Alan Ker Stout
(1900–83)Alan Ker Stout was born in Oxford on 9 May 1900 and died in Hobart, Tasmania on 20 July 1983. He was the only child of G. F. Stout ...
Alfred Edward Taylor
(1869–1945)Alfred Edward Taylor was born in Oundle, Northamptonshire on 22 December 1869 and died in Edinburgh on 31 October 1945. The eldest son of a Wesleyan minister, he was ...
analysis and synthesis
At the most elementary level, analysis concerns the separation of a whole into its component parts, whereas synthesis is the reverse process of combining parts to form a complex whole. ...
animal
Animal Farm a fable (1945) by George Orwell which consists of a satire on Russian Communism as it developed under Stalin. The animals of the farm, led by the pigs, revolt against the cruel farmer, ...
animal machine
Analogies drawn between animals and both machines and human beings, on the one hand, and directly between machines and human beings, on the other, have been fruitful in the life ...
animal spirits
Descartes held that nervous transmission was mediated through a fine ‘air or spirits’ that pass messages to the brain and eventually, through the pineal gland, to the soul.
animal testing
Animals have been widely used for many years to test vaccines, pharmaceutical drugs, cosmetics, etc. This is a legal requirement under the US Food and Drugs Act and similar legislation in most other ...
animal thought
In the philosophy of mind as well as ethics the treatment of animals exposes major problems. If other animals differ from human beings, how is the difference to be characterized: do animals think and ...
Anne Conway
(1631–79)Anne Finch was the daughter of Sir Henry Finch, Speaker of the House of Commons. She studied Descartes at an early age, and through her brother, a student at Cambridge, became acquainted ...
Antoine Arnauld
(1612–94), French theologian and philosopher. A brother of Angelique Arnauld (see following entry), from 1638 he was in touch with Saint-Cyran and in 1641 he retired to Port-Royal. His book De la ...
Antoine-Léonard Thomas
(1732–85).French writer, sometimes remembered for his philosophical ode ‘Sur le temps’ (which prefigures Lamartine's ‘Le Lac’), but principally for his grandiloquent éloges of great men (Marcus ...
archetype
An original which has been imitated; (in Jungian theory) a primitive mental image inherited from the earliest human ancestors, and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious.
argot
A secretive form of jargon (1) or slang peculiar to a specific group, originally a band of thieves. See also back slang, cant (2), register (2), rhyming slang. [French, origin unknown]
Aristotelianism
Aristotle's influence originally survived through his own school, the Lyceum. His works were collected and edited by Andronicus of Rhodes, and commentaries continued until Justinian closed the pagan ...
Arnold Geulincx
(1624–69)Born in Antwerp, Geulincx studied and taught at Louvain, until in 1658 he was deprived of his chair. Leaving Louvain he settled at Leiden, where he became a Calvinist. He is principally ...
atomism
A philosophical doctrine at least as old as Democritus, and plausibly viewed as an attempt to combine an a priori conviction of the unchangeable and immutable nature of the world with the variety and ...
Auguste Comte
(1798 –1857)A French philosopher who, with Claude-Henri Saint-Simon, founded positivism as a philosophy of science, an ideology of progress, and a humanist religion. Comte also coined the term ...
Avicenna
(980–1037),Persian-born Islamic philosopher and physician; Arabic name ibn-Sina. His philosophical system, drawing on Aristotle but in many ways closer to Neoplatonism, was the major influence on the ...
ball of wax example
The example Descartes uses in the second Meditation to show what is essential to bodies. The ball of wax brought near to the fire changes in its sensible properties, but remains the same substance. ...
Baruch Spinoza
(1632–77) Leading Dutch-Jewish philosopher,banned by the Portuguese Jewish community in 1656, probably because of his criticisms of the Scriptures (but possibly because of a financial dispute with ...
