“Windows To Spirituality”
Who Is Bertrand Russell? Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, essayist, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate. At various points in his life, Russell considered himself a liberal, a socialist and a pacifist, although he also confessed...
Shahab al-Din Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi “Shahāb ad-Dīn” Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardī (شهابالدین سهروردی, also known as Sohrevardi) (1154-1191) was a Persian philosopher and founder of the Iranian school of Illuminationism, an important school in Islamic philosophy that drew upon Zoroastrian and Platonic ideas. The “light” in his “Philosophy of Illumination” is a divine and metaphysical...
Who Is Ibn Arabi? Ibn ʿArabi (26 July 1165 – 16 November 1240) was an Andalusian Muslim scholar, mystic, poet, and philosopher, whose works have grown to be very influential beyond the Muslim world. Of the over 800 works which are attributed to him, 100 survive in the original manuscript....
What Is Leap Of Faith? A leap of faith, in its most commonly used meaning, is the act of believing in or accepting something outside the boundaries of reason. Overview Jumping to conclusions (officially the jumping conclusion bias, often abbreviated as JTC, and also referred to as the inference-observation confusion) is a psychological term referring...
What Is German Idealism? German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with Romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment. The best-known thinkers in the...
What Is Contemporary Philosophy? Contemporary philosophy is the present period in the history of Western philosophy beginning at the early 20th century with the increasing professionalization of the discipline and the rise of analytic and continental philosophy. The phrase “contemporary philosophy” is a piece of technical terminology in philosophy that...
What Is Idealism? In philosophy, idealism is the group of metaphysical philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as humans can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing. In contrast to materialism, idealism asserts...
Contemporary Islamic Philosophy The Contemporary Islamic philosophy revives some of the trends of medieval Islamic philosophy, notably the tension between Mutazilite and Asharite views of ethics in science and law, and the duty of Muslims and role of Islam in the sociology of knowledge and in forming ethical codes and...
Pacifism of Bertrand Russell and A. J. Muste This article covers The Pacifism of Bertrand Russell and A. J. Muste Life and hope for the world are to be found only in the deeds of love. Bertrand Russell If war no longer occupied men’s thoughts and energies, we would, within...
What Is Existentialism? Existentialism is a tradition of philosophical enquiry which takes as its starting point the experience of the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual. It is associated mainly with certain 19th- and 20th-century European philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief...
Phenomenology in Philosophy Phenomenology is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen and...
What Is Post-structuralism? Post-structuralism is either a continuation or a rejection of the intellectual project that preceded it—structuralism. Structuralism proposes that one may understand human culture by means of a structure—modeled on language (structural linguistics)—that differs from concrete reality and from abstract ideas—a “third order” that mediates between the two. Post-structuralist...
What is Structuralism? In sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, structuralism is the methodology that implies elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader, overarching system or structure. It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel....
Philosophy Of Language In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language, the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning, and thought. Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell were pivotal figures in analytic philosophy’s...
What Is Analytic Philosophy? Analytic philosophy (sometimes analytical philosophy) is a style of philosophy that became dominant in the Western world at the beginning of the 20th century. The term can refer to one of several things: As a philosophical practice, it is characterized by an emphasis on argumentative clarity and precision, often making use of formal...
Hellenistic Philosophy The Hellenistic philosophy is the period of Western philosophy and Middle Eastern philosophy that was developed in the Hellenistic period following Aristotle and ending with the beginning of Neoplatonism. Hellenistic schools of thought Pythagoreanism Main article: Pythagoreanism Pythagoreanism is the name given to the system of philosophy and science...
Naturalized Epistemology The Naturalized epistemology, coined by W. V. O. Quine, is a collection of philosophic views concerned with the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. This shared emphasis on scientific methods of studying knowledge shifts focus to the empirical processes of knowledge acquisition and...
Naturalism In Philosophy Naturalism in philosophy is the “idea or belief that only natural (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces operate in the world.” Adherents of naturalism (i.e., naturalists) assert that natural laws are the rules that govern the structure and behavior of the natural universe, that the changing universe at every stage...
What Spiritual Naturalism? Spiritual naturalism, or naturalistic spirituality combines mundane and spiritual ways of looking at the world. Spiritual naturalism may have first been proposed by Joris-Karl Huysmans in 1895 in his book En Route – “In ‘En Route’ Huysmans started upon the creation of what he called ‘Spiritual Naturalism,’ that is, realism applied to...
Ancient Egyptian Philosophy Today, there is some debate regarding ancient Egyptian philosophy and its true scope and nature. Several of the ancient Greek philosophers regarded Egypt as a place of wisdom and philosophy. Isocrates (b. 436 BCE) states in Busiris that “all men agree the Egyptians are the healthiest and most long of...
