Catégorie : Philosophie

• Calvin, John

  Calvin, John (1509-64) John Calvin, French Protestant reformer and theologian, was a minister among Reformed Christians in Geneva and Strasbourg. His Institutes of the Christian Religion (first edition 1536) - which follows the broad outline of the Apostles' Creed and is shaped by biblical and patristic thought - is the cornerstone of Reformed theology. Calvin's religious epistemology links self-knowledge and knowledge of God. He identifies in humans an innate awareness of God, which is s...

• Cassirer, Ernst

  Cassirer, Ernst (1874-1945) Cassirer is one of the major figures in the development of philosophical idealism in the first half of the twentieth century. He is known for his philosophy of culture based on his conception of 'symbolic form' , for his historical studies of the problem of knowledge in the rise of modern philosophy and science and for his works on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Cassirer expanded Kant 's critique of reason to a critique of culture by regarding the symbol as...

• Buridan, John

  Buridan, John ( c.1300-after 1358) Unlike most other important philosophers of the scholastic period, John Buridan never entered the theology faculty but spent his entire career as an arts master at the University of Paris. There he distinguished himself primarily as a logician who made numerous additions and refinements to the Parisian tradition of propositional logic. These included the development of a genuinely nominalist semantics, as well as techniques for analyzing propositions containin...

• Butler, Joseph

  Butler, Joseph (1692-1752) Joseph Butler the moral philosopher is in that long line of eighteenth-century thinkers who sought to answer Thomas Hobbes on human nature and moral motivation. Following the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, he rejects any purely egoistic conception of these. Instead, he analyses human nature into parts, of which he notices in detail appetites, affections, and passions on the one hand and the principles of self-love, benevolence and conscience on the other. His ethics consis...

• Carneades

  Carneades (214-129 BC) The Greek philosopher Carneades was head of the Academy from 167 to 137 BC. Born in North Africa he migrated to Athens, where he studied logic with the Stoic Diogenes of Babylon; but he was soon seduced by the Academy, to which his allegiance was thereafter lifelong. He was a celebrated figure; and in 155 BC he was sent by Athens to Rome as a political ambassador, where he astounded the youth by his rhetorical powers and outraged their elders by his arguments against...

• Buddha

  Buddha (6th-5th century BC) 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 clos...

• Carlyle, Thomas

• Calcidius

  Calcidius ( c. 4th century AD) The Platonist Calcidius (sometimes less correctly spelt Chalcidius) was the author of a Latin work containing a partial translation of, and partial commentary on, Plato 's Timaeus. Although of uncertain date, the doctrinal content of his commentary reflects the thought of the Middle Platonist era ( c.50 BC-AD 200). Calcidius' date and place of operation are uncertain, the only clue residing in his dedication of his work to one Osius, who has been taken, follo...

• Business ethics

  Business ethics Business ethics is the application of theories of right and wrong to activity within and between commercial enterprises, and between commercial enterprises and their broader environment. It is a wide range of activity, and no brief list can be made of the issues it raises. The safety of working practices; the fairness of recruitment; the transparency of financial accounting; the promptness of payments to suppliers; the degree of permissible aggression between competitors: all com...

• Callicles

  Callicles (late 5th century BC) Callicles, although known only as a character in Plato 's Gorgias (the dramatic date of which is somewhere between 430 and 405 BC), was probably an actual historical person. Employing a distinction between nature (physis ) and convention ( nomos ), he argues eloquently that the naturally superior should seize both political power and a greater share of material goods: it is only a convention of the weak majority which labels such behaviour unjust. In privat...

• Buffier, Claude

• 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...

• Burley, Walter

• Bryce, James

  Bryce, James (1838-1922) James Bryce, British statesman and writer, combined a distinguished public life with scholarship in history, politics and law. As a jurist his interest lay in historical jurisprudence, but he is best remembered for his comparative politics. He contributed significantly to democratic political theory and to a liberal-historicist approach in philosophy of law. Bryce was born in Belfast in 1838, of Ulster Scottish descent. He was educated at Glasgow University and Oxford Un...

• Buber, Martin

  Buber, Martin (1878-1965) Martin Buber covered a range of fields in his writings, from Jewish folklore and fiction, to biblical scholarship and translation, to philosophical anthropology and theology. Above all, however, Buber was a philosopher, in the lay- person's sense of the term sense: someone who devoted his intellectual energies to contemplating the meaning of life. Buber's passionate interest in mysticism was reflected in his early philosophical work. However, he later rejected the v...

• Bioethics

  Bioethics While bioethics, a part of applied ethics, is usually identified with medical ethics, in its broadest sense it is the study of the moral, social and political problems that arise out of biology and the life sciences generally and involve, either directly or indirectly, human wellbeing. Thus, environmental and animal ethics are sometimes included within it. In this regard, bioethics can be of broader concern than is either medical/biomedical ethics or the study of the moral problems tha...

• Brown, Thomas

  Brown, Thomas (1778-1820) Thomas Brown was the last prominent figure in the Scottish philosophical tradition deriving from David Hume and Thomas Reid. Like Reid, he took the mind's knowledge about itself to be a datum it is pointless to challenge or try to justify, since no other grounds can be more certain for us. But he defended Hume's account of causation as nothing more than invariable succession. The mind, therefore, is a simple substance, whose successive states are affected by and a...

• Bruno, Giordano

• Biel, Gabriel

• Brunner, Emil

  Brunner, Emil (1889-1966) Emil Brunner was one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century. He was a minister of the Swiss Reformed Church, a professor at the University of Zurich, and held distinguished lectureships in England, the USA and Japan. He joined the 'dialectical school' early in his career, but tried to rehabilitate natural theology, which led to a rift with Barth. His works were widely read and often served as basic texts in Reformed and Presbyterian s...