Empiricism

Empiricism

What Is Empiricism? In philosophy, empiricism is a theory that states that Empiricism comes only or primarily from sensory experience. It is one of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with empiricism, knowledge, epistemology, the study of human knowledge, rationalism, skepticism, empiricists, philosophy of science, empirical evidence, philosophy,...

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Instrumentalism

What Is Instrumentalism? In philosophy of science and in epistemology, instrumentalism is a methodological view that ideas are useful instruments, and that the worth of an idea is based on how effective it is in explaining and predicting phenomena. Instrumentalism is a pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey that thought is an...

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Medieval Philosophy

What Is Medieval Philosophy? Medieval philosophy is the philosophy that existed through the Middle Ages, the period roughly extending from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century to the Renaissance in the 15th century. Medieval philosophy, understood as a project of independent philosophical inquiry, began in Baghdad, in the middle of the 8th century, and...

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Renaissance Philosophy

What Is Renaissance Philosophy? The designation “Renaissance philosophy” is used by scholars of intellectual history to refer to the thought of the period running in Europe roughly between 1355 and 1650 (the dates shift forward for central and northern Europe and for areas such as Spanish America, India, Japan, and China under...

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Early Islamic Philosophy

What Is Early Islamic Philosophy? Early Islamic philosophy or classical Islamic philosophy is a period of intense philosophical development beginning in the 2nd century AH of the Islamic calendar (early 9th century CE) and lasting until the 6th century AH (late 12th century CE). The period is known as the Islamic Golden Age,...

Albert Camus

Albert Camus

Who Is Albert Camus? Albert Camus (7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44 in 1957, the second youngest recipient in history. His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall, and The Rebel. Camus...

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Omar Khayyam

Who Is Omar Khayyam? Omar Khayyam (عمر خیّام‎, 18 May 1048 – 4 December 1131) was a Persian polymath, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and poet. He was born in Nishapur, in northeastern Iran, and spent most of his life near the court of the Karakhanid and Seljuq rulers in the period which witnessed the First Crusade....

Bertrand Arthur William Russell

Bertrand Russell

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

Shahab al-Din Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi

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...

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Ibn Arabi

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....

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Leap Of Faith

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...

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German Idealism

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...

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Contemporary Philosophy

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...

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Idealism

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...

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Contemporary Islamic Philosophy

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...

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Pacifism of Bertrand Russell and A. J. Muste

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...

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Existentialism

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...

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Phenomenology in Philosophy

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...

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Post-structuralism

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...

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Structuralism

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....