Philosophical dictionary

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Tom Sorell

"'Modern' philosophy in the West is said to have begun with Bacon and Descartes. Their methodological and metaphysical writings, in conjunction with the discoveries that marked the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, are supposed to have interred both Aristotelian and scholastic science and the philosophy that supported it. But did the new or 'modern' philosophy effect a complete break with what preceded it? Were Bacon and Descartes untainted by scholastic influences? The theme of this book is that the new and traditional philosophies have more in common than the orthodox account suggests." "In two survey articles and thirteen essays on individual philosophers, the contributors show that the rise of modern philosophy was much more complicated and much more interesting than is usually thought. They consider not only metaphysics and the sciences but also the claims of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza to have invented 'modern' ethics and politics. These two aspects of 'modernity' in philosophy are connected for the first time. The book offers a broad view of the early modern philosophers, covering not only the much-studied major figures but also relatively neglected writers: Mersenne, Gassendi, White, and Sergeant."--BOOK JACKET.

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Jean Bardy

Que reste-t-il aujourd'hui de "l'évolution créatrice" de Bergson? Les progrès prodigieux accomplis par les sciences - biologie, physique, thermodynamique- semblent devoir marquer du sceau de la caducité un livre écrit alors que la théorie de la relativité vient de faire son apparition tandis que la biologie comme science n'en est encore qu'à ses débuts. Pourtant "l'évolution créatrice" surprend le lecteur à plus d'un titre. A l'heure où une "Réforme de la pensée" s'impose de plus en plus, la réconciliation de la science et de la philosophie est devenue urgente.

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Morton White

An examination of some of the main problems of contemporary analytic philosophy, in which it is argued that existential statements, neccessary truths and ethical judgments are not justified in fundamentally different ways.

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Suzanne Cunningham

Two of the dominant traditions in twentieth-century philosophy explicitly excluded Charles Darwin's account of evolution, not because they claimed it was mistaken, but because they saw it as irrelevant. These two traditions - analytic philosophy, founded by G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and phenomenology, fathered by Edmund Husserl - set the stage for great deal of subsequent philosophy. The non-Darwinian framework that they constructed continues to constrain significant portions of the field, in particular, theories of perception and mind. Philosophy and the Darwinian Legacy traces the major reasons for the exclusion of Darwin and evolutionary considerations from philosophy. These reasons include the ambivalence of nineteenth-century philosophy toward the views of Darwin, the numerous disagreements among biologists at the turn of the century about the status of Darwin's views and the determination of the architects of analytic philosophy and phenomenology to protect ethics, logic and sociopolitical values from all taint of historical contingency. Professor Cunningham argues that this exclusion of Darwinian views distorted most subsequent philosophical theories of perception and mind. She criticizes purely cognitivist theories of perception as well as Machine Functionalist theories of mind, and then offers positive proposals on how these theories should be amended to take account of the adaptive role that perception and mind play on behalf of a living organism's struggle for survival and well being.