Catégorie : Philosophie

• Axiom of choice

  Axiom of choice The axiom of choice is a mathematical postulate about sets: for each family of non-empty sets, there exists a function selecting one member from each set in the family. If those sets have no member in common, it postulates that there is a set having exactly one element in common with each set in the family. First formulated in 1904, the axiom of choice was highly controversial among mathematicians and philosophers, because it epitomized 'non -constructive' mathematics. Neverthel...

• Aureol, Peter

• 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 (theAbsolute or God). Aurobindo fashioned an entire worldview, a system intended to reflect both science and religion and to integrateseveral concerns of philosophy - epistemology, ontology, psychology, ethics - into a single vision. Of partic...

• Beauty

  Beauty On the subject of beauty, theorists generally agree only on rudimentary points about the term: that it commends on aesthetic grounds, has absolute and comparative forms, and so forth. Beyond this, dispute prevails. Realists hold that judgments of beauty ascribe to their subjects either a nonrelational property inherent in things or a capacity of things to affect respondents in a way that preserves objectivity. In both cases acute problems arise in defining the property and in explaining h...

• Barth, Karl

  Barth, Karl Karl Barth was the most prominent Protestant theologian of a generation shaken by the traumatic experience of the First World War and concerned with giving Christian theology a new grounding. He took a creative part in the struggle of the German Church against National Socialism, and, after the Second World War, exerted a worldwide influence that reached beyond the bounds of Protestantism. Although influenced at first by Christian socialism, Barth came to repudiate such ‘hyphenated'...

• Authority

  Authority The notion of authority has two main senses: expertise and the right to rule. To have authority in matters of belief (to be 'an authority' ) is to have theoretical authority ; to have authority over action (to be 'in authority' ) is to have practical authority . Both senses involve the subordination of an individual's judgment or will to that of another person in a way that is binding, independent of the particular content of what that person says or requires. If a person's aut...

• Atonement

  Atonement As a theological concept, atonement articulates the acts by which relations between God and creatures, disruptedby human offence, can be restored. Although other cultures show an awareness of the need for atonement, theChristian tradition understands it as provided by God's particular historical action in Jesus Christ. At its centre isthe notion of reconciliation between God and his alienated creatures, which is achieved particularly by the death of Jesus. The distinctive philosophic...

• Being

  Being Although 'being' has frequently been treated as a name for a property or special sort of entity, it is generally recognized that it is neither. Therefore, questions concerning being should not be understood as asking about the nature of some object or the character of some property. Rather, such questions raise a variety of problems concerning which sorts of entities there are, what one is saying when one says that some entity is, and the necessary conditions on thinking of an entity as...

• Barthes, Roland

  Barthes, Roland In the field of contemporary literary studies, the French essayist and cultural critic Roland Barthes cannot be easily classified. His early work on language and culture was strongly influenced by the intellectual currents of existentialism and Marxism that were dominant in French intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century. Gradually his work turned more to semiology (a general theory of signs), which had a close association with the structuralist tradition in literary critic...

• Averroism

• Augustine

  Augustine (AD 354-430) Augustine was the first of the great Christian philosophers. For well over eight centuries following his death, in fact until the ascendancy of Thomas Aquinas at the end of the thirteenth century, he wasalso the single most influential Christian philosopher. As a theologian and Church Father, Augustine was the person who did the most to define Christian heresy and so, by implication, to formulate Christian orthodoxy. Of the threemost prominent heresies defined by Augusti...

• Art and truth

• 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 fourcardinal aretai : wisdom ( phronēsis ), moderation ( sō phrosyn ē ), courage ( andreia ) and justice ( dikaiosyn ē ). Others, considered either coordinate with these or their sub-species, included piety, liberality and magnanimity. The termgenerated many controvers...

• Atheism

• Art, performing

• Astell, Mary

• Art, abstract

  Art, abstract The use of the term 'abstract' as a category of visual art dates from the second decade of the twentieth century, when painters and sculptors had turned away from verisimilitude and launched such modes ofabstraction as Cubism, Orphism, Futurism, Rayonism and Suprematism. Two subcategories may be distinguished:first, varieties of figurative representation that strongly schematize, and second, completely nonfigurative ornonobjective modes of design (in the widest sense o...

• 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 atopic in philosophy because reflection on the kinds of things said by critics generated various perplexities and insome cases encouraged a general scepticis...

• Arya Samaj

  Arya Samaj The Arya Samaj ( ārya -sam āj , ‘The Association of Nobles' ) is a Hindu reform movement founded in 1875 by Swami Dayanand Saraswati (1824-83). Based on the supposition that the true religion of India was put forth in the ancient Vedas, rather than in later epics and cycles of myths, the principal aim of the Arya Samaj is to purge modern Hinduism of beliefs and practices associated with the devotional and mythic literature of India. Condemning the hereditary caste system and dismis...

• Archytas

  Archytas (early to mid 4th century BC) Archytas of Tarentum (modern Taranto in southern Italy) was a contemporary and personal acquaintance of Plato, and the last of the famous Pythagoreans in antiquity. Anancient source (Proclus)chytas with those mathematicians 'who increased the number of theorems andprogressed towards a more scientific arrangement of them' and ranks him among the predecessors of Euclid. Hischief contribution in mathematics was to find a solution for th...