The Port Royal Logic Logic or the Art of Thinking, commonly known as The Port Royal Logic, was written by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole and first published in 1662. Although it was a textbook containing much worked-over material, the Logic was extremely influential, certainly the most important textbook in logic for the next two hundred years. Part of its influence was due to its

Ninon de Lenclos (1620—1705) A salonnière during the reign of Louis XIV, Ninon de Lenclos embodied libertinism in both theory and practice.  As a notorious courtesan, Lenclos scandalized France by her numerous affairs with prominent statesmen and ecclesiastics.  As a philosopher, she justified sexual license by her naturalistic theories of human nature and of morality.  In Lenclos’s perspective, the human person is demonstrably a part of material

José Ortega y Gasset (1883—1955) In the roughly 6,000 pages that Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote on the humanities, he covered a wide variety of topics. This captures the kind of thinker he was: one who cannot be strictly categorized to any one school of philosophy. José Ortega y Gasset did not want to constrain himself to any one area of study in

Epistemology of Memory We learn a lot. Friends tell us about their lives. Books tell us about the past. We see the world. We reason and we reflect on our mental lives. As a result we come to know and to form justified beliefs about a range of topics. We also seem to keep these beliefs. How? The natural answer is: by memory. It is

Johann Georg Hamann (1730—1788) Johann Georg Hamann was the philosophically most sophisticated thinker of the German Counter-enlightenment. Born in 1730 in Königsberg in eastern Prussia, Hamann was a contemporary and friendly acquaintance of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and in many ways Hamann’s career can be seen in parallel to that of his great friend. Like Kant, Hamann attended the University of Königsberg, and in his

Intentionality If I think about a piano, something in my thought picks out a piano. If I talk about cigars, something in my speech refers to cigars. This feature of thoughts and words, whereby they pick out, refer to, or are about things, is intentionality. In a word, intentionality is aboutness. Many mental states exhibit intentionality. If I believe that the weather is rainy today,