initiates discussion of categories as a central enterprise of philosophy. In the Categories he presents an 'ontological' scheme which cla...

• Camus, Albert

  Camus, Albert (1913-60) Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957 for having 'illuminated the problems of the human conscience in our times'. By mythologizing the experiences of a secular age struggling with an increasingly contested religious tradition, he dramatized the human effort to 'live and create without the aid of eternal values which, temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary Europe'(1943). Thus the challenge posed by 'the absurd' with which he is so univ...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: THE THEORY OF IDEAS of PLATO

  THE THEORY OF IDEAS of PLATO Plato's theory arises as follows. Socrates, Simmias, and Cebes are all called ‘men'; they have it in common that they are all men. Now when we say ‘Simmias is a man' does the word ‘man' stand for something in the way that the word ‘Simmias' stands for the individual man Simmias? If so, what? Is it the same thing as the word ‘man' stands for in the sentence ‘Cebes is a man'? Plato's answer is yes: in each case in which such an expression occurs it stands for the same...

• TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS - Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Ludwig Wittgenstein was the grandson of a Jewish land-agent and the son of a steel millionaire who had nine children by a Catholic wife, and baptized all of them into the Catholic faith. Born in Vienna in 1889, he attended the Realschule in Linz, where he was a contemporary of Adolf Hitler. At school he lost his faith, and soon after came under the influence of Schopenhauer's idealism. After studying engineering in Berlin and Manchester he went to Cambridge, where his philosophical gifts were re...

• al-Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din Yahya

  al-Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din Yahya (1154-91) Al-Suhrawardi, whose life spanned a period of less than forty years in the middle of the twelfth century AD, produced a series of highly assured works which established him as the founder of a new school of philosophy in the Muslim world, the school of Illuminationist philosophy (hikmat alishraq). Although arising out of the peripatetic philosophy developed by Ibn Sina, al-Suhrawardi's Illuminationist philosophy is critical of several of the positions...

• Rights

  EMPT IN BINGERVILLE S’INSTRUIRE POUR MIEUX SERVIR Union-Discipline-Travail - KOUASSI SERGE-YVAN - KRAH N'DRI - KONÉ MALICK - LEBY AUDE -SÉRIFOU AKEEM -TRAYÉ BALEZIN TEACHER: Mrs KOUAME

• Areté

  Aretē A pivotal term of ancient Greek ethics, aretē is conventionally translated 'virtue', but is more properly 'goodness' - the quality of being a good human being. Philosophy came, largely through Plato, to recognize four cardinal aretai: wisdom (phronēsis), moderation (sōphrosynē), courage (andreia) and justice (dikaiosynē). Others, considered either coordinate with these or their sub-species, included piety, liberality and magnanimity. The term generated many controversies. For example, is a...

• Animal language and thought

  Animal language and thought The question of animal language and thought has been debated since ancient times. Some have held that humans are exceptional in these respects, others that humans and animals are continuous with respect to language and thought. The issue is important because our self-image as a species is at stake. Arguments for human exceptionalism can be classified as Cartesian, Wittgensteinian and behaviourist. What these arguments have in common is the view that language and thoug...