Anaxagoras (c.500—428 B.C.E.) Anaxagoras of Clazomenae was an important Presocratic natural philosopher and scientist who lived and taught in Athens for approximately thirty years. He gained notoriety for his materialistic views, particularly his contention that the sun was a fiery rock. This led to charges of impiety, and he was sentenced to death by the Athenian court. He avoided this penalty by leaving Athens, et

David Hume: Moral Philosophy Although David Hume (1711-1776) is commonly known for his philosophical skepticism, and empiricist theory of knowledge, he also made many important contributions to moral philosophy. Hume’s ethical thought grapples with questions about the relationship between morality and reason, the role of human emotion in thought and action, the nature of moral evaluation, human sociability, and what it means to live a

Aristote (384 B.C.E.—322 B.C.E.) Aristotle is a towering figure in ancient Greek philosophy, who made important contributions to logic, critique, rhétorique, physics, biology, psychologie, mathématiques, métaphysique, éthique, and politics. He was a student of Plato for twenty years but is famous for rejecting Plato’s theory of forms. He was more empirically minded than both Plato and Plato’s teacher, Socrate. A prolific writer, lecturer, and polymath, Aristotle radically

Neo-Kantianism By its broadest definition, le terme « néo-kantisme » désigne tout penseur après Kant qui à la fois s'engage de manière substantielle dans les ramifications fondamentales de son idéalisme transcendantal et qui inscrit son propre projet au moins approximativement dans son cadre terminologique.. En ce sens, des penseurs aussi divers que Schopenhauer, Mach, Husserl, Foucault, pailleson, Kuhn, Vendeurs, Nancy, Korsgaard, et Friedman pourrait vaguement être considéré comme néo-kantien. Plus précisément, ‘Neo-Kantianism’ refers to

Praise and Blame Joel Feinberg observed that “moral responsibility… is a subject about which we are all confused” (1970: 37). Perhaps nowhere is this confusion more evident than in our understandings of praise and blame. This entry will contrast three influential philosophical accounts of our everyday practices of praise and blame, in terms of how they might be justified. D'un côté, a broadly

William James (1842—1910) William James is considered by many to be the most insightful and stimulating of American philosophers, as well as the second of the three great pragmatists (the middle link between Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey). As a professor of psychology and of philosophy at Harvard University, he became the most famous living American psychologist and later the most famous living American