Political Philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre This article focuses on Alasdair MacIntyre’s contribution to political philosophy since 1981, although MacIntyre has also written influential works on theology, Marxism, rationality, metaphysics, ethics, and the history of philosophy. He has made a personal intellectual journey from Marxism to Catholicism and from Aristotle to Aquinas, and he is one of the preeminent Thomist political philosophers. The most consistent and

Language in Classical Chinese Philosophy At first glance, early Chinese thought as expressed in Warring States period (475-221 BCE) texts does not seem to focus on the kinds of questions about language that one might expect from philosophers working on “the philosophy of language.” This does not mean, however, that language is philosophically insignificant to early Chinese thinkers. But it does show that discussions of

Anaximander (c. 610—546 B.C.E.) Anaximander was the author of the first surviving lines of Western philosophy. He speculated and argued about “the Boundless” as the origin of all that is. He also worked on the fields of what we now call geography and biology. Moreover, Anaximander was the first speculative astronomer. He originated the world-picture of the open universe, which replaced the closed universe of

Hegel: Social and Political Thought Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) is one of the greatest systematic thinkers in the history of Western philosophy. In addition to epitomizing German idealist philosophy, Hegel boldly claimed that his own system of philosophy represented an historical culmination of all previous philosophical thought. Hegel’s overall encyclopedic system is divided into the science of Logic, the philosophy of Nature, and the philosophy

Berlin Circle The Berlin Circle was a group of philosophers and scientists who gathered round Hans Reichenbach in late 1920s. Among its other members, were K. Grelling, C. G. Hempel, D. Hilbert, R. von Mises. The Berlin Circle’s name was Die Gesellschaft für Empirische Philosophie (Society for Empirical Philosophy). It joined up with the Vienna Circle; together they published the journal Erkenntnis that was edited

Leibniz: Logic The revolutionary ideas of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) on logic were developed by him between 1670 and 1690. The ideas can be divided into four areas: the Syllogism, the Universal Calculus, Propositional Logic, and Modal Logic. These revolutionary ideas remained hidden in the Archive of the Royal Library in Hanover until 1903 when the French mathematician Louis Couturat published the Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz.