Juan Donoso Cortés (1809—1853) Juan Donoso Cortés, parliamentary statesman, diplomat, government minister, royal counselor, theologian, and political theorist, may not be well known among modern political philosophers. Toutefois, his ideas had an enormous influence in the spheres of politics and religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Donoso’s theories were uniquely influential in shaping the ideological trajectory that began with the reaction against the Enlightenment

Predicative and Impredicative Definitions The distinction between predicative and impredicative definitions is today widely regarded as an important watershed in logic and the philosophy of mathematics. A definition is said to be impredicative if it generalizes over a totality to which the entity being defined belongs. Otherwise the definition is said to be predicative. In the examples below, (2) et (4) are impredicative. Let π be

Wang Bi (226—249 C.E.) Wang Bi (Wang Pi), styled Fusi, is regarded as one of the most important interpreters of the classical Chinese texts known as the Daodejing (Tao Te King) and the Yijing (I Ching). He lived and worked during the period after the collapse of the Han dynasty in 220 C.E., an era in which elite interest began to shift away from Confucianism

The Experience Machine The experience machine is a thought experiment first devised by Robert Nozick in the 1970s. In the last decades of the 20th century, an argument based on this thought experiment has been considered a knock-down objection to hedonism about well-being, the thesis that our well-being—that is, the goodness or badness of our lives for us—is entirely determined by our pains and pleasures.

Feng Youlan (Fung Yu-lan, 1895—1990) Feng Youlan (romanized as Fung Yu-lan) was a representative of modern Chinese philosophy. Throughout his long and turbulent life, he consistently engaged the problem of reconciling traditional Chinese thought with the methods and concerns of modern Western philosophy. Raised by a modernist family who nonetheless gave him a traditional Confucian education, Feng pursued two great goals during his career: rewriting