Xunzi (Hsün Tzu, c. 310—c. 220 B.C.E.) Xunzi, along with Confucius and Mencius, was one of the three great early architects of Confucian philosophy. In molti modi, he offers a more complete and sophisticated defense of Confucianism than Mencius. Xunzi lived toward the end of the Warring States period (453-221 BCE), generally regarded as the formative era for most later Chinese philosophy. It was a

Aesthetic Formalism Formalism in aesthetics has traditionally been taken to refer to the view in the philosophy of art that the properties in virtue of which an artwork is an artwork—and in virtue of which its value is determined—are formal in the sense of being accessible by direct sensation (typically sight or hearing) solo. While such Formalist intuitions have a long history, prominent anti-Formalist arguments

Teorie medievali della ragion pratica La ragione pratica è l'impiego della ragione al servizio del vivere una buona vita, e tutti i grandi pensatori medievali ne hanno dato conto. La ragione pratica è ragionare su, o meglio verso, un'azione, e un'azione ha sempre uno scopo o una fine, questo fine è inteso come in un certo senso buono. I medievali generalmente concordavano sul fatto che lo fosse

Giambattista Vico (1668—1744) Giambattista Vico is often credited with the invention of the philosophy of history. Nello specifico, he was the first to take seriously the possibility that people had fundamentally different schema of thought in different historical eras. Così, Vico became the first to chart a course of history that depended on the way the structure of thought changed over time. To illustrate the difference

Tyler Burge (1946—) Tyler Burge is an American philosopher who has done influential work in several areas of philosophy. These include philosophy of language, logica, filosofia della mente, epistemologia, filosofia della scienza (primarily philosophy of psychology), and history of philosophy (focusing especially on Frege, but also on the classical rationalists—Descartes, Leibniz, e Kant). Burge has also done some work in psychology itself. Burge is best

The Classical Theory of Concepts The classical theory of concepts is one of the five primary theories of concepts, the other four being prototype or exemplar theories, atomistic theories, theory-theories, and neoclassical theories. The classical theory implies that every complex concept has a classical analysis, where a classical analysis of a concept is a proposition giving metaphysically necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for being in