Manuel Carta talks with Prof. Maurizio Ferraris of the University of Turin, another leading exponent of New Realism. Professor Ferraris, are there any keywords you’d like to give our readers to help them understand New Realism? I’ll give you seven, one for each day of the week: Individuals. Ontology (what there is) is only made …
Veṅkaṭanātha (also known as Vedānta Deśika “teacher of Vedānta”) was an Indian polymath who wrote philosophical as well as religious and poetical works in several languages, including Sanskrit, Maṇipravāḷa—a Sanskritised form of literary Tamil—and Tamil. He is traditionally dated to 1269-1370, but as explained by Neevel “the lifespans of the earliest teachers of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta …
Tyler Burge is an American philosopher who has done influential work in several areas of philosophy. These include philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of science (primarily philosophy of psychology), and history of philosophy (focusing especially on Frege, but also on the classical rationalists—Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant). Burge has also done some …
Alexandre Kojève was responsible for the serious introduction of Hegel into 20th Century French philosophy, influencing many leading French intellectuals who attended his seminar on The Phenomenology of Spirit in Paris in the 30s. He focused on Hegel’s philosophy of history and is best known for his theory of ‘the end of history’ and for …
Victor Kraft was an Austrian philosopher and librarian. He was, as he himself emphasized, a “non-orthodox” member of the Vienna Circle and tried to reintroduce scientific philosophy in Austria after the Second World War. Beginning in 1903, Kraft argued for epistemology based on ontological realism. He did not claim that realism can be proven logically …
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 …
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 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 …
Paulo Freire was one of the most influential philosophers of education of the twentieth century. He worked wholeheartedly to help people both through his philosophy and his practice of critical pedagogy. A native of Brazil, Freire’s goal was to eradicate illiteracy among people from previously colonized countries and continents. His insights were rooted in the …
William James is considered by many to be the most insightful and stimulating of American philosophers, as well as the second of the three great pragmatists (the middle link between Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey). As a professor of psychology and of philosophy at Harvard University, he became the most famous living American psychologist and later the …