Saul Kripke, in his celebrated book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), offers a novel reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s main remarks in his later works, especially in Philosophical Investigations (1953) and, to some extent, in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956). Kripke presents Wittgenstein as proposing a skeptical argument against a certain conception of meaning and linguistic understanding, as well …
Thomas Samuel Kuhn, although trained as a physicist at Harvard University, became an historian and philosopher of science through the support of Harvard’s president, James Conant. In 1962, Kuhn’s renowned The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Structure) helped to inaugurate a revolution—the 1960s historiographic revolution—by providing a new image of science. For Kuhn, scientific revolutions involved paradigm shifts …
Guo Xiang (also known as Kuo Hsiang and Zixuan) is the author of the most important commentary on the classic Daoist text Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu). He is responsible for the current arrangement of thirty-three chapters divided into inner, outer and miscellaneous sections. His commentary represents a substantial philosophical achievement that has been compared to the Zhuangzi …
C.S. Peirce was a scientist and philosopher best known as the earliest proponent of pragmatism. An influential thinker and polymath, Peirce is among the greatest of American minds. His thought was a seminal influence upon William James, his life long friend, and upon John Dewey, his one-time student. James and Dewey went on to popularize pragmatism thereby achieving …
A Cistercian nun, Jacqueline Pascal made a major contribution to philosophy of education through her treatise on the methods and principles of the pedagogy used at the convent school at Port-Royal. In her educational theory, the teacher emerges as a spiritual director who encourages the moral progress of her pupils through ascetical exercises and personal …
A thinker with wide-ranging interests, Robert Nozick was one of the most important and influential political philosophers, along with John Rawls, in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. His first and most celebrated book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), produced, along with his Harvard colleague John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971), the revival of the discipline …
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is best known for his political thought, and deservedly so. His vision of the world is strikingly original and still relevant to contemporary politics. His main concern is the problem of social and political order: how human beings can live together in peace and avoid the danger and fear …
Maria daVenza Tillmanns argues that we need to be holistic in our approach to solving complex problems. In this article I would like to highlight a distinction between two essentially different orientations of thinking. One looks from the inside out, the other from the outside in. To focus from the inside out is to start …
Mary Midgley says that branches of knowledge are like maps – each answers a different set of questions so they can’t necessarily all be ‘reduced’ to physics. Reductivism comes in two phases. First there is the monistic move where we explain a great range of things as only aspects of a single basic stuff. Thus, …
Arnold Zuboff untangles the problems of a particular type of bad thinking. Sometimes, on learning that I am a philosopher, a non-philosopher who has gained the impression that it is difficult to get agreement in philosophy will tease me with the idea that philosophy can never definitely establish anything. I then like to point out …