George Santayana

Ideas – Beauty is pleasure objectified – pleasure regarded as the quality of an object. – Belief in the existence of anything is incapable of proof. – By animal faith we believe in ourselves and a world of which we are a part. – Knowledge is faith mediated by symbols. – Spirit is a

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Giambattista Vico

Ideas – There is no fixed human nature that remains identical regardless of time, place, and circumstance; human nature develops in accordance with self-knowledge and with insight into the essences of things. – A Divine Providence gives human beings those nonrational creative capacities, operating on associative principles, that will produce false beliefs from which

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Gilbert Ryle

A graduate of Oxford, Gilbert Ryle became a tutor at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1945, he became Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy. From 1947 to 1971 he was editor of the philosophical journal ‘Mind’. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ryle was concerned with problems caused by the confusion of grammatical with logical distinctions. He pointed out the

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Golden rule

‘Do as you would be done by’, or ‘Treat others as you would have them treat you’. Apart from the New Testament (Matthew 7.12) the rule occurs as far back as Confucius (551-479 BC) in his Analects (15.23; compare 5.11). Etymology The term “Golden Rule”, or “Golden law”, began to be used widely in the early 17th century

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Goodman’s paradox (20TH CENTURY)

Linguistic theory (also known as the ‘new riddle of induction’) concerning the concept of confirmation or prediction, developed by the American philosopher Nelson Goodman (1906-1998). According to Goodman, it is possible to define a vocabulary in such a way that, given a choice between two possibilities, it is as likely that the possibility which runs counter to

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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Ideas – There is an infinity of individual substances. – The irreducible, indivisible, indestructibele unit of substrance is the ‘monad’. – God is the ultimate, necessary being who is the sufficient reason for the existence of all other beings and who is the creator and orderer of all monads. – Each monad is different

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Gottlob Frege

Frege was born in Wismar. He started studying at the University of Jena in 1869 and moved to Göttingen after two years, where he received his Ph.D. in 1873. After returning to Jena two years later, he became lecturer of mathematics. In 1879, he was made associate professor and in 1896 became professor of

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Gregor Johann Mendel

Ideas – The inheritance of characteristics is governed by pairs of discrete elements derived from each parent. – These parental elements pass into the germ cells of the offspring without influencing each other; this is the law of segregation. – The inheritance of one element does not govern the inheritance of any other element;

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Haecceitism

Literally: ‘thisnessism’. Theory deriving from Johannes Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308), with roots in Aristotle, that as well as ordinary general properties there are special properties (haec-ceitie or thisnesses) necessarily associated each with just one individual. Socrates has the property of Socrateity and Plato that of Platonity. Traditional Aristotelianism individuated objects by their matter, which as such

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Hans-Georg Gadamer

Gadamer was born in Marburg, Germany, as the son of a pharmaceutical chemist who later also served as the rector of the university there. Gadamer resisted his father’s urging to take up the natural sciences and grew more and more interested in the humanities. He grew up and studied in Breslau under Hönigswald, but

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Hedonism

Set of doctrines shared between philosophical psychology and ethics. Ethical hedonism says either that pleasure alone (or ‘happiness’, which is usually not distinguished from pleasure by hedonists) is ultimately good, or that every action should aim to maximize pleasure; in neither case need the pleasure be the agent’s (a point that is often forgotten,

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Hempel’s paradox (20TH CENTURY)

Also known as the confirmation paradox, it was discovered by Carl Gustav Hempel (1905-1997). The statement ‘All prime ministers live at 10 Downing Street’ tends to be confirmed by finding a kennel containing a dog, because this is an example of a dwelling that is not 10 Downing Street which is the home of a non-prime-minister;

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Henri Louis Bergson

Ideas – There are two methods of intellectual inquiry: intuition and analysis. – Analysis understands reality in terms of stability, predictability, and spatial location; intuition, on the other hand, experiences growth, novelty, and temporal duration. – True donation is experienced only in the human person, and that duration is preserved in memory. – Memory,

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Henry David Thoreau

Ideas – The search for ultimate begins with simplification and the dispelling of the superfluities of life, and with the desire for clarity of vision and spiritual alertness. – There exists within each human being a moral sense and an intuitive capacity for the apprehension of spiritual turths. – Trancendental spiritual truths are revealed

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Henry More

Ideas – All knowledge is conditional on the validity of our faculties. – The world consists of active spirits and inert matter. – God’s existence can be proven. – The Platonic theory of the universe best fits with the findings of modern science. Biography Henry More was born at Grantham. Both his parents were

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Heraclitus of Ephesus

Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher of the late 6th century BC, lived in Ephesus, an important city on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, not far from Miletus, the birthplace of philosophy. We know nothing about his life other than what can be gleaned from his own statements, for all ancient biographies of him consist

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Hermeneutics

LITERALLY, THE STUDY OF INTERPRETATION. The term was originally associated with biblical studies, but a philosophical tendency has been developed especially by Friedrich Schleiermacher(1768-1834), Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), and Hans-Georg Gadamer(1900-2002). Dilthey emphasized the need in human studies (Geisteswissenschaften) for an empathetic understanding (usually called by the German term, Verstehen) which went beyond mere external description. (Compare also the philosophy

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Hilary Putnam

Putnam taught at Northwestern University, Princeton University, and MIT, until he became Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic at Harvard University in 1976. Drawing on his expertise in the theory of recursive functions and Turing machines, Putnam formulated a philosophical position that he named ‘functionalism’ in the 1950s. Functionalism became

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Hippocrates

Major Ideas – Diseases have natural origins: They do not arise from divine action; the course of diseases and their critical days can be found observation and experience. – Good health results from a balance of fluids (humors) in the body; disease results from an imbalance. – The balance of fluids – hence the

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Historicism

TERM USED FOR DIFFERENT AND INDEED INCOMPATIBLE THEORIES. It has two main senses. First, that historical events must be seen in their uniqueness and can only be understood against the background of their context. In this sense it is akin to the emphasis on Verstehen in Wilhelm Dilthey’s hermeneutics. The second sense is that of Karl Raimund

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