Aenesidemus
Of Cnossus, Sceptical philosopher, revived Pyrrhonism (see Pyrrhon) in the 1st cent. bc.
affective fallacy
A tendency to relate the meaning of a text to its readers' interpretations, which is criticized as a form of relativism by those literary theorists who claim that meaning resides primarily within the ...
Alasdair C. MacIntyre
(1929– )Foremost Aristotelian moral and political philosopher. An engaged and foreful critic of liberalism, MacIntyre has moved the basis of his assault from Marxism to Thomism. His pessimistic ...
ancient philosophy
‘Ancient philosophy’ is the conventional title, in Europe and the English-speaking academy, for the philosophical activities of the thinkers of the Graeco-Roman world. It includes a succession of ...
Anthony John Patrick Kenny
(1931– ).British philosopher who has written on topics in the philosophy of mind, medieval philosophy, ancient philosophy, the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the philosophy of Descartes, moral ...
anti-foundationalism
A philosophical position which rejects foundationalism, i.e. it rejects the need to ground philosophy. Anti-foundationalist philosophers are often accused of being nihilists or moral relativists ...
Bernard Arthur Owen Williams
(1929–2003)English philosopher. Born in Essex, Williams was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and held Fellowships at All Souls and New College. He was professor of philosophy at Cambridge from ...
capabilities
The capabilities approach to welfare propounded by contemporary philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen uses the number of basic capabilities enabled by a political and social system as a ...
Clifford Geertz
(1926–2006)One of the most influential contemporary American anthropologists and a leading proponent of symbolic anthropology—the study of individual cultures as unique and autonomous “systems of ...
constructionism
A philosophical (specifically epistemological) stance in phenomenological sociology in which social realities are seen as the product of sociohistorically situated practices rather than objective ...
constructivism
(ethical)The view that in moral thought we do not apprehend an independent moral reality, but construct a system of principles or norms governing right action. The view may suppose that such ...
context
1. Most broadly, any frame of reference or framework within which something is perceived, produced, consumed, communicated, interpreted, or otherwise experienced, or which is seen as relevant to the ...
contextualism
(aesthetics)The view that a work of art can only be understood in the context of its historical or cultural circumstances, or in the light of other works by the same artist or in a surrounding ...
conventionalism
A theory that magnifies the role of decisions, or free selection from amongst equally possible alternatives, in order to show that what appears to be objective or fixed by nature is in fact an ...
Edmund Husserl
(1859–1938)German philosopher, logician, and founder of the modern school of phenomenology.Born at Prossnitz (now Prostějov, in the Czech Republic), Husserl studied at the universities of Leipzig and ...
Edvard Alexander Westermarck
(1862–1939)Finnish anthropologist who wrote on the diversity of moral systems. Westermark espoused a kind of relativism, although without an account of what the truth of a moral statement actually ...
Ernest Gellner
(1925–95)Although Gellner was born in Czechoslovakia, his family (who had Jewish origins) left immediately after the German occupation in 1939, and he spent most of his working life in England. ...
essentialism
[Th]The idea that there are certain attitudes or emotions that are biologically inherent to human beings in general or to males or females differently. Essentialist claims are often backed up with ...
ethical objectivism
The view that the claims of ethics are objectively true; they are not ‘relative’ to a subject or a culture, nor purely subjective in their nature, in opposition to error theories, scepticism, and ...
ethnocentrism
Belief, often unconscious, in the superiority of one's own ethnic group or the universality of one's own culture-bound practices and preferences. In a global economy, such assumptions may be ...
