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Nineteenth century

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In the first part of the nineteenth century, the reigning philosophical outlook was idealist in one form or another, as the attempt was made to complete the intellectual ...

Russian thought is best approached without fixed preconceptions about the nature and proper boundaries of philosophy. Conditions of extreme political oppression and economic backwardness are not conducive to ...

The Egyptian reformer and Muslim apologist Muhammad ‘Abduh was a pupil and friend of al-Afghani. Although deeply influenced by him, ‘Abduh was less inclined to political activism and ...

The expression ‘the Absolute’ stands for that (supposed) unconditioned reality which is either the spiritual ground of all being or the whole of things considered as a spiritual ...

Al-Afghani is often described as one of the most prominent Islamic political leaders and philosophers of the nineteenth century. He was concerned with the subjection of the Muslim ...

Alexander propounded a metaphysical system based on a view of Space-Time differentiated into ‘motions’ from which new qualities emerged at certain levels of organization; matter, life and mind ...

Archibald Alison was born in Edinburgh but was educated at Balliol and ordained in the Church of England. He returned to Edinburgh in 1800 as an Anglican clergyman ...

Al-Sabzawari was the most influential nineteenth-century Iranian philosopher. His reputation rests in part on his Sharh al-manzuma, a commentary on his own Ghurar al-fara’id (The Blazes of the ...

Jonathan Edwards, the first great American philosopher, interpreted Calvinist theology within the newer framework of Newtonian physics and Lockean empiricism in his Freedom of the Will (1754). However, ...

Roberto Ardigò was the most prominent Italian philosopher of the nineteenth century. A priest and an academic, he was subjected to an ecclesiastical trial for his naturalistic philosophy ...

The Arya Samaj (ārya-samāj, ‘The Association of Nobles’) is a Hindu reform movement founded in 1875 by Swami Dayanand Saraswati (1824–83). Based on the supposition that the true ...

Although written in the early nineteenth century, Austin’s is probably the most coherent and sustained account of the theory of legal positivism. The complex relationships between legal positivism ...

Richard Avenarius, a German philosopher, is known as a proponent of ‘empiriocriticism’ and the principle of economy of thinking. Empiriocriticism is a modern version of empiricism which attempts ...

Bakunin was the leading proponent in the second half of the nineteenth century of a variety of anarchism rooted in a Romantic cult of primitive spontaneity, and one ...

The career of the Hegelian theologian Bruno Bauer is marked by his sudden turn from a reasoned defender of Christianity into one of its most extreme critics. His ...

Belinskii was considered by his followers in the nineteenth century, and by the official ideology of the Soviet period, to be not only Russia’s greatest literary critic, but ...

Jeremy Bentham held that all human and political action could be analysed in terms of pleasure and pain, and so made comprehensible. One such analysis is how people ...

Eduard Bernstein, an eminent German social democrat, is now noted as ‘the father of revisionism’. He made a reputation as the radical editor of the German Social Democratic ...

Boltzmann is famous in both physics and philosophy for interpreting thermodynamics in terms of molecular movement as if the second or ‘entropy’ law were merely statistically valid. This ...

Bernard Bolzano was a lone forerunner both of analytical philosophy and phenomenology. Born in Prague in the year when Kant’s first Critique appeared, he became one of the ...

George Boole, a British mathematician, is credited with making a fundamental contribution to modern logic. If Leibniz’s manuscript essays on logic, effectively unknown until the end of the ...

One of the most prominent and prolific of the British Idealists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bosanquet ranged across most fields of philosophy, making his ...

The French philosopher Émile Boutroux wanted to reestablish metaphysics in the face of a growing tendency towards materialism, but without rejecting the natural sciences. He hoped to achieve ...

Bowne was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of the American personalist school of philosophy. His position is theistic and idealistic, and finds in human persons ...

Bradley was the most famous and philosophically the most influential of the British Idealists, who had a marked impact on British philosophy in the later nineteenth and earlier ...