Aristote: Politics In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristote (384-322 avant notre ère) describes the happy life intended for man by nature as one lived in accordance with virtue, et, in his Politics, he describes the role that politics and the political community must play in bringing about the virtuous life in the citizenry. The Politics also provides analysis of the kinds of political community that existed in his time and shows where

Aesthetics in Continental Philosophy Although aesthetics is a significant area of research in its own right in the analytic philosophical tradition, aesthetics frequently seems to be accorded less value than philosophy of language, logique, épistémologie, métaphysique, and other areas of value theory such as ethics and political philosophy. Many of the most prominent analytic philosophers have not written on aesthetics at all. Matters stand very

Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) Pierre Bayle was a seventeenth-century French skeptical philosopher and historian. He is best known for his encyclopedic work The Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697, 1st edition; 1702, 2ème édition), a work which was widely influential on eighteenth-century figures such as Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson. Bayle is traditionally described as a skeptic, though the nature and extent of his skepticism remains hotly debated.

Paul Freire (1921—1997) By Slobodan Dimitrov – own work CC BY-SA 3.0 Paulo Freire was one of the most influential philosophers of education of the twentieth century. He worked wholeheartedly to help people both through his philosophy and his practice of critical pedagogy. A native of Brazil, Freire’s goal was to eradicate illiteracy among people from previously colonized countries and continents. His insights were rooted

Giorgio Agamben (1942– ) Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian philosophy and radical political theory, and in recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone