Catégorie : Philosophie

• Asceticism

• Value of Art

  Né à Tréguier d'une famille de marins, ERNEST RENAN devient à cinq ans orphelin de père. Il est élevé par sa mère et parsa soeur Henriette, de douze ans son aînée. On destine à la prêtrise cet enfant calme. Après sept années passées auséminaire, il s'aperçoit que le zèle apostolique lui fait défaut. L'étude seule l'intéresse. Et comme ses exigences en matièrede critique historique ont ébranlé sa foi, il renonce par honnêteté intellectuelle aux facilités de la carrière ecclésiastiquepour suivre s...

• Arendt, Hannah

• Artistic style

  Artistic style Artistic style is a problematic notion in several ways. Sometimes the term refers to style in general, as it does in'Good style requires good diction'. Sometimes it refers to style as a particular, as in 'Van Gogh's style' or 'theBaroque style'. In antiquity, style was a rhetorical concept referring to diction and syntax; consequently style isvery often identified with the formal elements of a work of art as opposed to the content. However, the kind ofsubject matter an artist c...

• Value of Art

• Arcesilaus

  Arcesilaus ( c.316- c.240 BC) Arcesilaus of Pitane came to Athens as a young man, and was seduced by Platonic philosophy. Around 265 he became head of the Academy. He turned the school in a sceptical direction, urging thatPlato himself had been of a sceptical bent. He revived the Socratic practice of dialectical argument, in which hedisplayed remarkable logical skill and honeyed oratorical talent. His dialectical prowess led him to 'suspendjudgment about everything'; but the main targe...

• Artistic taste

• Archē

  Archē Arch ē , or 'principle', is an ancient Greek philosophical term. Building on earlier uses, Aristotle established it as a technical term with a number of related meanings, including 'originating source', 'cause', 'principle ofknowledge' and 'basic entity'. Accordingly, it acquired importance in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy ofscience, and also in the particular sciences. According to Aristotle's doctrine of scientific principles, all sciencesand all scientific knowledge ar...

• Antiochus

  Antiochus ( c.130-68 BC) For most of his career the Greek philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon, a pupil of Philo of Larissa, was an orthodox ‘sceptical' Academic. He then changed his philosophy: some called him a Stoic, but he himself claimed to be returning to theOld Academy of Plato and his immediate successors. He took a generous view of his new home, urging that the Peripatetics and theStoics were not new schools of thought but mere modifications of Platonism, and the philosophical position whi...

• 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 Presocraticphilosopher about whom we have enough information to reconstruct his theories in any detail. He was principallyconcerned with the origin, structure and workings of the world, and attempted to account for them consistently,through a small number of principles and mechanisms....

• Ambiguity

  Ambiguity A word, phrase or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. The word ‘light', for example, can mean not very heavy or not very dark. Words like ‘light', ‘note', ‘bear' and ‘over' are lexically ambiguous. They induce ambiguity in phrases or sentences in which they occur, such as ‘light suit' and ‘Theduchess can't bear children'. However, phrases and sentences can be ambiguous even if none of their constituentsis. The phrase ‘porcelain egg conta...

• Analytic ethics

  Analytic ethics Moral philosophy has traditionally been divided into normative ethics and meta-ethics. Normative ethics concerns judgments about what is good and how we should act. Meta-ethics, with which 'analytic ethics' istypically identified, seeks to understand such judgments. Are they factual statements capable of being literallytrue or false ( cognitivism )? Or are they commands or expressions of attitude, capable only of greater or lesser appropriateness or efficacy ( noncognitivism )...

• Aquinas, Thomas

  Aquinas, Thomas (1224/6-74) Aquinas lived an active, demanding academic and ecclesiastical life that ended while he was still in his forties. He nonetheless produced many works, varying in length from a few pages to a fewvolumes. Because his writings grew out of his activities as a teacher in the Dominican order and a member of thetheology faculty of the University of Paris, most are concerned with what he and his contemporaries thought of astheology. However, much of academic theology in the...

• Anaxarchus

  Anaxarchus ( c.380- c.330 BC) The Greek philosopher Anaxarchus of Abdera was a friend of Alexander the Great, teacher and friend of Pyrrho, and heroic victim of a tyrant. More a court philosopher than a school one, and anambiguous personality, he seems to have mixed a highly original philosophical cocktail: a primarily ethical, cynicallyinclined outlook, combined with certain elements of Democritean ethics, epistemology and physics. His onlyattested work was a treatise On Kingship, his d...

• Apuleius

• Anaxagoras

  Anaxagoras (500-428 BC) Anaxagoras of Clazomenae was a major Greek philosopher of the Presocratic period, who worked in the Ionian tradition of inquiry into nature. While his cosmology largely recasts the sixth-centurysystem of Anaximenes, the focus of the surviving fragments is on ontological questions. The often quoted openingof his book - 'all things were together' - echoes the Eleatic Parmenides' characterization of true being, but signalsrecognition of time, change and plurality. Even so,...

• Anarchism

  Anarchism Anarchism is the view that a society without the state, or government, is both possible and desirable. Although there have been intimations of the anarchist outlook throughout history, anarchist ideas emerged in theirmodern form in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the wake of the French and IndustrialRevolutions. All anarchists support some version of each of the following broad claims: (1) people have no generalobligation to obey the commands of the stat...

• Antisthenes

  Antisthenes ( c.445- c.365 BC) Antisthenes was one of the most devoted followers of Socrates. As a young man he was heavily influenced by the display speeches of Gorgias the rhetorician and the interpretation of Homerpractised by the Sophists. He himself wrote much in the same vein, although almost all has been lost. Antisthenes'influence can be recognized most in the writer Xenophon. Although it is likely that he succeeded in annoying Platoand Isocrates, his influence on Cynicism has be...

• Anderson, John

  Anderson, John (1893-1962) Arguing against metaphysical ‘ultimates' (that is, supposed unconditioned conditions of things), relative truth, appeals to subjective experience, and opposing some of the main tendencies oftwentieth-century philosophy, Anderson developed a wide-ranging realist and empiricist philosophy. Highly criticalof religion, he was much concerned with other cultural values and advanced views (influential in Australia) onfreedom of thought, education, ethics and aest...

• Applied ethics