Sigmund Freud: Religion This article explores attempts by Sigmund Freud (1850-1939) to provide a naturalistic account of religion enhanced by insights and theoretical constructs derived from the discipline of psychoanalysis which he had pioneered. Freud was an Austrian neurologist and psychologist who is widely regarded as the father of psychoanalysis, which is both a psychological theory and therapeutic system. As a theory, psychoanalysis conceptualizes the

René Descartes: The Mind-Body Distinction One of the deepest and most lasting legacies of Descartes’ philosophy is his thesis that mind and body are really distinct—a thesis now called “mind-body dualism.” He reaches this conclusion by arguing that the nature of the mind (das ist, a thinking, non-extended thing) is completely different from that of the body (das ist, an extended, non-thinking thing), and therefore it

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712—1778) Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential thinkers during the Enlightenment in eighteenth century Europe. His first major philosophical work, A Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, was the winning response to an essay contest conducted by the Academy of Dijon in 1750. In dieser Arbeit, Rousseau argues that the progression of the sciences and arts has caused the corruption of

Charles Sanders Peirce: Logic Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was an accomplished scientist, Philosoph, and mathematician, who considered himself primarily a logician. His contributions to the development of modern logic at the turn of the 20th century were colossal, original and influential. Formal, or deductive, logic was just one of the branches in which he exercized his logical and analytical talent. His work developed upon Boole’s

Kripke’s Wittgenstein 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) und, bis zu einem gewissen Grad, 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 as

Perspectivism in Science Perspectivism, or perspectival realism, has been discussed in philosophy for many centuries, but as a view about science, it is a twenty-first-century topic. Although it has taken many forms and even though there is no agreed definition, perspectivism at its heart uses a visual metaphor to help us understand the scope and character of scientific knowledge. Several interrelated issues are surrounding this