Søren Kierkegaard (1813—1855) Søren Kierkegaard is an outsider in the history of philosophy. His peculiar authorship comprises a baffling array of different narrative points of view and disciplinary subject matter, including aesthetic novels, works of psychology and Christian dogmatics, satirical prefaces, philosophical “scraps” and “postscripts,” literary reviews, edifying discourses, Christian polemics, and retrospective self-interpretations. His arsenal of rhetoric includes irony, satire, parody, humor, polemic and

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839—1914) 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 what Peirce’s inability

Political Obligation Why should I obey the law? Apart from the obvious prudential and self-interested reasons (to avoid punishment, loss of reputation, and so forth), is there a moral obligation to do what the law requires just because the law requires it? If the answer is yes and the mere illegality of an act renders its performance prima facie morally wrong, then I am under

Occasionalism In the minds of most philosophers with a passing familiarity with early-modern philosophy, occasionalism is typically regarded as a laughable ad hoc or ‘for want of anything better’ solution to the mind-body problem, first opened up in Descartes’ Meditations. As typically presented in philosophy textbooks, the doctrine (usually identified exclusively with Nicholas Malebranche) certainly seems laughable: beginning from the assumption that the actual transmission

Anaximenes (d. 528 B.C.E.) According to the surviving sources on his life, Anaximenes flourished in the mid 6th century B.C.E. and died about 528. He is the third philosopher of the Milesian School of philosophy, so named because like Thales and Anaximander, Anaximenes was an inhabitant of Miletus, in Ionia (ancient Greece). Theophrastus notes that Anaximenes was an associate, and possibly a student, of Anaximander’s. Anaximenes

Edmund Husserl: Intentionality and Intentional Content Edmund Husserl (1859—1938) was an influential thinker of the first half of the twentieth century. His philosophy was heavily influenced by the works of Franz Brentano and Bernard Bolzano, and was also influenced in various ways by interaction with contemporaries such as Alexius Meinong, Kasimir Twardowski, and Gottlob Frege. In his own right, Husserl is considered the founder of