Benedikt von Spinoza (1632—1677) Benedict de Spinoza was among the most important of the post-Cartesian philosophers who flourished in the second half of the 17th century. Er leistete bedeutende Beiträge in praktisch allen Bereichen der Philosophie, und seine Schriften zeigen den Einfluss so unterschiedlicher Quellen wie des Stoizismus, Jüdischer Rationalismus, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Descartes, und eine Vielzahl heterodoxer religiöser Denker seiner Zeit. For this

Metaphor and Phenomenology The term “contemporary phenomenology” refers to a wide area of 20th and 21st century philosophy in which the study of the structures of consciousness occupies center stage. Since the appearance of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and subsequent developments in phenomenology and hermeneutics after Husserl, it has no longer been possible to view consciousness as a simple scientific object of study. It

Ethical Criticism of Art Traditionally, there were two opposing philosophical positions taken with respect to the legitimacy of the ethical evaluation of art: ‘moralism’ and ‘autonomism’, where moralism is the view that the aesthetic value of art should be determined by, or reduced to, its moral value, while autonomism holds that it is inappropriate to apply moral categories to art; they should be evaluated by

Fictionalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics The distinctive character of fictionalism about any discourse is (An) recognition of some valuable purpose to that discourse, und (b) the claim that that purpose can be served even if sentences uttered in the context of that discourse are not literally true. Regarding (b), if the discourse in question involves mathematics, either pure or applied, the core of the

Personalism Personalism is any philosophy that considers personality the supreme value and the key to the measuring of reality. Its American form took root in the late nineteenth century, flowered in the twentieth century, and continues its life in the twenty-first century. Noch, those roots can be traced to Europe and back through Western philosophy to the Mediterranean basin. Aber, Personalism did not originate exclusively in