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Aristotle Aristotle (; "Aristotélēs", ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, meteorology, geology and government. Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. It was above all from his teachings that the West inherited its intellectual lexicon, as well as problems and methods of inquiry. As a result, his philosophy has exerted a unique influence on almost every form of knowledge in the West and it continues to be a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion. Little is known about his life. Aristotle was born in the city of Stagira in Northern Greece. His father, Nicomachus, died when Aristotle was a child, and he was brought up by a guardian. At seventeen or eighteen years of age he joined Plato's Academy in Athens and remained there until the age of thirty-seven (c. 347 BC). Shortly after Plato died, Aristotle left Athens and, at the request of Philip II of Macedon, tutored Alexander the Great beginning in 343 BC. He established a library in the Lyceum which helped him to produce many of his hundreds of books on papyrus scrolls. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues for publication, only around a third of his original output has survived, none of it intended for publication. Aristotle's views on physical science profoundly shaped medieval scholarship. Their influence extended from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages into the Renaissance, and were not replaced systematically until the Enlightenment and theories such as classical mechanics were developed. Some of Aristotle's zoological observations found in his biology, such as on the hectocotyl (reproductive) arm of the octopus, were disbelieved until the 19th century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, studied by medieval scholars such as Peter Abelard and John Buridan. Aristotle's influence on logic also continued well into the 19th century. He influenced Judeo-Islamic philosophies (800–1400) during the Middle Ages, as well as Christian theology, especially the Neoplatonism of the Early Church and the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church. Aristotle was revered among medieval Muslim scholars as "The First Teacher" and among medieval Christians like Thomas Aquinas as simply "The Philosopher". His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. Aristotle has been called "the father of logic", "the father of biology", "the father of political science", the "father of zoology", "the father of scientific method", "the father of rhetoric", and "the father of meteorology". Life. In general, the details of Aristotle's life are not well-established. The biographies written in ancient times are often speculative and historians only agree on a few salient points. Aristotle, whose name means "the best purpose" in Ancient Greek, was born in 384 BC in Stagira, Chalcidice, about 55 km (34 miles) east of modern-day Thessaloniki. His father Nicomachus was the personal physician to King Amyntas of Macedon. While he was young, Aristotle learned about biology and medical information, which was taught by his father. Both of Aristotle's parents died when he was about thirteen, and Proxenus of Atarneus became his guardian. Although little information about Aristotle's childhood has survived, he probably spent some time within the Macedonian palace, making his first connections with the Macedonian monarchy. At the age of seventeen or eighteen, Aristotle moved to Athens to continue his education at Plato's Academy. He probably experienced the Eleusinian Mysteries as he wrote when describing the sights one viewed at the Eleusinian Mysteries, "to experience is to learn" [παθείν μαθεĩν]. Aristotle remained in Athens for nearly twenty years before leaving in 348/47 BC. The traditional story about his departure records that he was disappointed with the Academy's direction after control passed to Plato's nephew Speusippus, although it is possible that he feared the anti-Macedonian sentiments in Athens at that time and left before Plato died. Aristotle then accompanied Xenocrates to the court of his friend Hermias of Atarneus in Asia Minor. After the death of Hermias, Aristotle travelled with his pupil Theophrastus to the island of Lesbos, where together they researched the botany and zoology of the island and its sheltered lagoon. While in Lesbos, Aristotle married Pythias, either Hermias's adoptive daughter or niece. She bore him a daughter, whom they also named Pythias. In 343 BC, Aristotle was invited by Philip II of Macedon to become the tutor to his son Alexander. Aristotle was appointed as the head of the royal academy of Macedon. During Aristotle's time in the Macedonian court, he gave lessons not only to Alexander but also to two other future kings: Ptolemy and Cassander. Aristotle encouraged Alexander toward eastern conquest, and Aristotle's own attitude towards Persia was unabashedly ethnocentric. In one famous example, he counsels Alexander to be "a leader to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants". By 335 BC, Aristotle had returned to Athens, establishing his own school there known as the Lyceum. Aristotle conducted courses at the school for the next twelve years. While in Athens, his wife Pythias died and Aristotle became involved with Herpyllis of Stagira, who bore him a son whom he named after his father, Nicomachus. If the "Suda" an uncritical compilation from the Middle Ages is accurate, he may also have had an "erômenos", Palaephatus of Abydus. This period in Athens, between 335 and 323 BC, is when Aristotle is believed to have composed many of his works. He wrote many dialogues, of which only fragments have survived. Those works that have survived are in treatise form and were not, for the most part, intended for widespread publication; they are generally thought to be lecture aids for his students. His most important treatises include "Physics", "Metaphysics", "Nicomachean Ethics", "Politics", "On the Soul" and "Poetics". Aristotle studied and made significant contributions to "logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dance, and theatre." Near the end of his life, Alexander and Aristotle became estranged over Alexander's relationship with Persia and Persians. A widespread tradition in antiquity suspected Aristotle of playing a role in Alexander's death, but the only evidence of this is an unlikely claim made some six years after the death. Following Alexander's death, anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens was rekindled. In 322 BC, Demophilus and Eurymedon the Hierophant reportedly denounced Aristotle for impiety, prompting him to flee to his mother's family estate in Chalcis, on Euboea, at which occasion he was said to have stated: "I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy" – a reference to Athens's trial and execution of Socrates. He died on Euboea of natural causes later that same year, having named his student Antipater as his chief executor and leaving a will in which he asked to be buried next to his wife. Speculative philosophy. Logic. With the "Prior Analytics", Aristotle is credited with the earliest study of formal logic, and his conception of it was the dominant form of Western logic until 19th-century advances in mathematical logic. Kant stated in the "Critique of Pure Reason" that with Aristotle logic reached its completion. "Organon". What is today called "Aristotelian logic" with its types of syllogism (methods of logical argument), Aristotle himself would have labelled "analytics". The term "logic" he reserved to mean "dialectics". Most of Aristotle's work is probably not in its original form, because it was most likely edited by students and later lecturers. The logical works of Aristotle were compiled into a set of six books called the "Organon" around 40 BC by Andronicus of Rhodes or others among his followers. The books are: The order of the books (or the teachings from which they are composed) is not certain, but this list was derived from analysis of Aristotle's writings. It goes from the basics, the analysis of simple terms in the "Categories," the analysis of propositions and their elementary relations in "On Interpretation", to the study of more complex forms, namely, syllogisms (in the "Analytics") and dialectics (in the "Topics" and "Sophistical Refutations"). The first three treatises form the core of the logical theory "stricto sensu": the grammar of the language of logic and the correct rules of reasoning. The "Rhetoric" is not conventionally included, but it states that it relies on the "Topics". Metaphysics. The word "metaphysics" appears to have been coined by the first century AD editor who assembled various small selections of Aristotle's works to the treatise we know by the name "Metaphysics". Aristotle called it "first philosophy", and distinguished it from mathematics and natural science (physics) as the contemplative ("theoretikē") philosophy which is "theological" and studies the divine. He wrote in his "Metaphysics" (1026a16): Substance. Aristotle examines the concepts of substance ("ousia") and essence ("to ti ên einai", "the what it was to be") in his "Metaphysics" (Book VII), and he concludes that a particular substance is a combination of both matter and form, a philosophical theory called hylomorphism. In Book VIII, he distinguishes the matter of the substance as the substratum, or the stuff of which it is composed. For example, the matter of a house is the bricks, stones, timbers, etc., or whatever constitutes the "potential" house, while the form of the substance is the "actual" house, namely 'covering for bodies and chattels' or any other differentia that let us define something as a house. The formula that gives the components is the account of the matter, and the formula that gives the differentia is the account of the form. Immanent realism. Like his teacher Plato, Aristotle's philosophy aims at the universal. Aristotle's ontology places the universal ("katholou") in particulars ("kath' hekaston"), things in the world, whereas for Plato the universal is a separately existing form which actual things imitate. For Aristotle, "form" is still what phenomena are based on, but is "instantiated" in a particular substance. Plato argued that all things have a universal form, which could be either a property or a relation to other things. When one looks at an apple, for example, one sees an apple, and one can also analyse a form of an apple. In this distinction, there is a particular apple and a universal form of an apple. Moreover, one can place an apple next to a book, so that one can speak of both the book and apple as being next to each other. Plato argued that there are some universal forms that are not a part of particular things. For example, it is possible that there is no particular good in existence, but "good" is still a proper universal form. Aristotle disagreed with Plato on this point, arguing that all universals are instantiated at some period of time, and that there are no universals that are unattached to existing things. In addition, Aristotle disagreed with Plato about the location of universals. Where Plato spoke of the world of forms, a place where all universal forms subsist, Aristotle maintained that universals exist within each thing on which each universal is predicated. So, according to Aristotle, the form of apple exists within each apple, rather than in the world of the forms. Potentiality and actuality. With regard to the change ("kinesis") and its causes now, as he defines in his "Physics" and "On Generation and Corruption" 319b–320a, he distinguishes the coming to be from: The coming to be is a change where nothing persists of which the resultant is a property. In that particular change he introduces the concept of potentiality ("dynamis") and actuality ("entelecheia") in association with the matter and the form. Referring to potentiality, this is what a thing is capable of doing or being acted upon if the conditions are right and it is not prevented by something else. For example, the seed of a plant in the soil is potentially ("dynamei") a plant, and if it is not prevented by something, it will become a plant. Potentially beings can either 'act' ("poiein") or 'be acted upon' ("paschein"), which can be either innate or learned. For example, the eyes possess the potentiality of sight (innate – being acted upon), while the capability of playing the flute can be possessed by learning (exercise – acting). Actuality is the fulfilment of the end of the potentiality. Because the end ("telos") is the principle of every change, and for the sake of the end exists potentiality, therefore actuality is the end. Referring then to the previous example, it can be said that an actuality is when a plant does one of the activities that plants do. In summary, the matter used to make a house has potentiality to be a house and both the activity of building and the form of the final house are actualities, which is also a final cause or end. Then Aristotle proceeds and concludes that the actuality is prior to potentiality in formula, in time and in substantiality. With this definition of the particular substance (i.e., matter and form), Aristotle tries to solve the problem of the unity of the beings, for example, "what is it that makes a man one"? Since, according to Plato there are two Ideas: animal and biped, how then is man a unity? However, according to Aristotle, the potential being (matter) and the actual one (form) are one and the same. Epistemology. Aristotle's immanent realism means his epistemology is based on the study of things that exist or happen in the world, and rises to knowledge of the universal, whereas for Plato epistemology begins with knowledge of universal Forms (or ideas) and descends to knowledge of particular imitations of these. Aristotle uses induction from examples alongside deduction, whereas Plato relies on deduction from "a priori" principles. Natural philosophy. Aristotle's "natural philosophy" spans a wide range of natural phenomena including those now covered by physics, biology and other natural sciences. In Aristotle's terminology, "natural philosophy" is a branch of philosophy examining the phenomena of the natural world, and includes fields that would be regarded today as physics, biology and other natural sciences. Aristotle's work encompassed virtually all facets of intellectual inquiry. Aristotle makes philosophy in the broad sense coextensive with reasoning, which he also would describe as "science". However, his use of the term "science" carries a different meaning than that covered by the term "scientific method". For Aristotle, "all science ("dianoia") is either practical, poetical or theoretical" ("Metaphysics" 1025b25). His practical science includes ethics and politics; his poetical science means the study of fine arts including poetry; his theoretical science covers physics, mathematics and metaphysics. Physics. Five elements. In his "On Generation and Corruption", Aristotle related each of the four elements proposed earlier by Empedocles, Earth, Water, Air, and Fire, to two of the four sensible qualities, hot, cold, wet, and dry. In the Empedoclean scheme, all matter was made of the four elements, in differing proportions. Aristotle's scheme added the heavenly Aether, the divine substance of the heavenly spheres, stars and planets. Motion. Aristotle describes two kinds of motion: "violent" or "unnatural motion", such as that of a thrown stone, in the "Physics" (254b10), and "natural motion", such as of a falling object, in "On the Heavens" (300a20). In violent motion, as soon as the agent stops causing it, the motion stops also: in other words, the natural state of an object is to be at rest, since Aristotle does not address friction. With this understanding, it can be observed that, as Aristotle stated, heavy objects (on the ground, say) require more force to make them move; and objects pushed with greater force move faster. This would imply the equation incorrect in modern physics. Natural motion depends on the element concerned: the aether naturally moves in a circle around the heavens, while the 4 Empedoclean elements move vertically up (like fire, as is observed) or down (like earth) towards their natural resting places. In the "Physics" (215a25), Aristotle effectively states a quantitative law, that the speed, v, of a falling body is proportional (say, with constant c) to its weight, W, and inversely proportional to the density, ρ, of the fluid in which it is falling: Aristotle implies that in a vacuum the speed of fall would become infinite, and concludes from this apparent absurdity that a vacuum is not possible. Opinions have varied on whether Aristotle intended to state quantitative laws. Henri Carteron held the "extreme view" that Aristotle's concept of force was basically qualitative, but other authors reject this. Archimedes corrected Aristotle's theory that bodies move towards their natural resting places; metal boats can float if they displace enough water; floating depends in Archimedes' scheme on the mass and volume of the object, not as Aristotle thought its elementary composition. Aristotle's writings on motion remained influential until the Early Modern period. John Philoponus (in the Middle Ages) and Galileo are said to have shown by experiment that Aristotle's claim that a heavier object falls faster than a lighter object is incorrect. A contrary opinion is given by Carlo Rovelli, who argues that Aristotle's physics of motion is correct within its domain of validity, that of objects in the Earth's gravitational field immersed in a fluid such as air. In this system, heavy bodies in steady fall indeed travel faster than light ones (whether friction is ignored, or not), and they do fall more slowly in a denser medium. Newton's "forced" motion corresponds to Aristotle's "violent" motion with its external agent, but Aristotle's assumption that the agent's effect stops immediately it stops acting (e.g., the ball leaves the thrower's hand) has awkward consequences: he has to suppose that surrounding fluid helps to push the ball along to make it continue to rise even though the hand is no longer acting on it, resulting in the Medieval theory of impetus. Four causes. Aristotle suggested that the reason for anything coming about can be attributed to four different types of simultaneously active factors. His term "aitia" is traditionally translated as "cause", but it does not always refer to temporal sequence; it might be better translated as "explanation", but the traditional rendering will be employed here. Optics. Aristotle describes experiments in optics using a camera obscura in "Problems", book 15. The apparatus consisted of a dark chamber with a small aperture that let light in. With it, he saw that whatever shape he made the hole, the sun's image always remained circular. He also noted that increasing the distance between the aperture and the image surface magnified the image. Chance and spontaneity. According to Aristotle, spontaneity and chance are causes of some things, distinguishable from other types of cause such as simple necessity. Chance as an incidental cause lies in the realm of accidental things, "from what is spontaneous". There is also more a specific kind of chance, which Aristotle names "luck", that only applies to people's moral choices. Astronomy. In astronomy, Aristotle refuted Democritus's claim that the Milky Way was made up of "those stars which are shaded by the earth from the sun's rays," pointing out correctly that if "the size of the sun is greater than that of the earth and the distance of the stars from the earth many times greater than that of the sun, then... the sun shines on all the stars and the earth screens none of them." Geology/Natural Sciences. Aristotle was one of the first people to record any geological observations. He stated that geological change was too slow to be observed in one person's lifetime. The geologist Charles Lyell noted that Aristotle described such change, including "lakes that had dried up" and "deserts that had become watered by rivers", giving as examples the growth of the Nile delta since the time of Homer, and "the upheaving of one of the Aeolian islands, previous to a volcanic eruption."' Aristotle also made many observations about the hydrologic cycle and meteorology (including his major writings "Meteorologica"). For example, he made some of the earliest observations about desalination: he observed early – and correctly – that when seawater is heated, freshwater evaporates and that the oceans are then replenished by the cycle of rainfall and river runoff (“I have proved by experiment that salt water evaporated forms fresh and the vapor does not when it condenses condense into sea water again” Biology. Empirical research. Aristotle was the first person to study biology systematically, and biology forms a large part of his writings. He spent two years observing and describing the zoology of Lesbos and the surrounding seas, including in particular the Pyrrha lagoon in the centre of Lesbos. His data in "History of Animals", "Generation of Animals", "Movement of Animals", and "Parts of Animals" are assembled from his own observations, statements given by people with specialized knowledge such as beekeepers and fishermen, and less accurate accounts provided by travellers from overseas. His apparent emphasis on animals rather than plants is a historical accident: his works on botany have been lost, but two books on plants by his pupil Theophrastus have survived. Aristotle reports on the sea-life visible from observation on Lesbos and the catches of fishermen. He describes the catfish, electric ray, and frogfish in detail, as well as cephalopods such as the octopus and paper nautilus. His description of the hectocotyl arm of cephalopods, used in sexual reproduction, was widely disbelieved until the 19th century. He gives accurate descriptions of the four-chambered fore-stomachs of ruminants, and of the ovoviviparous embryological development of the hound shark. He notes that an animal's structure is well matched to function, so, among birds, the heron, which lives in marshes with soft mud and lives by catching fish, has a long neck and long legs, and a sharp spear-like beak, whereas ducks that swim have short legs and webbed feet. Darwin, too, noted these sorts of differences between similar kinds of animal, but unlike Aristotle used the data to come to the theory of evolution. Aristotle's writings can seem to modern readers close to implying evolution, but while Aristotle was aware that new mutations or hybridizations could occur, he saw these as rare accidents. For Aristotle, accidents, like heat waves in winter, must be considered distinct from natural causes. He was thus critical of Empedocles's materialist theory of a "survival of the fittest" origin of living things and their organs, and ridiculed the idea that accidents could lead to orderly results. To put his views into modern terms, he nowhere says that different species can have a common ancestor, or that one kind can change into another, or that kinds can become extinct. Scientific style. Aristotle did not do experiments in the modern sense. He used the ancient Greek term "pepeiramenoi" to mean observations, or at most investigative procedures like dissection. In "Generation of Animals", he finds a fertilized hen's egg of a suitable stage and opens it to see the embryo's heart beating inside. Instead, he practiced a different style of science: systematically gathering data, discovering patterns common to whole groups of animals, and inferring possible causal explanations from these. This style is common in modern biology when large amounts of data become available in a new field, such as genomics. It does not result in the same certainty as experimental science, but it sets out testable hypotheses and constructs a narrative explanation of what is observed. In this sense, Aristotle's biology is scientific. From the data he collected and documented, Aristotle inferred quite a number of rules relating the life-history features of the live-bearing tetrapods (terrestrial placental mammals) that he studied. Among these correct predictions are the following. Brood size decreases with (adult) body mass, so that an elephant has fewer young (usually just one) per brood than a mouse. Lifespan increases with gestation period, and also with body mass, so that elephants live longer than mice, have a longer period of gestation, and are heavier. As a final example, fecundity decreases with lifespan, so long-lived kinds like elephants have fewer young in total than short-lived kinds like mice. Classification of living things. Aristotle distinguished about 500 species of animals, arranging these in the "History of Animals" in a graded scale of perfection, a "scala naturae", with man at the top. His system had eleven grades of animal, from highest potential to lowest, expressed in their form at birth: the highest gave live birth to hot and wet creatures, the lowest laid cold, dry mineral-like eggs. Animals came above plants, and these in turn were above minerals. see also: He grouped what the modern zoologist would call vertebrates as the hotter "animals with blood", and below them the colder invertebrates as "animals without blood". Those with blood were divided into the live-bearing (mammals), and the egg-laying (birds, reptiles, fish). Those without blood were insects, crustacea (non-shelled – cephalopods, and shelled) and the hard-shelled molluscs (bivalves and gastropods). He recognised that animals did not exactly fit into a linear scale, and noted various exceptions, such as that sharks had a placenta like the tetrapods. To a modern biologist, the explanation, not available to Aristotle, is convergent evolution. He believed that purposive final causes guided all natural processes; this teleological view justified his observed data as an expression of formal design. Psychology. Soul. Aristotle's psychology, given in his treatise "On the Soul" ("peri psychēs"), posits three kinds of soul ("psyches"): the vegetative soul, the sensitive soul, and the rational soul. Humans have a rational soul. The human soul incorporates the powers of the other kinds: Like the vegetative soul it can grow and nourish itself; like the sensitive soul it can experience sensations and move locally. The unique part of the human, rational soul is its ability to receive forms of other things and to compare them using the "nous" (intellect) and "logos" (reason). For Aristotle, the soul is the form of a living being. Because all beings are composites of form and matter, the form of living beings is that which endows them with what is specific to living beings, e.g. the ability to initiate movement (or in the case of plants, growth and chemical transformations, which Aristotle considers types of movement). In contrast to earlier philosophers, but in accordance with the Egyptians, he placed the rational soul in the heart, rather than the brain. Notable is Aristotle's division of sensation and thought, which generally differed from the concepts of previous philosophers, with the exception of Alcmaeon. Memory. According to Aristotle in "On the Soul", memory is the ability to hold a perceived experience in the mind and to distinguish between the internal "appearance" and an occurrence in the past. In other words, a memory is a mental picture (phantasm) that can be recovered. Aristotle believed an impression is left on a semi-fluid bodily organ that undergoes several changes in order to make a memory. A memory occurs when stimuli such as sights or sounds are so complex that the nervous system cannot receive all the impressions at once. These changes are the same as those involved in the operations of sensation, Aristotelian , and thinking. Aristotle uses the term 'memory' for the actual retaining of an experience in the impression that can develop from sensation, and for the intellectual anxiety that comes with the impression because it is formed at a particular time and processing specific contents. Memory is of the past, prediction is of the future, and sensation is of the present. Retrieval of impressions cannot be performed suddenly. A transitional channel is needed and located in past experiences, both for previous experience and present experience. Because Aristotle believes people receive all kinds of sense perceptions and perceive them as impressions, people are continually weaving together new impressions of experiences. To search for these impressions, people search the memory itself. Within the memory, if one experience is offered instead of a specific memory, that person will reject this experience until they find what they are looking for. Recollection occurs when one retrieved experience naturally follows another. If the chain of "images" is needed, one memory will stimulate the next. When people recall experiences, they stimulate certain previous experiences until they reach the one that is needed. Recollection is thus the self-directed activity of retrieving the information stored in a memory impression. Only humans can remember impressions of intellectual activity, such as numbers and words. Animals that have perception of time can retrieve memories of their past observations. Remembering involves only perception of the things remembered and of the time passed. Aristotle believed the chain of thought, which ends in recollection of certain impressions, was connected systematically in relationships such as similarity, contrast, and contiguity, described in his laws of association. Aristotle believed that past experiences are hidden within the mind. A force operates to awaken the hidden material to bring up the actual experience. According to Aristotle, association is the power innate in a mental state, which operates upon the unexpressed remains of former experiences, allowing them to rise and be recalled. Dreams. Aristotle describes sleep in "On Sleep and Wakefulness". Sleep takes place as a result of overuse of the senses or of digestion, so it is vital to the body. While a person is asleep, the critical activities, which include thinking, sensing, recalling and remembering, do not function as they do during wakefulness. Since a person cannot sense during sleep they cannot have desire, which is the result of sensation. However, the senses are able to work during sleep, albeit differently, unless they are weary. Dreams do not involve actually sensing a stimulus. In dreams, sensation is still involved, but in an altered manner. Aristotle explains that when a person stares at a moving stimulus such as the waves in a body of water, and then looks away, the next thing they look at appears to have a wavelike motion. When a person perceives a stimulus and the stimulus is no longer the focus of their attention, it leaves an impression. When the body is awake and the senses are functioning properly, a person constantly encounters new stimuli to sense and so the impressions of previously perceived stimuli are ignored. However, during sleep the impressions made throughout the day are noticed as there are no new distracting sensory experiences. So, dreams result from these lasting impressions. Since impressions are all that are left and not the exact stimuli, dreams do not resemble the actual waking experience. During sleep, a person is in an altered state of mind. Aristotle compares a sleeping person to a person who is overtaken by strong feelings toward a stimulus. For example, a person who has a strong infatuation with someone may begin to think they see that person everywhere because they are so overtaken by their feelings. Since a person sleeping is in a suggestible state and unable to make judgements, they become easily deceived by what appears in their dreams, like the infatuated person. This leads the person to believe the dream is real, even when the dreams are absurd in nature. In "De Anima" iii 3, Aristotle ascribes the ability to create, to store, and to recall images in the absence of perception to the faculty of imagination, "phantasia". One component of Aristotle's theory of dreams disagrees with previously held beliefs. He claimed that dreams are not foretelling and not sent by a divine being. Aristotle reasoned naturalistically that instances in which dreams do resemble future events are simply coincidences. Aristotle claimed that a dream is first established by the fact that the person is asleep when they experience it. If a person had an image appear for a moment after waking up or if they see something in the dark it is not considered a dream because they were awake when it occurred. Secondly, any sensory experience that is perceived while a person is asleep does not qualify as part of a dream. For example, if, while a person is sleeping, a door shuts and in their dream they hear a door is shut, this sensory experience is not part of the dream. Lastly, the images of dreams must be a result of lasting impressions of waking sensory experiences. Practical philosophy. Aristotle's practical philosophy covers areas such as ethics, politics, economics, and rhetoric. Just war theory. Aristotelian just war theory is not well regarded in the present day, especially his view that warfare was justified to enslave "natural slaves". In Aristotelian philosophy, the abolition of what he considers "natural slavery" would undermine civic freedom. The pursuit of freedom is inseparable from pursuing mastery over "those who deserve to be slaves". According to "The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Politics" the targets of this aggressive warfare were non-Greeks, noting Aristotle's view that "our poets say 'it is proper for Greeks to rule non-Greeks' ". Aristotle generally has a favourable opinion of war, extolling it as a chance for virtue and writing that "the leisure that accompanies peace" tends to make people "arrogant". War to "avoid becoming enslaved to others" is justified as self-defence. He writes that war "compels people to be just and temperate", however, in order to be just "war must be chosen for the sake of peace" (with the exception of wars of aggression discussed above). Ethics. Aristotle considered ethics to be a practical rather than theoretical study, i.e., one aimed at becoming good and doing good rather than knowing for its own sake. He wrote several treatises on ethics, including most notably, the "Nicomachean Ethics". Aristotle taught that virtue has to do with the proper function ("ergon") of a thing. An eye is only a good eye in so much as it can see, because the proper function of an eye is sight. Aristotle reasoned that humans must have a function specific to humans, and that this function must be an activity of the "psuchē" ("soul") in accordance with reason ("logos"). Aristotle identified such an optimum activity (the virtuous mean, between the accompanying vices of excess or deficiency) of the soul as the aim of all human deliberate action, "eudaimonia", generally translated as "happiness" or sometimes "well being". To have the potential of ever being happy in this way necessarily requires a good character ("ēthikē" "aretē"), often translated as moral or ethical virtue or excellence. Aristotle taught that to achieve a virtuous and potentially happy character requires a first stage of having the fortune to be habituated not deliberately, but by teachers, and experience, leading to a later stage in which one consciously chooses to do the best things. When the best people come to live life this way their practical wisdom ("phronesis") and their intellect ("nous") can develop with each other towards the highest possible human virtue, the wisdom of an accomplished theoretical or speculative thinker, or in other words, a philosopher. Politics. In addition to his works on ethics, which address the individual, Aristotle addressed the city in his work titled "Politics". Aristotle considered the city to be a natural community. Moreover, he considered the city to be prior in importance to the family which in turn is prior to the individual, "for the whole must of necessity be prior to the part". He famously stated that "man is by nature a political animal" and argued that humanity's defining factor among others in the animal kingdom is its rationality. Aristotle conceived of politics as being like an organism rather than like a machine, and as a collection of parts none of which can exist without the others. Aristotle's conception of the city is organic, and he is considered one of the first to conceive of the city in this manner. The common modern understanding of a political community as a modern state is quite different from Aristotle's understanding. Although he was aware of the existence and potential of larger empires, the natural community according to Aristotle was the city ("polis") which functions as a political "community" or "partnership" ("koinōnia"). The aim of the city is not just to avoid injustice or for economic stability, but rather to allow at least some citizens the possibility to live a good life, and to perform beautiful acts: "The political partnership must be regarded, therefore, as being for the sake of noble actions, not for the sake of living together." This is distinguished from modern approaches, beginning with social contract theory, according to which individuals leave the state of nature because of "fear of violent death" or its "inconveniences." In "Protrepticus", the character 'Aristotle' states: As Plato's disciple Aristotle was rather skeptical concerning democracy and, following Plato's vague ideas, he developed a coherent theory of integrating various forms of power into a so-called mixed state: To illustrate this approach, Aristotle proposed a first-of-its-kind mathematical model of voting, albeit textually described, where the democratic principle of "one voter–one vote" is combined with the oligarchic "merit-weighted voting"; for relevant quotes and their translation into mathematical formulas see. Economics. Aristotle made substantial contributions to economic thought, especially to thought in the Middle Ages. In "Politics", Aristotle addresses the city, property, and trade. His response to criticisms of private property, in Lionel Robbins's view, anticipated later proponents of private property among philosophers and economists, as it related to the overall utility of social arrangements. Aristotle believed that although communal arrangements may seem beneficial to society, and that although private property is often blamed for social strife, such evils in fact come from human nature. In "Politics", Aristotle offers one of the earliest accounts of the origin of money. Money came into use because people became dependent on one another, importing what they needed and exporting the surplus. For the sake of convenience, people then agreed to deal in something that is intrinsically useful and easily applicable, such as iron or silver. Aristotle's discussions on retail and interest was a major influence on economic thought in the Middle Ages. He had a low opinion of retail, believing that contrary to using money to procure things one needs in managing the household, retail trade seeks to make a profit. It thus uses goods as a means to an end, rather than as an end unto itself. He believed that retail trade was in this way unnatural. Similarly, Aristotle considered making a profit through interest unnatural, as it makes a gain out of the money itself, and not from its use. Aristotle gave a summary of the function of money that was perhaps remarkably precocious for his time. He wrote that because it is impossible to determine the value of every good through a count of the number of other goods it is worth, the necessity arises of a single universal standard of measurement. Money thus allows for the association of different goods and makes them "commensurable". He goes on to state that money is also useful for future exchange, making it a sort of security. That is, "if we do not want a thing now, we shall be able to get it when we do want it". Rhetoric and poetics. Aristotle's "Rhetoric" proposes that a speaker can use three basic kinds of appeals to persuade his audience: "ethos" (an appeal to the speaker's character), "pathos" (an appeal to the audience's emotion), and "logos" (an appeal to logical reasoning). He also categorizes rhetoric into three genres: epideictic (ceremonial speeches dealing with praise or blame), forensic (judicial speeches over guilt or innocence), and deliberative (speeches calling on an audience to make a decision on an issue). Aristotle also outlines two kinds of rhetorical proofs: "enthymeme" (proof by syllogism) and "paradeigma" (proof by example). Aristotle writes in his "Poetics" that epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and dance are all fundamentally acts of "mimesis" ("imitation"), each varying in imitation by medium, object, and manner. He applies the term "mimesis" both as a property of a work of art and also as the product of the artist's intention and contends that the audience's realisation of the "mimesis" is vital to understanding the work itself. Aristotle states that "mimesis" is a natural instinct of humanity that separates humans from animals and that all human artistry "follows the pattern of nature". Because of this, Aristotle believed that each of the mimetic arts possesses what Stephen Halliwell calls "highly structured procedures for the achievement of their purposes." For example, music imitates with the media of rhythm and harmony, whereas dance imitates with rhythm alone, and poetry with language. The forms also differ in their object of imitation. Comedy, for instance, is a dramatic imitation of men worse than average; whereas tragedy imitates men slightly better than average. Lastly, the forms differ in their manner of imitation – through narrative or character, through change or no change, and through drama or no drama. While it is believed that Aristotle's "Poetics" originally comprised two books – one on comedy and one on tragedy – only the portion that focuses on tragedy has survived. Aristotle taught that tragedy is composed of six elements: plot-structure, character, style, thought, spectacle, and lyric poetry. The characters in a tragedy are merely a means of driving the story; and the plot, not the characters, is the chief focus of tragedy. Tragedy is the imitation of action arousing pity and fear, and is meant to effect the catharsis of those same emotions. Aristotle concludes "Poetics" with a discussion on which, if either, is superior: epic or tragic mimesis. He suggests that because tragedy possesses all the attributes of an epic, possibly possesses additional attributes such as spectacle and music, is more unified, and achieves the aim of its mimesis in shorter scope, it can be considered superior to epic. Aristotle was a keen systematic collector of riddles, folklore, and proverbs; he and his school had a special interest in the riddles of the Delphic Oracle and studied the fables of Aesop. Views on women. Aristotle's analysis of procreation describes an active, ensouling masculine element bringing life to an inert, passive female element. On this ground, proponents of feminist metaphysics have accused Aristotle of misogyny and sexism. However, Aristotle gave equal weight to women's happiness as he did to men's, and commented in his "Rhetoric" that the things that lead to happiness need to be in women as well as men. Influence. More than 2300 years after his death, Aristotle remains one of the most influential people who ever lived. He contributed to almost every field of human knowledge then in existence, and he was the founder of many new fields. According to the philosopher Bryan Magee, "it is doubtful whether any human being has ever known as much as he did". Among countless other achievements, Aristotle was the founder of formal logic, pioneered the study of zoology, and left every future scientist and philosopher in his debt through his contributions to the scientific method. Taneli Kukkonen, writing in "The Classical Tradition", observes that his achievement in founding two sciences is unmatched, and his reach in influencing "every branch of intellectual enterprise" including Western ethical and political theory, theology, rhetoric and literary analysis is equally long. As a result, Kukkonen argues, any analysis of reality today "will almost certainly carry Aristotelian overtones ... evidence of an exceptionally forceful mind." Jonathan Barnes wrote that "an account of Aristotle's intellectual afterlife would be little less than a history of European thought". On his successor, Theophrastus. Aristotle's pupil and successor, Theophrastus, wrote the "History of Plants", a pioneering work in botany. Some of his technical terms remain in use, such as carpel from "carpos", fruit, and pericarp, from "pericarpion", seed chamber. Theophrastus was much less concerned with formal causes than Aristotle was, instead pragmatically describing how plants functioned. On later Greek philosophers. The immediate influence of Aristotle's work was felt as the Lyceum grew into the Peripatetic school. Aristotle's notable students included Aristoxenus, Dicaearchus, Demetrius of Phalerum, Eudemos of Rhodes, Harpalus, Hephaestion, Mnason of Phocis, Nicomachus, and Theophrastus. Aristotle's influence over Alexander the Great is seen in the latter's bringing with him on his expedition a host of zoologists, botanists, and researchers. He had also learned a great deal about Persian customs and traditions from his teacher. Although his respect for Aristotle was diminished as his travels made it clear that much of Aristotle's geography was clearly wrong, when the old philosopher released his works to the public, Alexander complained "Thou hast not done well to publish thy acroamatic doctrines; for in what shall I surpass other men if those doctrines wherein I have been trained are to be all men's common property?" On Hellenistic science. After Theophrastus, the Lyceum failed to produce any original work. Though interest in Aristotle's ideas survived, they were generally taken unquestioningly. It is not until the age of Alexandria under the Ptolemies that advances in biology can be again found. The first medical teacher at Alexandria, Herophilus of Chalcedon, corrected Aristotle, placing intelligence in the brain, and connected the nervous system to motion and sensation. Herophilus also distinguished between veins and arteries, noting that the latter pulse while the former do not. Though a few ancient atomists such as Lucretius challenged the teleological viewpoint of Aristotelian ideas about life, teleology (and after the rise of Christianity, natural theology) would remain central to biological thought essentially until the 18th and 19th centuries. Ernst Mayr states that there was "nothing of any real consequence in biology after Lucretius and Galen until the Renaissance." On Byzantine scholars. Greek Christian scribes played a crucial role in the preservation of Aristotle by copying all the extant Greek language manuscripts of the corpus. The first Greek Christians to comment extensively on Aristotle were Philoponus, Elias, and David in the sixth century, and Stephen of Alexandria in the early seventh century. John Philoponus stands out for having attempted a fundamental critique of Aristotle's views on the eternity of the world, movement, and other elements of Aristotelian thought. Philoponus questioned Aristotle's teaching of physics, noting its flaws and introducing the theory of impetus to explain his observations. After a hiatus of several centuries, formal commentary by Eustratius and Michael of Ephesus reappeared in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, apparently sponsored by Anna Comnena. On the medieval Islamic world. Aristotle was one of the most revered Western thinkers in early Islamic theology. Most of the still extant works of Aristotle, as well as a number of the original Greek commentaries, were translated into Arabic and studied by Muslim philosophers, scientists and scholars. Averroes, Avicenna and Alpharabius, who wrote on Aristotle in great depth, also influenced Thomas Aquinas and other Western Christian scholastic philosophers. Alkindus greatly admired Aristotle's philosophy, and Averroes spoke of Aristotle as the "exemplar" for all future philosophers. Medieval Muslim scholars regularly described Aristotle as the "First Teacher". The title "teacher" was first given to Aristotle by Muslim scholars, and was later used by Western philosophers (as in the famous poem of Dante) who were influenced by the tradition of Islamic philosophy. On medieval Europe. With the loss of the study of ancient Greek in the early medieval Latin West, Aristotle was practically unknown there from c. AD 600 to c. 1100 except through the Latin translation of the "Organon" made by Boethius. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, interest in Aristotle revived and Latin Christians had translations made, both from Arabic translations, such as those by Gerard of Cremona, and from the original Greek, such as those by James of Venice and William of Moerbeke. After the Scholastic Thomas Aquinas wrote his "Summa Theologica", working from Moerbeke's translations and calling Aristotle "The Philosopher", the demand for Aristotle's writings grew, and the Greek manuscripts returned to the West, stimulating a revival of Aristotelianism in Europe that continued into the Renaissance. These thinkers blended Aristotelian philosophy with Christianity, bringing the thought of Ancient Greece into the Middle Ages. Scholars such as Boethius, Peter Abelard, and John Buridan worked on Aristotelian logic. The medieval English poet Chaucer describes his student as being happy by having A cautionary medieval tale held that Aristotle advised his pupil Alexander to avoid the king's seductive mistress, Phyllis, but was himself captivated by her, and allowed her to ride him. Phyllis had secretly told Alexander what to expect, and he witnessed Phyllis proving that a woman's charms could overcome even the greatest philosopher's male intellect. Artists such as Hans Baldung produced a series of illustrations of the popular theme. The Italian poet Dante says of Aristotle in "The Divine Comedy": On Early Modern scientists. In the Early Modern period, scientists such as William Harvey in England and Galileo Galilei in Italy reacted against the theories of Aristotle and other classical era thinkers like Galen, establishing new theories based to some degree on observation and experiment. Harvey demonstrated the circulation of the blood, establishing that the heart functioned as a pump rather than being the seat of the soul and the controller of the body's heat, as Aristotle thought. Galileo used more doubtful arguments to displace Aristotle's physics, proposing that bodies all fall at the same speed whatever their weight. On 19th-century thinkers. The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has been said to have taken nearly all of his political philosophy from Aristotle. Aristotle rigidly separated action from production, and argued for the deserved subservience of some people ("natural slaves"), and the natural superiority (virtue, "arete") of others. It was Martin Heidegger, not Nietzsche, who elaborated a new interpretation of Aristotle, intended to warrant his deconstruction of scholastic and philosophical tradition. The English mathematician George Boole fully accepted Aristotle's logic, but decided "to go under, over, and beyond" it with his system of algebraic logic in his 1854 book "The Laws of Thought". This gives logic a mathematical foundation with equations, enables it to solve equations as well as check validity, and allows it to handle a wider class of problems by expanding propositions of any number of terms, not just two. Modern rejection and rehabilitation. During the 20th century, Aristotle's work was widely criticized. The philosopher Bertrand Russell argued that "almost every serious intellectual advance has had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine". Russell called Aristotle's ethics "repulsive", and labelled his logic "as definitely antiquated as Ptolemaic astronomy". Russell stated that these errors made it difficult to do historical justice to Aristotle, until one remembered what an advance he made upon all of his predecessors. The Dutch historian of science Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis wrote that Aristotle and his predecessors showed the difficulty of science by "proceed[ing] so readily to frame a theory of such a general character" on limited evidence from their senses. In 1985, the biologist Peter Medawar could still state in "pure seventeenth century" tones that Aristotle had assembled "a strange and generally speaking rather tiresome farrago of hearsay, imperfect observation, wishful thinking and credulity amounting to downright gullibility". By the start of the 21st century, however, Aristotle was taken more seriously: Kukkonen noted that "In the best 20th-century scholarship Aristotle comes alive as a thinker wrestling with the full weight of the Greek philosophical tradition." Alasdair MacIntyre has attempted to reform what he calls the Aristotelian tradition in a way that is anti-elitist and capable of disputing the claims of both liberals and Nietzscheans. Kukkonen observed, too, that "that most enduring of romantic images, Aristotle tutoring the future conqueror Alexander" remained current, as in the 2004 film "Alexander", while the "firm rules" of Aristotle's theory of drama have ensured a role for the "Poetics" in Hollywood. Biologists continue to be interested in Aristotle's thinking. Armand Marie Leroi has reconstructed Aristotle's biology, while Niko Tinbergen's four questions, based on Aristotle's four causes, are used to analyse animal behaviour; they examine function, phylogeny, mechanism, and ontogeny. Surviving works. Corpus Aristotelicum. The works of Aristotle that have survived from antiquity through medieval manuscript transmission are collected in the Corpus Aristotelicum. These texts, as opposed to Aristotle's lost works, are technical philosophical treatises from within Aristotle's school. Reference to them is made according to the organization of Immanuel Bekker's Royal Prussian Academy edition ("Aristotelis Opera edidit Academia Regia Borussica", Berlin, 1831–1870), which in turn is based on ancient classifications of these works. Loss and preservation. Aristotle wrote his works on papyrus scrolls, the common writing medium of that era. His writings are divisible into two groups: the "exoteric", intended for the public, and the "esoteric", for use within the Lyceum school. Aristotle's "lost" works stray considerably in characterization from the surviving Aristotelian corpus. Whereas the lost works appear to have been originally written with a view to subsequent publication, the surviving works mostly resemble lecture notes not intended for publication. Cicero's description of Aristotle's literary style as "a river of gold" must have applied to the published works, not the surviving notes. A major question in the history of Aristotle's works is how the exoteric writings were all lost, and how the ones now possessed came to be found. The consensus is that Andronicus of Rhodes collected the esoteric works of Aristotle's school which existed in the form of smaller, separate works, distinguished them from those of Theophrastus and other Peripatetics, edited them, and finally compiled them into the more cohesive, larger works as they are known today. Legacy. Depictions. Aristotle has been depicted by major artists including Lucas Cranach the Elder, Justus van Gent, Raphael, Paolo Veronese, Jusepe de Ribera, Rembrandt, and Francesco Hayez over the centuries. Among the best-known depictions is Raphael's fresco "The School of Athens", in the Vatican's Apostolic Palace, where the figures of Plato and Aristotle are central to the image, at the architectural vanishing point, reflecting their importance. Rembrandt's "Aristotle with a Bust of Homer", too, is a celebrated work, showing the knowing philosopher and the blind Homer from an earlier age: as the art critic Jonathan Jones writes, "this painting will remain one of the greatest and most mysterious in the world, ensnaring us in its musty, glowing, pitch-black, terrible knowledge of time." Eponyms. The Aristotle Mountains in Antarctica are named after Aristotle. He was the first person known to conjecture, in his book "Meteorology", the existence of a landmass in the southern high-latitude region and called it "Antarctica". Aristoteles is a crater on the Moon bearing the classical form of Aristotle's name. Further reading. The secondary literature on Aristotle is vast. The following is only a small selection.

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Bracha L. Ettinger Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger () is an Israeli-born French and Israeli artist, visual analyst, psychoanalyst, philosopher, painter and writer. Ettinger is a professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and at GCAS, Dublin. Life and work. Bracha Ettinger was born in Tel Aviv on 23 March 1948. She received her M.A. in Clinical Psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where she worked as research assistant then personal assistant of Amos Tversky (1969/70, 1973/74, 1974/75) and Danny Kahneman (1970/71). She married Loni Ettinger in June 1975 and moved to London where she studied, trained and worked between 1975 and 1979 at the London Centre for Psychotherapy (with Elsa Seglow), the Tavistock Clinic and the Philadelphia Association (with R. D. Laing). Her daughter the actress Lana Ettinger, was born in London. She returned to Israel in 1979 and worked at Shalvata Hospital. Ettinger, who has painted and drawn since early childhood, is self-taught. In her early days she avoided the art scene. In 1981 she divorced her first husband, decided to become a professional artist and moved to Paris where she lived and worked from 1981 to 2003 with her partner Joav Toker. Her son Itai Toker was born in 1988. As well as painting, drawing and photography, she began writing, and received a D.E.A. in Psychoanalysis from the University Paris VII Diderot in 1987, and a Ph.D. in Aesthetics of Art from the University of Paris VIII in 1996. Ettinger had a solo project at the Pompidou Centre in 1987, and a solo exhibition at the Museum of Calais in 1988. In 1995 she had a solo exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and in 1996 she participated in the Contemporary art section of "Face à l'Histoire. 1933–1996" exhibition in the Pompidou Centre. In 2000 she had a mid-life retrospective at the Centre for Fine Arts (The Palais des Beaux Arts) in Brussels, and in 2001 a solo exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York. As well as working as an artist, Ettinger continued to train as psychoanalyst with Françoise Dolto, Piera Auglanier, Pierre Fedida, and Jacques-Alain Miller, and has become an influential contemporary French feminist. Around 1988 Ettinger began her Conversation and Photography project. Her personal art notebooks have become source for theoretical articulations, and her art has inspired art historians (among them the distinguished art historian Griselda Pollock and international curator Catherine de Zegher) and philosophers (like Jean-François Lyotard, Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Brian Massumi) who dedicated a number of essays to her painting. Based mainly in Paris, Ettinger was visiting professor (1997–1998) and then research professor (1999–2004) in psychoanalysis and aesthetics at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Since 2001 she has also been visiting professor in Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics at the AHRC Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (now CentreCATH). Ettinger had partly returned to Tel Aviv in 2003, and was a lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem until 2006. From 2006 on she became Chair and Professor at the EGS. Some of her specific academic fields of endeavour are feminist psychoanalysis, art, aesthetics, ethics, the gaze, sexual difference and gender studies, Jacques Lacan, the feminine, early (including pre-birth) psychic impressions, pre-maternal and maternal subjectivity. Artistic. Ettinger's art engages in the subject of trauma, mothers and women during war as well as the feminine in mythology Eurydice, Medusa, Demeter, Persephone. Her abstract research in painting concerns light and space, and in this it follows from Monet and Rothko. Her subjects concern the human condition and the tragedy of war, and her work in this aspect follows on after artists such as Käthe Kollwitz and Francisco Goya. The painting process engages a space of passage between figures and abstraction, and her attitude to abstraction resonates with the spiritual concerns of Agnes Martin and Hilma af Klint. Another major subject in her work is the unconscious and in particular the feminine and the maternal. Her notebooks accompany the painting process but are equally art works. From 1981 until 1992, Ettinger's principal artwork consisted of drawing and mixed media on paper as well as notebooks and artist's books, where alongside theoretical work and conversations she made ink and wash painting and drawing. Since 1992, apart from her notebooks, most of her artwork consists of mixed media and oil paintings, with few parallel series that spread over time like: "Matrix — Family Album", "Autistwork" and "Eurydice", with themes of generational transmission of memory, personal and historical trauma, the Shoah and the World Wars, the gaze, light, color and the space, womanhood and maternality, inspired by classical painting and creating an abstract space where the questions of beauty and sublime become relevant for our time. Between 1984-2008, images that she obtains first by collage and xerox processing are abstracted in a long process of oil painting that takes a few years. From 2008 until now Ettinger works her oil paintings directly on canvas and doing video art films that contains her drawings and photographs. According to Griselda Pollock, Catherine de Zegher and Chris Dercon, director of the Tate Modern who had chosen her work for the "contemporary art" section of the Pompidou Center's major exhibition of 20th Century art "Face à l'Histoire", Ettinger has become one of the major artists of the New European Painting. Along with painting she has worked on installations, theoretical research, lectures, video works, and "encounter events". Her paintings, photos, drawings, and notebooks have been exhibited at the Pompidou Centre (1987, 1996, 2010–2011), and the Stedelijk Museum in 1997. In the last decade, Ettinger's oil on canvas paintings involve figures like Medusa, Demeter and Persephone, and Eurydice. Though from 2010 onward her work still consists mainly of oil paintings and drawings, she is also doing new media animated video-films where the images are multi-layered like her painting. In 2015, Ettinger participated with a solo show in the 14th Istanbul Biennial drafted and curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. In 2018-2019 she participated with a solo show at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018 in India. Reception. Ettinger's work consists mostly of oil painting and writing. Ettinger is now considered to be a prominent figure among both the French painters' and the Israeli art's scenes. Ettinger's art was recently analysed at length in the book "Women Artists at the Millennium", in Griselda Pollock's "Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum" and in Catherine de Zegher's anthology "Women's Work is Never Done". Her ideas in cultural theory, psychoanalysis, and French feminism (see "Feminist theory and psychoanalysis") achieved recognition after the publication of "Matrix and Metramorphosis" (1992), fragments from her notebooks (Moma, Oxford, 1993) and "The Matrixial Gaze" (1995). Over the last two decades her work has been influential in art history, film theory (including feminist film theory), psychoanalysis, aesthetics and gender studies. Group exhibitions. Among the venues Ettinger presented in: Solo exhibitions. Ettinger's Solo exhibitions (Selection): Psychoanalyst. Ettinger is a theoretician who proposed an ontology of string-like subject-subject (trans-subjective) and subject-object (transjective) transmissivity for a rethinking of the human subject. Working at the intersections of human subjectivity, feminine sexuality, maternal subjectivity, psychoanalysis, art and aesthetics, she contributed to psychoanalysis the idea of a feminine-maternal sphere, function, and structure with its symbolic and imaginary dimensions based on femaleness in the real (womb). This dimension, as symbolic, contributes to ethical thinking about human responsibility to one another and to the world. She is a senior clinical psychologist, and a practising psychoanalyst. Her artistic practice and her articulation, since 1985, of what has become known as the matrixial theory of trans-subjectivity have transformed contemporary debates in contemporary art, psychoanalysis, women's studies, and cultural studies. Ettinger was an analysand of Ronald Laing in London and Piera Aulagnier in Paris. She is member of the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (TAICP), the New Lacanian School (NLS) and the World Association of Psychoanalysis (AMP / WAP). For Ettinger, the Freudian attitude to psychoanalysis is crucial as it emphasizes the phantasmatic value of materials that arise during regression. To Freud and Lacan she adds, however, a feminine-maternal space-time with its particular structures, functions, and dynamics in the unconscious. She claims that, in a similar way, when seduction is assigned to the paternal figure during regression, it is recognized in most cases as a result of the therapeutic process itself. It is worked-through accordingly without therapist's father-blaming, and without a resulting father-hate. Therapists must likewise realize that during regression phantasmatic maternal "not-enoughness" appears and must also be recognized as the result of the process itself, and be worked-through without the mother-hating that Ettinger considers contributes to a "psychotization" of the subject, and a block to the passage from rage to sorrow and compassion. To be able to recognize the phantasmatic status of the psychic material arising during therapy, the Lacanian concepts of Symbolic, Imaginary and Real are useful to her. The idea of a corpo-Real is a part of her symbolization of a new feminine psychic zone (the matrixial, the womb as time space of psychic encounter-event), in both male and female subjects, and of the feminine-matrixial sexual difference. Thus, even if Ettinger critiques the Freudian and Lacanian analysis of the feminine, she considers herself as a "post" or "neo" Freudian and Lacanian, who elaborates the feminine in continuity to these psychoanalysts, but claims a supplementary feminine-maternal Eros. Ettinger criticises Winnicott and Bollas for offering patients a "ready-made mother-monster" as a cause for each psychic pain. She considers any practice of archaic-motherhood blaming as an obstacle, as "hystericizing" and even momentarily "psychoticizing" (in the sense of leading to internal splits rather than recognition of differences,) when such "cause" is brought as "explanation" by the analyst, a "cause" attributed to the unremembered early period of life where I and non-I are transconnected. Ettinger agrees with Lacan that the "ultimate" cause is in principle lacking: "objet a". She calls for a delicate process of differentiation, coemergence, and cofading between the generations, especially in analysing the same-sex (daughter-mother, son-father) relationships, with emphasize on transmission, not split. Thus, the process itself helps to negotiate and articulate delicately sexual difference, in the present. To the idea that the self is structured via mirror-like reflection she adds that of primal apperception of the other, through "fascinance" (aesthetic openness to the other and the cosmos), compassion and awe (affective accesses to the other) directed from the beginning to the (m)Other and the outside, not to the self. Psychoanalytic theory. Major concepts. Ettinger invented the Matrixial Trans-subjectivity theory, or simply "The Matrixial", with concepts like borderlinking, borderspacing, martrixial borderspace, copoiesis, wit(h)nessing, co/in-habit(u)ation and proposed the partial-subjects of "I" and "non-I". Ettinger is a Freudian and Lacanian scholar and follows the late Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, object relations theory and Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari. The early theory: from 1985 through the 1990s. Ettinger articulated a feminine-maternal and feminine-prematernal dimension, space, function, Eros and dynamics in the human Unconscious. She had suggested that pre-natal impressions, connected to the phantasmatic and traumatic real of the pregnant becoming-mother, are trans-inscribed in the emerging subject and form the primary phase and position of the human psyche. "I" and "non-I", without rejection and without symbiotic fusion, conjointly inscribe memory traces that are dispersed asymmetrically but in a trans-subjective mode. Trans-subjective mental and affective unconscious "strings", connecting the prenatal emerging subject to the archaic m/Other, open unconscious routes ("feminine", non phallic, in both males and females) that enable subjectivizing processes all throughout life whenever a new matrixial encounter-event takes place. The matrixial encounter-event forms specific aesthetical and ethical accesses to the Other. Ettinger articulated the 'matrixial gaze' and the process of 'co-poiesis'. This allows new understanding of trans-generational transmission, trauma and artistic processes. Ettinger formulates the woman(girl)-to-woman(mother) difference as the first sexual difference for females to be viewed first of all according to the matrixial parameters. The feminie-maternal Eros informs also the father/son and mother/son relations. According to Ettinger, in parallel but also before expressions of abjection (Julia Kristeva) or rejection (Freud on Narcissism) of the other, primary compassion, awe and fascinance (which are unconscious psychic affective accesses to the other, and which join reattunement and differentiating-in-jointness by borderlinking) occur. The combination of fascinance and primary compassion does not enter the economy of social exchange, attraction and rejection; it has particular forms of Eros and of resistance that can inspire the political sphere and reach action and speech that is ethical-political without entering any political institutional organization. The infant's primary compassion is a proto-ethical psychological means that joins the aesthetical fascinance and creates a feel-knowing that functions at best within maternal (and also parental) compassionate hospitality. Here, one witnesses in jointness: The I wit(h)ness while borderlinking (bordurelaint) to the non-I and borderspacing (bordurespacant) from the other. Ettinger calls for the recognition of the matrixial transference as a dimension in the transferential relationships in psychoanalysis. They must entails besideness to (and not a split from) the archaic the m/Other (Autremere) and parental figures; jointness-in-differentiation rather than their exclusion. She sees in the trans-subjectivity a distinct dimension of human specific linkage and shareability, different from, and supplementary to "inter-subjectivity" and "self" psychology. Her most prominent and comprehensive book regarding this theory is "The Matrixial Borderspace" (reprint of essays from 1994–1999) published in French in 1999 and in English in 2006, but her most recent concepts are mainly elaborated in the different essays printed in 2005–2006. The theory in the 2000s. Her more recent artistic and theoretical work centers around the spiritual in art and ethics. In the domain of psychoanalysis, around the question of same-sex differences, the primary feminine difference is the difference opened between woman (girl) and woman (m/Other), maternal subjectivity, maternal/pregnance Eros of com-passion, the effects of compassion and awe and the passion for borderlinking and borderspacing and the idea that three kinds of fantasy (that she names Mother-fantasies) should be recognized, when they appear in a state of regression aroused by therapy itself, as primal: Mother-fantasies of Not-enoughness, Devouring and Abandonment. Their mis-recognition in psychoanalysis (and analytical therapy), together with the ignorance of maternal Eros of com-passion leads to catastrophic blows to the matrixial daughter-mother tissue and hurts the maternal potentiality of the daughter herself, in the sense that attacking the "non-I" is always also attacking the "I" that dwells inside an "I"-and-"non-I" trans-subjective matrixial (feminine-maternal) tissue. Contributing to Self psychoanalysis after Heinz Kohut, Ettinger articulated the difference between com-passionate borderlinking, compassion (as affect) and empathy, and between "empathy without compassion" and "empathy within compassion", claiming that the analyst's empathy without compassion harms the matrixial psychic tissue of the analysand, while empathy within compassion leads to creativity and to the broadening of the ethical horizon. Ettinger explains how by empathy (toward the patient's complaints) "without" compassion (toward the patient's surrounding past and present family figures, no less than toward the patient itself), the therapist "produces" the patient's real mother as a "ready-made monster-mother" figure, that serves to absorb complaints of all kinds, and thus, a dangerous splitting is induced between the "good" mother figure (the therapist) and a "bad" mother figure (the real mother). This splitting is destructive in both internal and external terms, and mainly for the daughter-mother relations, since the I and non-I are in any case always trans-connected, and therefore any split and projected hate (toward such figures) will turn into a self-hate in the woman/daughter web. Such a concept of subjectivity, where "non-I" is trans-connected to the "I", has deep ethical implications as well as far-reaching sociological and political implications that have been further developed by Griselda Pollock in order to rethink modern and postmodern art and History. Ettinger's recent theoretical proposals starting around 2008 include the three Shocks of maternality and the paternal infnticide impulses (Laius Complex) Carriance and the Demeter–Persephone Complex, working around Greek Mythology and the Hebrew Bible, the woman artists Eva Hesse, Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz and the poets and writers Sylvia Plath, Marguerite Duras and Alejandra Pizarnik. Other activities. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger is a disabled veteran heroine who was wounded while she led the biggest rescue, evacuation and saving operation in the history of the Middle East: saving the drowning young men of the Eilat shipwreck (in 1967), when she was 19 years old. She was wounded during the operation and suffered shell-shock after it. Only recently 50 years later this event was released from secrecy, and she was given the highest Air-Force medal for her Heroism. Ettinger is a supporter of the Palestinian rights, and an activist member in "Physicians for Human Rights" ("PHR-Israel"). Dr. Ettinger contributes to the organization as senior clinical psychologist, attending Palestinian patients in needed areas in the Palestinian occupied territories. Ettinger is also famous for her portrait photography, taken in the context of conversation projects. Some of her portraits, like those of Jean-François Lyotard, Joyce McDougall, Edmond Jabès, Emmanuel Lévinas, Robert Doisneau and Yeshayahu Leibowitz appear in several official publications and collections. Fascinance: Forum for Ettinger Studies. Fascinance is forum started by Srishti Madurai in South India on 24 December 2013 which offers Introductory Course in Ettingerian Psychoanalysis The aims of this group: Publications. Ettinger is author of several books and more than eighty psychoanalytical essays elaborating different aesthetical, ethical, psychoanalytical and artistic aspects of the matrixial. She is co-author of volumes of conversation with Emmanuel Levinas, Edmond Jabès, Craigie Horsfield, Félix Guattari and Christian Boltanski. Her book "Regard et Espace-de-Bord Matrixiels" (essays 1994–1999) appeared in French in 1999 (La lettre volée), and has been published in English as "The Matrixial Borderspace" (2006, University of Minnesota Press, edited by Brian Massumi and forwarded by Judith Butler and Griselda Pollock). Ettinger is one of the leading intellectuals associated with contemporary French feminism and feminist psychoanalytical thought alongside Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. The journal "Theory Culture & Society" dedicated an issue to her work ["TC&S, Vol.21, n.1"] in 2004.

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Wilhelm Dilthey Wilhelm Dilthey (; ; 19 November 1833 – 1 October 1911) was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held G. W. F. Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science. He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in its central epistemological and ontological assumptions, which are drawn from German literary and philosophical traditions. Life. Dilthey was born in 1833 as the son of a Reformed pastor in the village of Biebrich in the Duchy of Nassau, now in Hesse, Germany. As a young man he followed family traditions by studying theology at Heidelberg University, where his teachers included the young Kuno Fischer. He then moved to the University of Berlin and was taught by, amongst others, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg and August Boeckh, both former pupils of Friedrich Schleiermacher. In January 1864, he received his doctorate from Berlin with a thesis in Latin on Schleiermacher's ethics, and in June of the same year he also earned his habilitation with a thesis on moral consciousness. He became a "Privatdozent" at Berlin in 1865. In 1859, he edited Schleiermacher's letters and soon after he was also commissioned to write a biography—the first volume of which was eventually published in 1870. In 1867 he took up a professorship at the University of Basel, but later—in 1882—he returned to Berlin where he held the prestigious chair in philosophy at the University. In 1874, he married Katherine Puttmann, and the couple had one son and two daughters. He died in 1911. Work. Hermeneutics. Dilthey took some of his inspiration from the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher on hermeneutics, which he helped revive. Both figures are linked to German Romanticism. Schleiermacher was strongly influenced by German Romanticism which led him to place more emphasis on human emotion and the imagination. Dilthey, in his turn, as the author of a vast monograph on Schleiermacher, responds to the questions raised by Droysen and Ranke about the philosophical legitimation of the human sciences. He argues that 'scientific explanation of nature' ("erklären") must be completed with a theory of how the world is given to human beings through symbolically mediated practices. To provide such a theory is the aim of the philosophy of the humanities—a field of study to which Dilthey dedicated his entire academic career. The school of Romantic hermeneutics stressed that historically embedded interpreters—a "living" rather than a Cartesian dualism or "theoretical" subject—use 'understanding' and 'interpretation' ("Verstehen"), which combine individual-psychological and social-historical description and analysis, to gain a greater knowledge of texts and authors in their contexts. However, Dilthey remains distinct from other German Romantics and life philosophers through his emphasis on “historicality.” Dilthey understood man as a historical being. However, history is not described in terms of an object of the past, but “a series of world views.” Man cannot understand himself through reflection or introspection, but only through what “history can tell him…never in objective concepts but always only in the living experience which springs up out of the depths of his own being.” Dilthey wants to emphasize the “intrinsic temporality of all understanding,” that man's understanding is dependent on past worldviews, interpretations, and a shared world. The process of interpretive inquiry established by Schleiermacher involved what Dilthey called the hermeneutic circle—the recurring movement between the implicit and the explicit, the particular and the whole. Schleiermacher saw the approaches to interpreting sacred scriptures (for example, the Pauline epistles) and Classical texts (e.g. Plato's philosophy) as more specific forms of what he proposed as "general hermeneutics" ("allgemeine Hermeneutik"). Schleiermacher approached hermeneutics as the “art of understanding” and recognized both the importance of language, and the thoughts of an author, to interpreting a text. Dilthey saw understanding as the key for the human sciences ("Geisteswissenschaften") in contrast with the natural sciences. The natural sciences observe and explain nature, but the humanities understand human expressions of life. So long as a science is “accessible to us through a procedure based on the systematic relation between life, expression, and understanding” Dilthey considered it a part of the human sciences. Along with Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel and Henri Bergson, Dilthey's work influenced early twentieth-century "Lebensphilosophie" and "Existenzphilosophie". Dilthey's students included Bernhard Groethuysen, Hans Lipps, Herman Nohl, Theodor Litt, Eduard Spranger, Georg Misch and Erich Rothacker. Dilthey's philosophy also influenced the religious philosopher Martin Buber. Dilthey's works informed the early Martin Heidegger's approach to hermeneutics in his early lecture courses, in which he developed a "hermeneutics of factical life," and in "Being and Time" (1927). But Heidegger grew increasingly critical of Dilthey, arguing for a more radical "temporalization" of the possibilities of interpretation and human existence. In "Wahrheit und Methode" ("Truth and Method", 1960), Hans-Georg Gadamer, influenced by Heidegger, criticised Dilthey's approach to hermeneutics as both overly aesthetic and subjective as well as method-oriented and "positivistic." According to Gadamer, Dilthey's hermeneutics is insufficiently concerned with the ontological event of truth and inadequately considers the implications of how the interpreter and the interpreter's interpretations are not outside of tradition but occupy a particular position within it, i.e., have a temporal horizon. Psychology. Dilthey was interested in psychology. In his work "Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology" ("Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie", 1894), he introduced a distinction between explanatory psychology ("erklärende Psychologie"; also explanative psychology) and descriptive psychology ("beschreibende Psychologie"; also analytic psychology, "zergliedernde Psychologie"): in his terminology, explanatory psychology is the study of psychological phenomena from a third-person point of view, which involves their subordination to a system of causality, while descriptive psychology is a discipline that attempts to explicate how different mental processes converge in the "structural nexus of consciousness." The distinction is based on the more general distinction between explanatory/explanative sciences ("erklärende Wissenschaften"), on the one hand, and interpretive sciences ("beschreibende Wissenschaften" or "verstehende Wissenschaften", that is, the sciences which are based on the "Verstehen" method), on the other—see below. In his later work ("Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften", 1910), he used the alternative term structural psychology ("Strukturpsychologie") for descriptive psychology. Sociology. Dilthey was also interested in what some would call sociology in the 21st century, although he strongly objected to being labelled as such, as the sociology of his time was mainly that of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. He objected to their dialectical/evolutionist assumptions about the necessary changes that all societal formations must go through, as well as their narrowly natural-scientific methodology. Comte's idea of positivism was, according to Dilthey, one-sided and misleading. Dilthey did, however, have good things to say about the neo-Kantian sociology of Georg Simmel, with whom he was a colleague at the University of Berlin. Simmel himself was later an associate of Max Weber, the primary founder of sociological antipositivism. J. I. Hans Bakker has argued that Dilthey should be considered one of the classical sociological theorists due to his own influence in the foundation of nonpositivist "verstehende" sociology and the "Verstehen" method. Distinction between natural sciences and human sciences. A lifelong concern was to establish a proper theoretical and methodological foundation for the "human sciences" (e.g. history, law, literary criticism), distinct from, but equally "scientific" as, the "natural sciences" (e.g. physics, chemistry). He suggested that all human experience divides naturally into two parts: that of the surrounding natural world, in which "objective necessity" rules, and that of inner experience, characterized by "sovereignty of the will, responsibility for actions, a capacity to subject everything to thinking and to resist everything within the fortress of freedom of his/her own person". Dilthey strongly rejected using a model formed exclusively from the natural sciences ("Naturwissenschaften"), and instead proposed developing a separate model for the human sciences ("Geisteswissenschaften"). His argument centered around the idea that in the natural sciences we seek to explain phenomena in terms of cause and effect, or the general and the particular; in contrast, in the human sciences, we seek to "understand" ("verstehen") in terms of the relations of the part and the whole. In the social sciences we may also combine the two approaches, a point stressed by German sociologist Max Weber. His principles, a general theory of understanding or comprehension ("Verstehen") could, he asserted, be applied to all manner of interpretation ranging from ancient texts to art work, religious works, and even law. His interpretation of different theories of aesthetics in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was preliminary to his speculations concerning the form aesthetic theory would take in the twentieth century. Both the natural and human sciences originate in the context or "nexus of life" ("Lebenszusammenhang"), a concept which influenced the phenomenological account of the lifeworld ("Lebenswelt"), but are differentiated in how they relate to their life-context. Whereas the natural sciences abstract away from it, it becomes the primary object of inquiry in the human sciences. Dilthey defended his use of the term "Geisteswissenschaft" (literally, "science of the mind" or "spiritual knowledge") by pointing out that other terms such as "social science" and "cultural sciences" are equally one-sided and that the human mind or spirit is the central phenomenon from which all others are derived and analyzable. For Dilthey, like Hegel, "Geist" ("mind" or "spirit") has a cultural rather than a social meaning. It is not an abstract intellectual principle or disembodied behavioral experience but refers to the individual's life in its concrete cultural-historical context. Weltanschauungen. In 1911, Dilthey developed a typology of the three basic "Weltanschauungen", or World-Views, which he considered to be "typical" (comparable to Max Weber's notion of "ideal types") and conflicting ways of conceiving of humanity's relation to Nature. This approach influenced Karl Jaspers' "Psychology of Worldviews" as well as Rudolf Steiner's "Philosophy of Freedom". Comparison with the Neo-Kantians. Dilthey's ideas should be examined in terms of his similarities and differences with Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, members of the Baden School of Neo-Kantianism. Dilthey was not a Neo-Kantian, but had a profound knowledge of Immanuel Kant's philosophy, which deeply influenced his thinking. But whereas Neo-Kantianism was primarily interested in epistemology on the basis of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason", Dilthey took Kant's "Critique of Judgment" as his point of departure. An important debate between Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians concerned the "human" as opposed to "cultural" sciences, with the Neo-Kantians arguing for the exclusion of psychology from the cultural sciences and Dilthey for its inclusion as a human science. Editorial work. In 1859, Dilthey was asked to complete the editing of Schleiermacher's letters. Dilthey also inaugurated the Academy edition (the "Akademie-Ausgabe" abbreviated as "AA" or "Ak") of Kant's writings ("Gesammelte Schriften", Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1902–38) in 1895, and served as its first editor. Bibliography. Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works are being published by Princeton University Press under the editorship of the noted Dilthey scholars Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Published volumes include: Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften are currently published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht:

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Nikolas Kompridis Nikolas Kompridis (; born 1953) is a Canadian philosopher and political theorist. His major published work addresses the direction and orientation of Frankfurt School critical theory; the legacy of philosophical romanticism; and the aesthetic dimension(s) of politics. His writing touches on a variety of issues in social and political thought, aesthetics, and the philosophy of culture, often in terms of re-worked concepts of receptivity and world disclosure—a paradigm he calls "reflective disclosure". Critical theory. After gaining his Ph.D. at Toronto's York University, Kompridis worked with the influential philosopher and Frankfurt School social theorist Jürgen Habermas while a post-doctoral fellow at Goethe University. Following his time with Habermas he wrote a book responding to what he saw as serious shortcomings and inconsistencies in his mentor's work. In "Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future", Kompridis argues that Habermasian critical theory, which has in recent decades become the main paradigm of that tradition, has largely severed its own roots in German Idealism, while neglecting modernity's distinctive relationship to time and the utopian potential of critique. While drawing on many of Habermas' own insights (along with the philosophical traditions of German Idealism, American Pragmatism, and the work of many others), Kompridis proposes an alternative approach to social criticism and what he sees as its role in facilitating social change. This interpretation is guided by an engagement with Martin Heidegger's concept of world disclosure, as well as alternative conceptions of key philosophical categories, like critique, agency, reason, and normativity. Arguing against Habermas' procedural conception of reason and in favour of a new paradigm Kompridis calls reflective disclosure, the book suggests that critical theory should become a "possibility-disclosing" practice of social criticism "if it is to have a future worthy of its past." Critical reception and engagement. In a largely favourable review of the book, Fred R. Dallmayr writes: This is an important and timely (or time-sensitive) book, both in philosophical and in practical-political terms. Today its plea for a recovery of trust in the future has gained unexpectedly broad resonance… the book in a way signals the end of a period marked by divergent, even opposite tendencies: on the one hand, the "postmodern" fascination with "extraordinary" rupture (or rapture), and on the other, the streamlining of critical theory in the mold of a rule-governed, rationalist normalcy. James Swindal suggests that Kompridis has not taken more recent work of Habermas' fully into account, but that nonetheless, "this is a book that needed to be written" because "Habermas’s critique of disclosure was at times narrow and short-sighted. But as Habermas is now rethinking some of these shortcomings, Kompridis gives him – and indeed all critical theorists – ample resources" for a better balance between disclosure and procedural thinking. Similarly, Dana Villa writes that "Kompridis argues—persuasively, I think— that contemporary critical theory would do well to abandon its insistence that communicative rationality is the quasi-transcendental core of democratic legitimacy" and rethink its suspicion of world disclosure. In November 2011, the journal "Philosophy and Social Criticism" published a number of responses to the book from other critical theorists, along with a reply from Kompridis. Kompridis has also published a number of essays arguing for his own conceptions of cultural change, receptivity, critique, recognition and reason, and has engaged in written debates about these and other issues with critical theorists including Amy Allen, Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib (see "Exchange with Seyla Benhabib", below). Romanticism. Kompridis has written that he sees critical theory, and critique in general, as implicitly romantic in its self-understanding, and much of his scholarly work reflects this concern. His edited collection, "Philosophical Romanticism" (2006), includes essays on diverse themes in romanticism from philosophers such as Albert Borgmann, Stanley Cavell, Hubert Dreyfus, Richard Eldridge, Robert Pippin and others, as well as his own contributions. The topics addressed in the volume include: "Beginning anew"; "Self-determination and expression"; "Art and irony"; "The living force of things"; and "Returning the everyday". In 2009, Kompridis published a chapter on Romanticism in "The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature", articulating his view of the relationship between romanticism and social change, and particularly the work of the social critic. There, he connects the work of a number of poets, artists and philosophers – including Rainer Maria Rilke, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Luc Godard, William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson – whom Kompridis sees sharing a deep concern with the possibility of individual and cooperative transformation. He writes that: What is demanded of [the romantic critic], in spite of all the obstacles and constraints, in spite of the improbability and possible futility of it all, is to find and found new ways of looking at things, new ways of speaking and acting, new kinds of practices, and new kinds of institutions. Anyone who thinks such change is not only necessary but also (improbably) possible, whatever their view of 'romanticism,' is a hopeless romantic. Politics, aesthetics and receptivity. "The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought" (2014) is a collection of essays, edited by Kompridis, which explores the connections between aesthetics and democratic politics. The book takes as its starting point a statement by Jacques Rancière (who is also a contributor), that "politics is aesthetic in principle." A musician by training, Kompridis has frequently married an interest in aesthetics with other philosophical concerns. Among others, he has authored papers on topics including the philosophy of music under conditions of cultural pluralism ("Amidst the Plurality of Voices: Philosophy of Music after Adorno"), on the relation between receptivity, recognition, and literature ("Recognition and Receptivity: Forms of Normative Response in the Lives of the Animals We Are"—which engages with prior debates about J. M. Coetzee's novel, "The Lives of Animals", as well as debates in critical theory on recognition); and on "The priority of receptivity to creativity," a paper that explores Russell Hoban's novel, "The Medusa Frequency". Kompridis has lectured on film, on the relationship between cultural memory, diversity, and the arts, and has discussed music and philosophy with his former teacher, the composer Martin Bresnick, in a discussion broadcast on ABC's "Big Ideas" program. In 2011, Kompridis guest-edited and contributed to a special issue of the journal "Ethics and Global Politics" on "A Politics of Receptivity". Technology and human being. In 2008, Kompridis spoke at a conference on "The Post/Human Condition" held in Auckland (a related essay was published in the online journal "Parrhesia"). In the talk, Kompridis outlined the potential dangers he saw from the new, convergent "techno-sciences" of genetic engineering, synthetic biology, robotics and nanotechnology, while criticizing what he considered to be the transhumanist aspirations of several major research programs in those fields. According to Kompridis, the post-human is now "a real, not a notional… possibility," and therefore the question of what it means to be human "is all of a sudden a pressing question, a question absolutely pressed for time—since, evidently, the space in which it can still be meaningfully posed, and thus the space in which a meaningful response could be fashioned, is shrinking at an alarming rate." While acknowledging that in a culturally plural world, there can be no single or essentialist conception of what it means to be human, Kompridis nonetheless argues that "we have an obligation to deepen our understanding of what it is that is actually threatened" by the new technologies. Otherwise, the question of what it means to be human will be "permanently foreclosed" for human beings, because it will have been already "decided by scientific experts and market forces, and a certain tendency of our liberal culture to favour anything that increases the freedom of choice of individuals." Kompridis therefore proposes an inter-disciplinary "counter science of the human" to provide alternatives to naturalistic assumptions about identity, which predominate in the natural sciences, and which work in concert with the wider culture of individualism to erode, and preclude, other understandings of what it means to be human. This counter science would take as its two main starting points: This approach is intended to complement and build upon the work of other philosophers, including Harry Frankfurt, Charles Taylor and Maurice Merlau-Ponty.

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Judith Butler Judith Pamela Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminist, queer, and literary theory. In 1993, Butler began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where they have served, beginning in 1998, as the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory. They are also the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School. Butler is best known for their books "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity" (1990) and "Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex" (1993), in which they challenge conventional notions of gender and develop their theory of gender performativity. This theory has had a major influence on feminist and queer scholarship. Their work is often studied and debated in film studies courses emphasizing gender studies and performativity in discourse. Butler has supported lesbian and gay rights movements and they have spoken out on many contemporary political issues, including criticism of Israeli politics. Early life and education. Judith Butler was born on February 24, 1956, in Cleveland, Ohio, to a family of Hungarian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish descent. Most of their maternal grandmother's family perished in the Holocaust. Butler's parents were practising Reform Jews. Their mother was raised Orthodox, eventually becoming Conservative and then Reform, while their father was raised Reform. As a child and teenager, Butler attended both Hebrew school and special classes on Jewish ethics, where they received their "first training in philosophy". Butler stated in a 2010 interview with "Haaretz" that they began the ethics classes at the age of 14 and that they were created as a form of punishment by Butler's Hebrew school's Rabbi because they were "too talkative in class". Butler also stated that they were "thrilled" by the idea of these tutorials, and when asked what they wanted to study in these special sessions, they responded with three questions preoccupying them at the time: "Why was Spinoza excommunicated from the synagogue? Could German Idealism be held accountable for Nazism? And how was one to understand existential theology, including the work of Martin Buber?" Butler attended Bennington College before transferring to Yale University, where they studied philosophy and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1978 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1984. They spent one academic year at Heidelberg University as a Fulbright Scholar. Butler taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before joining University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. In 2002 they held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. In addition, they joined the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University as Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Visiting Professor of the Humanities in the spring semesters of 2012, 2013 and 2014 with the option of remaining as full-time faculty. Butler serves on the editorial board or advisory board of several academic journals, including "JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics" and "Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society." Overview of major works. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution" (1988). In the essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution" (Performative Acts), Judith Butler proposes that gender is performative. The essay draws on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the feminism of Simone de Beauvoir, noting that both thinkers grounded their theories in "lived experience" and viewed the sexual body as a historical idea or situation. Butler distinguishes "between sex, as biological facticity, and gender, as the cultural interpretation or signification of that facticity." Butler argues that gender is best perceived as performative, which suggests that it has a social audience. It also suggests that women's performances are compelled and enforced by historical social practice. For Butler, the "script" of gender performance is effortlessly transmitted generation to generation in the form of socially established "meanings.” They state, "gender is not a radical choice ... [nor is it] imposed or inscribed upon the individual". Given the social nature of human beings, most actions are witnessed, reproduced, and internalized and thus take on a performative or theatric quality. According to Butler's theory, gender is essentially a performative repetition of acts associated with male or female. Currently, the actions appropriate for men and women have been transmitted to reproduce a social atmosphere that both maintains and legitimizes a seemingly natural gender binary. Consistently with Butler's acceptance of the body as a historical idea, Performative Acts suggests that our concept of gender is seen as natural or innate because the body "becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time". In Performative Acts, Butler argues that the performance of gender itself creates gender. The essay compares the performativity of gender to performance in the theater, noting such similarities as the idea of each individual functioning as an actor of their gender. However, Butler highlights a critical difference between gender performance in reality and theater performances: because there is a clear distinction from reality in the theater, a theater performance does not produce the same fear in an actor that gender performances often encounter in real life. Butler uses Sigmund Freud's notion of how a person's identity is modeled in terms of the normal. Butler revises Freud's notion of this concept's applicability to lesbianism, where Freud says that lesbians are modeling their behavior on men, the perceived normal or ideal. Butler instead says that all gender works in this way of performativity and a representation of an internalized notion of gender norms. "Gender Trouble" (1990). "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity" was first published in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally, in multiple languages. The book's title alludes to the 1974 John Waters film "Female Trouble", which stars the drag queen Divine. "Gender Trouble" discusses the works of Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. The book has even inspired an intellectual fanzine, "Judy!" The crux of Butler's argument in "Gender Trouble" is that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality—the natural-seeming coherence, for example, of masculine gender and heterosexual desire in male bodies—is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. Although the repeated, stylized bodily acts establish the appearance of an essential, ontological "core" gender, Butler understands gender, along with sex and sexuality, to be performative. Butler explicitly challenges biological accounts of binary sex. The performance of gender is not voluntary, in Butler's opinion, and they believe the gendered, sexed, desiring subject must be constructed within what they call, borrowing from Foucault's "Discipline and Punish", "regulative discourses." These, also called "frameworks of intelligibility" or "disciplinary regimes," determine in advance what possibilities of sex, gender, and sexuality are socially permitted to appear as coherent or "natural". Regulative discourse includes disciplinary techniques that coerce the stylized actions and thereby maintain the appearance of "core" gender, sex and sexuality. The supposed obviousness of sex as a natural fact attests to how deeply its production in discourse is concealed. The sexed body, once established as a natural fact, is the alibi for constructions of gender and sexuality, which then purport to be the just-as-natural expressions or consequences of sex. In Butler's account, it is on the basis of the construction of natural binary sex that binary gender and heterosexuality are likewise constructed as natural. Butler claims that without a critique of sex as produced by discourse, the sex/gender distinction as a feminist strategy for contesting constructions of binary asymmetric gender and compulsory heterosexuality will be ineffective. Butler offers a critique of the terms "gender" and "sex" as they have been used by feminists. Butler argues that feminism made a mistake in trying to make "women" a discrete, ahistorical group with common characteristics. Butler writes that this approach reinforces the binary view of gender relations. Butler believes that feminists should not try to define "women" and they also believe that feminists should "focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement." Finally, Butler aims to break the supposed links between sex and gender so that gender and desire can be "flexible, free floating and not caused by other stable factors". The idea of identity as free and flexible and gender as a performance, not an essence, is one of the foundations of queer theory. "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" (1990). Judith Butler explores the production of identities such as "homosexual" and "heterosexual" and the limiting nature of identity categories. An identity category for them is a result of certain exclusions and concealments, and thus a site of regulation. Butler acknowledges, however, that categorized identities are important for political action at the present time. Butler believes that identity forms through repetition or imitation and is not original. Imitation fosters the illusion of continuity. Heterosexual identity, which is set up as an ideal, requires constant, compulsive repetition if it is to be safeguarded. "Bodies That Matter" (1993). "Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"" seeks to clear up readings and supposed misreadings of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice. Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Derrida's theory of iterability, which is a form of citationality: Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed "by" a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance. "Excitable Speech" (1997). In "Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative", Butler surveys the problems of hate speech and censorship. They argue that censorship is difficult to evaluate, and that in some cases it may be useful or even necessary, while in others it may be worse than tolerance. Butler argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after being declared such by state authorities. In this way, the state reserves for itself the power to define hate speech and, conversely, the limits of acceptable discourse. In this connection, Butler criticizes feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon's argument against pornography for its unquestioning acceptance of the state's power to censor. Deploying Foucault's argument from the first volume of "The History of Sexuality", Butler claims that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid. As Foucault argues, for example, the strict sexual mores of 19th-century Western Europe did nothing but amplify the discourse of sexuality they sought to control. Extending this argument using Derrida and Lacan, Butler claims that censorship is primitive to language, and that the linguistic "I" is a mere effect of an originary censorship. In this way, Butler questions the possibility of any genuinely oppositional discourse; "If speech depends upon censorship, then the principle that one might seek to oppose is at once the formative principle of oppositional speech". "Undoing Gender" (2004). "Undoing Gender" collects Butler's reflections on gender, sex, sexuality, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex people for a more general readership than many of their other books. Butler revisits and refines their notion of performativity and focuses on the question of undoing "restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life". Butler discusses how gender is performed without one being conscious of it, but says that it does not mean this performativity is "automatic or mechanical". They argue that we have desires that do not originate from our personhood, but rather, from social norms. The writer also debates our notions of "human" and "less-than-human" and how these culturally imposed ideas can keep one from having a "viable life" as the biggest concerns are usually about whether a person will be accepted if his or her desires differ from normality. Butler states that one may feel the need of being recognized in order to live, but that at the same time, the conditions to be recognized make life "unlivable". The writer proposes an interrogation of such conditions so that people who resist them may have more possibilities of living. In Butler's discussion of intersex issues and people, Butler addresses the case of David Reimer, a person whose sex was medically "reassigned" from male to female after a botched circumcision at eight months of age. Reimer was "made" female by doctors, but later in life identified as "really" male, married and became a stepfather to his wife's three children, and went on to tell his story in "As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl", which he wrote with John Colapinto. Reimer died by suicide in 2004. "Giving an Account of Oneself" (2005). In "Giving an Account of Oneself", Butler develops an ethics based on the opacity of the subject to itself; in other words, the limits of self-knowledge. Primarily borrowing from Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Laplanche, Adriana Cavarero and Emmanuel Levinas, Butler develops a theory of the formation of the subject. Butler theorizes the subject in relation to the social – a community of others and their norms – which is beyond the control of the subject it forms, as precisely the very condition of that subject's formation, the resources by which the subject becomes recognizably human, a grammatical "I", in the first place. Butler accepts the claim that if the subject is opaque to itself the limitations of its free ethical responsibility and obligations are due to the limits of narrative, presuppositions of language and projection. Instead Butler argues for an ethics based precisely on the limits of self-knowledge as the limits of responsibility itself. Any concept of responsibility which demands the full transparency of the self to itself, an entirely accountable self, necessarily does violence to the opacity which marks the constitution of the self it addresses. The scene of address by which responsibility is enabled is always already a relation between subjects who are variably opaque to themselves and to each other. The ethics that Butler envisions is therefore one in which the responsible self knows the limits of its knowing, recognizes the limits of its capacity to give an account of itself to others, and respects those limits as symptomatically human. To take seriously one's opacity to oneself in ethical deliberation means then to critically interrogate the social world in which one comes to be human in the first place and which remains precisely that which one cannot know about oneself. In this way, Butler locates social and political critique at the core of ethical practice. "Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly" (2015). In "Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly", Butler discusses the power of public gatherings, considering what they signify and how they work. They use this framework to analyze the power and possibilities of protests, such as the Black Lives Matter protests regarding the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014. "The Force of Nonviolence" (2020). In "The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind", Butler connects the ideologies of nonviolence and the political struggle for social equality. They review the traditional understanding of "nonviolence," stating that it "is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power." Instead of this understanding, Butler argues that "nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field." Reception. Butler's work has been influential in feminist and queer theory, cultural studies, and continental philosophy. Yet their contribution to a range of other disciplines—such as psychoanalysis, literary, film, and performance studies as well as visual arts—has also been significant. Their theory of gender performativity as well as their conception of "critically queer" have not only transformed understandings of gender and queer identity in the academic world, but have shaped and mobilized various kinds of political activism, particularly queer activism, across the globe. Butler's work has also entered into contemporary debates on the teaching of gender, gay parenting, and the depathologization of transgender people. Before election to the papacy, Pope Benedict XVI wrote several pages challenging Butler's arguments on gender. In several countries, Butler became the symbol of the destruction of traditional gender roles for reactionary movements. This was particularly the case in France during the anti-gay marriage protests. Bruno Perreau has written that Butler was literally depicted as an "antichrist", both because of their gender and their Jewish identity, the fear of minority politics and critical studies being expressed through fantasies of a corrupted body. Some academics and political activists maintain that Butler's radical departure from the sex/gender dichotomy and Butler's non-essentialist conception of gender—along with their insistence that power helps form the subject—revolutionized feminist and queer praxis, thought, and studies. Darin Barney of McGill University wrote that: Criticism. In 1998, Denis Dutton's journal "Philosophy and Literature" awarded Butler first prize in its fourth annual "Bad Writing Competition", which set out to "celebrate bad writing from the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles." Butler's unwitting entry, which ran in a 1997 issue of the scholarly journal "Diacritics", ran thus: Some critics have accused Butler of elitism due to their difficult prose style, while others claim that Butler reduces gender to "discourse" or promotes a form of gender voluntarism. Susan Bordo, for example, has argued that Butler reduces gender to language and has contended that the body is a major part of gender, in opposition to Butler's conception of gender as performative. A particularly vocal critic has been feminist Martha Nussbaum, who has argued that Butler misreads J. L. Austin's idea of performative utterance, makes erroneous legal claims, forecloses an essential site of resistance by repudiating pre-cultural agency, and provides no "normative theory of social justice and human dignity." Finally, Nancy Fraser's critique of Butler was part of a famous exchange between the two theorists. Fraser has suggested that Butler's focus on performativity distances them from "everyday ways of talking and thinking about ourselves. ... Why should we use such a self-distancing idiom?" Butler responded to criticisms of their prose in the preface to the 1999 edition of their book, "Gender Trouble." More recently, several critics—most prominently, Viviane Namaste —have criticised Judith Butler's "Undoing Gender" for under-emphasizing the intersectional aspects of gender-based violence. For example, Timothy Laurie notes that Butler's use of phrases like "gender politics" and "gender violence" in relation to assaults on transgender individuals in the United States can "[scour] a landscape filled with class and labour relations, racialised urban stratification, and complex interactions between sexual identity, sexual practices and sex work", and produce instead "a clean surface on which struggles over 'the human' are imagined to play out". German feminist Alice Schwarzer speaks of Butler's "radical intellectual games" that would not change how society classifies and treats a woman; thus, by eliminating female and male identity Butler would have abolished the discourse about sexism in the queer community. Schwarzer also accuses Butler of remaining silent about the oppression of women and homosexuals in the Islamic world, while readily exercising their right to same-sex-marriage in the United States; instead, Butler would sweepingly defend Islam, including Islamism, from critics. Political activism. Much of Butler's early political activism centered around queer and feminist issues, and they served, for a period of time, as the chair of the board of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. Over the years, Butler has been particularly active in the gay and lesbian rights, feminist, and anti-war movements. They have also written and spoken out on issues ranging from affirmative action and gay marriage to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay. More recently, Butler has been active in the Occupy movement and has publicly expressed support for a version of the 2005 BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign against Israel. They emphasize that Israel does not and should not be taken to represent all Jews or Jewish opinion. On September 7, 2006, Butler participated in a faculty-organized teach-in against the 2006 Lebanon War at the University of California, Berkeley. Another widely publicized moment occurred in June 2010, when Butler refused the Civil Courage Award (Zivilcouragepreis) of the Christopher Street Day (CSD) Parade in Berlin, Germany at the award ceremony. They cited racist comments on the part of organizers and a general failure of CSD organizations to distance themselves from racism in general and from anti-Muslim excuses for war more specifically. Criticizing the event's commercialism, Butler went on to name several groups that they commended as stronger opponents of "homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, and militarism". In October 2011, Butler attended Occupy Wall Street and, in reference to calls for clarification of the protesters' demands, they said: People have asked, so what are the demands? What are the demands all of these people are making? Either they say there are no demands and that leaves your critics confused, or they say that the demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands. And the impossible demands, they say, are just not practical. If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible – that the right to shelter, food and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession redistribute their wealth and cease their greed, then yes, we demand the impossible. Butler is an executive member of FFIPP - Educational Network for Human Rights in Israel/Palestine. They are also a member of the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. In mainstream US politics, they expressed support for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Adorno Prize affair. When Butler received the 2012 Adorno Prize, the prize committee came under attack from Israel's Ambassador to Germany Yakov Hadas-Handelsman; the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in Jerusalem, Efraim Zuroff; and the German Central Council of Jews. They were upset at Butler's selection because of Butler's remarks about Israel and specifically their "calls for a boycott against Israel". Butler responded saying that "[Butler] did not take attacks from German Jewish leaders personally". Rather, they wrote, the attacks are "directed against everyone who is critical against Israel and its current policies". In a letter to the "Mondoweiss" website, Butler asserted that they developed strong ethical views on the basis of Jewish philosophical thought and that it is "blatantly untrue, absurd, and painful for anyone to argue that those who formulate a criticism of the State of Israel is anti-Semitic or, if Jewish, self-hating". Comments on Hamas and Hezbollah. Butler was criticized for statements they had made about Hamas and Hezbollah. Butler was accused of describing them as "social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left." They were accused of defending "Hezbollah and Hamas as progressive organizations" and supporting their tactics. Butler responded to these criticisms by stating that their remarks on Hamas and Hezbollah were taken completely out of context and, in so doing, their established views on non-violence were contradicted and misrepresented. Butler describes the origin of their remarks on Hamas and Hezbollah in the following way: I was asked by a member of an academic audience a few years ago whether I thought Hamas and Hezbollah belonged to "the global left" and I replied with two points. My first point was merely descriptive: those political organizations define themselves as anti-imperialist, and anti-imperialism is one characteristic of the global left, so on that basis one could describe them as part of the global left. My second point was then critical: as with any group on the left, one has to decide whether one is for that group or against that group, and one needs to critically evaluate their stand. Comments on Black Lives Matter. In a January 2015 interview with George Yancy of "The New York Times", Butler discussed the Black Lives Matter movement. They said: The dialogue draws heavily on their 2004 book "Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence." Avital Ronell sexual harassment case. On May 11, 2018, Butler led a group of scholars in writing a letter to New York University following the sexual harassment suit filed by a former NYU graduate student against his advisor Avital Ronell. The signatories acknowledged not having had access to the confidential findings of the investigation that followed the Title IX complaint against Ronell. Nonetheless, they accused the complainant of waging a "malicious campaign" against Ronell. The signatories also wrote that the presumed "malicious intention has animated and sustained this legal nightmare" for a highly regarded scholar. "If she were to be terminated or relieved of her duties, the injustice would be widely recognized and opposed." Butler, the chief signatory, invoked their title as President Elect of the Modern Language Association. James J. Marino, a professor at Cleveland State University and a member of the MLA, started a petition to demand Butler's resignation or removal from their post. He argued that "Protesting against one instance of punishment is only a means to the larger end of preserving senior faculty's privilege of impunity. ... [Butler] was standing up for an old, corrupt, and long-standing way of doing business. The time for doing business that way is over. We should never look back." Some three months later, Butler apologized to the MLA for the letter. "I acknowledged that I should not have allowed the MLA affiliation to go forward with my name," Butler wrote to the "Chronicle of Higher Education". "I expressed regret to the MLA officers and staff, and my colleagues accepted my apology. I extend that same apology to MLA members." Personal life. Butler is a lesbian, says they are legally non-binary, and goes by she or they pronouns. They live in Berkeley with their partner Wendy Brown and son, Isaac. Selected honors and awards. Butler has had a visiting appointment at Birkbeck, University of London (2009–). Publications. All of Butler's books have been translated into numerous languages; "Gender Trouble", alone, has been translated into twenty-seven languages. In addition, they have co-authored and edited over a dozen volumes—the most recent of which is "Dispossession: The Performative in the Political" (2013), coauthored with Athena Athanasiou. Over the years Butler has also published many influential essays, interviews, and public presentations. Butler is considered by many as "one of the most influential voices in contemporary political theory," and as the most widely read and influential gender theorist in the world. The following is a partial list of Butler's publications.

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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz (; or ; – 14 November 1716) was a German philosopher, mathematician, scientist, diplomat and polymath. He is a prominent figure in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. As a philosopher, he was one of the greatest representatives of 17th century rationalism. As a mathematician, his greatest achievement was the development of the main ideas of differential and integral calculus, independently of Isaac Newton's contemporaneous developments. Mathematical works have consistently favored Leibniz's notation as the conventional expression of calculus. However, it was only in the 20th century that Leibniz's law of continuity and transcendental law of homogeneity found a consistent mathematical formulation by means of non-standard analysis. He was also a pioneer in the field of mechanical calculators. While working on adding automatic multiplication and division to Pascal's calculator, he was the first to describe a pinwheel calculator in 1685 and invented the Leibniz wheel, used in the arithmometer, the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. He also refined the binary number system, which is the foundation of nearly all digital (electronic, solid-state, discrete logic) computers, including the Von Neumann architecture, which is the standard design paradigm, or "computer architecture", followed from the second half of the 20th century, and into the 21st. In philosophy and theology, Leibniz is most noted for his optimism, i.e. his conclusion that our world is, in a qualified sense, the best possible world that God could have created, a view that was often lampooned by other thinkers, such as Voltaire in his satirical novella Candide. Leibniz, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, was one of the three great early modern rationalists. The work of Leibniz anticipated modern logic and analytic philosophy, but his philosophy also assimilates elements of the scholastic tradition, notably the assumption that some substantive knowledge of reality can be achieved by reasoning from first principles or prior definitions. Leibniz made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in philosophy, probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. He wrote works on philosophy, politics, law, ethics, theology, history, and philology. Leibniz also contributed to the field of library science: while serving as overseer of the Wolfenbüttel library in Germany, he devised a cataloging system that would have served as a guide for many of Europe's largest libraries. Leibniz's contributions to this vast array of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of thousands of letters, and in unpublished manuscripts. He wrote in several languages, primarily in Latin, French and German, but also in English, Italian and Dutch. There is no complete gathering of the writings of Leibniz translated into English. Biography. Early life. Gottfried Leibniz was born on 1 July 1646, toward the end of the Thirty Years' War, in Leipzig, Saxony, to Friedrich Leibniz and Catharina Schmuck. Friedrich noted in his family journal: In English: Leibniz was baptized on 3 July of that year at St. Nicholas Church, Leipzig; his godfather was the Lutheran theologian . His father died when he was six years old, and from that point on he was raised by his mother. Leibniz's father had been a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Leipzig, and the boy later inherited his father's personal library. He was given free access to it from the age of seven. While Leibniz's schoolwork was largely confined to the study of a small canon of authorities, his father's library enabled him to study a wide variety of advanced philosophical and theological works—ones that he would not have otherwise been able to read until his college years. Access to his father's library, largely written in Latin, also led to his proficiency in the Latin language, which he achieved by the age of 12. He also composed 300 hexameters of Latin verse, in a single morning, for a special event at school at the age of 13. In April 1661 he enrolled in his father's former university at age 14, and completed his bachelor's degree in Philosophy in December 1662. He defended his "Disputatio Metaphysica de Principio Individui" ("Metaphysical Disputation on the Principle of Individuation"), which addressed the principle of individuation, on 9 June 1663. Leibniz earned his master's degree in Philosophy on 7 February 1664. He published and defended a dissertation "Specimen Quaestionum Philosophicarum ex Jure collectarum" ("An Essay of Collected Philosophical Problems of Right"), arguing for both a theoretical and a pedagogical relationship between philosophy and law, in December 1664. After one year of legal studies, he was awarded his bachelor's degree in Law on 28 September 1665. His dissertation was titled "De conditionibus" ("On Conditions"). In early 1666, at age 19, Leibniz wrote his first book, "De Arte Combinatoria" ("On the Combinatorial Art"), the first part of which was also his habilitation thesis in Philosophy, which he defended in March 1666. "De Arte Combinatoria" was inspired by Ramon Llull's "Ars Magna" and contained a proof of the existence of God, cast in geometrical form, and based on the argument from motion. His next goal was to earn his license and Doctorate in Law, which normally required three years of study. In 1666, the University of Leipzig turned down Leibniz's doctoral application and refused to grant him a Doctorate in Law, most likely due to his relative youth. Leibniz subsequently left Leipzig. Leibniz then enrolled in the University of Altdorf and quickly submitted a thesis, which he had probably been working on earlier in Leipzig. The title of his thesis was "Disputatio Inauguralis de Casibus Perplexis in Jure" ("Inaugural Disputation on Ambiguous Legal Cases"). Leibniz earned his license to practice law and his Doctorate in Law in November 1666. He next declined the offer of an academic appointment at Altdorf, saying that "my thoughts were turned in an entirely different direction". As an adult, Leibniz often introduced himself as "Gottfried von Leibniz". Many posthumously published editions of his writings presented his name on the title page as "Freiherr G. W. von Leibniz." However, no document has ever been found from any contemporary government that stated his appointment to any form of nobility. 1666–1676. Leibniz's first position was as a salaried secretary to an alchemical society in Nuremberg. He knew fairly little about the subject at that time but presented himself as deeply learned. He soon met Johann Christian von Boyneburg (1622–1672), the dismissed chief minister of the Elector of Mainz, Johann Philipp von Schönborn. Von Boyneburg hired Leibniz as an assistant, and shortly thereafter reconciled with the Elector and introduced Leibniz to him. Leibniz then dedicated an essay on law to the Elector in the hope of obtaining employment. The stratagem worked; the Elector asked Leibniz to assist with the redrafting of the legal code for the Electorate. In 1669, Leibniz was appointed assessor in the Court of Appeal. Although von Boyneburg died late in 1672, Leibniz remained under the employment of his widow until she dismissed him in 1674. Von Boyneburg did much to promote Leibniz's reputation, and the latter's memoranda and letters began to attract favorable notice. After Leibniz's service to the Elector there soon followed a diplomatic role. He published an essay, under the pseudonym of a fictitious Polish nobleman, arguing (unsuccessfully) for the German candidate for the Polish crown. The main force in European geopolitics during Leibniz's adult life was the ambition of Louis XIV of France, backed by French military and economic might. Meanwhile, the Thirty Years' War had left German-speaking Europe exhausted, fragmented, and economically backward. Leibniz proposed to protect German-speaking Europe by distracting Louis as follows. France would be invited to take Egypt as a stepping stone towards an eventual conquest of the Dutch East Indies. In return, France would agree to leave Germany and the Netherlands undisturbed. This plan obtained the Elector's cautious support. In 1672, the French government invited Leibniz to Paris for discussion, but the plan was soon overtaken by the outbreak of the Franco-Dutch War and became irrelevant. Napoleon's failed invasion of Egypt in 1798 can be seen as an unwitting, late implementation of Leibniz's plan, after the Eastern hemisphere colonial supremacy in Europe had already passed from the Dutch to the British. Thus Leibniz went to Paris in 1672. Soon after arriving, he met Dutch physicist and mathematician Christiaan Huygens and realised that his own knowledge of mathematics and physics was patchy. With Huygens as his mentor, he began a program of self-study that soon pushed him to making major contributions to both subjects, including discovering his version of the differential and integral calculus. He met Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld, the leading French philosophers of the day, and studied the writings of Descartes and Pascal, unpublished as well as published. He befriended a German mathematician, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus; they corresponded for the rest of their lives. When it became clear that France would not implement its part of Leibniz's Egyptian plan, the Elector sent his nephew, escorted by Leibniz, on a related mission to the English government in London, early in 1673. There Leibniz came into acquaintance of Henry Oldenburg and John Collins. He met with the Royal Society where he demonstrated a calculating machine that he had designed and had been building since 1670. The machine was able to execute all four basic operations (adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing), and the society quickly made him an external member. The mission ended abruptly when news of the Elector's death (12 February 1673) reached them. Leibniz promptly returned to Paris and not, as had been planned, to Mainz. The sudden deaths of his two patrons in the same winter meant that Leibniz had to find a new basis for his career. In this regard, a 1669 invitation from Duke John Frederick of Brunswick to visit Hanover proved to have been fateful. Leibniz had declined the invitation, but had begun corresponding with the duke in 1671. In 1673, the duke offered Leibniz the post of counsellor. Leibniz very reluctantly accepted the position two years later, only after it became clear that no employment was forthcoming in Paris, whose intellectual stimulation he relished, or with the Habsburg imperial court. In 1675 he tried to get admitted to the French Academy of Sciences as a foreign honorary member, but it was considered that there were already enough foreigners there and so no invitation came. He left Paris in October 1676. House of Hanover, 1676–1716. Leibniz managed to delay his arrival in Hanover until the end of 1676 after making one more short journey to London, where Newton accused him of having seen Newton's unpublished work on calculus in advance. This was alleged to be evidence supporting the accusation, made decades later, that he had stolen calculus from Newton. On the journey from London to Hanover, Leibniz stopped in The Hague where he met van Leeuwenhoek, the discoverer of microorganisms. He also spent several days in intense discussion with Spinoza, who had just completed his masterwork, the "Ethics". In 1677, he was promoted, at his request, to Privy Counselor of Justice, a post he held for the rest of his life. Leibniz served three consecutive rulers of the House of Brunswick as historian, political adviser, and most consequentially, as librarian of the ducal library. He thenceforth employed his pen on all the various political, historical, and theological matters involving the House of Brunswick; the resulting documents form a valuable part of the historical record for the period. Leibniz began promoting a project to use windmills to improve the mining operations in the Harz Mountains. This project did little to improve mining operations and was shut down by Duke Ernst August in 1685. Among the few people in north Germany to accept Leibniz were the Electress Sophia of Hanover (1630–1714), her daughter Sophia Charlotte of Hanover (1668–1705), the Queen of Prussia and his avowed disciple, and Caroline of Ansbach, the consort of her grandson, the future George II. To each of these women he was correspondent, adviser, and friend. In turn, they all approved of Leibniz more than did their spouses and the future king George I of Great Britain. The population of Hanover was only about 10,000, and its provinciality eventually grated on Leibniz. Nevertheless, to be a major courtier to the House of Brunswick was quite an honor, especially in light of the meteoric rise in the prestige of that House during Leibniz's association with it. In 1692, the Duke of Brunswick became a hereditary Elector of the Holy Roman Empire. The British Act of Settlement 1701 designated the Electress Sophia and her descent as the royal family of England, once both King William III and his sister-in-law and successor, Queen Anne, were dead. Leibniz played a role in the initiatives and negotiations leading up to that Act, but not always an effective one. For example, something he published anonymously in England, thinking to promote the Brunswick cause, was formally censured by the British Parliament. The Brunswicks tolerated the enormous effort Leibniz devoted to intellectual pursuits unrelated to his duties as a courtier, pursuits such as perfecting calculus, writing about other mathematics, logic, physics, and philosophy, and keeping up a vast correspondence. He began working on calculus in 1674; the earliest evidence of its use in his surviving notebooks is 1675. By 1677 he had a coherent system in hand, but did not publish it until 1684. Leibniz's most important mathematical papers were published between 1682 and 1692, usually in a journal which he and Otto Mencke founded in 1682, the "Acta Eruditorum". That journal played a key role in advancing his mathematical and scientific reputation, which in turn enhanced his eminence in diplomacy, history, theology, and philosophy. The Elector Ernest Augustus commissioned Leibniz to write a history of the House of Brunswick, going back to the time of Charlemagne or earlier, hoping that the resulting book would advance his dynastic ambitions. From 1687 to 1690, Leibniz traveled extensively in Germany, Austria, and Italy, seeking and finding archival materials bearing on this project. Decades went by but no history appeared; the next Elector became quite annoyed at Leibniz's apparent dilatoriness. Leibniz never finished the project, in part because of his huge output on many other fronts, but also because he insisted on writing a meticulously researched and erudite book based on archival sources, when his patrons would have been quite happy with a short popular book, one perhaps little more than a genealogy with commentary, to be completed in three years or less. They never knew that he had in fact carried out a fair part of his assigned task: when the material Leibniz had written and collected for his history of the House of Brunswick was finally published in the 19th century, it filled three volumes. Leibniz was appointed Librarian of the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Lower Saxony, in 1691. In 1708, John Keill, writing in the journal of the Royal Society and with Newton's presumed blessing, accused Leibniz of having plagiarised Newton's calculus. Thus began the calculus priority dispute which darkened the remainder of Leibniz's life. A formal investigation by the Royal Society (in which Newton was an unacknowledged participant), undertaken in response to Leibniz's demand for a retraction, upheld Keill's charge. Historians of mathematics writing since 1900 or so have tended to acquit Leibniz, pointing to important differences between Leibniz's and Newton's versions of calculus. In 1711, while traveling in northern Europe, the Russian Tsar Peter the Great stopped in Hanover and met Leibniz, who then took some interest in Russian matters for the rest of his life. In 1712, Leibniz began a two-year residence in Vienna, where he was appointed Imperial Court Councillor to the Habsburgs. On the death of Queen Anne in 1714, Elector George Louis became King George I of Great Britain, under the terms of the 1701 Act of Settlement. Even though Leibniz had done much to bring about this happy event, it was not to be his hour of glory. Despite the intercession of the Princess of Wales, Caroline of Ansbach, George I forbade Leibniz to join him in London until he completed at least one volume of the history of the Brunswick family his father had commissioned nearly 30 years earlier. Moreover, for George I to include Leibniz in his London court would have been deemed insulting to Newton, who was seen as having won the calculus priority dispute and whose standing in British official circles could not have been higher. Finally, his dear friend and defender, the Dowager Electress Sophia, died in 1714. Death. Leibniz died in Hanover in 1716. At the time, he was so out of favor that neither George I (who happened to be near Hanover at that time) nor any fellow courtier other than his personal secretary attended the funeral. Even though Leibniz was a life member of the Royal Society and the Berlin Academy of Sciences, neither organization saw fit to honor his death. His grave went unmarked for more than 50 years. Leibniz was eulogized by Fontenelle, before the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, which had admitted him as a foreign member in 1700. The eulogy was composed at the behest of the Duchess of Orleans, a niece of the Electress Sophia. Personal life. Leibniz never married. He complained on occasion about money, but the fair sum he left to his sole heir, his sister's stepson, proved that the Brunswicks had, by and large, paid him well. In his diplomatic endeavors, he at times verged on the unscrupulous, as was all too often the case with professional diplomats of his day. On several occasions, Leibniz backdated and altered personal manuscripts, actions which put him in a bad light during the calculus controversy. On the other hand, he was charming, well-mannered, and not without humor and imagination. He had many friends and admirers all over Europe. He identified as a Protestant and a philosophical theist. Leibniz remained committed to Trinitarian Christianity throughout his life. Philosopher. Leibniz's philosophical thinking appears fragmented, because his philosophical writings consist mainly of a multitude of short pieces: journal articles, manuscripts published long after his death, and many letters to many correspondents. He wrote only two book-length philosophical treatises, of which only the "Théodicée" of 1710 was published in his lifetime. Leibniz dated his beginning as a philosopher to his "Discourse on Metaphysics", which he composed in 1686 as a commentary on a running dispute between Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld. This led to an extensive and valuable correspondence with Arnauld; it and the "Discourse" were not published until the 19th century. In 1695, Leibniz made his public entrée into European philosophy with a journal article titled "New System of the Nature and Communication of Substances". Between 1695 and 1705, he composed his "New Essays on Human Understanding", a lengthy commentary on John Locke's 1690 "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding", but upon learning of Locke's 1704 death, lost the desire to publish it, so that the "New Essays" were not published until 1765. The "Monadologie", composed in 1714 and published posthumously, consists of 90 aphorisms. Leibniz also wrote a short paper, "Primae veritates" ("First Truths"), first published by Louis Couturat in 1903 (pp. 518–523) summarizing his views on metaphysics. The paper is undated; that he wrote it while in Vienna in 1689 was determined only in 1999, when the ongoing critical edition finally published Leibniz's philosophical writings for the period 1677–90. Couturat's reading of this paper was the launching point for much 20th-century thinking about Leibniz, especially among analytic philosophers. But after a meticulous study of all of Leibniz's philosophical writings up to 1688—a study the 1999 additions to the critical edition made possible—Mercer (2001) begged to differ with Couturat's reading; the jury is still out. Leibniz met Spinoza in 1676, read some of his unpublished writings, and has since been suspected of appropriating some of Spinoza's ideas. While Leibniz admired Spinoza's powerful intellect, he was also forthrightly dismayed by Spinoza's conclusions, especially when these were inconsistent with Christian orthodoxy. Unlike Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz had a thorough university education in philosophy. He was influenced by his Leipzig professor Jakob Thomasius, who also supervised his BA thesis in philosophy. Leibniz also eagerly read Francisco Suárez, a Spanish Jesuit respected even in Lutheran universities. Leibniz was deeply interested in the new methods and conclusions of Descartes, Huygens, Newton, and Boyle, but viewed their work through a lens heavily tinted by scholastic notions. Yet it remains the case that Leibniz's methods and concerns often anticipate the logic, and analytic and linguistic philosophy of the 20th century. Principles. Leibniz variously invoked one or another of seven fundamental philosophical Principles: Leibniz would on occasion give a rational defense of a specific principle, but more often took them for granted. Monads. Leibniz's best known contribution to metaphysics is his theory of monads, as exposited in "Monadologie". He proposes his theory that the universe is made of an infinite number of simple substances known as monads. Monads can also be compared to the corpuscles of the Mechanical Philosophy of René Descartes and others. These simple substances or monads are the "ultimate units of existence in nature". Monads have no parts but still exist by the qualities that they have. These qualities are continuously changing over time, and each monad is unique. They are also not affected by time and are subject to only creation and annihilation. Monads are centers of force; substance is force, while space, matter, and motion are merely phenomenal. It is said that he anticipated Albert Einstein by arguing, against Newton, that space, time, and motion are completely relative as he quipped, "As for my own opinion, I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something merely relative, as time is, that I hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions." Einstein, who called himself a "Leibnizian" even wrote in the introduction to Max Jammer's book "Concepts of Space" that Leibnizianism was superior to Newtonianism, and his ideas would have dominated over Newton's had it not been for the poor technological tools of the time; it has been argued that Leibniz paved the way for Einstein's theory of relativity. Leibniz's proof of God can be summarized in the "Théodicée". Reason is governed by the principle of contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason. Using the principle of reasoning, Leibniz concluded that the first reason of all things is God. All that we see and experience is subject to change, and the fact that this world is contingent can be explained by the possibility of the world being arranged differently in space and time. The contingent world must have some necessary reason for its existence. Leibniz uses a geometry book as an example to explain his reasoning. If this book was copied from an infinite chain of copies, there must be some reason for the content of the book. Leibniz concluded that there must be the "monas monadum" or God. The ontological essence of a monad is its irreducible simplicity. Unlike atoms, monads possess no material or spatial character. They also differ from atoms by their complete mutual independence, so that interactions among monads are only apparent. Instead, by virtue of the principle of pre-established harmony, each monad follows a pre-programmed set of "instructions" peculiar to itself, so that a monad "knows" what to do at each moment. By virtue of these intrinsic instructions, each monad is like a little mirror of the universe. Monads need not be "small"; e.g., each human being constitutes a monad, in which case free will is problematic. Monads are purported to have gotten rid of the problematic: Theodicy and optimism. The "Theodicy" tries to justify the apparent imperfections of the world by claiming that it is optimal among all possible worlds. It must be the best possible and most balanced world, because it was created by an all powerful and all knowing God, who would not choose to create an imperfect world if a better world could be known to him or possible to exist. In effect, apparent flaws that can be identified in this world must exist in every possible world, because otherwise God would have chosen to create the world that excluded those flaws. Leibniz asserted that the truths of theology (religion) and philosophy cannot contradict each other, since reason and faith are both "gifts of God" so that their conflict would imply God contending against himself. The "Theodicy" is Leibniz's attempt to reconcile his personal philosophical system with his interpretation of the tenets of Christianity. This project was motivated in part by Leibniz's belief, shared by many conservative philosophers and theologians during the Enlightenment, in the rational and enlightened nature of the Christian religion as compared against its purportedly less-advanced non-Western counterparts. It was also shaped by Leibniz's belief in the perfectibility of human nature (if humanity relied on correct philosophy and religion as a guide), and by his belief that metaphysical necessity must have a rational or logical foundation, even if this metaphysical causality seemed inexplicable in terms of physical necessity (the natural laws identified by science). Because reason and faith must be entirely reconciled, any tenet of faith which could not be defended by reason must be rejected. Leibniz then approached one of the central criticisms of Christian theism: if God is all good, all wise, and all powerful, then how did evil come into the world? The answer (according to Leibniz) is that, while God is indeed unlimited in wisdom and power, his human creations, as creations, are limited both in their wisdom and in their will (power to act). This predisposes humans to false beliefs, wrong decisions, and ineffective actions in the exercise of their free will. God does not arbitrarily inflict pain and suffering on humans; rather he permits both "moral evil" (sin) and "physical evil" (pain and suffering) as the necessary consequences of "metaphysical evil" (imperfection), as a means by which humans can identify and correct their erroneous decisions, and as a contrast to true good. Further, although human actions flow from prior causes that ultimately arise in God and therefore are known to God as metaphysical certainties, an individual's free will is exercised within natural laws, where choices are merely contingently necessary and to be decided in the event by a "wonderful spontaneity" that provides individuals with an escape from rigorous predestination. "Discourse on Metaphysics". For Leibniz, "God is an absolutely perfect being". He describes this perfection later in section VI as the simplest form of something with the most substantial outcome (VI). Along these lines, he declares that every type of perfection "pertains to him (God) in the highest degree" (I). Even though his types of perfections are not specifically drawn out, Leibniz highlights the one thing that, to him, does certify imperfections and proves that God is perfect: "that one acts imperfectly if he acts with less perfection than he is capable of", and since God is a perfect being, he cannot act imperfectly (III). Because God cannot act imperfectly, the decisions he makes pertaining to the world must be perfect. Leibniz also comforts readers, stating that because he has done everything to the most perfect degree; those who love him cannot be injured. However, to love God is a subject of difficulty as Leibniz believes that we are "not disposed to wish for that which God desires" because we have the ability to alter our disposition (IV). In accordance with this, many act as rebels, but Leibniz says that the only way we can truly love God is by being content "with all that comes to us according to his will" (IV). Because God is "an absolutely perfect being" (I), Leibniz argues that God would be acting imperfectly if he acted with any less perfection than what he is able of (III). His syllogism then ends with the statement that God has made the world perfectly in all ways. This also affects how we should view God and his will. Leibniz states that, in lieu of God’s will, we have to understand that God "is the best of all masters" and he will know when his good succeeds, so we, therefore, must act in conformity to his good will—or as much of it as we understand (IV). In our view of God, Leibniz declares that we cannot admire the work solely because of the maker, lest we mar the glory and love God in doing so. Instead, we must admire the maker for the work he has done (II). Effectively, Leibniz states that if we say the earth is good because of the will of God, and not good according to some standards of goodness, then how can we praise God for what he has done if contrary actions are also praiseworthy by this definition (II). Leibniz then asserts that different principles and geometry cannot simply be from the will of God, but must follow from his understanding. Fundamental question of metaphysics. Leibniz wrote: "Why is there something rather than nothing? The sufficient reason ... is found in a substance which ... is a necessary being bearing the reason for its existence within itself." Martin Heidegger called this question "the fundamental question of metaphysics". Symbolic thought. Leibniz believed that much of human reasoning could be reduced to calculations of a sort, and that such calculations could resolve many differences of opinion: The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate ["calculemus"], without further ado, to see who is right. Leibniz's calculus ratiocinator, which resembles symbolic logic, can be viewed as a way of making such calculations feasible. Leibniz wrote memoranda that can now be read as groping attempts to get symbolic logic—and thus his "calculus"—off the ground. These writings remained unpublished until the appearance of a selection edited by Carl Immanuel Gerhardt (1859). Louis Couturat published a selection in 1901; by this time the main developments of modern logic had been created by Charles Sanders Peirce and by Gottlob Frege. Leibniz thought symbols were important for human understanding. He attached so much importance to the development of good notations that he attributed all his discoveries in mathematics to this. His notation for calculus is an example of his skill in this regard. Leibniz's passion for symbols and notation, as well as his belief that these are essential to a well-running logic and mathematics, made him a precursor of semiotics. But Leibniz took his speculations much further. Defining a character as any written sign, he then defined a "real" character as one that represents an idea directly and not simply as the word embodying the idea. Some real characters, such as the notation of logic, serve only to facilitate reasoning. Many characters well known in his day, including Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese characters, and the symbols of astronomy and chemistry, he deemed not real. Instead, he proposed the creation of a "characteristica universalis" or "universal characteristic", built on an alphabet of human thought in which each fundamental concept would be represented by a unique "real" character: It is obvious that if we could find characters or signs suited for expressing all our thoughts as clearly and as exactly as arithmetic expresses numbers or geometry expresses lines, we could do in all matters "insofar as they are subject to reasoning" all that we can do in arithmetic and geometry. For all investigations which depend on reasoning would be carried out by transposing these characters and by a species of calculus. Complex thoughts would be represented by combining characters for simpler thoughts. Leibniz saw that the uniqueness of prime factorization suggests a central role for prime numbers in the universal characteristic, a striking anticipation of Gödel numbering. Granted, there is no intuitive or mnemonic way to number any set of elementary concepts using the prime numbers. Because Leibniz was a mathematical novice when he first wrote about the "characteristic", at first he did not conceive it as an algebra but rather as a universal language or script. Only in 1676 did he conceive of a kind of "algebra of thought", modeled on and including conventional algebra and its notation. The resulting "characteristic" included a logical calculus, some combinatorics, algebra, his "analysis situs" (geometry of situation), a universal concept language, and more. What Leibniz actually intended by his "characteristica universalis" and calculus ratiocinator, and the extent to which modern formal logic does justice to calculus, may never be established. Leibniz's idea of reasoning through a universal language of symbols and calculations remarkably foreshadows great 20th-century developments in formal systems, such as Turing completeness, where computation was used to define equivalent universal languages (see Turing degree). Formal logic. Leibniz has been noted as one of the most important logicians between the times of Aristotle and Gottlob Frege. Leibniz enunciated the principal properties of what we now call conjunction, disjunction, negation, identity, set inclusion, and the empty set. The principles of Leibniz's logic and, arguably, of his whole philosophy, reduce to two: The formal logic that emerged early in the 20th century also requires, at minimum, unary negation and quantified variables ranging over some universe of discourse. Leibniz published nothing on formal logic in his lifetime; most of what he wrote on the subject consists of working drafts. In his "History of Western Philosophy", Bertrand Russell went so far as to claim that Leibniz had developed logic in his unpublished writings to a level which was reached only 200 years later. Russell's principal work on Leibniz found that many of Leibniz's most startling philosophical ideas and claims (e.g., that each of the fundamental monads mirrors the whole universe) follow logically from Leibniz's conscious choice to reject "relations" between things as unreal. He regarded such relations as (real) "qualities" of things (Leibniz admitted unary predicates only): For him, "Mary is the mother of John" describes separate qualities of Mary and of John. This view contrasts with the relational logic of De Morgan, Peirce, Schröder and Russell himself, now standard in predicate logic. Notably, Leibniz also declared space and time to be inherently relational. Leibniz's 1690 discovery of his algebra of concepts (deductively equivalent to the Boolean algebra) and the associated metaphysics, are of interest in present-day computational metaphysics. Mathematician. Although the mathematical notion of function was implicit in trigonometric and logarithmic tables, which existed in his day, Leibniz was the first, in 1692 and 1694, to employ it explicitly, to denote any of several geometric concepts derived from a curve, such as abscissa, ordinate, tangent, chord, and the perpendicular (see History of the function concept). In the 18th century, "function" lost these geometrical associations. Leibniz also believed that the sum of an infinite number of zeros would equal to one half using the analogy of the creation of the world from nothing. Leibniz was also one of the pioneers in actuarial science, calculating the purchase price of life annuities and the liquidation of a state's debt. Leibniz's research into formal logic, also relevant to mathematics, is discussed in the preceding section. The best overview of Leibniz's writings on calculus may be found in Bos (1974). Leibniz, who invented one of the earliest mechanical calculators, said of calculation: "For it is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used." Linear systems. Leibniz arranged the coefficients of a system of linear equations into an array, now called a matrix, in order to find a solution to the system if it existed. This method was later called Gaussian elimination. Leibniz laid down the foundations and theory of determinants, although Seki Takakazu discovered determinants well before Leibniz. His works show calculating the determinants using cofactors. Calculating the determinant using cofactors is named the Leibniz formula. Finding the determinant of a matrix using this method proves impractical with large "n", requiring to calculate "n!" products and the number of n-permutations. He also solved systems of linear equations using determinants, which is now called Cramer's rule. This method for solving systems of linear equations based on determinants was found in 1684 by Leibniz (Cramer published his findings in 1750). Although Gaussian elimination requires formula_1 arithmetic operations, linear algebra textbooks still teach cofactor expansion before LU factorization. Geometry. The Leibniz formula for states that Leibniz wrote that circles "can most simply be expressed by this series, that is, the aggregate of fractions alternately added and subtracted". However this formula is only accurate with a large number of terms, using 10,000,000 terms to obtain the correct value of to 8 decimal places. Leibniz attempted to create a definition for a straight line while attempting to prove the parallel postulate. While most mathematicians defined a straight line as the shortest line between two points, Leibniz believed that this was merely a property of a straight line rather than the definition. Calculus. Leibniz is credited, along with Sir Isaac Newton, with the discovery of calculus (differential and integral calculus). According to Leibniz's notebooks, a critical breakthrough occurred on 11 November 1675, when he employed integral calculus for the first time to find the area under the graph of a function . He introduced several notations used to this day, for instance the integral sign , representing an elongated S, from the Latin word "summa", and the used for differentials, from the Latin word "differentia". Leibniz did not publish anything about his calculus until 1684. Leibniz expressed the inverse relation of integration and differentiation, later called the fundamental theorem of calculus, by means of a figure in his 1693 paper "Supplementum geometriae dimensoriae...". However, James Gregory is credited for the theorem's discovery in geometric form, Isaac Barrow proved a more generalized geometric version, and Newton developed supporting theory. The concept became more transparent as developed through Leibniz's formalism and new notation. The product rule of differential calculus is still called "Leibniz's law". In addition, the theorem that tells how and when to differentiate under the integral sign is called the Leibniz integral rule. Leibniz exploited infinitesimals in developing calculus, manipulating them in ways suggesting that they had paradoxical algebraic properties. George Berkeley, in a tract called "The Analyst" and also in "De Motu", criticized these. A recent study argues that Leibnizian calculus was free of contradictions, and was better grounded than Berkeley's empiricist criticisms. From 1711 until his death, Leibniz was engaged in a dispute with John Keill, Newton and others, over whether Leibniz had invented calculus independently of Newton. This subject is treated at length in the article Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy. The use of infinitesimals in mathematics was frowned upon by followers of Karl Weierstrass, but survived in science and engineering, and even in rigorous mathematics, via the fundamental computational device known as the differential. Beginning in 1960, Abraham Robinson worked out a rigorous foundation for Leibniz's infinitesimals, using model theory, in the context of a field of hyperreal numbers. The resulting non-standard analysis can be seen as a belated vindication of Leibniz's mathematical reasoning. Robinson's transfer principle is a mathematical implementation of Leibniz's heuristic law of continuity, while the standard part function implements the Leibnizian transcendental law of homogeneity. Topology. Leibniz was the first to use the term "analysis situs", later used in the 19th century to refer to what is now known as topology. There are two takes on this situation. On the one hand, Mates, citing a 1954 paper in German by Jacob Freudenthal, argues: Although for Leibniz the situs of a sequence of points is completely determined by the distance between them and is altered if those distances are altered, his admirer Euler, in the famous 1736 paper solving the Königsberg Bridge Problem and its generalizations, used the term "geometria situs" in such a sense that the situs remains unchanged under topological deformations. He mistakenly credits Leibniz with originating this concept. ... [It] is sometimes not realized that Leibniz used the term in an entirely different sense and hence can hardly be considered the founder of that part of mathematics. But Hideaki Hirano argues differently, quoting Mandelbrot: To sample Leibniz' scientific works is a sobering experience. Next to calculus, and to other thoughts that have been carried out to completion, the number and variety of premonitory thrusts is overwhelming. We saw examples in "packing", ... My Leibniz mania is further reinforced by finding that for one moment its hero attached importance to geometric scaling. In "Euclidis Prota" ..., which is an attempt to tighten Euclid's axioms, he states ...: "I have diverse definitions for the straight line. The straight line is a curve, any part of which is similar to the whole, and it alone has this property, not only among curves but among sets." This claim can be proved today. Thus the fractal geometry promoted by Mandelbrot drew on Leibniz's notions of self-similarity and the principle of continuity: "Natura non facit saltus". We also see that when Leibniz wrote, in a metaphysical vein, that "the straight line is a curve, any part of which is similar to the whole", he was anticipating topology by more than two centuries. As for "packing", Leibniz told his friend and correspondent Des Bosses to imagine a circle, then to inscribe within it three congruent circles with maximum radius; the latter smaller circles could be filled with three even smaller circles by the same procedure. This process can be continued infinitely, from which arises a good idea of self-similarity. Leibniz's improvement of Euclid's axiom contains the same concept. Scientist and engineer. Leibniz's writings are currently discussed, not only for their anticipations and possible discoveries not yet recognized, but as ways of advancing present knowledge. Much of his writing on physics is included in Gerhardt's "Mathematical Writings". Physics. Leibniz contributed a fair amount to the statics and dynamics emerging around him, often disagreeing with Descartes and Newton. He devised a new theory of motion (dynamics) based on kinetic energy and potential energy, which posited space as relative, whereas Newton was thoroughly convinced that space was absolute. An important example of Leibniz's mature physical thinking is his "Specimen Dynamicum" of 1695. Until the discovery of subatomic particles and the quantum mechanics governing them, many of Leibniz's speculative ideas about aspects of nature not reducible to statics and dynamics made little sense. For instance, he anticipated Albert Einstein by arguing, against Newton, that space, time and motion are relative, not absolute: "As for my own opinion, I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something merely relative, as time is, that I hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions." Leibniz held a relationist notion of space and time, against Newton's substantivalist views. According to Newton's substantivalism, space and time are entities in their own right, existing independently of things. Leibniz's relationism, in contrast, describes space and time as systems of relations that exist between objects. The rise of general relativity and subsequent work in the history of physics has put Leibniz's stance in a more favorable light. One of Leibniz's projects was to recast Newton's theory as a vortex theory. However, his project went beyond vortex theory, since at its heart there was an attempt to explain one of the most difficult problems in physics, that of the origin of the cohesion of matter. The principle of sufficient reason has been invoked in recent cosmology, and his identity of indiscernibles in quantum mechanics, a field some even credit him with having anticipated in some sense. Those who advocate digital philosophy, a recent direction in cosmology, claim Leibniz as a precursor. In addition to his theories about the nature of reality, Leibniz's contributions to the development of calculus have also had a major impact on physics. The "vis viva". Leibniz's "vis viva" (Latin for "living force") is , twice the modern kinetic energy. He realized that the total energy would be conserved in certain mechanical systems, so he considered it an innate motive characteristic of matter. Here too his thinking gave rise to another regrettable nationalistic dispute. His "vis viva" was seen as rivaling the conservation of momentum championed by Newton in England and by Descartes and Voltaire in France; hence academics in those countries tended to neglect Leibniz's idea. Leibniz knew of the validity of conservation of momentum. In reality, both energy and momentum are conserved, so both approaches are valid. Other natural science. By proposing that the earth has a molten core, he anticipated modern geology. In embryology, he was a preformationist, but also proposed that organisms are the outcome of a combination of an infinite number of possible microstructures and of their powers. In the life sciences and paleontology, he revealed an amazing transformist intuition, fueled by his study of comparative anatomy and fossils. One of his principal works on this subject, "Protogaea", unpublished in his lifetime, has recently been published in English for the first time. He worked out a primal organismic theory. In medicine, he exhorted the physicians of his time—with some results—to ground their theories in detailed comparative observations and verified experiments, and to distinguish firmly scientific and metaphysical points of view. Psychology. Psychology had been a central interest of Leibniz. He appears to be an "underappreciated pioneer of psychology" He wrote on topics which are now regarded as fields of psychology: attention and consciousness, memory, learning (association), motivation (the act of "striving"), emergent individuality, the general dynamics of development (evolutionary psychology). His discussions in the "New Essays" and "Monadology" often rely on everyday observations such as the behaviour of a dog or the noise of the sea, and he develops intuitive analogies (the synchronous running of clocks or the balance spring of a clock). He also devised postulates and principles that apply to psychology: the continuum of the unnoticed "petite perceptions" to the distinct, self-aware apperception, and psychophysical parallelism from the point of view of causality and of purpose: "Souls act according to the laws of final causes, through aspirations, ends and means. Bodies act according to the laws of efficient causes, i.e. the laws of motion. And these two realms, that of efficient causes and that of final causes, harmonize with one another." This idea refers to the mind-body problem, stating that the mind and brain do not act upon each other, but act alongside each other separately but in harmony. Leibniz, however, did not use the term "psychologia". Leibniz’ epistemological position—against John Locke and English empiricism (sensualism)—was made clear: "Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, nisi intellectu ipse." – "Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself." Principles that are not present in sensory impressions can be recognised in human perception and consciousness: logical inferences, categories of thought, the principle of causality and the principle of purpose (teleology). Leibniz found his most important interpreter in Wilhelm Wundt, founder of psychology as a discipline. Wundt used the "… nisi intellectu ipse" quotation 1862 on the title page of his "Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung" (Contributions on the Theory of Sensory Perception) and published a detailed and aspiring monograph on Leibniz Wundt shaped the term apperception, introduced by Leibniz, into an experimental psychologically based apperception psychology that included neuropsychological modelling – an excellent example of how a concept created by a great philosopher could stimulate a psychological research program. One principle in the thinking of Leibniz played a fundamental role: "the principle of equality of separate but corresponding viewpoints." Wundt characterized this style of thought (perspectivism) in a way that also applied for him—viewpoints that "supplement one another, while also being able to appear as opposites that only resolve themselves when considered more deeply." Much of Leibniz's work went on to have a great impact on the field of psychology. Leibniz thought that there are many petites perceptions, or small perceptions of which we perceive but of which we are unaware. He believed that by the principle that phenomena found in nature were continuous by default, it was likely that the transition between conscious and unconscious states had intermediary steps. For this to be true, there must also be a portion of the mind of which we are unaware at any given time. His theory regarding consciousness in relation to the principle of continuity can be seen as an early theory regarding the stages of sleep. In this way, Leibniz's theory of perception can be viewed as one of many theories leading up to the idea of the unconscious. Leibniz was a direct influence on Ernst Platner, who is credited with originally coining the term Unbewußtseyn (unconscious). Additionally, the idea of subliminal stimuli can be traced back to his theory of small perceptions. Leibniz's ideas regarding music and tonal perception went on to influence the laboratory studies of Wilhelm Wundt. Social science. In public health, he advocated establishing a medical administrative authority, with powers over epidemiology and veterinary medicine. He worked to set up a coherent medical training program, oriented towards public health and preventive measures. In economic policy, he proposed tax reforms and a national insurance program, and discussed the balance of trade. He even proposed something akin to what much later emerged as game theory. In sociology he laid the ground for communication theory. Technology. In 1906, Garland published a volume of Leibniz's writings bearing on his many practical inventions and engineering work. To date, few of these writings have been translated into English. Nevertheless, it is well understood that Leibniz was a serious inventor, engineer, and applied scientist, with great respect for practical life. Following the motto "theoria cum praxi", he urged that theory be combined with practical application, and thus has been claimed as the father of applied science. He designed wind-driven propellers and water pumps, mining machines to extract ore, hydraulic presses, lamps, submarines, clocks, etc. With Denis Papin, he created a steam engine. He even proposed a method for desalinating water. From 1680 to 1685, he struggled to overcome the chronic flooding that afflicted the ducal silver mines in the Harz Mountains, but did not succeed. Computation. Leibniz may have been the first computer scientist and information theorist. Early in life, he documented the binary numeral system (base 2), then revisited that system throughout his career. While Leibniz was examining other cultures to compare his metaphysical views, he encountered an ancient Chinese book "I Ching". Leibniz interpreted a diagram which showed yin and yang and corresponded it to a zero and one. More information can be found in the Sinophile section. Leibniz may have plagiarized Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz and Thomas Harriot, who independently developed the binary system, as he was familiar with their works on the binary system. Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz worked extensively on logarithms including logarithms with base 2. Thomas Harriot's manuscripts contained a table of binary numbers and their notation, which demonstrated that any number could be written on a base 2 system. Regardless, Leibniz simplified the binary system and articulated logical properties such as conjunction, disjunction, negation, identity, inclusion, and the empty set. He anticipated Lagrangian interpolation and algorithmic information theory. His calculus ratiocinator anticipated aspects of the universal Turing machine. In 1961, Norbert Wiener suggested that Leibniz should be considered the patron saint of cybernetics. In 1671, Leibniz began to invent a machine that could execute all four arithmetic operations, gradually improving it over a number of years. This "stepped reckoner" attracted fair attention and was the basis of his election to the Royal Society in 1673. A number of such machines were made during his years in Hanover by a craftsman working under his supervision. They were not an unambiguous success because they did not fully mechanize the carry operation. Couturat reported finding an unpublished note by Leibniz, dated 1674, describing a machine capable of performing some algebraic operations. Leibniz also devised a (now reproduced) cipher machine, recovered by Nicholas Rescher in 2010. In 1693, Leibniz described a design of a machine which could, in theory, integrate differential equations, which he called "integraph". Leibniz was groping towards hardware and software concepts worked out much later by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. In 1679, while mulling over his binary arithmetic, Leibniz imagined a machine in which binary numbers were represented by marbles, governed by a rudimentary sort of punched cards. Modern electronic digital computers replace Leibniz's marbles moving by gravity with shift registers, voltage gradients, and pulses of electrons, but otherwise they run roughly as Leibniz envisioned in 1679. Librarian. Later in Leibniz’s career (after the death of von Boyneburg), Leibniz moved to Paris and accepted a position as a librarian in the Hanoverian court of Johann Friedrich, Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg. Leibniz’s predecessor, Tobias Fleischer, had already created a cataloging system for the Duke’s library but it was a clumsy attempt. At this library, Leibniz focused more on advancing the library than on the cataloging. For instance, within a month of taking the new position, he developed a comprehensive plan to expand the library. He was one of the first to consider developing a core collection for a library and felt "that a library for display and ostentation is a luxury and indeed superfluous, but a well-stocked and organized library is important and useful for all areas of human endeavor and is to be regarded on the same level as schools and churches". Unfortunately, Leibniz lacked the funds to develop the library in this manner. After working at this library, by the end of 1690 Leibniz was appointed as privy-councilor and librarian of the Bibliotheca Augusta at Wolfenbüttel. It was an extensive library with at least 25,946 printed volumes. At this library, Leibniz sought to improve the catalog. He was not allowed to make complete changes to the existing closed catalog, but was allowed to improve upon it so he started on that task immediately. He created an alphabetical author catalog and had also created other cataloging methods that were not implemented. While serving as librarian of the ducal libraries in Hanover and Wolfenbüttel, Leibniz effectively became one of the founders of library science. He also designed a book indexing system in ignorance of the only other such system then extant, that of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. He also called on publishers to distribute abstracts of all new titles they produced each year, in a standard form that would facilitate indexing. He hoped that this abstracting project would eventually include everything printed from his day back to Gutenberg. Neither proposal met with success at the time, but something like them became standard practice among English language publishers during the 20th century, under the aegis of the Library of Congress and the British Library. He called for the creation of an empirical database as a way to further all sciences. His "characteristica universalis", calculus ratiocinator, and a "community of minds"—intended, among other things, to bring political and religious unity to Europe—can be seen as distant unwitting anticipations of artificial languages (e.g., Esperanto and its rivals), symbolic logic, even the World Wide Web. Advocate of scientific societies. Leibniz emphasized that research was a collaborative endeavor. Hence he warmly advocated the formation of national scientific societies along the lines of the British Royal Society and the French Académie Royale des Sciences. More specifically, in his correspondence and travels he urged the creation of such societies in Dresden, Saint Petersburg, Vienna, and Berlin. Only one such project came to fruition; in 1700, the Berlin Academy of Sciences was created. Leibniz drew up its first statutes, and served as its first President for the remainder of his life. That Academy evolved into the German Academy of Sciences, the publisher of the ongoing critical edition of his works. Lawyer and moralist. Leibniz's writings on law, ethics, and politics were long overlooked by English-speaking scholars, but this has changed of late. While Leibniz was no apologist for absolute monarchy like Hobbes, or for tyranny in any form, neither did he echo the political and constitutional views of his contemporary John Locke, views invoked in support of liberalism, in 18th-century America and later elsewhere. The following excerpt from a 1695 letter to Baron J. C. Boyneburg's son Philipp is very revealing of Leibniz's political sentiments: As for ... the great question of the power of sovereigns and the obedience their peoples owe them, I usually say that it would be good for princes to be persuaded that their people have the right to resist them, and for the people, on the other hand, to be persuaded to obey them passively. I am, however, quite of the opinion of Grotius, that one ought to obey as a rule, the evil of revolution being greater beyond comparison than the evils causing it. Yet I recognize that a prince can go to such excess, and place the well-being of the state in such danger, that the obligation to endure ceases. This is most rare, however, and the theologian who authorizes violence under this pretext should take care against excess; excess being infinitely more dangerous than deficiency. In 1677, Leibniz called for a European confederation, governed by a council or senate, whose members would represent entire nations and would be free to vote their consciences; this is sometimes considered an anticipation of the European Union. He believed that Europe would adopt a uniform religion. He reiterated these proposals in 1715. But at the same time, he arrived to propose an interreligious and multicultural project to create a universal system of justice, which required from him a broad interdisciplinary perspective. In order to propose it, he combined linguistics (especially sinology), moral and legal philosophy, management, economics, and politics. Ecumenism. Leibniz devoted considerable intellectual and diplomatic effort to what would now be called ecumenical endeavor, seeking to reconcile first the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches, and later the Lutheran and Reformed churches. In this respect, he followed the example of his early patrons, Baron von Boyneburg and the Duke John Frederickboth cradle Lutherans who converted to Catholicism as adultswho did what they could to encourage the reunion of the two faiths, and who warmly welcomed such endeavors by others. (The House of Brunswick remained Lutheran, because the Duke's children did not follow their father.) These efforts included corresponding with French bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, and involved Leibniz in some theological controversy. He evidently thought that the thoroughgoing application of reason would suffice to heal the breach caused by the Reformation. Philologist. Leibniz the philologist was an avid student of languages, eagerly latching on to any information about vocabulary and grammar that came his way. He refuted the belief, widely held by Christian scholars in his day, that Hebrew was the primeval language of the human race. He also refuted the argument, advanced by Swedish scholars in his day, that a form of proto-Swedish was the ancestor of the Germanic languages. He puzzled over the origins of the Slavic languages and was fascinated by classical Chinese. Leibniz was also an expert in the Sanskrit language. He published the "princeps editio" (first modern edition) of the late medieval "Chronicon Holtzatiae", a Latin chronicle of the County of Holstein. Sinophile. Leibniz was perhaps the first major European intellectual to take a close interest in Chinese civilization, which he knew by corresponding with, and reading other works by, European Christian missionaries posted in China. He apparently read "Confucius Sinarum Philosophus" in the first year of its publication. He came to the conclusion that Europeans could learn much from the Confucian ethical tradition. He mulled over the possibility that the Chinese characters were an unwitting form of his universal characteristic. He noted how the "I Ching" hexagrams correspond to the binary numbers from 000000 to 111111, and concluded that this mapping was evidence of major Chinese accomplishments in the sort of philosophical mathematics he admired. Leibniz communicated his ideas of the binary system representing Christianity to the Emperor of China, hoping it would convert him. Leibniz was the only major Western philosopher of the time who attempted to accommodate Confucian ideas to prevailing European beliefs. Leibniz's attraction to Chinese philosophy originates from his perception that Chinese philosophy was similar to his own. The historian E.R. Hughes suggests that Leibniz's ideas of "simple substance" and "pre-established harmony" were directly influenced by Confucianism, pointing to the fact that they were conceived during the period when he was reading "Confucius Sinarum Philosophus". Polymath. While making his grand tour of European archives to research the Brunswick family history that he never completed, Leibniz stopped in Vienna between May 1688 and February 1689, where he did much legal and diplomatic work for the Brunswicks. He visited mines, talked with mine engineers, and tried to negotiate export contracts for lead from the ducal mines in the Harz mountains. His proposal that the streets of Vienna be lit with lamps burning rapeseed oil was implemented. During a formal audience with the Austrian Emperor and in subsequent memoranda, he advocated reorganizing the Austrian economy, reforming the coinage of much of central Europe, negotiating a Concordat between the Habsburgs and the Vatican, and creating an imperial research library, official archive, and public insurance fund. He wrote and published an important paper on mechanics. Posthumous reputation. When Leibniz died, his reputation was in decline. He was remembered for only one book, the "Théodicée", whose supposed central argument Voltaire lampooned in his popular book "Candide", which concludes with the character Candide saying, "Non liquet" (it is not clear), a term that was applied during the Roman Republic to a legal verdict of "not proven". Voltaire's depiction of Leibniz's ideas was so influential that many believed it to be an accurate description. Thus Voltaire and his "Candide" bear some of the blame for the lingering failure to appreciate and understand Leibniz's ideas. Leibniz had an ardent disciple, Christian Wolff, whose dogmatic and facile outlook did Leibniz's reputation much harm. He also influenced David Hume, who read his "Théodicée" and used some of his ideas. In any event, philosophical fashion was moving away from the rationalism and system building of the 17th century, of which Leibniz had been such an ardent proponent. His work on law, diplomacy, and history was seen as of ephemeral interest. The vastness and richness of his correspondence went unrecognized. Much of Europe came to doubt that Leibniz had discovered calculus independently of Newton, and hence his whole work in mathematics and physics was neglected. Voltaire, an admirer of Newton, also wrote "Candide" at least in part to discredit Leibniz's claim to having discovered calculus and Leibniz's charge that Newton's theory of universal gravitation was incorrect. Leibniz's long march to his present glory began with the 1765 publication of the "Nouveaux Essais", which Kant read closely. In 1768, Louis Dutens edited the first multi-volume edition of Leibniz's writings, followed in the 19th century by a number of editions, including those edited by Erdmann, Foucher de Careil, Gerhardt, Gerland, Klopp, and Mollat. Publication of Leibniz's correspondence with notables such as Antoine Arnauld, Samuel Clarke, Sophia of Hanover, and her daughter Sophia Charlotte of Hanover, began. In 1900, Bertrand Russell published a critical study of Leibniz's metaphysics. Shortly thereafter, Louis Couturat published an important study of Leibniz, and edited a volume of Leibniz's heretofore unpublished writings, mainly on logic. They made Leibniz somewhat respectable among 20th-century analytical and linguistic philosophers in the English-speaking world (Leibniz had already been of great influence to many Germans such as Bernhard Riemann). For example, Leibniz's phrase "salva veritate", meaning interchangeability without loss of or compromising the truth, recurs in Willard Quine's writings. Nevertheless, the secondary literature on Leibniz did not really blossom until after World War II. This is especially true of English speaking countries; in Gregory Brown's bibliography fewer than 30 of the English language entries were published before 1946. American Leibniz studies owe much to Leroy Loemker (1904–1985) through his translations and his interpretive essays in LeClerc (1973). Nicholas Jolley has surmised that Leibniz's reputation as a philosopher is now perhaps higher than at any time since he was alive. Analytic and contemporary philosophy continue to invoke his notions of identity, individuation, and possible worlds. Work in the history of 17th- and 18th-century ideas has revealed more clearly the 17th-century "Intellectual Revolution" that preceded the better-known Industrial and commercial revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1985, the German government created the Leibniz Prize, offering an annual award of 1.55 million euros for experimental results and 770,000 euros for theoretical ones. It was the world's largest prize for scientific achievement prior to the Fundamental Physics Prize. The collection of manuscript papers of Leibniz at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek – Niedersächische Landesbibliothek was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2007. Cultural references. Leibniz still receives popular attention. The Google Doodle for July 1, 2018 celebrated Leibniz's 372nd birthday. Using a quill, his hand is shown writing "Google" in binary ASCII code. One of the earliest popular but indirect expositions of Leibniz was Voltaire's satire "Candide", published in 1759. Leibniz was lampooned as Professor Pangloss, described as "the greatest philosopher of the Holy Roman Empire". Leibniz also appears as one of the main historical figures in Neal Stephenson's series of novels "The Baroque Cycle". Stephenson credits readings and discussions concerning Leibniz for inspiring him to write the series. Leibniz also stars in Adam Ehrlich Sachs's novel "The Organs of Sense". Writings and publication. Leibniz mainly wrote in three languages: scholastic Latin, French and German. During his lifetime, he published many pamphlets and scholarly articles, but only two "philosophical" books, the "Combinatorial Art" and the "Théodicée". (He published numerous pamphlets, often anonymous, on behalf of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, most notably the "De jure suprematum" a major consideration of the nature of sovereignty.) One substantial book appeared posthumously, his "Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain", which Leibniz had withheld from publication after the death of John Locke. Only in 1895, when Bodemann completed his catalogue of Leibniz's manuscripts and correspondence, did the enormous extent of Leibniz's "Nachlass" become clear: about 15,000 letters to more than 1000 recipients plus more than 40,000 other items. Moreover, quite a few of these letters are of essay length. Much of his vast correspondence, especially the letters dated after 1700, remains unpublished, and much of what is published has appeared only in recent decades. The amount, variety, and disorder of Leibniz's writings are a predictable result of a situation he described in a letter as follows: I cannot tell you how extraordinarily distracted and spread out I am. I am trying to find various things in the archives; I look at old papers and hunt up unpublished documents. From these I hope to shed some light on the history of the [House of] Brunswick. I receive and answer a huge number of letters. At the same time, I have so many mathematical results, philosophical thoughts, and other literary innovations that should not be allowed to vanish that I often do not know where to begin. The extant parts of the critical edition of Leibniz's writings are organized as follows: The systematic cataloguing of all of Leibniz's "Nachlass" began in 1901. It was hampered by two world wars and then by decades of German division into two states with the Cold War's "iron curtain" in between, separating scholars, and also scattering portions of his literary estates. The ambitious project has had to deal with writings in seven languages, contained in some 200,000 written and printed pages. In 1985 it was reorganized and included in a joint program of German federal and state ("Länder") academies. Since then the branches in Potsdam, Münster, Hanover and Berlin have jointly published 57 volumes of the critical edition, with an average of 870 pages, and prepared index and concordance works. Selected works. The year given is usually that in which the work was completed, not of its eventual publication. Collections. Six important collections of English translations are Wiener (1951), Parkinson (1966), Loemker (1969), Ariew and Garber (1989), Woolhouse and Francks (1998), and Strickland (2006). The ongoing critical edition of all of Leibniz's writings is "Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe". References. Sources. Bibliographies. An updated bibliography of more than 25.000 titles is available at Leibniz Bibliographie.

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Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. His work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines. Sartre was also noted for his open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyles and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity ("mauvaise foi", literally, 'bad faith') and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work "Being and Nothingness" ("L'Être et le Néant", 1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work "Existentialism Is a Humanism" ("L'existentialisme est un humanisme", 1946), originally presented as a lecture. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution." Biography. Early life. Jean-Paul Sartre was born on 21 June 1905 in Paris as the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie (Schweitzer). His mother was of Alsatian origin and the first cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer, whose father Louis Théophile was the younger brother of Anne-Marie's father. When Sartre was two years old, his father died of an illness, which he most likely contracted in Indochina. Anne-Marie moved back to her parents' house in Meudon, where she raised Sartre with help from her father Charles Schweitzer, a teacher of German who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at a very early age. When he was twelve, Sartre's mother remarried, and the family moved to La Rochelle, where he was frequently bullied, in part due to the wandering of his blind right eye (sensory exotropia). As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergson's essay '. He attended the Cours Hattemer, a private school in Paris. He studied and earned certificates in psychology, history of philosophy, logic, general philosophy, ethics and sociology, and physics, as well as his ' (roughly equivalent to an MA thesis) in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure, an institution of higher education that was the alma mater for several prominent French thinkers and intellectuals. (His 1928 M.A. thesis under the title "L'Image dans la vie psychologique: rôle et nature" ["Image in Psychological Life: Role and Nature"] was supervised by Henri Delacroix.) It was at ENS that Sartre began his lifelong, sometimes fractious, friendship with Raymond Aron. Perhaps the most decisive influence on Sartre's philosophical development was his weekly attendance at Alexandre Kojève's seminars, which continued for a number of years. From his first years in the École Normale, Sartre was one of its fiercest pranksters. In 1927, his antimilitarist satirical cartoon in the revue of the school, coauthored with Georges Canguilhem, particularly upset the director Gustave Lanson. In the same year, with his comrades Nizan, Larroutis, Baillou and Herland, he organized a media prank following Charles Lindbergh's successful New York City–Paris flight; Sartre & Co. called newspapers and informed them that Lindbergh was going to be awarded an honorary École degree. Many newspapers, including "Le Petit Parisien", announced the event on 25 May. Thousands, including journalists and curious spectators, showed up, unaware that what they were witnessing was a stunt involving a Lindbergh look-alike. The public's resultant outcry forced Lanson to resign. In 1929 at the École Normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who studied at the Sorbonne and later went on to become a noted philosopher, writer, and feminist. The two became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship, though they were not monogamous. The first time Sartre took the agrégation, he failed. He took it a second time and virtually tied for first place with Beauvoir, although Sartre was eventually awarded first place, with Beauvoir second. From 1931 until 1945, Sartre taught at various lycées of Le Havre (at the Lycée de Le Havre, the present-day , 1931–1936), Laon (at the Lycée de Laon, 1936–37), and, finally, Paris (at the Lycée Pasteur, 1937–1939, and at the Lycée Condorcet, 1941–1944; see below). In 1932, Sartre read "Voyage au bout de la nuit" by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a book that had a remarkable influence on him. In 1933–34, he succeeded Raymond Aron at the Institut français d'Allemagne in Berlin where he studied Edmund Husserl's phenomenological philosophy. Aron had already advised him in 1930 to read Emmanuel Levinas's "Théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl" ("The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology"). The neo-Hegelian revival led by Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite in the 1930s inspired a whole generation of French thinkers, including Sartre, to discover Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit". World War II. In 1939 Sartre was drafted into the French army, where he served as a meteorologist. He was captured by German troops in 1940 in Padoux, and he spent nine months as a prisoner of war—in Nancy and finally in , Trier, where he wrote his first theatrical piece, "Barionà, fils du tonnerre", a drama concerning Christmas. It was during this period of confinement that Sartre read Martin Heidegger's "Sein und Zeit", later to become a major influence on his own essay on phenomenological ontology. Because of poor health (he claimed that his poor eyesight and exotropia affected his balance) Sartre was released in April 1941. According to other sources, he escaped after a medical visit to the ophthalmologist. Given civilian status, he recovered his teaching position at Lycée Pasteur near Paris and settled at the Hotel Mistral. In October 1941 he was given a position, previously held by a Jewish teacher who had been forbidden to teach by Vichy law, at Lycée Condorcet in Paris. After coming back to Paris in May 1941, he participated in the founding of the underground group "Socialisme et Liberté" ("Socialism and Liberty") with other writers Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Dominique Desanti, Jean Kanapa, and École Normale students. In spring of 1941, Sartre suggested with "cheerful ferocity" at a meeting that the "Socialisme et Liberté" assassinate prominent war collaborators like Marcel Déat, but de Beauvoir noted his idea was rejected as "none of us felt qualified to make bombs or hurl grenades". The British historian Ian Ousby observed that the French always had far more hatred for collaborators than they did for the Germans, noting it was French people like Déat that Sartre wanted to assassinate rather than the military governor of France, General Otto von Stülpnagel, and the popular slogan always was "Death to Laval!" rather than "Death to Hitler!". In August Sartre and de Beauvoir went to the French Riviera seeking the support of André Gide and André Malraux. However, both Gide and Malraux were undecided, and this may have been the cause of Sartre's disappointment and discouragement. "Socialisme et liberté" soon dissolved and Sartre decided to write instead of being involved in active resistance. He then wrote "Being and Nothingness", "The Flies", and "No Exit", none of which were censored by the Germans, and also contributed to both legal and illegal literary magazines. In his essay "Paris under the Occupation", Sartre wrote that the "correct" behaviour of the Germans had entrapped too many Parisians into complicity with the occupation, accepting what was unnatural as natural: The Germans did not stride, revolver in hand, through the streets. They did not force civilians to make way for them on the pavement. They would offer seats to old ladies on the Metro. They showed great fondness for children and would pat them on the cheek. They had been told to behave correctly and being well-disciplined, they tried shyly and conscientiously to do so. Some of them even displayed a naive kindness which could find no practical expression. Sartre noted when Wehrmacht soldiers asked Parisians politely in their German-accented French for directions, people usually felt embarrassed and ashamed as they tried their best to help out the Wehrmacht which led Sartre to remark "We could not be "natural"". French was a language widely taught in German schools and most Germans could speak at least some French. Sartre himself always found it difficult when a Wehrmacht soldier asked him for directions, usually saying he did not know where it was that the soldier wanted to go, but still felt uncomfortable as the very act of speaking to the Wehrmacht meant he had been complicit in the Occupation. Ousby wrote: "But, in however humble a fashion, everyone still had to decide how they were going to cope with life in a fragmenting society ... So Sartre's worries ... about how to react when a German soldier stopped him in the street and asked politely for directions were not as fussily inconsequential as they might sound at first. They were emblematic of how the dilemmas of the Occupation presented themselves in daily life". Sartre wrote the very "correctness" of the Germans caused moral corruption in many people who used the "correct" behavior of the Germans as an excuse for passivity, and the very act of simply trying to live one's day-to-day existence without challenging the occupation aided the "New Order in Europe", which depended upon the passivity of ordinary people to accomplish its goals. Throughout the occupation, it was German policy to plunder France, and food shortages were always a major problem as the majority of food from the French countryside went to Germany. Sartre wrote about the "languid existence" of the Parisians as people waited obsessively for the one weekly arrival of trucks bringing food from the countryside that the Germans allowed, writing: "Paris would grow peaked and yawn with hunger under the empty sky. Cut off from the rest of the world, fed only through the pity or some ulterior motive, the town led a purely abstract and symbolic life". Sartre himself lived on a diet of rabbits sent to him by a friend of de Beauvoir living in Anjou. The rabbits were usually in an advanced state of decay full of maggots, and despite being hungry, Sartre once threw out one rabbit as uneatable, saying it had more maggots in it than meat. Sartre also remarked that conversations at the Café de Flore between intellectuals had changed, as the fear that one of them might be a "mouche" (informer) or a writer of the "corbeau" (anonymous denunciatory letters) meant that no one really said what they meant anymore, imposing self-censorship. Sartre and his friends at the Café de Flore had reasons for their fear; by September 1940, the "Abwehr" alone had already recruited 32,000 French people to work as "mouches" while by 1942 the Paris "Kommandantur" was receiving an average of 1,500 letters/per day sent by the "corbeaux". Sartre wrote under the occupation Paris had become a "sham", resembling the empty wine bottles displayed in shop windows as all of the wine had been exported to Germany, looking like the old Paris, but hollowed out, as what had made Paris special was gone. Paris had almost no cars on the streets during the occupation as the oil went to Germany while the Germans imposed a nightly curfew, which led Sartre to remark that Paris "was peopled by the absent". Sartre also noted that people began to disappear under the occupation, writing: One day you might phone a friend and the phone would ring for a long time in an empty flat. You would go round and ring the doorbell, but no-one would answer it. If the "concierge" forced the door, you would find two chairs standing close together in the hall with the fag-ends of German cigarettes on the floor between their legs. If the wife or mother of the man who had vanished had been present at his arrest, she would tell you that he had been taken away by very polite Germans, like those who asked the way in the street. And when she went to ask what had happened to them at the offices in the Avenue Foch or the Rue des Saussaies she would be politely received and sent away with comforting words" [No. 11 Rue des Saussaies was the headquarters of the Gestapo in Paris]. Sartre wrote the "feldgrau" ("field grey") uniforms of the Wehrmacht and the green uniforms of the Order Police which had seemed so alien in 1940 had become accepted, as people were numbed into accepting what Sartre called "a pale, dull green, unobtrusive strain, which the eye almost expected to find among the dark clothes of the civilians". Under the occupation, the French often called the Germans "les autres" ("the others"), which inspired Sartre's aphorism in his play "Huis clos" ("No Exit") of "l'enfer, c'est les Autres" ("Hell is other people"). Sartre intended the line "l'enfer, c'est les Autres" at least in part to be a dig at the German occupiers. Sartre was a very active contributor to "Combat", a newspaper created during the clandestine period by Albert Camus, a philosopher and author who held similar beliefs. Sartre and de Beauvoir remained friends with Camus until 1951, with the publication of Camus's "The Rebel". Sartre wrote extensively post-war about neglected minority groups, namely French Jews and black people. In 1946, he published "Anti-Semite and Jew," after having published the first part of the essay, “Portrait de l’antisémite,” the year before in "Les Temps modernes, No. 3." In the essay, in the course of explaining the etiology of "hate," he attacks anti-Semitism in France during a time when the Jews who came back from concentration camps were quickly abandoned. In 1947, Sartre published several articles concerning the condition of African Americans in the United States—specifically the racism and discrimination against them in the country—in his second "Situations" collection. Then, in 1948, for the introduction of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s "l’Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry)", he wrote “Black Orpheus” (re-published in "Situations III)," a critique of colonialism and racism in light of the philosophy Sartre developed in "Being and Nothingness." Later, while Sartre was labeled by some authors as a resistant, the French philosopher and resistant Vladimir Jankelevitch criticized Sartre's lack of political commitment during the German occupation, and interpreted his further struggles for liberty as an attempt to redeem himself. According to Camus, Sartre was a writer who resisted; not a resister who wrote. In 1945, after the war ended, Sartre moved to an apartment on the rue Bonaparte, where he was to produce most of his subsequent work and where he lived until 1962. It was from there that he helped establish a quarterly literary and political review, "Les Temps modernes" ("Modern Times"), in part to popularize his thought. He ceased teaching and devoted his time to writing and political activism. He would draw on his war experiences for his great trilogy of novels, "Les Chemins de la Liberté" ("The Roads to Freedom") (1945–1949). Cold War politics and anticolonialism. The first period of Sartre's career, defined in large part by "Being and Nothingness" (1943), gave way to a second period—when the world was perceived as split into communist and capitalist blocs—of highly publicized political involvement. Sartre tended to glorify the Resistance after the war as the uncompromising expression of morality in action, and recalled that the "résistants" were a "band of brothers" who had enjoyed "real freedom" in a way that did not exist before nor after the war. Sartre was "merciless" in attacking anyone who had collaborated or remained passive during the German occupation; for instance, criticizing Camus for signing an appeal to spare the collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach from being executed. His 1948 play "Les mains sales" ("Dirty Hands") in particular explored the problem of being a politically "engaged" intellectual. He embraced Marxism but did not join the Communist Party. For a time in the late 1940s, Sartre described French nationalism as "provincial" and in a 1949 essay called for a "United States of Europe". In an essay published in the June 1949 edition of the journal "Politique étrangère", Sartre wrote: If we want French civilization to survive, it must be fitted into the framework of a great European civilization. Why? I have said that civilization is the reflection on a shared situation. In Italy, in France, in Benelux, in Sweden, in Norway, in Germany, in Greece, in Austria, everywhere we find the same problems and the same dangers ... But this cultural polity has prospects only as elements of a policy which defends Europe's cultural autonomy vis-à-vis America and the Soviet Union, but also its political and economic autonomy, with the aim of making Europe a single force between the blocs, not a third bloc, but an autonomous force which will refuse to allow itself to be torn into shreds between American optimism and Russian scientificism. About the Korean War, Sartre wrote: "I have no doubt that the South Korean feudalists and the American imperialists have promoted this war. But I do not doubt either that it was begun by the North Koreans". In July 1950, Sartre wrote in "Les Temps Modernes" about his and de Beauvoir's attitude to the Soviet Union: As we were neither members of the [Communist] party nor its avowed sympathizers, it was not our duty to write about Soviet labor camps; we were free to remain aloof from the quarrel over the nature of this system, provided that no events of sociological significance had occurred. Sartre held that the Soviet Union was a "revolutionary" state working for the betterment of humanity and could be criticized only for failing to live up to its own ideals, but that critics had to take in mind that the Soviet state needed to defend itself against a hostile world; by contrast Sartre held that the failures of "bourgeois" states were due to their innate shortcomings. The Swiss journalist François Bondy wrote that, based on a reading of Sartre's numerous essays, speeches and interviews "a simple basic pattern never fails to emerge: social change must be comprehensive and revolutionary" and the parties that promote the revolutionary charges "may be criticized, but only by those who completely identify themselves with its purpose, its struggle and its road to power", deeming Sartre's position to be "existentialist". Sartre believed at this time in the moral superiority of the Eastern Bloc in spite of its human rights violations, arguing that this belief was necessary "to keep hope alive" and opposed any criticism of Soviet Union to the extent that Maurice Merleau-Ponty called him an "ultra-Bolshevik". Sartre's expression "workers of Billancourt must not be deprived of their hopes" (Fr. "il ne faut pas désespérer Billancourt"), became a catchphrase meaning communist activists should not tell the whole truth to the workers in order to avoid decline in their revolutionary enthusiasm. In 1954, just after Stalin's death, Sartre visited the Soviet Union, which he stated he found a "complete freedom of criticism" while condemning the United States for sinking into "prefascism". Sartre wrote about those Soviet writers expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union "still had the opportunity of rehabilitating themselves by writing better books". Sartre's comments on Hungarian revolution of 1956 are quite representative to his frequently contradictory and changing views. On one hand, Sartre saw in Hungary a true reunification between intellectuals and workers only to criticize it for "losing socialist base". He condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956. In 1964 Sartre attacked Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" which condemned the Stalinist repressions and purges. Sartre argued that "the masses were not ready to receive the truth". In 1973 he argued that "revolutionary authority always needs to get rid of some people that threaten it, and their death is the only way". A number of people, starting from Frank Gibney in 1961, classified Sartre as a "useful idiot" due to his uncritical position. Sartre came to admire the Polish leader Władysław Gomułka, a man who favored a "Polish road to socialism" and wanted more independence for Poland, but was loyal to the Soviet Union because of the Oder-Neisse line issue. Sartre's newspaper "Les Temps Modernes" devoted a number of special issues in 1957 and 1958 to Poland under Gomułka, praising him for his reforms. Bondy wrote of the notable contradiction between Sarte's "ultra Bolshevism" as he expressed admiration for the Chinese leader Mao Zedong as the man who led the oppressed masses of the Third World into revolution while also praising more moderate Communist leaders like Gomułka. As an anti-colonialist, Sartre took a prominent role in the struggle against French rule in Algeria, and the use of torture and concentration camps by the French in Algeria. He became an eminent supporter of the FLN in the Algerian War and was one of the signatories of the "Manifeste des 121". Consequently, Sartre became a domestic target of the paramilitary Organisation armée secrète (OAS), escaping two bomb attacks in the early '60s. He later argued in 1959 that each French person was responsible for the collective crimes during the Algerian War of Independence. (He had an Algerian mistress, Arlette Elkaïm, who became his adopted daughter in 1965.) He opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and, along with Bertrand Russell and others, organized a tribunal intended to expose U.S. war crimes, which became known as the Russell Tribunal in 1967. His work after Stalin's death, the "Critique de la raison dialectique" ("Critique of Dialectical Reason"), appeared in 1960 (a second volume appearing posthumously). In the "Critique" Sartre set out to give Marxism a more vigorous intellectual defense than it had received until then; he ended by concluding that Marx's notion of "class" as an objective entity was fallacious. Sartre's emphasis on the humanist values in the early works of Marx led to a dispute with a leading leftist intellectual in France in the 1960s, Louis Althusser, who claimed that the ideas of the young Marx were decisively superseded by the "scientific" system of the later Marx. In the late 1950s, Sartre began to argue that the European working classes were too apolitical to carry out the revolution predicated by Marx, and influenced by Frantz Fanon stated to argue it was the impoverished masses of the Third World, the "real damned of the earth", who would carry out the revolution. A major theme of Sarte's political essays in the 1960s was of his disgust with the "Americanization" of the French working class who would much rather watch American TV shows dubbed into French than agitate for a revolution. Sartre went to Cuba in the 1960s to meet Fidel Castro and spoke with Ernesto "Che" Guevara. After Guevara's death, Sartre would declare him to be "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age" and the "era's most perfect man". Sartre would also compliment Guevara by professing that "he lived his words, spoke his own actions and his story and the story of the world ran parallel". However he stood against the persecution of gays by Castro's government, which he compared to Nazi persecution of the Jews, and said: "In Cuba there are no Jews, but there are homosexuals". During a collective hunger strike in 1974, Sartre visited Red Army Faction member Andreas Baader in Stammheim Prison and criticized the harsh conditions of imprisonment. Towards the end of his life, Sartre began to describe himself as a "special kind" of anarchist. Late life and death. In 1964 Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic account of the first ten years of his life, "Les Mots" ("The Words"). The book is an ironic counterblast to Marcel Proust, whose reputation had unexpectedly eclipsed that of André Gide (who had provided the model of "littérature engagée" for Sartre's generation). Literature, Sartre concluded, functioned ultimately as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world. In October 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but he declined it. He was the first Nobel laureate to voluntarily decline the prize, and remains one of only two laureates to do so. According to Lars Gyllensten, in the book "Minnen, bara minnen" ("Memories, Only Memories") published in 2000, Sartre himself or someone close to him got in touch with the Swedish Academy in 1975 with a request for the prize money, but was refused. In 1945, he had refused the Légion d'honneur. The Nobel prize was announced on 22 October 1964; on 14 October, Sartre had written a letter to the Nobel Institute, asking to be removed from the list of nominees, and warning that he would not accept the prize if awarded, but the letter went unread; on 23 October, "Le Figaro" published a statement by Sartre explaining his refusal. He said he did not wish to be "transformed" by such an award, and did not want to take sides in an East vs. West cultural struggle by accepting an award from a prominent Western cultural institution. Nevertheless, he was that year's prizewinner. After being awarded the prize he tried to escape the media by hiding in the house of Simone's sister Hélène de Beauvoir in Goxwiller, Alsace. Though his name was then a household word (as was "existentialism" during the tumultuous 1960s), Sartre remained a simple man with few possessions, actively committed to causes until the end of his life, such as the May 1968 strikes in Paris during the summer of 1968 during which he was arrested for civil disobedience. President Charles de Gaulle intervened and pardoned him, commenting that "you don't arrest Voltaire". In 1975, when asked how he would like to be remembered, Sartre replied: I would like [people] to remember "Nausea", [my plays] "No Exit" and "The Devil and the Good Lord", and then my two philosophical works, more particularly the second one, "Critique of Dialectical Reason". Then my essay on Genet, "Saint Genet". ... If these are remembered, that would be quite an achievement, and I don't ask for more. As a man, if a certain Jean-Paul Sartre is remembered, I would like people to remember the milieu or historical situation in which I lived, ... how I lived in it, in terms of all the aspirations which I tried to gather up within myself. Sartre's physical condition deteriorated, partially because of the merciless pace of work (and the use of amphetamine) he put himself through during the writing of the "Critique" and a massive analytical biography of Gustave Flaubert ("The Family Idiot"), both of which remained unfinished. He suffered from hypertension, and became almost completely blind in 1973. Sartre was a notorious chain smoker, which could also have contributed to the deterioration of his health. Sartre died on 15 April 1980 in Paris from edema of the lung. He had not wanted to be buried at Père-Lachaise Cemetery between his mother and stepfather, so it was arranged that he be buried at Montparnasse Cemetery. At his funeral on Saturday, 19 April, 50,000 Parisians descended onto boulevard du Montparnasse to accompany Sartre's cortege. The funeral started at "the hospital at 2:00 p.m., then filed through the fourteenth arrondissement, past all Sartre's haunts, and entered the cemetery through the gate on the Boulevard Edgar Quinet". Sartre was initially buried in a temporary grave to the left of the cemetery gate. Four days later the body was disinterred for cremation at Père-Lachaise Cemetery, and his ashes were reburied at the permanent site in Montparnasse Cemetery, to the right of the cemetery gate. Thought. Sartre's primary idea is that people, as humans, are "condemned to be free". "This may seem paradoxical because condemnation is normally an external judgment which constitutes the conclusion of a judgment. Here, it is not the human who has chosen to be like this. There is a contingency of human existence. It is a condemnation of their being. Their being is not determined, so it is up to everyone to create their own existence, for which they are then responsible. They cannot not be free, there is a form of necessity for freedom, which can never be given up." This theory relies upon his position that there is no creator, and is illustrated using the example of the paper cutter. Sartre says that if one considered a paper cutter, one would assume that the creator would have had a plan for it: an essence. Sartre said that human beings have no essence before their existence because there is no Creator. Thus: "existence precedes essence". This forms the basis for his assertion that because one cannot explain one's own actions and behavior by referring to any specific human nature, they are necessarily fully responsible for those actions. "We are left alone, without excuse." "We can act without being determined by our past which is always separated from us." Sartre maintained that the concepts of authenticity and individuality have to be earned but not learned. We need to experience "death consciousness" so as to wake up ourselves as to what is really important; the authentic in our lives which is life experience, not knowledge. Death draws the final point when we as beings cease to live for ourselves and permanently become objects that exist only for the outside world. In this way death emphasizes the burden of our free, individual existence. "We can oppose authenticity to an inauthentic way of being. Authenticity consists in experiencing the indeterminate character of existence in anguish. It is also to know how to face it by giving meaning to our actions and by recognizing ourselves as the author of this meaning. On the other hand, an inauthentic way of being consists in running away, in lying to oneself in order to escape this anguish and the responsibility for one’s own existence." As a junior lecturer at the Lycée du Havre in 1938, Sartre wrote the novel "La Nausée" ("Nausea"), which serves in some ways as a manifesto of existentialism and remains one of his most famous books. Taking a page from the German phenomenological movement, he believed that our ideas are the product of experiences of real-life situations, and that novels and plays can well describe such fundamental experiences, having equal value to discursive essays for the elaboration of philosophical theories such as existentialism. With such purpose, this novel concerns a dejected researcher (Roquentin) in a town similar to Le Havre who becomes starkly conscious of the fact that inanimate objects and situations remain absolutely indifferent to his existence. As such, they show themselves to be resistant to whatever significance human consciousness might perceive in them. He also took inspiration from phenomenologist epistemology, explained by Franz Adler in this way: "Man chooses and makes himself by acting. Any action implies the judgment that he is right under the circumstances not only for the actor, but also for everybody else in similar circumstances." This indifference of "things in themselves" (closely linked with the later notion of "being-in-itself" in his "Being and Nothingness") has the effect of highlighting all the more the freedom Roquentin has to perceive and act in the world; everywhere he looks, he finds situations imbued with meanings which bear the stamp of his existence. Hence the "nausea" referred to in the title of the book; all that he encounters in his everyday life is suffused with a pervasive, even horrible, taste—specifically, his freedom. The book takes the term from Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", where it is used in the context of the often nauseating quality of existence. No matter how much Roquentin longs for something else or something different, he cannot get away from this harrowing evidence of his engagement with the world. The novel also acts as a terrifying realization of some of Immanuel Kant's fundamental ideas about freedom; Sartre uses the idea of the autonomy of the will (that morality is derived from our ability to choose in reality; the ability to choose being derived from human freedom; embodied in the famous saying "Condemned to be free") as a way to show the world's indifference to the individual. The freedom that Kant exposed is here a strong burden, for the freedom to act towards objects is ultimately useless, and the practical application of Kant's ideas proves to be bitterly rejected. Also important is Sartre's analysis of psychological concepts, including his suggestion that consciousness exists as something other than itself, and that the conscious awareness of things is not limited to their knowledge: for Sartre intentionality applies to the emotions as well as to cognitions, to desires as well as to perceptions. "When an external object is perceived, consciousness is also conscious of itself, even if consciousness is not its own object: it is a non-positional consciousness of itself." Career as public intellectual. While the broad focus of Sartre's life revolved around the notion of human freedom, he began a sustained intellectual participation in more public matters towards the end of the Second World War, around 1944–1945. Before World War II, he was content with the role of an apolitical liberal intellectual: "Now teaching at a lycée in Laon ... Sartre made his headquarters the Dome café at the crossing of Montparnasse and Raspail boulevards. He attended plays, read novels, and dined [with] women. He wrote. And he was published." Sartre and his lifelong companion, de Beauvoir, existed, in her words, where "the world about us was a mere backdrop against which our private lives were played out". Sartre portrayed his own pre-war situation in the character Mathieu, chief protagonist in "The Age of Reason", which was completed during Sartre's first year as a soldier in the Second World War. By forging Mathieu as an absolute rationalist, analyzing every situation, and functioning entirely on reason, he removed any strands of authentic content from his character and as a result, Mathieu could "recognize no allegiance except to [him]self", though he realized that without "responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go on existing". Mathieu's commitment was only to himself, never to the outside world. Mathieu was restrained from action each time because he had no reasons for acting. Sartre then, for these reasons, was not compelled to participate in the Spanish Civil War, and it took the invasion of his own country to motivate him into action and to provide a crystallization of these ideas. It was the war that gave him a purpose beyond himself, and the atrocities of the war can be seen as the turning point in his public stance. The war opened Sartre's eyes to a political reality he had not yet understood until forced into continual engagement with it: "the world itself destroyed Sartre's illusions about isolated self-determining individuals and made clear his own personal stake in the events of the time." Returning to Paris in 1941 he formed the "Socialisme et Liberté" resistance group. In 1943, after the group disbanded, Sartre joined a writers' Resistance group, in which he remained an active participant until the end of the war. He continued to write ferociously, and it was due to this "crucial experience of war and captivity that Sartre began to try to build up a positive moral system and to express it through literature". The symbolic initiation of this new phase in Sartre's work is packaged in the introduction he wrote for a new journal, "Les Temps modernes", in October 1945. Here he aligned the journal, and thus himself, with the Left and called for writers to express their political commitment. Yet, this alignment was indefinite, directed more to the concept of the Left than a specific party of the Left. Sartre's philosophy lent itself to his being a public intellectual. He envisaged culture as a very fluid concept; neither pre-determined, nor definitely finished; instead, in true existential fashion, "culture was always conceived as a process of continual invention and re-invention." This marks Sartre, the intellectual, as a pragmatist, willing to move and shift stance along with events. He did not dogmatically follow a cause other than the belief in human freedom, preferring to retain a pacifist's objectivity. It is this overarching theme of freedom that means his work "subverts the bases for distinctions among the disciplines". Therefore, he was able to hold knowledge across a vast array of subjects: "the international world order, the political and economic organisation of contemporary society, especially France, the institutional and legal frameworks that regulate the lives of ordinary citizens, the educational system, the media networks that control and disseminate information. Sartre systematically refused to keep quiet about what he saw as inequalities and injustices in the world." Sartre always sympathized with the Left, and supported the French Communist Party (PCF) until the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. Following the Liberation the PCF were infuriated by Sartre's philosophy, which appeared to lure young French men and women away from the ideology of communism and into Sartre's own existentialism. From 1956 onwards Sartre rejected the claims of the PCF to represent the French working classes, objecting to its "authoritarian tendencies". In the late 1960s Sartre supported the Maoists, a movement that rejected the authority of established communist parties. However, despite aligning with the Maoists, Sartre said after the May events: "If one rereads all my books, one will realize that I have not changed profoundly, and that I have always remained an anarchist." He would later explicitly allow himself to be called an anarchist. In the aftermath of a war that had for the first time properly engaged Sartre in political matters, he set forth a body of work which "reflected on virtually every important theme of his early thought and began to explore alternative solutions to the problems posed there". The greatest difficulties that he and all public intellectuals of the time faced were the increasing technological aspects of the world that were outdating the printed word as a form of expression. In Sartre's opinion, the "traditional bourgeois literary forms remain innately superior", but there is "a recognition that the new technological 'mass media' forms must be embraced" if Sartre's ethical and political goals as an authentic, committed intellectual are to be achieved: the demystification of bourgeois political practices and the raising of the consciousness, both political and cultural, of the working class. The struggle for Sartre was against the monopolising moguls who were beginning to take over the media and destroy the role of the intellectual. His attempts to reach a public were mediated by these powers, and it was often these powers he had to campaign against. He was skilled enough, however, to circumvent some of these issues by his interactive approach to the various forms of media, advertising his radio interviews in a newspaper column for example, and vice versa. Sartre's role as a public intellectual occasionally put him in physical danger, such as in June 1961, when a plastic bomb exploded in the entrance of his apartment building. His public support of Algerian self-determination at the time had led Sartre to become a target of the campaign of terror that mounted as the colonists' position deteriorated. A similar occurrence took place the next year and he had begun to receive threatening letters from Oran, Algeria. Literature. Sartre wrote successfully in a number of literary modes and made major contributions to literary criticism and literary biography. His plays are richly symbolic and serve as a means of conveying his philosophy. The best-known, "Huis-clos" ("No Exit"), contains the famous line "L'enfer, c'est les autres", usually translated as "Hell is other people." Aside from the impact of "Nausea", Sartre's major work of fiction was "The Roads to Freedom" trilogy which charts the progression of how World War II affected Sartre's ideas. In this way, "Roads to Freedom" presents a less theoretical and more practical approach to existentialism. John Huston got Sartre to script his film "". However it was too long and Sartre withdrew his name from the film's credits. Nevertheless, many key elements from Sartre's script survive in the finished film. Despite their similarities as polemicists, novelists, adapters, and playwrights, Sartre's literary work has been counterposed, often pejoratively, to that of Camus in the popular imagination. In 1948 the Roman Catholic Church placed Sartre's oeuvre on the "Index Librorum Prohibitorum" (List of Prohibited Books). Criticism. Some philosophers argue that Sartre's thought is contradictory. Specifically, they believe that Sartre makes metaphysical arguments despite his claim that his philosophical views ignore metaphysics. Herbert Marcuse criticized "Being and Nothingness" for projecting anxiety and meaninglessness onto the nature of existence itself: "Insofar as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine: it hypostatizes specific historical conditions of human existence into ontological and metaphysical characteristics. Existentialism thus becomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its radicalism is illusory." In "Letter on Humanism", Heidegger criticized Sartre's existentialism: Existentialism says existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking "existentia" and "essentia" according to their metaphysical meaning, which, from Plato's time on, has said that "essentia" precedes "existentia". Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays with metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being. The philosophers Richard Wollheim and Thomas Baldwin have argued that Sartre's attempt to show that Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious is mistaken was based on a misinterpretation of Freud. Richard Webster considers Sartre one of many modern thinkers who have reconstructed Christian orthodoxies in secular form. Brian C. Anderson denounced Sartre as an apologist for tyranny and terror and a supporter of Stalinism, Maoism, and Castro's rule over Cuba. The historian Paul Johnson asserted that Sartre's ideas had inspired the Khmer Rouge leadership: "The events in Cambodia in the 1970s, in which between one-fifth and one-third of the nation was starved to death or murdered, were entirely the work of a group of intellectuals, who were for the most part pupils and admirers of Jean-Paul Sartre – 'Sartre's Children' as I call them." Sartre's philosophy, and his actions in the world, were opposed by a group of French literati dubbed the Hussards. Sartre, who stated in his preface to Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" that, "To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remains a dead man and a free man", has been criticized by Anderson and Michael Walzer for supporting the killing of European civilians by the FLN during the Algerian War. Walzer suggests that Sartre, a European, was a hypocrite for not volunteering to be killed. The critic, poet, essayist and philosopher Clive James excoriated Sartre in his book of mini biographies "Cultural Amnesia" (2007). James attacks Sartre's philosophy as being "all a pose".

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Ellen Mitchell (philosopher) Ellen M. Mitchell (1838–1920) was an American philosopher, educator and education reformer. She was one of the first women to be appointed lecturer in a university, in addition to writing philosophy, literature and literary criticism. Biography. Ellen M. Smith was born in the Village of Geddes, New York to Harriet H. Rowland and Edwin R. Smith, the eldest of their four children. She graduated from the Cortland Academy, Homer, N.Y. in 1860, with a major in Classics. Ellen, also, taught school in Syracuse. During the Civil War her brother, Edwin R. Smith, Jr., served in New York's 149th Regiment. Edwin was killed in the Battle of Chancellorsville, May 3, 1863. He was initially reported severely wounded; the family tried to determine whether the Confederates had captured him and treated him in the Confederate field hospital at Ellwood Manor. However, Edwin was lost without a trace. Ellen adopted the nom de plume "Ella Ellwood" in identification with Edwin, writing with the name Ellwood during the war. Following Edwin's death, Ellen resigned her teaching position in Syracuse and moved to Cairo, Illinois, where she lived with her uncle, Ward L. Smith and his wife, Anna. During the war, Ellen moved to St. Louis, Missouri. She wrote for the Missouri Republican newspaper of St. Louis, continuing to use the nom de plume Ella Ellwood until the war's end. She married St. Louis attorney and Union civil war veteran Joseph W. Mitchell in the Presbyterian Church of Alton, Illinois in September, 1867. Alton, Illinois had been, before the war, a primary source of advocacy for abolition of slavery, and was the location of the murder of the influential abolitionist advocate, the Presbyterian minister Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, and the destruction of his printing press by a pro-slavery mob from St. Louis. The marriage of Ellen and Joseph was, thus, their consecration to the union cause. While in St. Louis, she attended the Hegelian philosophy lectures which had been organized there by William T. Harris. She and Joseph also contributed to a literary and philosophical discussion group called "The Pen & Pencil Club," often hosting the meetings in their home. Ellen and Joseph moved to Denver, Colorado in 1878, seeking effective treatment for Joseph's illness (possibly tuberculosis). However, Joseph died in February, 1879. Ellen remained in Denver, where she taught school and, then, lectured on philosophy and literature in the University of Denver. Also, she actively contributed to the Kant Club, and to the Fortnightly Club, of Denver. Mitchell attended the first session, in July 1879, of the Concord Summer School of Philosophy, which was hosted in Concord, Massachusetts. by Bronson Alcott on his property. William T. Harris organized the school and its programs after leaving St. Louis, with the intention of unifying the Hegelian Idealism of the St. Louis Philosophical Society with the Transcendentalism of Concord. At that first 1879 session, Ellen became acquainted with many women from across the country who were leading the struggle for women's suffrage, as well as the efforts to improve educational and social policy standards. Among those she met while attending the 1879 Concord session was Julia Ward Howe who, later, became the president of the Association for the Advancement of Women. The Concord School played an important role in helping to build networks of policy reformers; more than one half of those who attended were women. Mrs. Mitchell participated in the annual Concord School of Philosophy every year, until its final session in 1888. She wrote, in 1880, a description of the lectures during the previous session, and she delivered a paper titled "Friendship in Aristotle's Ethics" during the Concord session of July, 1887. Mitchell actively contributed to the Association for the Advancement of Women, regularly attending the annual congresses. At the 12th Woman's Congress in 1884, held at Baltimore, she delivered a paper titled "A Study of Hegel." By the A.A.W.'s 13th Congress, held at Des Moines, Iowa, she was Vice Pres. of the A.A.W. for Colorado. At that same 13th Annual Congress, Prof. Maria Mitchell, of Vassar College, New York, and Ellen M. Mitchell, of Chicago (Mrs. Francis Mitchell) also were serving the A.A.W. as V.P.'s for the states of New York and Illinois, respectively. At the A.A.W.'s 18th Women's Congress, at Toronto in 1890, Mitchell delivered a paper titled, "The Dramas of Henrik Ibsen." Continuing as V. P. of the A.A.W. for Colorado, she was "Chairman" of the A.A.W.'s Committee for Topics and Papers. For the A.A.W.'s 19th Woman's Congress in 1891, at Grand Rapids, Mich., she continued serving as V.P. for Colorado, as the Chair of the Topics & Papers Committee, and she delivered a paper titled "The Real and the Ideal in Art." Throughout her career, Mitchell advocated, and endeavored to realize, the noble aspiration for American philosophy which was advocated by Walt Whitman in his great poetic essay manifesto of 1871, "Democratic Vistas". After 1890, she permanently returned to Geddes (by then a part of Syracuse) to care for her parents. In Syracuse, she organized and led the Round-Table of Syracuse, a literary and philosophical community adult seminar group. The Round Table began in 1894 and continued for more than 20 years. To assist the participants in their studies and discussions, Mitchell wrote and privately published a series of essays on Dante, Tennyson, and Goethe. The title for one of the essays, "The Way of the Soul" is adapted from Hegel's introduction to his Phenomenology of Spirit. In her introduction to the essay, she wrote:— Mitchell died in Syracuse, N.Y. May 14, 1920 at the age of 81, three months before the 19th amendment to the constitution was ratified, finally establishing universal suffrage. She is interred beside her parents in the Myrtle Hill Cemetery of the Village of Geddes. In her obituary, May 16, 1920, the "Syracuse Herald" newspaper commented: "The Herald records with sincere regret the death of Mrs. Ellen M. Mitchell, for many years the gentle preceptor and oracle of the Syracuse Round Table. The value of her services to the literary life of the city cannot easily be overestimated...Mrs. Mitchell's personality was singularly lovable, and it imparted a magnetic charm to her discourse and her teaching. On its intellectual side the City of Syracuse is much the poorer by her death." Philosophy. "A Study of Greek Philosophy", Mitchell's book length philosophical discussion, was published in 1891 by S.C.Griggs & Co. The book contains 36 chapter essays, chronologically presenting the development of the classical Greek tradition in philosophy, extending from the pre-Socratics to the neo-Platonists. Her book is the first book length philosophical analysis to have been written in America by a woman scholar. It guides university students, philosophy specialists, educators, and adult scholars through a program of study of the ancient Greek tradition in philosophy. The book is, also, the first book to preserve the legacy of ancient Greek philosophy in the New World. In her introduction to her book, Mitchell wrote:— Reviews of the book were offered by prominent scholars and thought leaders when it was published in 1891: William R. Alger, in his introduction to the book wrote, in part:— Mitchell focused her writings on the philosophy of history, philosophy of art, political ethics, transcendentalism, and Phidias and Plato. While lecturing at the Denver University she was one of the first to introduce women to idealist thought, the other being Marietta Kies. In "The Philosophy of Pessimism", she was one of the philosophers who resisted philosophical systems that grew out of the skeptical tradition. They were not interested in determining what is not true, possible, or real. She only believed in positive theories that relied on what God created, like nature rather than based on human reason and judgment, it was based on the God-given world. Mitchell was part of the idealist philosophers. One of her larger successes was "A Study of Hegel." This seventeen page article did not discuss Hegel's theories in detail. It does discuss important issues for women; nature, art, and religion. There is a paragraph in the article that distorts Hegel's thought by using her own thoughts:— This conflicts with Hegel's belief as the mind must not be said to stand apart from the world as Mitchell here implies. This paragraph starts the same as Hegel's belief of communicating with the world through senses, but it changes to hers about how to gain the power of knowledge is through using these senses to your individual experiences in life. This shows that she did not always just state other philosopher beliefs, but also had her own philosophies. When it came to the person and society Mitchell said that someone being away from social order is impossible. She states that "social institutions play a critical role in individual self-determination", meaning that in order to rise above, an individual must become a part of society to be able to rise above it. In her book "A study of Greek Philosophy", she claims the object of knowledge in philosophy is the human spirit itself, and truth is a living process which develops and advances in the civilizing course of humanity. Later in the book it reveals that we gain self-knowledge as we gain more experiences in life that affects our knowledge and become who we are.

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Richard Aaron Richard Ithamar Aaron, (6 November 1901 – 29 March 1987) was a Welsh philosopher who became an authority on the work of John Locke. He also wrote a history of philosophy in the Welsh language. Early life and education. Born in Blaendulais, Glamorgan, Aaron was the son of a Welsh Baptist draper, William Aaron, and his wife, Margaret Griffith. He was educated at Ystalyfera Grammar School, then at the University of Wales from 1918, where he studied history and philosophy. In 1923 he was elected a Fellow of the university, allowing him to attend Oriel College, Oxford, where he was awarded a DPhil in 1928 for a dissertation on "The History and Value of the Distinction between Intellect and Intuition". Career. In 1926 Aaron was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Swansea University. After the retirement of W. Jenkin Jones in 1932, Aaron was appointed to the chair of philosophy at Aberystwyth University where he settled, initially on the nearby hill of Bryn Hir and later at Garth Celyn. Although his early publications focused on epistemology and the history of ideas, Aaron became fascinated with the work and life of John Locke. The interest was sparked by his discovery of unexamined information in the Lovelace Collection: notes and drafts left by John Locke to his cousin Peter King. There he found letters, notebooks, catalogues, and most pertinently, an early draft of Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding", hitherto presumed missing. Aaron's research led to the 1937 publication of a book on the life and work of Locke that subsequently became an accepted standard work. The proofs were read by Rhiannon Morgan, whom Aaron married in 1937. They had five children. Aaron produced several more books and articles, including a book in Welsh on the history of philosophy, "Hanes athroniaeth—o Descartes i Hegel" in 1932. His attempts to boost interest in philosophy in Wales included establishing in that year a philosophy section at the University of Wales Guild of Graduates, which still conducts its proceedings in Welsh. Other notable publications of Aaron's include an essay, "Two Senses of the Word Universal", in "Mind" in 1939, and "Our Knowledge of Universals", a study read to the British Academy in 1945 and published in volume 23 of its "Proceedings". Aaron's work shows fascination with the idea of a universal, which culminated in a 1952 book "The Theory of Universals". Here he attacks the notion of universals as Platonic forms, but is as critical of Aristotelian realism on essences as he is of nominalism and conceptualism as theories of universals. In 1952–1953, Aaron was a Visiting Professor at Yale University. In 1956 he was able to study the third draft of Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" at the Pierpont Morgan Library, which led to a substantial addition to the second edition of "John Locke", published in 1955. He became a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) and President of the Mind Association in the same year. In 1956 an annual lecture hosted by the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association (publisher of the journal "Mind") was instituted in Aberystwyth and Aaron invited to give the inaugural lecture. In 1957 he was elected President of the Aristotelian Society. In 1967 Aaron published a second edition of "The Theory of Universals" with a new preface and several additions and rewritten chapters. In 1971, he published a third edition of his Locke biography and the book "Knowing and the Function of Reason", which includes broad discussion of the laws of non-contradiction, excluded middle and identity, of the use of language in speech and thought, and of substance and causality. After retiring in 1969, he taught for a semester at Carlton College, Minnesota, before returning to Wales, where he helped to write articles for the 1974 edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica". He began to feel the effects of Alzheimer's disease and died at his home on 29 March 1987. Richard Aaron was the father of the academic and Welsh literature specialist Jane Aaron, born in 1951.

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Dennis J. Schmidt Dennis Joseph Schmidt is an American philosopher living in Sydney, Australia where he is Research Professor and Chair at Western Sydney University. Prior to moving to Sydney in 2015, he taught at Binghamton University (1982-1994), Villanova University (1994-2003), and Penn State University (2003-2015). He is known for his research on ancient Greek philosophy and literature, post-Kantian philosophy, hermeneutics and philosophy of art. He received his PhD in philosophy from the Boston College in 1982. Dennis Schmidt lives with his wife, Jennifer Mensch (who also teaches at Western Sydney University and is the author or 'Kant's Organisim') and his daughter Zoe Schmidt. Schmidt is the editor of "SUNY Press Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy" which has published a number of important works in the contemporary Continental tradition. In addition to his own publications Schmidt has substantially revised and edited Joan Stambaugh's 1995 translation of Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time" (1927).

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge (; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He also shared volumes and collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd. He wrote the poems "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan", as well as the major prose work "Biographia Literaria". His critical work, especially on William Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases, including "suspension of disbelief". He had a major influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and American transcendentalism. Throughout his adult life Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he had bipolar disorder, which had not been defined during his lifetime. He was physically unhealthy, which may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these conditions with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction. Early life and education. Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 in the town of Ottery St Mary in Devon, England. Samuel's father was the Reverend John Coleridge (1718–1781), the well-respected vicar of St Mary's Church, Ottery St Mary and was headmaster of the King's School, a free grammar school established by King Henry VIII (1509–1547) in the town. He had previously been master of Hugh Squier's School in South Molton, Devon, and lecturer of nearby Molland. John Coleridge had three children by his first wife. Samuel was the youngest of ten by the Reverend Mr. Coleridge's second wife, Anne Bowden (1726–1809), probably the daughter of John Bowden, Mayor of South Molton, Devon, in 1726. Coleridge suggests that he "took no pleasure in boyish sports" but instead read "incessantly" and played by himself. After John Coleridge died in 1781, 8-year-old Samuel was sent to Christ's Hospital, a charity school which was founded in the 16th century in Greyfriars, London, where he remained throughout his childhood, studying and writing poetry. At that school Coleridge became friends with Charles Lamb, a schoolmate, and studied the works of Virgil and William Lisle Bowles. In one of a series of autobiographical letters written to Thomas Poole, Coleridge wrote: "At six years old I remember to have read "Belisarius", "Robinson Crusoe", and "Philip Quarll" – and then I found the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments" – one tale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on me (I had read it in the evening while my mother was mending stockings) that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was in the dark – and I distinctly remember the anxious and fearful eagerness with which I used to watch the window in which the books lay – and whenever the sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask, and read." Coleridge seems to have appreciated his teacher, as he wrote in recollections of his school days in "Biographia Literaria": I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master [...] At the same time that we were studying the Greek Tragic Poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learnt from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. [...] In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of our school education) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words... In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming "Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? your Nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!" [...] Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I cannot pass over in silence, because I think it ... worthy of imitation. He would often permit our theme exercises, ... to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer, why this or that sentence might not have found as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks of the day. He later wrote of his loneliness at school in the poem "Frost at Midnight": "With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt/Of my sweet birthplace." From 1791 until 1794, Coleridge attended Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1792, he won the Browne Gold Medal for an ode that he wrote attacking the slave trade. In December 1793, he left the college and enlisted in the 15th (The King's) Light Dragoons using the false name "Silas Tomkyn Comberbache", perhaps because of debt or because the girl that he loved, Mary Evans, had rejected him. His brothers arranged for his discharge a few months later under the reason of "insanity" and he was readmitted to Jesus College, though he would never receive a degree from the university. Pantisocracy and marriage. Cambridge and Somerset. At Jesus College, Coleridge was introduced to political and theological ideas then considered radical, including those of the poet Robert Southey with whom he collaborated on the play "The Fall of Robespierre". Coleridge joined Southey in a plan, later abandoned, to found a utopian commune-like society, called Pantisocracy, in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. In 1795, the two friends married sisters Sara and Edith Fricker, in St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, but Coleridge's marriage with Sara proved unhappy. He grew to detest his wife, whom he married mainly because of social constraints. Following the birth of their fourth child, he eventually separated from her. A third sister, Mary, had already married a third poet Robert Lovell and both became partners in Pantisocracy. Lovell also introduced Coleridge and Southey to their future patron Joseph Cottle but died of a fever in April 1796. Coleridge was with him at his death. In 1796 he released his first volume of poems entitled "Poems on various subjects", which also included four poems by Charles Lamb as well as a collaboration with Robert Southey and a work suggested by his and Lamb's schoolfriend Robert Favell. Among the poems were "Religious Musings", "Monody on the Death of Chatterton" and an early version of "The Eolian Harp" entitled "Effusion 35". A second edition was printed in 1797, this time including an appendix of works by Lamb and Charles Lloyd, a young poet to whom Coleridge had become a private tutor. In 1796 he also privately printed "Sonnets from Various Authors", including sonnets by Lamb, Lloyd, Southey and himself as well as older poets such as William Lisle Bowles. Coleridge made plans to establish a journal, "The Watchman", to be printed every eight days to avoid a weekly newspaper tax. The first issue of the short-lived journal was published in March 1796. It had ceased publication by May of that year. The years 1797 and 1798, during which he lived in what is now known as Coleridge Cottage, in Nether Stowey, Somerset, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge's life. In 1795, Coleridge met poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. (Wordsworth, having visited him and being enchanted by the surroundings, rented Alfoxton Park, a little over three miles [5 km] away.) Besides "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", Coleridge composed the symbolic poem "Kubla Khan", written—Coleridge himself claimed—as a result of an opium dream, in "a kind of a reverie"; and the first part of the narrative poem "Christabel". The writing of "Kubla Khan", written about the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and his legendary palace at Xanadu, was said to have been interrupted by the arrival of a "Person from Porlock" – an event that has been embellished upon in such varied contexts as science fiction and Nabokov's "Lolita". During this period, he also produced his much-praised "conversation poems" "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison", "Frost at Midnight", and "". In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume of poetry, "Lyrical Ballads", which proved to be the starting point for the English romantic age. Wordsworth may have contributed more poems, but the real star of the collection was Coleridge's first version of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". It was the longest work and drew more praise and attention than anything else in the volume. In the spring Coleridge temporarily took over for Rev. Joshua Toulmin at Taunton's Mary Street Unitarian Chapel while Rev. Toulmin grieved over the drowning death of his daughter Jane. Poetically commenting on Toulmin's strength, Coleridge wrote in a 1798 letter to John Prior Estlin, "I walked into Taunton (eleven miles) and back again, and performed the divine services for Dr. Toulmin. I suppose you must have heard that his daughter, (Jane, on 15 April 1798) in a melancholy derangement, suffered herself to be swallowed up by the tide on the sea-coast between Sidmouth and Bere (Beer). These events cut cruelly into the hearts of old men: but the good Dr. Toulmin bears it like the true practical Christian, – there is indeed a tear in his eye, but that eye is lifted up to the Heavenly Father." The West Midlands and the North. Coleridge also worked briefly in Shropshire, where he came in December 1797 as locum to its local Unitarian minister, Dr Rowe, in their church in the High Street at Shrewsbury. He is said to have read his "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" at a literary evening in Mardol. He was then contemplating a career in the ministry, and gave a probationary sermon in High Street church on Sunday, 14 January 1798. William Hazlitt, a Unitarian minister's son, was in the congregation, having walked from Wem to hear him. Coleridge later visited Hazlitt and his father at Wem but within a day or two of preaching he received a letter from Josiah Wedgwood II, who had offered to help him out of financial difficulties with an annuity of £150 (approximately £13,000 in today's money) per year on condition he give up his ministerial career. Coleridge accepted this, to the disappointment of Hazlitt who hoped to have him as a neighbour in Shropshire. From 16 September 1798, Coleridge and the Wordsworths left for a stay in Germany; Coleridge soon went his own way and spent much of his time in university towns. In February 1799 he enrolled at the University of Göttingen, where he attended lectures by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn. During this period, he became interested in German philosophy, especially the transcendental idealism and critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and in the literary criticism of the 18th-century dramatist Gotthold Lessing. Coleridge studied German and, after his return to England, translated the dramatic trilogy "Wallenstein" by the German Classical poet Friedrich Schiller into English. He continued to pioneer these ideas through his own critical writings for the rest of his life (sometimes without attribution), although they were unfamiliar and difficult for a culture dominated by empiricism. In 1799, Coleridge and the Wordsworths stayed at Thomas Hutchinson's farm on the River Tees at Sockburn, near Darlington. It was at Sockburn that Coleridge wrote his ballad-poem "Love", addressed to Sara Hutchinson. The knight mentioned is the mailed figure on the Conyers tomb in ruined Sockburn church. The figure has a wyvern at his feet, a reference to the Sockburn Worm slain by Sir John Conyers (and a possible source for Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"). The worm was supposedly buried under the rock in the nearby pasture; this was the 'greystone' of Coleridge's first draft, later transformed into a 'mount'. The poem was a direct inspiration for John Keats' famous poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci". Coleridge's early intellectual debts, besides German idealists like Kant and critics like Lessing, were first to William Godwin's "Political Justice", especially during his Pantisocratic period, and to David Hartley's "Observations on Man", which is the source of the psychology which is found in "Frost at Midnight". Hartley argued that one becomes aware of sensory events as impressions, and that "ideas" are derived by noticing similarities and differences between impressions and then by naming them. Connections resulting from the coincidence of impressions create linkages, so that the occurrence of one impression triggers those links and calls up the memory of those ideas with which it is associated (See Dorothy Emmet, "Coleridge and Philosophy"). Coleridge was critical of the literary taste of his contemporaries, and a literary conservative insofar as he was afraid that the lack of taste in the ever growing masses of literate people would mean a continued desecration of literature itself. In 1800, he returned to England and shortly thereafter settled with his family and friends in Greta Hall at Keswick in the Lake District of Cumberland to be near Grasmere, where Wordsworth had moved. He was a houseguest of the Wordsworths' for eighteen months, but was a difficult houseguest, as his dependency on laudanum grew and his frequent nightmares would wake the children. He was also a fussy eater, to Dorothy Wordsworth's frustration, who had to cook. For example, not content with salt, Coleridge sprinkled cayenne pepper on his eggs, which he ate from a teacup. His marital problems, nightmares, illnesses, increased opium dependency, tensions with Wordsworth, and a lack of confidence in his poetic powers fuelled the composition of "Dejection: An Ode" and an intensification of his philosophical studies. In 1802, Coleridge took a nine-day walking holiday in the fells of the Lake District. Coleridge is credited with the first recorded descent of Scafell to Mickledore via Broad Stand, although this was more due to his getting lost than a keenness for mountaineering. Later life and increasing drug use. Travel and "The Friend". In 1804, he travelled to Sicily and Malta, working for a time as Acting Public Secretary of Malta under the Civil Commissioner, Alexander Ball, a task he performed successfully. He lived in San Anton Palace in the village of Attard. He gave this up and returned to England in 1806. Dorothy Wordsworth was shocked at his condition upon his return. From 1807 to 1808, Coleridge returned to Malta and then travelled in Sicily and Italy, in the hope that leaving Britain's damp climate would improve his health and thus enable him to reduce his consumption of opium. Thomas De Quincey alleges in his "Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets" that it was during this period that Coleridge became a full-blown opium addict, using the drug as a substitute for the lost vigour and creativity of his youth. It has been suggested that this reflects De Quincey's own experiences more than Coleridge's. His opium addiction (he was using as much as two quarts of laudanum a week) now began to take over his life: he separated from his wife Sara in 1808, quarrelled with Wordsworth in 1810, lost part of his annuity in 1811, and put himself under the care of Dr. Daniel in 1814. His addiction caused severe constipation, which required regular and humiliating enemas. In 1809, Coleridge made his second attempt to become a newspaper publisher with the publication of the journal entitled "The Friend". It was a weekly publication that, in Coleridge's typically ambitious style, was written, edited, and published almost entirely single-handedly. Given that Coleridge tended to be highly disorganised and had no head for business, the publication was probably doomed from the start. Coleridge financed the journal by selling over five hundred subscriptions, over two dozen of which were sold to members of Parliament, but in late 1809, publication was crippled by a financial crisis and Coleridge was obliged to approach "Conversation Sharp", Tom Poole and one or two other wealthy friends for an emergency loan to continue. "The Friend" was an eclectic publication that drew upon every corner of Coleridge's remarkably diverse knowledge of law, philosophy, morals, politics, history, and literary criticism. Although it was often turgid, rambling, and inaccessible to most readers, it ran for 25 issues and was republished in book form a number of times. Years after its initial publication, a revised and expanded edition of "The Friend", with added philosophical content including his 'Essays on the Principles of Method', became a highly influential work and its effect was felt on writers and philosophers from John Stuart Mill to Ralph Waldo Emerson. London: final years and death. Between 1810 and 1820, Coleridge gave a series of lectures in London and Bristol – those on Shakespeare renewed interest in the playwright as a model for contemporary writers. Much of Coleridge's reputation as a literary critic is founded on the lectures that he undertook in the winter of 1810–11, which were sponsored by the Philosophical Institution and given at Scot's Corporation Hall off Fetter Lane, Fleet Street. These lectures were heralded in the prospectus as "A Course of Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, in Illustration of the Principles of Poetry." Coleridge's ill-health, opium-addiction problems, and somewhat unstable personality meant that all his lectures were plagued with problems of delays and a general irregularity of quality from one lecture to the next. As a result of these factors, Coleridge often failed to prepare anything but the loosest set of notes for his lectures and regularly entered into extremely long digressions which his audiences found difficult to follow. However, it was the lecture on "Hamlet" given on 2 January 1812 that was considered the best and has influenced "Hamlet" studies ever since. Before Coleridge, "Hamlet" was often denigrated and belittled by critics from Voltaire to Dr. Johnson. Coleridge rescued the play's reputation, and his thoughts on it are often still published as supplements to the text. In 1812 he allowed Robert Southey to make use of extracts from his vast number of private notebooks in their collaboration "Omniana; Or, Horae Otiosiores". In August 1814, Coleridge was approached by Lord Byron's publisher, John Murray, about the possibility of translating Goethe's classic "Faust" (1808). Coleridge was regarded by many as the greatest living writer on the demonic and he accepted the commission, only to abandon work on it after six weeks. Until recently, scholars were in agreement that Coleridge never returned to the project, despite Goethe's own belief in the 1820s that he had in fact completed a long translation of the work. In September 2007, Oxford University Press sparked a heated scholarly controversy by publishing an English translation of Goethe's work that purported to be Coleridge's long-lost masterpiece (the text in question first appeared anonymously in 1821). Between 1814 and 1816, Coleridge lived in Calne, Wiltshire and seemed able to focus on his work and manage his addiction, drafting "Biographia Literaria". He rented rooms from a local surgeon, Mr Page, on Church Street, just opposite the entrance to the churchyard. A blue plaque marks the property today. In April 1816, Coleridge, with his addiction worsening, his spirits depressed, and his family alienated, took residence in the Highgate homes, then just north of London, of the physician James Gillman, first at South Grove and later at the nearby 3 The Grove. It is unclear whether his growing use of opium (and the brandy in which it was dissolved) was a symptom or a cause of his growing depression. Gillman was partially successful in controlling the poet's addiction. Coleridge remained in Highgate for the rest of his life, and the house became a place of literary pilgrimage for writers including Carlyle and Emerson. In Gillman's home, Coleridge finished his major prose work, the "Biographia Literaria" (mostly drafted in 1815, and finished in 1817), a volume composed of 23 chapters of autobiographical notes and dissertations on various subjects, including some incisive literary theory and criticism. He composed a considerable amount of poetry, of variable quality. He published other writings while he was living at the Gillman homes, notably the "Lay Sermons" of 1816 and 1817, "Sibylline Leaves" (1817), "Hush" (1820), "Aids to Reflection" (1825), and "On the Constitution of the Church and State" (1830). He also produced essays published shortly after his death, such as "Essay on Faith" (1838) and "Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit" (1840). A number of his followers were central to the Oxford Movement, and his religious writings profoundly shaped Anglicanism in the mid-nineteenth century. Coleridge also worked extensively on the various manuscripts which form his "Opus Maximum", a work which was in part intended as a post-Kantian work of philosophical synthesis. The work was never published in his lifetime, and has frequently been seen as evidence for his tendency to conceive grand projects which he then had difficulty in carrying through to completion. But while he frequently berated himself for his "indolence", the long list of his published works calls this myth into question. Critics are divided on whether the "Opus Maximum", first published in 2002, successfully resolved the philosophical issues he had been exploring for most of his adult life. Coleridge died in Highgate, London on 25 July 1834 as a result of heart failure compounded by an unknown lung disorder, possibly linked to his use of opium. Coleridge had spent 18 years under the roof of the Gillman family, who built an addition onto their home to accommodate the poet.Faith may be defined as fidelity to our own being, so far as such being is not and cannot become an object of the senses; and hence, by clear inference or implication to being generally, as far as the same is not the object of the senses; and again to whatever is affirmed or understood as the condition, or concomitant, or consequence of the same. This will be best explained by an instance or example. That I am conscious of something within me peremptorily commanding me to do unto others as I would they should do unto me; in other words a categorical (that is, primary and unconditional) imperative; that the maxim ("regula maxima", or supreme rule) of my actions, both inward and outward, should be such as I could, without any contradiction arising therefrom, will to be the law of all moral and rational beings. "Essay on Faith" Carlyle described him at Highgate: "Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle ... The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of "Magus", girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gilman's house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon." Remains. Coleridge is buried in the aisle of St. Michael's Parish Church in Highgate, London. He was originally buried at Old Highgate Chapel, next to the main entrance of Highgate School, but was re-interred in St. Michael's in 1961. Coleridge could see the red door of the then new church from his last residence across the green, where he lived with a doctor he had hoped might cure him (in a house owned today by Kate Moss). When it was discovered Coleridge's vault had become derelict, the coffins – Coleridge's and those of his wife, daughter, son-in-law, and grandson – were moved to St. Michael's after an international fundraising appeal. Drew Clode, a member of St. Michael's stewardship committee states, "they put the coffins in a convenient space which was dry and secure, and quite suitable, bricked them up and forgot about them". A recent excavation revealed the coffins were not in the location most believed, the far corner of the crypt, but actually below a memorial slab in the nave inscribed with: "Beneath this stone lies the body of Samuel Taylor Coleridge". St. Michael's plans to restore the crypt and allow public access. Says vicar Kunle Ayodeji of the plans: "...we hope that the whole crypt can be cleared as a space for meetings and other uses, which would also allow access to Coleridge’s cellar." Poetry. Coleridge is one of the most important figures in English poetry. His poems directly and deeply influenced all the major poets of the age. He was known by his contemporaries as a meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his careful reworking of his poems than any other poet, and Southey and Wordsworth were dependent on his professional advice. His influence on Wordsworth is particularly important because many critics have credited Coleridge with the very idea of "Conversational Poetry". The idea of utilising common, everyday language to express profound poetic images and ideas for which Wordsworth became so famous may have originated almost entirely in Coleridge’s mind. It is difficult to imagine Wordsworth’s great poems, "The Excursion" or "The Prelude", ever having been written without the direct influence of Coleridge’s originality. As important as Coleridge was to poetry as a poet, he was equally important to poetry as a critic. His philosophy of poetry, which he developed over many years, has been deeply influential in the field of literary criticism. This influence can be seen in such critics as A. O. Lovejoy and I. A. Richards. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", "Christabel", and "Kubla Khan". Coleridge is arguably best known for his longer poems, particularly "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel". Even those who have never read the "Rime" have come under its influence: its words have given the English language the metaphor of an albatross around one's neck, the quotation of "water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink" (almost always rendered as "but not a drop to drink"), and the phrase "a sadder and a wiser man" (usually rendered as "a sadder but wiser man"). The phrase "All creatures great and small" may have been inspired by "The Rime": "He prayeth best, who loveth best;/ All things both great and small;/ For the dear God who loveth us;/ He made and loveth all." Millions more who have never read the poem nonetheless know its story thanks to the 1984 song "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by the English heavy metal band Iron Maiden. "Christabel" is known for its musical rhythm, language, and its Gothic tale. "Kubla Khan", or, "A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment", although shorter, is also widely known. Both "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel" have an additional "Romantic" aura because they were never finished. Stopford Brooke characterised both poems as having no rival due to their "exquisite metrical movement" and "imaginative phrasing." The Conversation poems. The eight of Coleridge's poems listed above are now often discussed as a group entitled "Conversation poems". The term itself was coined in 1928 by George McLean Harper, who borrowed the subtitle of "The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem" (1798) to describe the seven other poems as well. The poems are considered by many critics to be among Coleridge's finest verses; thus Harold Bloom has written, "With "Dejection", "The Ancient Mariner", and "Kubla Khan", "Frost at Midnight" shows Coleridge at his most impressive." They are also among his most influential poems, as discussed further below. Harper himself considered that the eight poems represented a form of blank verse that is "...more fluent and easy than Milton's, or any that had been written since Milton". In 2006 Robert Koelzer wrote about another aspect of this apparent "easiness", noting that Conversation poems such as "... Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" and "The Nightingale" maintain a middle register of speech, employing an idiomatic language that is capable of being construed as un-symbolic and un-musical: language that lets itself be taken as 'merely talk' rather than rapturous 'song'." The last ten lines of "Frost at Midnight" were chosen by Harper as the "best example of the peculiar kind of blank verse Coleridge had evolved, as natural-seeming as prose, but as exquisitely artistic as the most complicated sonnet." The speaker of the poem is addressing his infant son, asleep by his side: <poem> Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. </poem> In 1965, M. H. Abrams wrote a broad description that applies to the Conversation poems: "The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied by integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation." In fact, Abrams was describing both the Conversation poems and later poems influenced by them. Abrams' essay has been called a "touchstone of literary criticism". As Paul Magnuson described it in 2002, "Abrams credited Coleridge with originating what Abrams called the 'greater Romantic lyric', a genre that began with Coleridge's 'Conversation' poems, and included Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey", Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection" and Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale", and was a major influence on more modern lyrics by Matthew Arnold, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and W. H. Auden." Literary criticism. "Biographia Literaria". In addition to his poetry, Coleridge also wrote influential pieces of literary criticism including "Biographia Literaria", a collection of his thoughts and opinions on literature which he published in 1817. The work delivered both biographical explanations of the author's life as well as his impressions on literature. The collection also contained an analysis of a broad range of philosophical principles of literature ranging from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and Schelling and applied them to the poetry of peers such as William Wordsworth. Coleridge's explanation of metaphysical principles were popular topics of discourse in academic communities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and T.S. Eliot stated that he believed that Coleridge was "perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a sense the last." Eliot suggests that Coleridge displayed "natural abilities" far greater than his contemporaries, dissecting literature and applying philosophical principles of metaphysics in a way that brought the subject of his criticisms away from the text and into a world of logical analysis that mixed logical analysis and emotion. However, Eliot also criticises Coleridge for allowing his emotion to play a role in the metaphysical process, believing that critics should not have emotions that are not provoked by the work being studied. Hugh Kenner in "Historical Fictions", discusses Norman Fruman's "Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel" and suggests that the term "criticism" is too often applied to "Biographia Literaria", which both he and Fruman describe as having failed to explain or help the reader understand works of art. To Kenner, Coleridge's attempt to discuss complex philosophical concepts without describing the rational process behind them displays a lack of critical thinking that makes the volume more of a biography than a work of criticism. In "Biographia Literaria" and his poetry, symbols are not merely "objective correlatives" to Coleridge, but instruments for making the universe and personal experience intelligible and spiritually covalent. To Coleridge, the "cinque spotted spider," making its way upstream "by fits and starts," [Biographia Literaria] is not merely a comment on the intermittent nature of creativity, imagination, or spiritual progress, but the journey and destination of his life. The spider's five legs represent the central problem that Coleridge lived to resolve, the conflict between Aristotelian logic and Christian philosophy. Two legs of the spider represent the "me-not me" of thesis and antithesis, the idea that a thing cannot be itself and its opposite simultaneously, the basis of the clockwork Newtonian world view that Coleridge rejected. The remaining three legs—exothesis, mesothesis and synthesis or the Holy trinity—represent the idea that things can diverge without being contradictory. Taken together, the five legs—with synthesis in the center, form the Holy Cross of Ramist logic. The cinque-spotted spider is Coleridge's emblem of holism, the quest and substance of Coleridge's thought and spiritual life. Coleridge and the influence of the Gothic. Coleridge wrote reviews of Ann Radcliffe's books and "The Mad Monk", among others. He comments in his reviews: "Situations of torment, and images of naked horror, are easily conceived; and a writer in whose works they abound, deserves our gratitude almost equally with him who should drag us by way of sport through a military hospital, or force us to sit at the dissecting-table of a natural philosopher. To trace the nice boundaries, beyond which terror and sympathy are deserted by the pleasurable emotions, – to reach those limits, yet never to pass them, hic labor, hic opus est." and "The horrible and the preternatural have usually seized on the popular taste, at the rise and decline of literature. Most powerful stimulants, they can never be required except by the torpor of an unawakened, or the languor of an exhausted, appetite... We trust, however, that satiety will banish what good sense should have prevented; and that, wearied with fiends, incomprehensible characters, with shrieks, murders, and subterraneous dungeons, the public will learn, by the multitude of the manufacturers, with how little expense of thought or imagination this species of composition is manufactured." However, Coleridge used these elements in poems such as "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798), "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" (published in 1816, but known in manuscript form before then) and certainly influenced other poets and writers of the time. Poems like these both drew inspiration from and helped to inflame the craze for Gothic romance. Coleridge also made considerable use of Gothic elements in his commercially successful play "Remorse". Mary Shelley, who knew Coleridge well, mentions "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" twice directly in "Frankenstein", and some of the descriptions in the novel echo it indirectly. Although William Godwin, her father, disagreed with Coleridge on some important issues, he respected his opinions and Coleridge often visited the Godwins. Mary Shelley later recalled hiding behind the sofa and hearing his voice chanting "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". C. S. Lewis also makes mention of his name in "The Screwtape Letters" (as a poor example of prayer, in which the devils should encourage). Religious beliefs. Although his father was an Anglican vicar, Coleridge worked as a Unitarian preacher between 1796 and 1797. He eventually returned to the Church of England in 1814. His most noteworthy writings on religion are "Lay Sermons" (1817), "Aids to Reflection" (1825) and "The Constitution of Church and State" (1830). Theological legacy. Despite being mostly remembered today for his poetry and literary criticism, Coleridge was also (perhaps in his own eyes primarily) a theologian. His writings include discussions of the status of scripture, the doctrines of the Fall, justification and sanctification, and the personality and infinity of God. A key figure in the Anglican theology of his day, his writings are still regularly referred to by contemporary Anglican theologians. F. D. Maurice, F. J. A. Hort, F. W. Robertson, B. F. Westcott, John Oman and Thomas Erskine (once called the "Scottish Coleridge") were all influenced by him. Political thinking. Coleridge was also a profound political thinker. While he began his life as a political radical, and an enthusiast for the French Revolution, over the years Coleridge developed a more conservative view of society, somewhat in the manner of Burke. Although seen as cowardly treachery by the next generation of Romantic poets, Coleridge's later thought became a fruitful source for the evolving radicalism of J. S. Mill. Mill found three aspects of Coleridge's thought especially illuminating: Collected works. The current standard edition is "The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," edited by Kathleen Coburn and many others from 1969 to 2002. This collection appeared across 16 volumes as Bollingen Series 75, published variously by Princeton University Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul. The set is broken down as follows into further parts, resulting in a total of 34 separate printed volumes: In addition, Coleridge's letters are available in: "The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge" (1956–71), ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

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Plato Plato ( ; "Plátōn", in Classical Attic; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was an Athenian philosopher during the Classical period in Ancient Greece, founder of the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered as one of the most important and influential individuals in human history, and the pivotal figure in the history of Ancient Greek and Western philosophy, along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle. Plato has also often been cited as one of the founders of Western religion and spirituality. The so-called neoplatonism of philosophers such as Plotinus and Porphyry greatly influenced Christianity through Church Fathers such as Augustine. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Plato was an innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic forms in philosophy. Plato is also considered the founder of Western political philosophy. His most famous contribution is the theory of Forms known by pure reason, in which Plato presents a solution to the problem of universals known as Platonism (also ambiguously called either Platonic realism or Platonic idealism). He is also the namesake of Platonic love and the Platonic solids. His own most decisive philosophical influences are usually thought to have been along with Socrates, the pre-Socratics Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Parmenides, although few of his predecessors' works remain extant and much of what we know about these figures today derives from Plato himself. Unlike the work of nearly all of his contemporaries, Plato's entire body of work is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years. Although their popularity has fluctuated over the years, Plato's works have never been without readers since the time they were written. Biography. Early life. Birth and family. Due to a lack of surviving accounts, little is known about Plato's early life and education. Plato belonged to an aristocratic and influential family. According to a disputed tradition, reported by doxographer Diogenes Laërtius, Plato's father Ariston traced his descent from the king of Athens, Codrus, and the king of Messenia, Melanthus. According to the ancient Hellenic tradition, Codrus was said to have been descended from the mythological deity Poseidon. Plato's mother was Perictione, whose family boasted of a relationship with the famous Athenian lawmaker and lyric poet Solon, one of the seven sages, who repealed the laws of Draco (except for the death penalty for homicide). Perictione was sister of Charmides and niece of Critias, both prominent figures of the Thirty Tyrants, known as the Thirty, the brief oligarchic regime (404–403 BC), which followed on the collapse of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). According to some accounts, Ariston tried to force his attentions on Perictione, but failed in his purpose; then the god Apollo appeared to him in a vision, and as a result, Ariston left Perictione unmolested. The exact time and place of Plato's birth are unknown. Based on ancient sources, most modern scholars believe that he was born in Athens or Aegina between 429 and 423 BC, not long after the start of the Peloponnesian War. The traditional date of Plato's birth during the 87th or 88th Olympiad, 428 or 427 BC, is based on a dubious interpretation of Diogenes Laërtius, who says, "When [Socrates] was gone, [Plato] joined Cratylus the Heracleitean and Hermogenes, who philosophized in the manner of Parmenides. Then, at twenty-eight, Hermodorus says, [Plato] went to Euclides in Megara." However, as Debra Nails argues, the text does not state that Plato left for Megara immediately after joining Cratylus and Hermogenes. In his "Seventh Letter", Plato notes that his coming of age coincided with the taking of power by the Thirty, remarking, "But a youth under the age of twenty made himself a laughingstock if he attempted to enter the political arena." Thus, Nails dates Plato's birth to 424/423. According to Neanthes, Plato was six years younger than Isocrates, and therefore was born the same year the prominent Athenian statesman Pericles died (429 BC). Jonathan Barnes regards 428 BC as the year of Plato's birth. The grammarian Apollodorus of Athens in his "Chronicles" argues that Plato was born in the 88th Olympiad. Both the "Suda" and Sir Thomas Browne also claimed he was born during the 88th Olympiad. Another legend related that, when Plato was an infant, bees settled on his lips while he was sleeping: an augury of the sweetness of style in which he would discourse about philosophy. Besides Plato himself, Ariston and Perictione had three other children; two sons, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and a daughter Potone, the mother of Speusippus (the nephew and successor of Plato as head of the Academy). The brothers Adeimantus and Glaucon are mentioned in the "Republic" as sons of Ariston, and presumably brothers of Plato, though some have argued they were uncles. In a scenario in the "Memorabilia", Xenophon confused the issue by presenting a Glaucon much younger than Plato. Ariston appears to have died in Plato's childhood, although the precise dating of his death is difficult. Perictione then married Pyrilampes, her mother's brother, who had served many times as an ambassador to the Persian court and was a friend of Pericles, the leader of the democratic faction in Athens. Pyrilampes had a son from a previous marriage, Demus, who was famous for his beauty. Perictione gave birth to Pyrilampes' second son, Antiphon, the half-brother of Plato, who appears in "Parmenides". In contrast to his reticence about himself, Plato often introduced his distinguished relatives into his dialogues or referred to them with some precision. In addition to Adeimantus and Glaucon in the "Republic", Charmides has a dialogue named after him; and Critias speaks in both "Charmides" and "Protagoras". These and other references suggest a considerable amount of family pride and enable us to reconstruct Plato's family tree. According to Burnet, "the opening scene of the "Charmides" is a glorification of the whole [family] connection ... Plato's dialogues are not only a memorial to Socrates but also the happier days of his own family." Name. The fact that the philosopher in his maturity called himself "Platon" is indisputable, but the origin of this name remains mysterious. "Platon" is a nickname from the adjective "platýs" () 'broad'. Although "Platon" was a fairly common name (31 instances are known from Athens alone), the name does not occur in Plato's known family line. The sources of Diogenes Laërtius account for this by claiming that his wrestling coach, Ariston of Argos, dubbed him "broad" on account of his chest and shoulders, or that Plato derived his name from the breadth of his eloquence, or his wide forehead. While recalling a moral lesson about frugal living Seneca mentions the meaning of Plato's name: "His very name was given him because of his broad chest." His true name was supposedly Aristocles (), meaning 'best reputation'. According to Diogenes Laërtius, he was named after his grandfather, as was common in Athenian society. But there is only one inscription of an Aristocles, an early archon of Athens in 605/4 BC. There is no record of a line from Aristocles to Plato's father, Ariston. Recently a scholar has argued that even the name Aristocles for Plato was a much later invention. However, another scholar claims that "there is good reason for not dismissing [the idea that Aristocles was Plato's given name] as a mere invention of his biographers", noting how prevalent that account is in our sources. Education. Ancient sources describe him as a bright though modest boy who excelled in his studies. Apuleius informs us that Speusippus praised Plato's quickness of mind and modesty as a boy, and the "first fruits of his youth infused with hard work and love of study". His father contributed all which was necessary to give to his son a good education, and, therefore, Plato must have been instructed in grammar, music, and gymnastics by the most distinguished teachers of his time. Plato invokes Damon many times in the "Republic". Plato was a wrestler, and Dicaearchus went so far as to say that Plato wrestled at the Isthmian games. Plato had also attended courses of philosophy; before meeting Socrates, he first became acquainted with Cratylus and the Heraclitean doctrines. Ambrose believed that Plato met Jeremiah in Egypt and was influenced by his ideas. Augustine initially accepted this claim, but later rejected it, arguing in "The City of God" that "Plato was born a hundred years after Jeremiah prophesied." Later life and death. Plato may have travelled in Italy, Sicily, Egypt, and Cyrene. Plato's own statement was that he visited Italy and Sicily at the age of forty and was disgusted by the sensuality of life there. Said to have returned to Athens at the age of forty, Plato founded one of the earliest known organized schools in Western Civilization on a plot of land in the Grove of Hecademus or Academus. This land was named after Academus, an Attic hero in Greek mythology. In historic Greek times it was adorned with oriental plane and olive plantations The Academy was a large enclosure of ground about six stadia (a total of between a kilometer and a half mile) outside of Athens proper. One story is that the name of the Academy comes from the ancient hero, Academus; still another story is that the name came from a supposed former owner of the plot of land, an Athenian citizen whose name was (also) Academus; while yet another account is that it was named after a member of the army of Castor and Pollux, an Arcadian named Echedemus. The Academy operated until it was destroyed by Lucius Cornelius Sulla in 84 BC. Many intellectuals were schooled in the Academy, the most prominent one being Aristotle. Throughout his later life, Plato became entangled with the politics of the city of Syracuse. According to Diogenes Laërtius, Plato initially visited Syracuse while it was under the rule of Dionysius. During this first trip Dionysius's brother-in-law, Dion of Syracuse, became one of Plato's disciples, but the tyrant himself turned against Plato. Plato almost faced death, but he was sold into slavery. Anniceris, a Cyrenaic philosopher, subsequently bought Plato's freedom for twenty minas, and sent him home. After Dionysius's death, according to Plato's "Seventh Letter", Dion requested Plato return to Syracuse to tutor Dionysius II and guide him to become a philosopher king. Dionysius II seemed to accept Plato's teachings, but he became suspicious of Dion, his uncle. Dionysius expelled Dion and kept Plato against his will. Eventually Plato left Syracuse. Dion would return to overthrow Dionysius and ruled Syracuse for a short time before being usurped by Calippus, a fellow disciple of Plato. According to Seneca, Plato died at the age of 81 on the same day he was born. The Suda indicates that he lived to 82 years, while Neanthes claims an age of 84. A variety of sources have given accounts of his death. One story, based on a mutilated manuscript, suggests Plato died in his bed, whilst a young Thracian girl played the flute to him. Another tradition suggests Plato died at a wedding feast. The account is based on Diogenes Laërtius's reference to an account by Hermippus, a third-century Alexandrian. According to Tertullian, Plato simply died in his sleep. Plato owned an estate at Iphistiadae, which by will he left to a certain youth named Adeimantus, presumably a younger relative, as Plato had an elder brother or uncle by this name. Influences. Pythagoras. Although Socrates influenced Plato directly as related in the dialogues, the influence of Pythagoras upon Plato, or in a broader sense, the Pythagoreans, such as Archytas also appears to have been significant. Aristotle claimed that the philosophy of Plato closely followed the teachings of the Pythagoreans, and Cicero repeats this claim: "They say Plato learned all things Pythagorean." It is probable that both were influenced by Orphism, and both believed in metempsychosis, transmigration of the soul. Pythagoras held that all things are number, and the cosmos comes from numerical principles. He introduced the concept of form as distinct from matter, and that the physical world is an imitation of an eternal mathematical world. These ideas were very influential on Heraclitus, Parmenides and Plato. George Karamanolis notes thatNumenius accepted both Pythagoras and Plato as the two authorities one should follow in philosophy, but he regarded Plato's authority as subordinate to that of Pythagoras, whom he considered to be the source of all true philosophy—including Plato's own. For Numenius it is just that Plato wrote so many philosophical works, whereas Pythagoras' views were originally passed on only orally. According to R. M. Hare, this influence consists of three points: Plato and mathematics. Plato may have studied under the mathematician Theodorus of Cyrene, and has a dialogue named for and whose central character is the mathematician Theaetetus. While not a mathematician, Plato was considered an accomplished teacher of mathematics. Eudoxus of Cnidus, the greatest mathematician in Classical Greece, who contributed much of what is found in Euclid's "Elements", was taught by Archytas and Plato. Plato helped to distinguish between pure and applied mathematics by widening the gap between "arithmetic", now called number theory and "logistic", now called arithmetic. In the dialogue "Timaeus" Plato associated each of the four classical elements (earth, air, water, and fire) with a regular solid (cube, octahedron, icosahedron, and tetrahedron respectively) due to their shape, the so-called Platonic solids. The fifth regular solid, the dodecahedron, was supposed to be the element which made up the heavens. Heraclitus and Parmenides. The two philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides, following the way initiated by pre-Socratic Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras, depart from mythology and begin the metaphysical tradition that strongly influenced Plato and continues today. The surviving fragments written by Heraclitus suggest the view that all things are continuously changing, or becoming. His image of the river, with ever-changing waters, is well known. According to some ancient traditions such as that of Diogenes Laërtius, Plato received these ideas through Heraclitus' disciple Cratylus, who held the more radical view that continuous change warrants scepticism because we cannot define a thing that does not have a permanent nature. Parmenides adopted an altogether contrary vision, arguing for the idea of changeless Being and the view that change is an illusion. John Palmer notes "Parmenides' distinction among the principal modes of being and his derivation of the attributes that must belong to what must be, simply as such, qualify him to be seen as the founder of metaphysics or ontology as a domain of inquiry distinct from theology." These ideas about change and permanence, or becoming and Being, influenced Plato in formulating his theory of Forms. Plato's most self-critical dialogue is the "Parmenides", which features Parmenides and his student Zeno, who, following Parmenides' denial of change, argued forcefully through his paradoxes to deny the existence of motion. Plato's "Sophist" dialogue includes an Eleatic stranger, a follower of Parmenides, as a foil for his arguments against Parmenides. In the dialogue, Plato distinguishes nouns and verbs, providing some of the earliest treatment of subject and predicate. He also argues that motion and rest both "are", against followers of Parmenides who say rest is but motion is not. Socrates. Plato was one of the devoted young followers of Socrates. The precise relationship between Plato and Socrates remains an area of contention among scholars. Plato never speaks in his own voice in his dialogues, and speaks as Socrates in all but "the Laws". In the "Second Letter", it says, "no writing of Plato exists or ever will exist, but those now said to be his are those of a Socrates become beautiful and new"; if the Letter is Plato's, the final qualification seems to call into question the dialogues' historical fidelity. In any case, Xenophon's "Memorabilia" and Aristophanes's "The Clouds" seem to present a somewhat different portrait of Socrates from the one Plato paints. The Socratic problem asks how to reconcile these various accounts. Leo Strauss notes that Socrates' reputation for irony casts doubt on whether Plato's Socrates is expressing sincere beliefs. Aristotle attributes a different doctrine with respect to Forms to Plato and Socrates. Aristotle suggests that Socrates' idea of forms can be discovered through investigation of the natural world, unlike Plato's Forms that exist beyond and outside the ordinary range of human understanding. In the dialogues of Plato though, Socrates sometimes seems to support a mystical side, discussing reincarnation and the mystery religions, this is generally attributed to Plato. Regardless, this view of Socrates cannot be dismissed out of hand, as we cannot be sure of the differences between the views of Plato and Socrates. In the "Meno" Plato refers to the Eleusinian Mysteries, telling Meno he would understand Socrates's answers better if he could stay for the initiations next week. It is possible that Plato and Socrates took part in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Philosophy. Metaphysics. In Plato's dialogues, Socrates and his company of disputants had something to say on many subjects, including several aspects of metaphysics. These include religion and science, human nature, love, and sexuality. More than one dialogue contrasts perception and reality, nature and custom, and body and soul. The Forms. "Platonism" and its theory of Forms (or theory of Ideas) denies the reality of the material world, considering it only an image or copy of the real world. The theory of Forms is first introduced in the "Phaedo" dialogue (also known as "On the Soul"), wherein Socrates refutes the pluralism of the likes of Anaxagoras, then the most popular response to Heraclitus and Parmenides, while giving the "Opposites Argument" in support of the Forms. According to this theory of Forms, there are at least two worlds: the apparent world of concrete objects, grasped by the senses, which constantly changes, and an unchanging and unseen world of Forms or abstract objects, grasped by pure reason (), which ground what is apparent. It can also be said there are three worlds, with the apparent world consisting of both the world of material objects and of mental images, with the "third realm" consisting of the Forms. Thus, though there is the term "Platonic idealism", this refers to Platonic Ideas or the Forms, and not to some platonic kind of idealism, an 18th-century view which sees matter as unreal in favour of mind. For Plato, though grasped by the mind, only the Forms are truly real. Plato's Forms thus represent types of things, as well as properties, patterns, and relations, to which we refer as objects. Just as individual tables, chairs, and cars refer to objects in this world, 'tableness', 'chairness', and 'carness', as well as e. g. justice, truth, and beauty refer to objects in another world. One of Plato's most cited examples for the Forms were the truths of geometry, such as the Pythagorean theorem. In other words, the Forms are universals given as a solution to the problem of universals, or the problem of "the One and the Many", e. g. how one predicate "red" can apply to many red objects. For Plato, this is because there is one abstract object or Form of red, redness itself, in which the several red things "participate". As Plato's solution is that universals are Forms and that Forms are real if anything is, Plato's philosophy is unambiguously called Platonic realism. According to Aristotle, Plato's best-known argument in support of the Forms was the "one over many" argument. Aside from being immutable, timeless, changeless, and one over many, the Forms also provide definitions and the standard against which all instances are measured. In the dialogues Socrates regularly asks for the meaning – in the sense of intensional definitions – of a general term (e. g. justice, truth, beauty), and criticizes those who instead give him particular, extensional examples, rather than the quality shared by all examples. There is thus a world of perfect, eternal, and changeless meanings of predicates, the Forms, existing in the realm of Being outside of space and time; and the imperfect sensible world of becoming, subjects somehow in a state between being and nothing, that partakes of the qualities of the Forms, and is its instantiation. The soul. Plato advocates a belief in the immortality of the soul, and several dialogues end with long speeches imagining the afterlife. In the "Timaeus", Socrates locates the parts of the soul within the human body: Reason is located in the head, spirit in the top third of the torso, and the appetite in the middle third of the torso, down to the navel. Epistemology. Socrates also discusses several aspects of epistemology. More than one dialogue contrasts knowledge ("episteme") and opinion ("doxa"). Plato's epistemology involves Socrates arguing that knowledge is not empirical, and that it comes from divine insight. The Forms are also responsible for both knowledge or certainty, and are grasped by pure reason. In several dialogues, Socrates inverts the common man's intuition about what is knowable and what is real. Reality is unavailable to those who use their senses. Socrates says that he who sees with his eyes is blind. While most people take the objects of their senses to be real if anything is, Socrates is contemptuous of people who think that something has to be graspable in the hands to be real. In the "Theaetetus", he says such people are "eu amousoi" (εὖ ἄμουσοι), an expression that means literally, "happily without the muses". In other words, such people are willingly ignorant, living without divine inspiration and access to higher insights about reality. In Plato's dialogues, Socrates always insists on his ignorance and humility, that he knows nothing, so-called "Socratic irony." Several dialogues refute a series of viewpoints, but offer no positive position, thus ending in aporia. Recollection. In several of Plato's dialogues, Socrates promulgates the idea that knowledge is a matter of recollection of the state before one is born, and not of observation or study. Keeping with the theme of admitting his own ignorance, Socrates regularly complains of his forgetfulness. In the "Meno", Socrates uses a geometrical example to expound Plato's view that knowledge in this latter sense is acquired by recollection. Socrates elicits a fact concerning a geometrical construction from a slave boy, who could not have otherwise known the fact (due to the slave boy's lack of education). The knowledge must be present, Socrates concludes, in an eternal, non-experiential form. In other dialogues, the "Sophist", "Statesman", "Republic", and the "Parmenides", Plato himself associates knowledge with the apprehension of unchanging Forms and their relationships to one another (which he calls "expertise" in Dialectic), including through the processes of "collection" and "division". More explicitly, Plato himself argues in the "Timaeus" that knowledge is always proportionate to the realm from which it is gained. In other words, if one derives one's account of something experientially, because the world of sense is in flux, the views therein attained will be mere opinions. And opinions are characterized by a lack of necessity and stability. On the other hand, if one derives one's account of something by way of the non-sensible forms, because these forms are unchanging, so too is the account derived from them. That apprehension of forms is required for knowledge may be taken to cohere with Plato's theory in the "Theaetetus" and "Meno". Indeed, the apprehension of Forms may be at the base of the "account" required for justification, in that it offers foundational knowledge which itself needs no account, thereby avoiding an infinite regression. Justified true belief. Many have interpreted Plato as stating — even having been the first to write — that knowledge is justified true belief, an influential view that informed future developments in epistemology. This interpretation is partly based on a reading of the "Theaetetus" wherein Plato argues that knowledge is distinguished from mere true belief by the knower having an "account" of the object of their true belief. And this theory may again be seen in the "Meno", where it is suggested that true belief can be raised to the level of knowledge if it is bound with an account as to the question of "why" the object of the true belief is so. Many years later, Edmund Gettier famously demonstrated the problems of the justified true belief account of knowledge. That the modern theory of justified true belief as knowledge, which Gettier addresses, is equivalent to Plato's is accepted by some scholars but rejected by others. Plato himself also identified problems with the "justified true belief" definition in the "Theaetetus", concluding that justification (or an "account") would require knowledge of "difference", meaning that the definition of knowledge is circular. Ethics. Several dialogues discuss ethics including virtue and vice, pleasure and pain, crime and punishment, and justice and medicine. Plato views "The Good" as the supreme Form, somehow existing even "beyond being". Socrates propounded a moral intellectualism which claimed nobody does bad on purpose, and to know what is good results in doing what is good; that knowledge is virtue. In the "Protagoras" dialogue it is argued that virtue is innate and cannot be learned. Socrates presents the famous Euthyphro dilemma in the dialogue of the same name: "Is the pious (τὸ ὅσιον) loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?" (10a) Justice. As above, in the "Republic", Plato asks the question, “What is justice?” By means of the Greek term "dikaiosune" – a term for “justice” that captures both individual justice and the justice that informs societies, Plato is able not only to inform metaphysics, but also ethics and politics with the question: “What is the basis of moral and social obligation?” Plato's well-known answer rests upon the fundamental responsibility to seek wisdom, wisdom which leads to an understanding of the Form of the Good. Plato further argues that such understanding of Forms produces and ensures the good communal life when ideally structured under a philosopher king in a society with three classes (philosopher kings, guardians, and workers) that neatly mirror his triadic view of the individual soul (reason, spirit, and appetite). In this manner, justice is obtained when knowledge of how to fulfill one's moral and political function in society is put into practice. Politics. The dialogues also discuss politics. Some of Plato's most famous doctrines are contained in the "Republic" as well as in the "Laws" and the "Statesman". Because these doctrines are not spoken directly by Plato and vary between dialogues, they cannot be straightforwardly assumed as representing Plato's own views. Socrates asserts that societies have a tripartite class structure corresponding to the appetite/spirit/reason structure of the individual soul. The appetite/spirit/reason are analogous to the castes of society. According to this model, the principles of Athenian democracy (as it existed in his day) are rejected as only a few are fit to rule. Instead of rhetoric and persuasion, Socrates says reason and wisdom should govern. As Socrates puts it: Socrates describes these "philosopher kings" as "those who love the sight of truth" and supports the idea with the analogy of a captain and his ship or a doctor and his medicine. According to him, sailing and health are not things that everyone is qualified to practice by nature. A large part of the "Republic" then addresses how the educational system should be set up to produce these philosopher kings. In addition, the ideal city is used as an image to illuminate the state of one's soul, or the will, reason, and desires combined in the human body. Socrates is attempting to make an image of a rightly ordered human, and then later goes on to describe the different kinds of humans that can be observed, from tyrants to lovers of money in various kinds of cities. The ideal city is not promoted, but only used to magnify the different kinds of individual humans and the state of their soul. However, the philosopher king image was used by many after Plato to justify their personal political beliefs. The philosophic soul according to Socrates has reason, will, and desires united in virtuous harmony. A philosopher has the moderate love for wisdom and the courage to act according to wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge about the Good or the right relations between all that exists. Wherein it concerns states and rulers, Socrates asks which is better—a bad democracy or a country reigned by a tyrant. He argues that it is better to be ruled by a bad tyrant, than by a bad democracy (since here all the people are now responsible for such actions, rather than one individual committing many bad deeds.) This is emphasised within the "Republic" as Socrates describes the event of mutiny on board a ship. Socrates suggests the ship's crew to be in line with the democratic rule of many and the captain, although inhibited through ailments, the tyrant. Socrates' description of this event is parallel to that of democracy within the state and the inherent problems that arise. According to Socrates, a state made up of different kinds of souls will, overall, decline from an aristocracy (rule by the best) to a timocracy (rule by the honourable), then to an oligarchy (rule by the few), then to a democracy (rule by the people), and finally to tyranny (rule by one person, rule by a tyrant). Aristocracy in the sense of government (politeia) is advocated in Plato's Republic. This regime is ruled by a philosopher king, and thus is grounded on wisdom and reason. The aristocratic state, and the man whose nature corresponds to it, are the objects of Plato's analyses throughout much of the "Republic", as opposed to the other four types of states/men, who are discussed later in his work. In Book VIII, Socrates states in order the other four imperfect societies with a description of the state's structure and individual character. In timocracy, the ruling class is made up primarily of those with a warrior-like character. Oligarchy is made up of a society in which wealth is the criterion of merit and the wealthy are in control. In democracy, the state bears resemblance to ancient Athens with traits such as equality of political opportunity and freedom for the individual to do as he likes. Democracy then degenerates into tyranny from the conflict of rich and poor. It is characterized by an undisciplined society existing in chaos, where the tyrant rises as a popular champion leading to the formation of his private army and the growth of oppression. Art and poetry. Several dialogues tackle questions about art, including rhetoric and rhapsody. Socrates says that poetry is inspired by the muses, and is not rational. He speaks approvingly of this, and other forms of divine madness (drunkenness, eroticism, and dreaming) in the "Phaedrus", and yet in the "Republic" wants to outlaw Homer's great poetry, and laughter as well. In "Ion", Socrates gives no hint of the disapproval of Homer that he expresses in the "Republic". The dialogue "Ion" suggests that Homer's "Iliad" functioned in the ancient Greek world as the Bible does today in the modern Christian world: as divinely inspired literature that can provide moral guidance, if only it can be properly interpreted. Unwritten doctrines. For a long time, Plato's unwritten doctrines had been controversial. Many modern books on Plato seem to diminish its importance; nevertheless, the first important witness who mentions its existence is Aristotle, who in his "Physics" writes: "It is true, indeed, that the account he gives there [i.e. in "Timaeus"] of the participant is different from what he says in his so-called "unwritten teachings" ()." The term "" literally means "unwritten doctrines" or "unwritten dogmas" and it stands for the most fundamental metaphysical teaching of Plato, which he disclosed only orally, and some say only to his most trusted fellows, and which he may have kept secret from the public. The importance of the unwritten doctrines does not seem to have been seriously questioned before the 19th century. A reason for not revealing it to everyone is partially discussed in "Phaedrus" where Plato criticizes the written transmission of knowledge as faulty, favouring instead the spoken "logos": "he who has knowledge of the just and the good and beautiful ... will not, when in earnest, write them in ink, sowing them through a pen with words, which cannot defend themselves by argument and cannot teach the truth effectually." The same argument is repeated in Plato's "Seventh Letter": "every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing." In the same letter he writes: "I can certainly declare concerning all these writers who claim to know the subjects that I seriously study ... there does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any treatise of mine dealing therewith." Such secrecy is necessary in order not "to expose them to unseemly and degrading treatment". It is, however, said that Plato once disclosed this knowledge to the public in his lecture "On the Good" (), in which the Good () is identified with the One (the Unity, ), the fundamental ontological principle. The content of this lecture has been transmitted by several witnesses. Aristoxenus describes the event in the following words: "Each came expecting to learn something about the things that are generally considered good for men, such as wealth, good health, physical strength, and altogether a kind of wonderful happiness. But when the mathematical demonstrations came, including numbers, geometrical figures and astronomy, and finally the statement Good is One seemed to them, I imagine, utterly unexpected and strange; hence some belittled the matter, while others rejected it." Simplicius quotes Alexander of Aphrodisias, who states that "according to Plato, the first principles of everything, including the Forms themselves are One and Indefinite Duality (), which he called Large and Small ()", and Simplicius reports as well that "one might also learn this from Speusippus and Xenocrates and the others who were present at Plato's lecture on the Good". Their account is in full agreement with Aristotle's description of Plato's metaphysical doctrine. In "Metaphysics" he writes: "Now since the Forms are the causes of everything else, he [i.e. Plato] supposed that their elements are the elements of all things. Accordingly, the material principle is the Great and Small [i.e. the Dyad], and the essence is the One (), since the numbers are derived from the Great and Small by participation in the One". "From this account it is clear that he only employed two causes: that of the essence, and the material cause; for the Forms are the cause of the essence in everything else, and the One is the cause of it in the Forms. He also tells us what the material substrate is of which the Forms are predicated in the case of sensible things, and the One in that of the Forms—that it is this the duality (the Dyad, ), the Great and Small (). Further, he assigned to these two elements respectively the causation of good and of evil". The most important aspect of this interpretation of Plato's metaphysics is the continuity between his teaching and the Neoplatonic interpretation of Plotinus or Ficino which has been considered erroneous by many but may in fact have been directly influenced by oral transmission of Plato's doctrine. A modern scholar who recognized the importance of the unwritten doctrine of Plato was Heinrich Gomperz who described it in his speech during the 7th International Congress of Philosophy in 1930. All the sources related to the have been collected by Konrad Gaiser and published as "Testimonia Platonica". These sources have subsequently been interpreted by scholars from the German "Tübingen School of interpretation" such as Hans Joachim Krämer or Thomas A. Szlezák. Themes of Plato's dialogues. Trial of Socrates. The trial of Socrates and his death sentence is the central, unifying event of Plato's dialogues. It is relayed in the dialogues "Apology", "Crito", and "Phaedo". "Apology" is Socrates' defence speech, and "Crito" and "Phaedo" take place in prison after the conviction. "Apology" is among the most frequently read of Plato's works. In the "Apology", Socrates tries to dismiss rumours that he is a sophist and defends himself against charges of disbelief in the gods and corruption of the young. Socrates insists that long-standing slander will be the real cause of his demise, and says the legal charges are essentially false. Socrates famously denies being wise, and explains how his life as a philosopher was launched by the Oracle at Delphi. He says that his quest to resolve the riddle of the oracle put him at odds with his fellow man, and that this is the reason he has been mistaken for a menace to the city-state of Athens. In "Apology", Socrates is presented as mentioning Plato by name as one of those youths close enough to him to have been corrupted, if he were in fact guilty of corrupting the youth, and questioning why their fathers and brothers did not step forward to testify against him if he was indeed guilty of such a crime. Later, Plato is mentioned along with Crito, Critobolus, and Apollodorus as offering to pay a fine of 30 minas on Socrates' behalf, in lieu of the death penalty proposed by Meletus. In the "Phaedo", the title character lists those who were in attendance at the prison on Socrates' last day, explaining Plato's absence by saying, "Plato was ill". The trial in other dialogues. If Plato's important dialogues do not refer to Socrates' execution explicitly, they allude to it, or use characters or themes that play a part in it. Five dialogues foreshadow the trial: In the "Theaetetus" and the "Euthyphro" Socrates tells people that he is about to face corruption charges. In the "Meno", one of the men who brings legal charges against Socrates, Anytus, warns him about the trouble he may get into if he does not stop criticizing important people. In the "Gorgias", Socrates says that his trial will be like a doctor prosecuted by a cook who asks a jury of children to choose between the doctor's bitter medicine and the cook's tasty treats. In the "Republic", Socrates explains why an enlightened man (presumably himself) will stumble in a courtroom situation. Plato's support of aristocracy and distrust of democracy is also taken to be partly rooted in a democracy having killed Socrates. In the "Protagoras", Socrates is a guest at the home of Callias, son of Hipponicus, a man whom Socrates disparages in the "Apology" as having wasted a great amount of money on sophists' fees. Two other important dialogues, the "Symposium" and the "Phaedrus", are linked to the main storyline by characters. In the "Apology", Socrates says Aristophanes slandered him in a comic play, and blames him for causing his bad reputation, and ultimately, his death. In the "Symposium", the two of them are drinking together with other friends. The character Phaedrus is linked to the main story line by character (Phaedrus is also a participant in the "Symposium" and the "Protagoras") and by theme (the philosopher as divine emissary, etc.) The "Protagoras" is also strongly linked to the "Symposium" by characters: all of the formal speakers at the "Symposium" (with the exception of Aristophanes) are present at the home of Callias in that dialogue. Charmides and his guardian Critias are present for the discussion in the "Protagoras". Examples of characters crossing between dialogues can be further multiplied. The "Protagoras" contains the largest gathering of Socratic associates. In the dialogues Plato is most celebrated and admired for, Socrates is concerned with human and political virtue, has a distinctive personality, and friends and enemies who "travel" with him from dialogue to dialogue. This is not to say that Socrates is consistent: a man who is his friend in one dialogue may be an adversary or subject of his mockery in another. For example, Socrates praises the wisdom of Euthyphro many times in the "Cratylus", but makes him look like a fool in the "Euthyphro". He disparages sophists generally, and Prodicus specifically in the "Apology", whom he also slyly jabs in the "Cratylus" for charging the hefty fee of fifty drachmas for a course on language and grammar. However, Socrates tells Theaetetus in his namesake dialogue that he admires Prodicus and has directed many pupils to him. Socrates' ideas are also not consistent within or between or among dialogues. Allegories. "Mythos" and "logos" are terms that evolved throughout classical Greek history. In the times of Homer and Hesiod (8th century BC) they were essentially synonyms, and contained the meaning of 'tale' or 'history'. Later came historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, as well as philosophers like Heraclitus and Parmenides and other Presocratics who introduced a distinction between both terms; mythos became more a "nonverifiable account", and logos a "rational account". It may seem that Plato, being a disciple of Socrates and a strong partisan of philosophy based on "logos", should have avoided the use of myth-telling. Instead, he made abundant use of it. This fact has produced analytical and interpretative work, in order to clarify the reasons and purposes for that use. Plato, in general, distinguished between three types of myth. First, there were the false myths, like those based on stories of gods subject to passions and sufferings, because reason teaches that God is perfect. Then came the myths based on true reasoning, and therefore also true. Finally, there were those non-verifiable because beyond of human reason, but containing some truth in them. Regarding the subjects of Plato's myths, they are of two types, those dealing with the origin of the universe, and those about morals and the origin and fate of the soul. It is generally agreed that the main purpose for Plato in using myths was didactic. He considered that only a few people were capable or interested in following a reasoned philosophical discourse, but men in general are attracted by stories and tales. Consequently, then, he used the myth to convey the conclusions of the philosophical reasoning. Some of Plato's myths were based in traditional ones, others were modifications of them, and finally, he also invented altogether new myths. Notable examples include the story of Atlantis, the Myth of Er, and the Allegory of the Cave. The Cave. The theory of Forms is most famously captured in his Allegory of the Cave, and more explicitly in his analogy of the sun and the divided line. The Allegory of the Cave is a paradoxical analogy wherein Socrates argues that the invisible world is the most intelligible ("noeton") and that the visible world ("(h)oraton") is the least knowable, and the most obscure. Socrates says in the "Republic" that people who take the sun-lit world of the senses to be good and real are living pitifully in a den of evil and ignorance. Socrates admits that few climb out of the den, or cave of ignorance, and those who do, not only have a terrible struggle to attain the heights, but when they go back down for a visit or to help other people up, they find themselves objects of scorn and ridicule. According to Socrates, physical objects and physical events are "shadows" of their ideal or perfect forms, and exist only to the extent that they instantiate the perfect versions of themselves. Just as shadows are temporary, inconsequential epiphenomena produced by physical objects, physical objects are themselves fleeting phenomena caused by more substantial causes, the ideals of which they are mere instances. For example, Socrates thinks that perfect justice exists (although it is not clear where) and his own trial would be a cheap copy of it. The Allegory of the Cave is intimately connected to his political ideology, that only people who have climbed out of the cave and cast their eyes on a vision of goodness are fit to rule. Socrates claims that the enlightened men of society must be forced from their divine contemplation and be compelled to run the city according to their lofty insights. Thus is born the idea of the "philosopher-king", the wise person who accepts the power thrust upon him by the people who are wise enough to choose a good master. This is the main thesis of Socrates in the "Republic", that the most wisdom the masses can muster is the wise choice of a ruler. Ring of Gyges. A ring which could make one invisible, the Ring of Gyges is proposed in the "Republic" by the character of Glaucon, and considered by the rest of the characters for its ethical consequences, whether an individual possessing it would be most happy abstaining or doing injustice. Chariot. He also compares the soul ("psyche") to a chariot. In this allegory he introduces a triple soul composed of a charioteer and two horses. The charioteer is a symbol of the intellectual and logical part of the soul ("logistikon"), and the two horses represent the moral virtues ("thymoeides") and passionate instincts ("epithymetikon"), respectively, to illustrate the conflict between them. Dialectic. Socrates employs a dialectic method which proceeds by questioning. The role of dialectic in Plato's thought is contested but there are two main interpretations: a type of reasoning and a method of intuition. Simon Blackburn adopts the first, saying that Plato's dialectic is "the process of eliciting the truth by means of questions aimed at opening out what is already implicitly known, or at exposing the contradictions and muddles of an opponent's position." A similar interpretation has been put forth by Louis Hartz, who compares Plato's dialectic to that of Hegel. According to this view, opposing arguments improve upon each other, and prevailing opinion is shaped by the synthesis of many conflicting ideas over time. Each new idea exposes a flaw in the accepted model, and the epistemological substance of the debate continually approaches the truth. Hartz's is a teleological interpretation at the core, in which philosophers will ultimately exhaust the available body of knowledge and thus reach "the end of history." Karl Popper, on the other hand, claims that dialectic is the art of intuition for "visualising the divine originals, the Forms or Ideas, of unveiling the Great Mystery behind the common man's everyday world of appearances." Family. Plato often discusses the father-son relationship and the question of whether a father's interest in his sons has much to do with how well his sons turn out. In ancient Athens, a boy was socially located by his family identity, and Plato often refers to his characters in terms of their paternal and fraternal relationships. Socrates was not a family man, and saw himself as the son of his mother, who was apparently a midwife. A divine fatalist, Socrates mocks men who spent exorbitant fees on tutors and trainers for their sons, and repeatedly ventures the idea that good character is a gift from the gods. Plato's dialogue "Crito" reminds Socrates that orphans are at the mercy of chance, but Socrates is unconcerned. In the "Theaetetus", he is found recruiting as a disciple a young man whose inheritance has been squandered. Socrates twice compares the relationship of the older man and his boy lover to the father-son relationship, and in the "Phaedo", Socrates' disciples, towards whom he displays more concern than his biological sons, say they will feel "fatherless" when he is gone. Though Plato agreed with Aristotle that women were inferior to men, in the fourth book of the "Republic" the character of Socrates says this was only because of "nomos" or custom and not because of nature, and thus women needed "paidia", rearing or education to be equal to men. In the "merely probable tale" of the eponymous character in the "Timaeus", unjust men who live corrupted lives would be reincarnated as women or various animal kinds. Narration. Plato never presents himself as a participant in any of the dialogues, and with the exception of the "Apology", there is no suggestion that he heard any of the dialogues firsthand. Some dialogues have no narrator but have a pure "dramatic" form (examples: "Meno", "Gorgias", "Phaedrus", "Crito", "Euthyphro"), some dialogues are narrated by Socrates, wherein he speaks in first person (examples: "Lysis", "Charmides", "Republic"). One dialogue, "Protagoras", begins in dramatic form but quickly proceeds to Socrates' narration of a conversation he had previously with the sophist for whom the dialogue is named; this narration continues uninterrupted till the dialogue's end. Two dialogues "Phaedo" and "Symposium" also begin in dramatic form but then proceed to virtually uninterrupted narration by followers of Socrates. "Phaedo", an account of Socrates' final conversation and hemlock drinking, is narrated by Phaedo to Echecrates in a foreign city not long after the execution took place. The "Symposium" is narrated by Apollodorus, a Socratic disciple, apparently to Glaucon. Apollodorus assures his listener that he is recounting the story, which took place when he himself was an infant, not from his own memory, but as remembered by Aristodemus, who told him the story years ago. The "Theaetetus" is a peculiar case: a dialogue in dramatic form embedded within another dialogue in dramatic form. In the beginning of the "Theaetetus", Euclides says that he compiled the conversation from notes he took based on what Socrates told him of his conversation with the title character. The rest of the "Theaetetus" is presented as a "book" written in dramatic form and read by one of Euclides' slaves. Some scholars take this as an indication that Plato had by this date wearied of the narrated form. With the exception of the "Theaetetus", Plato gives no explicit indication as to how these orally transmitted conversations came to be written down. History of Plato's dialogues. Thirty-five dialogues and thirteen letters (the "Epistles") have traditionally been ascribed to Plato, though modern scholarship doubts the authenticity of at least some of these. Plato's writings have been published in several fashions; this has led to several conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato's texts. The usual system for making unique references to sections of the text by Plato derives from a 16th-century edition of Plato's works by Henricus Stephanus known as Stephanus pagination. One tradition regarding the arrangement of Plato's texts is according to tetralogies. This scheme is ascribed by Diogenes Laërtius to an ancient scholar and court astrologer to Tiberius named Thrasyllus. The list includes works of doubtful authenticity (written in italic), and includes the Letters. Chronology. No one knows the exact order Plato's dialogues were written in, nor the extent to which some might have been later revised and rewritten. The works are usually grouped into "Early" (sometimes by some into "Transitional"), "Middle", and "Late" period. This choice to group chronologically is thought worthy of criticism by some (Cooper "et al"), given that it is recognized that there is no absolute agreement as to the true chronology, since the facts of the temporal order of writing are not confidently ascertained. Chronology was not a consideration in ancient times, in that groupings of this nature are "virtually absent" (Tarrant) in the extant writings of ancient Platonists. Whereas those classified as "early dialogues" often conclude in aporia, the so-called "middle dialogues" provide more clearly stated positive teachings that are often ascribed to Plato such as the theory of Forms. The remaining dialogues are classified as "late" and are generally agreed to be difficult and challenging pieces of philosophy. This grouping is the only one proven by stylometric analysis. Among those who classify the dialogues into periods of composition, Socrates figures in all of the "early dialogues" and they are considered the most faithful representations of the historical Socrates. The following represents one relatively common division. It should, however, be kept in mind that many of the positions in the ordering are still highly disputed, and also that the very notion that Plato's dialogues can or should be "ordered" is by no means universally accepted. Increasingly in the most recent Plato scholarship, writers are sceptical of the notion that the order of Plato's writings can be established with any precision, though Plato's works are still often characterized as falling at least roughly into three groups. Early: "Apology", "Charmides", "Crito", "Euthyphro", "Gorgias", "Hippias Minor", "Hippias Major", "Ion", "Laches", "Lysis", "Protagoras" Middle: "Cratylus", "Euthydemus", "Meno", "Parmenides", "Phaedo", "Phaedrus", "Republic", "Symposium", "Theatetus" Late: "Critias", "Sophist", "Statesman", "Timaeus", "Philebus", "Laws." A significant distinction of the early Plato and the later Plato has been offered by scholars such as E.R. Dodds and has been summarized by Harold Bloom in his book titled "Agon": "E.R. Dodds is the classical scholar whose writings most illuminated the Hellenic descent (in) "The Greeks and the Irrational" ... In his chapter on Plato and the Irrational Soul ... Dodds traces Plato's spiritual evolution from the pure rationalist of the "Protagoras" to the transcendental psychologist, influenced by the Pythagoreans and Orphics, of the later works culminating in the "Laws"." Lewis Campbell was the first to make exhaustive use of stylometry to prove the great probability that the "Critias", "Timaeus", "Laws", "Philebus", "Sophist", and "Statesman" were all clustered together as a group, while the "Parmenides", "Phaedrus", "Republic", and "Theaetetus" belong to a separate group, which must be earlier (given Aristotle's statement in his "Politics" that the "Laws" was written after the "Republic"; cf. Diogenes Laërtius "Lives" 3.37). What is remarkable about Campbell's conclusions is that, in spite of all the stylometric studies that have been conducted since his time, perhaps the only chronological fact about Plato's works that can now be said to be "proven" by stylometry is the fact that "Critias", "Timaeus", "Laws", "Philebus", "Sophist", and "Statesman" are the latest of Plato's dialogues, the others earlier. "Protagoras" is often considered one of the last of the "early dialogues". Three dialogues are often considered "transitional" or "pre-middle": "Euthydemus", "Gorgias", and "Meno". Proponents of dividing the dialogues into periods often consider the "Parmenides" and "Theaetetus" to come late in the middle period and be transitional to the next, as they seem to treat the theory of Forms critically ("Parmenides") or only indirectly ("Theaetetus"). Ritter's stylometric analysis places "Phaedrus" as probably after "Theaetetus" and "Parmenides", although it does not relate to the theory of Forms in the same way. The first book of the "Republic" is often thought to have been written significantly earlier than the rest of the work, although possibly having undergone revisions when the later books were attached to it. While looked to for Plato's "mature" answers to the questions posed by his earlier works, those answers are difficult to discern. Some scholars indicate that the theory of Forms is absent from the late dialogues, its having been refuted in the "Parmenides", but there is not total consensus that the "Parmenides" actually refutes the theory of Forms. Writings of doubted authenticity. Jowett mentions in his Appendix to Menexenus, that works which bore the character of a writer were attributed to that writer even when the actual author was unknown. For below: (*) if there is no consensus among scholars as to whether Plato is the author, and (‡) if most scholars agree that Plato is "not" the author of the work. "Alcibiades I" (*), "Alcibiades II" (‡), "Clitophon" (*), "Epinomis" (‡), "Letters" (*), "Hipparchus" (‡), "Menexenus" (*), "Minos" (‡), "Lovers" (‡), "Theages" (‡) Spurious writings. The following works were transmitted under Plato's name, most of them already considered spurious in antiquity, and so were not included by Thrasyllus in his tetralogical arrangement. These works are labelled as "Notheuomenoi" ("spurious") or "Apocrypha". "Axiochus", "Definitions", "Demodocus", "Epigrams", "Eryxias", "Halcyon", "On Justice", "On Virtue", "Sisyphus". Textual sources and history. Some 250 known manuscripts of Plato survive. The texts of Plato as received today apparently represent the complete written philosophical work of Plato and are generally good by the standards of textual criticism. No modern edition of Plato in the original Greek represents a single source, but rather it is reconstructed from multiple sources which are compared with each other. These sources are medieval manuscripts written on vellum (mainly from 9th to 13th century AD Byzantium), papyri (mainly from late antiquity in Egypt), and from the independent "testimonia" of other authors who quote various segments of the works (which come from a variety of sources). The text as presented is usually not much different from what appears in the Byzantine manuscripts, and papyri and testimonia just confirm the manuscript tradition. In some editions, however, the readings in the papyri or testimonia are favoured in some places by the editing critic of the text. Reviewing editions of papyri for the "Republic" in 1987, Slings suggests that the use of papyri is hampered due to some poor editing practices. In the first century AD, Thrasyllus of Mendes had compiled and published the works of Plato in the original Greek, both genuine and spurious. While it has not survived to the present day, all the extant medieval Greek manuscripts are based on his edition. The oldest surviving complete manuscript for many of the dialogues is the Clarke Plato (Codex Oxoniensis Clarkianus 39, or Codex Boleianus MS E.D. Clarke 39), which was written in Constantinople in 895 and acquired by Oxford University in 1809. The Clarke is given the siglum "B" in modern editions. "B" contains the first six tetralogies and is described internally as being written by "John the Calligrapher" on behalf of Arethas of Caesarea. It appears to have undergone corrections by Arethas himself. For the last two tetralogies and the apocrypha, the oldest surviving complete manuscript is Codex Parisinus graecus 1807, designated "A", which was written nearly contemporaneously to "B", circa 900 AD. "A" must be a copy of the edition edited by the patriarch, Photios, teacher of Arethas."A" probably had an initial volume containing the first 7 tetralogies which is now lost, but of which a copy was made, Codex Venetus append. class. 4, 1, which has the siglum "T". The oldest manuscript for the seventh tetralogy is Codex Vindobonensis 54. suppl. phil. Gr. 7, with siglum "W", with a supposed date in the twelfth century. In total there are fifty-one such Byzantine manuscripts known, while others may yet be found. To help establish the text, the older evidence of papyri and the independent evidence of the testimony of commentators and other authors (i.e., those who quote and refer to an old text of Plato which is no longer extant) are also used. Many papyri which contain fragments of Plato's texts are among the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. The 2003 Oxford Classical Texts edition by Slings even cites the Coptic translation of a fragment of the "Republic" in the Nag Hammadi library as evidence. Important authors for testimony include Olympiodorus the Younger, Plutarch, Proclus, Iamblichus, Eusebius, and Stobaeus. During the early Renaissance, the Greek language and, along with it, Plato's texts were reintroduced to Western Europe by Byzantine scholars. In September or October 1484 Filippo Valori and Francesco Berlinghieri printed 1025 copies of Ficino's translation, using the printing press at the Dominican convent S.Jacopo di Ripoli. Cosimo had been influenced toward studying Plato by the many Byzantine Platonists in Florence during his day, including George Gemistus Plethon. The 1578 edition of Plato's complete works published by Henricus Stephanus (Henri Estienne) in Geneva also included parallel Latin translation and running commentary by Joannes Serranus (Jean de Serres). It was this edition which established standard Stephanus pagination, still in use today. Modern editions. The Oxford Classical Texts offers the current standard complete Greek text of Plato's complete works. In five volumes edited by John Burnet, its first edition was published 1900–1907, and it is still available from the publisher, having last been printed in 1993. The second edition is still in progress with only the first volume, printed in 1995, and the "Republic", printed in 2003, available. The "Cambridge Greek and Latin Texts" and "Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries" series includes Greek editions of the "Protagoras", "Symposium", "Phaedrus", "Alcibiades", and "Clitophon", with English philological, literary, and, to an extent, philosophical commentary. One distinguished edition of the Greek text is E. R. Dodds' of the "Gorgias", which includes extensive English commentary. The modern standard complete English edition is the 1997 Hackett "Plato, Complete Works", edited by John M. Cooper. For many of these translations Hackett offers separate volumes which include more by way of commentary, notes, and introductory material. There is also the "Clarendon Plato Series" by Oxford University Press which offers English translations and thorough philosophical commentary by leading scholars on a few of Plato's works, including John McDowell's version of the "Theaetetus". Cornell University Press has also begun the "Agora" series of English translations of classical and medieval philosophical texts, including a few of Plato's. Criticism. The most famous criticism of the Theory of Forms is the Third Man Argument by Aristotle in the "Metaphysics". Plato had actually already considered this objection with the idea of "large" rather than "man" in the dialogue "Parmenides", using the elderly Elean philosophers Parmenides and Zeno characters anachronistically to criticize the character of the younger Socrates who proposed the idea. The dialogue ends in "aporia". Many recent philosophers have diverged from what some would describe as the ontological models and moral ideals characteristic of traditional Platonism. A number of these postmodern philosophers have thus appeared to disparage Platonism from more or less informed perspectives. Friedrich Nietzsche notoriously attacked Plato's "idea of the good itself" along with many fundamentals of Christian morality, which he interpreted as "Platonism for the masses" in one of his most important works, "Beyond Good and Evil" (1886). Martin Heidegger argued against Plato's alleged obfuscation of "Being" in his incomplete tome, "Being and Time" (1927), and the philosopher of science Karl Popper argued in "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (1945) that Plato's alleged proposal for a utopian political regime in the "Republic" was prototypically totalitarian. Legacy. In the arts. Plato's Academy mosaic was created in the villa of T. Siminius Stephanus in Pompeii, around 100 BC to 100 CE. "The School of Athens" fresco by Raphael features Plato also as a central figure. The Nuremberg Chronicle depicts Plato and others as anachronistic schoolmen. In philosophy. Plato's thought is often compared with that of his most famous student, Aristotle, whose reputation during the Western Middle Ages so completely eclipsed that of Plato that the Scholastic philosophers referred to Aristotle as "the Philosopher". However, in the Byzantine Empire, the study of Plato continued. The only Platonic work known to western scholarship was "Timaeus", until translations were made after the fall of Constantinople, which occurred during 1453. George Gemistos Plethon brought Plato's original writings from Constantinople in the century of its fall. It is believed that Plethon passed a copy of the "Dialogues" to Cosimo de' Medici when in 1438 the Council of Ferrara, called to unify the Greek and Latin Churches, was adjourned to Florence, where Plethon then lectured on the relation and differences of Plato and Aristotle, and fired Cosimo with his enthusiasm; Cosimo would supply Marsilio Ficino with Plato's text for translation to Latin. During the early Islamic era, Persian and Arab scholars translated much of Plato into Arabic and wrote commentaries and interpretations on Plato's, Aristotle's and other Platonist philosophers' works (see Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, Hunayn ibn Ishaq). Many of these commentaries on Plato were translated from Arabic into Latin and as such influenced Medieval scholastic philosophers. During the Renaissance, with the general resurgence of interest in classical civilization, knowledge of Plato's philosophy would become widespread again in the West. Many of the greatest early modern scientists and artists who broke with Scholasticism and fostered the flowering of the Renaissance, with the support of the Plato-inspired Lorenzo (grandson of Cosimo), saw Plato's philosophy as the basis for progress in the arts and sciences. More problematic was Plato's belief in metempsychosis as well as his ethical views (on polyamory and euthanasia in particular), which did not match those of Christianity. It was Plethon's student Bessarion who reconciled Plato with Christian theology, arguing that Plato's views were only ideals, unattainable due to the fall of man. The Cambridge Platonists were around in the 17th century. By the 19th century, Plato's reputation was restored, and at least on par with Aristotle's. Notable Western philosophers have continued to draw upon Plato's work since that time. Plato's influence has been especially strong in mathematics and the sciences. Plato's resurgence further inspired some of the greatest advances in logic since Aristotle, primarily through Gottlob Frege and his followers Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, and Alfred Tarski. Albert Einstein suggested that the scientist who takes philosophy seriously would have to avoid systematization and take on many different roles, and possibly appear as a Platonist or Pythagorean, in that such a one would have "the viewpoint of logical simplicity as an indispensable and effective tool of his research." The political philosopher and professor Leo Strauss is considered by some as the prime thinker involved in the recovery of Platonic thought in its more political, and less metaphysical, form. Strauss' political approach was in part inspired by the appropriation of Plato and Aristotle by medieval Jewish and Islamic political philosophers, especially Maimonides and Al-Farabi, as opposed to the Christian metaphysical tradition that developed from Neoplatonism. Deeply influenced by Nietzsche and Heidegger, Strauss nonetheless rejects their condemnation of Plato and looks to the dialogues for a solution to what all three latter-day thinkers acknowledge as 'the crisis of the West. W. V. O. Quine dubbed the problem of negative existentials "Plato's beard". Noam Chomsky dubbed the problem of knowledge Plato's problem. One author calls the definist fallacy the Socratic fallacy. More broadly, platonism (sometimes distinguished from Plato's particular view by the lowercase) refers to the view that there are many abstract objects. Still to this day, platonists take number and the truths of mathematics as the best support in favour of this view. Most mathematicians think, like platonists, that numbers and the truths of mathematics are perceived by reason rather than the senses yet exist independently of minds and people, that is to say, they are discovered rather than invented. Contemporary platonism is also more open to the idea of there being infinitely many abstract objects, as numbers or propositions might qualify as abstract objects, while ancient Platonism seemed to resist this view, possibly because of the need to overcome the problem of "the One and the Many". Thus e. g. in the Parmenides dialogue, Plato denies there are Forms for more mundane things like hair and mud. However, he repeatedly does support the idea that there are Forms of artifacts, e. g. the Form of Bed. Contemporary platonism also tends to view abstract objects as unable to cause anything, but it is unclear whether the ancient Platonists felt this way. References. Works cited. Primary sources (Greek and Roman) Secondary sources

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Kojin Karatani is a Japanese philosopher and literary critic. Biography. Karatani was educated at University of Tokyo, where he received a BA in economics and an MA in English literature. The Gunzō Literary Prize, which he received at the age of 27 for an essay on Natsume Sōseki, was his first critical acclaim as a literary critic. While teaching at Hosei University, Tokyo, he wrote extensively about modernity and postmodernity with a particular focus on language, number, and money, concepts that form the subtitle of one of his central books: "Architecture as Metaphor". In 1975, he was invited to Yale University to teach Japanese literature as a visiting professor, where he met Paul de Man and Fredric Jameson and began to work on formalism. He started from a study of Natsume Sōseki. Karatani collaborated with novelist Kenji Nakagami, to whom he introduced the works of Faulkner. With Nakagami, he published "Kobayashi Hideo o koete" ("Overcoming Kobayashi Hideo"). The title is an ironic reference to “Kindai no chokoku” ("Overcoming Modernity"), a symposium held in the summer of 1942 at Kyoto Imperial University (now Kyoto University) at which Hideo Kobayashi (whom Karatani and Nakagami did not hold in great esteem) was a participant. He was also a regular member of ANY, the international architects' conference that was held annually for the last decade of the 20th century and that also published an architectural/philosophical series with Rizzoli under the general heading of "Anyone". Since 1990, Karatani has been regularly teaching at Columbia University as a visiting professor. Karatani founded the (NAM) in Japan in the summer of 2000. NAM was conceived as a counter–capitalist/nation-state association, inspired by the experiment of LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems, based on non-marketed currency). He was also the co-editor, with Akira Asada, of the Japanese quarterly journal "Hihyōkūkan" ("Critical Space"), until it ended in 2002. In 2006, Karatani retired from the chair of the International Center for Human Sciences at Kinki University, Osaka, where he had been teaching. Philosophy. Karatani has produced philosophical concepts, such as "the will to architecture", which he calls the foundation of all Western thinking, but the best-known of them is probably that of "Transcritique", which he proposed in his book "Transcritique", where he reads Kant through Marx and vice versa. Writing about "Transcritique" in the "New Left Review" of January–February 2004, Slavoj Žižek brought Karatani's work to greater critical attention. Žižek borrowed the concept of "parallax view" (which is also the title of his review) for the title of his own book. Karatani has interrogated the possibility of a (de Manian) deconstruction and engaged in a dialogue with Jacques Derrida at the Second International Conference on Humanistic Discourse, organized by the Université de Montréal. Derrida commented on Karatani's paper "Nationalism and Ecriture" with an emphasis on the interpretation of his own concept of écriture. Bibliography. In English In Japanese

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Ivan Soll Ivan Soll (born "Albert Ivan Soll"; born March 1938) is an American philosopher who is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the United States. He taught at UW from 1965 until his retirement in May 2011. His teaching and research focused on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosophy in general, existentialism, aesthetics, and various figures of continental philosophy. Background. Soll was a student of Nietzsche scholar and translator Walter Kaufmann while at Princeton University. Soll completed his A.B. at Princeton University in 1960 with a senior thesis titled "Futility, Freedom and Freud: A Critical Triptych on the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre". He then pursued graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard University, the University of Munich, and Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1966 with a dissertation titled "Hegel’s Search For Absolute Knowledge". Soll taught the majority of his academic career at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He came to UW-Madison as an instructor in philosophy in 1964, and taught there until his retirement in May 2011. He was promoted to assistant professor in 1966, promoted again to associate professor with tenure in 1969, and to full professor in 1973. He has also held visiting professorships at Justus-Liebig University (Germany), the University of Auckland, and the Bosphorus University, Istanbul. His philosophical interests include continental philosophy - especially German philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and existentialism generally. He also focused on the intersections of philosophy and literature, the history of philosophy, aesthetics, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of life. He has published widely in aesthetics, and complements his academic knowledge with expert proficiency in the manufacture of fine art books. Ivan has exhibited his hand-crafted art books in many galleries around the world, and he has integrated the experience in doing so with his academic work. In the area of German philosophy, he has written the influential "Introduction to Hegel's Metaphysics", has authored more than 50 scholarly articles, and has given nearly 130 talks at various national and international venues. Soll has been the recipient of NEH, ACLS, and UW-Madison IRH fellowships, as well as a Bellagio fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation and a German D.A.A.D award. He has frequently been the lead professor at UW-Madison study abroad programs: in London (twice), Florence (five times) and Budapest (twice). Ideas, Activities and Contributions. Soll established his reputation among Nietzsche scholars with his 1973 essay "Reflections on Recurrence: A Re-Examination of Nietzsche's Doctrine" which puts forth a novel interpretation of Nietzsche's idea of the eternal recurrence. Soll's interpretation states that the literal possibility of the eternal recurrence is not as important as taking on the idea for what its consequences imply. He argues that the implications of this idea force the individual to evaluate past, current, and future life choices. Documented in the book "Genius In Their Own Words: The Intellectual Journeys of Seven Great 20th-Century Thinkers" edited by David Ramsay Steele (foreword by Arthur Danto) a mediated series of questions posed by Soll were presented to the famed French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre on various aspects of Sartre's philosophy with Sartre providing his answers to Soll's questions. Soll contributed three introductions to Walter Kaufmann's "Discovering the Mind" series of books which were some of the last published works from Kaufmann. Soll has also authored several encyclopedia entries on different topics of philosophy. He continues to be discussed by younger Nietzsche scholars like Bernard Reginster who engaged with his ideas in the 2006 book "The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism". Soll's courses on Nietzsche and Existentialism at the University of Wisconsin–Madison continue to be popular courses in the Wisconsin Philosophy Department. He regularly teaches Introduction to Philosophy thereby introducing the discipline to many new students. Soll and his wife, Marta Gomez, have produced original artists' books collaboratively at their Tiramisu Press in Madison, Wisconsin. Soll was a participant in the Peter Sloterdijk lecture series seminar and conference workshop, May 19 to 23, 2008 at the University of Warwick where he discussed the relationship between the philosophies of Sloterdijk and Nietzsche. Soll completed an essay on Charles Darwin's influence on German philosophy for a volume on Darwin to be published in Turkey, and an essay on Nietzsche's anti-moralism for a conference in Britain in 2010. For the 2010 Summer he taught in Istanbul. In 2010 he gave the lead-off lecture at a conference in England on Nietzsche's Postmoralism and the keynote address in German, titled "Lob der Illusion" (In Praise of Illusion), at a conference in Germany. Ph.D. Students. Soll served as Ph.D. Dissertation Advisor to these students:

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Michel Foucault Paul-Michel Foucault ( , ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory. Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, "The History of Madness" (1961). After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced "The Birth of the Clinic" (1963) and "The Order of Things" (1966), publications which displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called "archaeology." From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. Foucault subsequently published "The Archaeology of Knowledge" (1969). In 1970, Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He also became active in several left-wing groups involved in campaigns against racism and human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later published "Discipline and Punish" (1975) and "The History of Sexuality" (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methods which emphasized the role that power plays in society. Foucault died in Paris from complications of HIV/AIDS; he became the first public figure in France to die from complications of the disease. His partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES charity in his memory. Early life. Early years: 1926–1938. Paul-Michel Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 in the city of Poitiers, west-central France, as the second of three children in a prosperous, socially-conservative, upper-middle-class family. Family tradition prescribed naming him after his father, Paul Foucault (1893–1959), but his mother insisted on the addition of Michel; referred to as Paul at school, he expressed a preference for "Michel" throughout his life. His father, a successful local surgeon born in Fontainebleau, moved to Poitiers, where he set up his own practice. He married Anne Malapert, the daughter of prosperous surgeon Dr. Prosper Malapert, who owned a private practice and taught anatomy at the University of Poitiers' School of Medicine. Paul Foucault eventually took over his father-in-law's medical practice, while Anne took charge of their large mid-19th-century house, Le Piroir, in the village of Vendeuvre-du-Poitou. Together the couple had three children—a girl named Francine and two boys, Paul-Michel and Denys—who all shared the same fair hair and bright blue eyes. The children were raised to be nominal Catholics, attending mass at the Church of Saint-Porchair, and while Michel briefly became an altar boy, none of the family was devout. In later life, Foucault revealed very little about his childhood. Describing himself as a "juvenile delinquent," he claimed his father was a "bully" who sternly punished him. In 1930, two years early, Foucault began his schooling at the local Lycée Henry-IV. There he undertook two years of elementary education before entering the main "lycée", where he stayed until 1936. Afterwards, he took his first four years of secondary education at the same establishment, excelling in French, Greek, Latin, and history, though doing poorly at mathematics, including arithmetic. Teens to young adulthood: 1939–1945. In 1939, the Second World War began, followed by Nazi Germany's occupation of France in 1940. Foucault's parents opposed the occupation and the Vichy regime, but did not join the Resistance. That year, Foucault's mother enrolled him in the Collège Saint-Stanislas, a strict Catholic institution run by the Jesuits. Although he later described his years there as an "ordeal," Foucault excelled academically, particularly in philosophy, history, and literature. In 1942 he entered his final year, the "terminale", where he focused on the study of philosophy, earning his "baccalauréat" in 1943. Returning to the local Lycée Henry-IV, he studied history and philosophy for a year, aided by a personal tutor, the philosopher . Rejecting his father's wishes that he become a surgeon, in 1945 Foucault went to Paris, where he enrolled in one of the country's most prestigious secondary schools, which was also known as the Lycée Henri-IV. Here he studied under the philosopher Jean Hyppolite, an existentialist and expert on the work of 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hyppolite had devoted himself to uniting existentialist theories with the dialectical theories of Hegel and Karl Marx. These ideas influenced Foucault, who adopted Hyppolite's conviction that philosophy must develop through a study of history. University studies: 1946–1951. In autumn 1946, attaining excellent results, Foucault was admitted to the élite École Normale Supérieure (ENS), for which he undertook exams and an oral interrogation by Georges Canguilhem and Pierre-Maxime Schuhl to gain entry. Of the hundred students entering the ENS, Foucault ranked fourth based on his entry results, and encountered the highly competitive nature of the institution. Like most of his classmates, he lived in the school's communal dormitories on the Parisian Rue d'Ulm. He remained largely unpopular, spending much time alone, reading voraciously. His fellow students noted his love of violence and the macabre; he decorated his bedroom with images of torture and war drawn during the Napoleonic Wars by Spanish artist Francisco Goya, and on one occasion chased a classmate with a dagger. Prone to self-harm, in 1948 Foucault allegedly attempted suicide; his father sent him to see the psychiatrist Jean Delay at the Sainte-Anne Hospital Center. Obsessed with the idea of self-mutilation and suicide, Foucault attempted the latter several times in ensuing years, praising suicide in later writings. The ENS's doctor examined Foucault's state of mind, suggesting that his suicidal tendencies emerged from the distress surrounding his homosexuality, because same-sex sexual activity was socially taboo in France. At the time, Foucault engaged in homosexual activity with men whom he encountered in the underground Parisian gay scene, also indulging in drug use; according to biographer James Miller, he enjoyed the thrill and sense of danger that these activities offered him. Although studying various subjects, Foucault soon gravitated towards philosophy, reading not only Hegel and Marx but also Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl and most significantly, Martin Heidegger. He began reading the publications of philosopher Gaston Bachelard, taking a particular interest in his work exploring the history of science. He graduated from the ENS with a B.A. (licence) in Philosophy in 1948 and a DES ("", roughly equivalent to an M.A.) in Philosophy in 1949. His DES thesis under the direction of Hyppolite was titled "La Constitution d'un transcendental dans La Phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel" ("The Constitution of a Historical Transcendental in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit"). In 1948, the philosopher Louis Althusser became a tutor at the ENS. A Marxist, he influenced both Foucault and a number of other students, encouraging them to join the French Communist Party ("Parti communiste français", PCF). Foucault did so in 1950, but never became particularly active in its activities, and never adopted an orthodox Marxist viewpoint, rejecting core Marxist tenets such as class struggle. He soon became dissatisfied with the bigotry that he experienced within the party's ranks; he personally faced homophobia and was appalled by the anti-semitism exhibited during the 1952–53 "Doctors' plot" in the Soviet Union. He left the Communist Party in 1953, but remained Althusser's friend and defender for the rest of his life. Although failing at the first attempt in 1950, he passed his "agrégation" in philosophy on the second try, in 1951. Excused from national service on medical grounds, he decided to start a doctorate at the Fondation Thiers in 1951, focusing on the philosophy of psychology, but he relinquished it after only one year in 1952. Foucault was also interested in psychology and he attended Daniel Lagache's lectures at the University of Paris, where he obtained a B.A. (licence) in Psychology in 1949 and a Diploma in Psychopathology ("Diplôme de psychopathologie") from the University's Institute of Psychology (now ) in June 1952. Early career (1951–1960). Over the following few years, Foucault embarked on a variety of research and teaching jobs. From 1951 to 1955, he worked as a psychology instructor at the ENS at Althusser's invitation. In Paris, he shared a flat with his brother, who was training to become a surgeon, but for three days in the week commuted to the northern town of Lille, teaching psychology at the Université de Lille from 1953 to 1954. Many of his students liked his lecturing style. Meanwhile, he continued working on his thesis, visiting the Bibliothèque Nationale every day to read the work of psychologists like Ivan Pavlov, Jean Piaget and Karl Jaspers. Undertaking research at the psychiatric institute of the Sainte-Anne Hospital, he became an unofficial intern, studying the relationship between doctor and patient and aiding experiments in the electroencephalographic laboratory. Foucault adopted many of the theories of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, undertaking psychoanalytical interpretation of his dreams and making friends undergo Rorschach tests. Embracing the Parisian "avant-garde", Foucault entered into a romantic relationship with the serialist composer Jean Barraqué. Together, they tried to produce their greatest work, heavily used recreational drugs and engaged in sado-masochistic sexual activity. In August 1953, Foucault and Barraqué holidayed in Italy, where the philosopher immersed himself in "Untimely Meditations" (1873–76), a set of four essays by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Later describing Nietzsche's work as "a revelation", he felt that reading the book deeply affected him, being a watershed moment in his life. Foucault subsequently experienced another groundbreaking self-revelation when watching a Parisian performance of Samuel Beckett's new play, "Waiting for Godot", in 1953. Interested in literature, Foucault was an avid reader of the philosopher Maurice Blanchot's book reviews published in "Nouvelle Revue Française". Enamoured of Blanchot's literary style and critical theories, in later works he adopted Blanchot's technique of "interviewing" himself. Foucault also came across Hermann Broch's 1945 novel "The Death of Virgil", a work that obsessed both him and Barraqué. While the latter attempted to convert the work into an epic opera, Foucault admired Broch's text for its portrayal of death as an affirmation of life. The couple took a mutual interest in the work of such authors as the Marquis de Sade, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka and Jean Genet, all of whose works explored the themes of sex and violence. Interested in the work of Swiss psychologist Ludwig Binswanger, Foucault aided family friend Jacqueline Verdeaux in translating his works into French. Foucault was particularly interested in Binswanger's studies of Ellen West who, like himself, had a deep obsession with suicide, eventually killing herself. In 1954, Foucault authored an introduction to Binswanger's paper "Dream and Existence", in which he argued that dreams constituted "the birth of the world" or "the heart laid bare," expressing the mind's deepest desires. That same year, Foucault published his first book, "Maladie mentale et personalité" ("Mental Illness and Personality"), in which he exhibited his influence from both Marxist and Heideggerian thought, covering a wide range of subject matter from the reflex psychology of Pavlov to the classic psychoanalysis of Freud. Referencing the work of sociologists and anthropologists such as Émile Durkheim and Margaret Mead, he presented his theory that illness was culturally relative. Biographer James Miller noted that while the book exhibited "erudition and evident intelligence," it lacked the "kind of fire and flair" which Foucault exhibited in subsequent works. It was largely critically ignored, receiving only one review at the time. Foucault grew to despise it, unsuccessfully attempting to prevent its republication and translation into English. Sweden, Poland, and West Germany: 1955–1960. Foucault spent the next five years abroad, first in Sweden, working as cultural diplomat at the University of Uppsala, a job obtained through his acquaintance with historian of religion Georges Dumézil. At Uppsala he was appointed a Reader in French language and literature, while simultaneously working as director of the Maison de France, thus opening the possibility of a cultural-diplomatic career. Although finding it difficult to adjust to the "Nordic gloom" and long winters, he developed close friendships with two Frenchmen, biochemist Jean-François Miquel and physicist Jacques Papet-Lépine, and entered into romantic and sexual relationships with various men. In Uppsala he became known for his heavy alcohol consumption and reckless driving in his new Jaguar car. In spring 1956 Barraqué broke from his relationship with Foucault, announcing that he wanted to leave the "vertigo of madness". In Uppsala, Foucault spent much of his spare time in the university's "Carolina Rediviva" library, making use of their Bibliotheca Walleriana collection of texts on the history of medicine for his ongoing research. Finishing his doctoral thesis, Foucault hoped that Uppsala University would accept it, but Sten Lindroth, a positivistic historian of science there, remained unimpressed, asserting that it was full of speculative generalisations and was a poor work of history; he refused to allow Foucault to be awarded a doctorate at Uppsala. In part because of this rejection, Foucault left Sweden. Later, Foucault admitted that the work was a first draft with certain lack of quality. Again at Dumézil's behest, in October 1958 Foucault arrived in the capital of Polish People's Republic, Warsaw and took charge of the University of Warsaw's Centre Français. Foucault found life in Poland difficult due to the lack of material goods and services following the destruction of the Second World War. Witnessing the aftermath of the Polish October of 1956, when students had protested against the governing communist Polish United Workers' Party, he felt that most Poles despised their government as a puppet regime of the Soviet Union, and thought that the system ran "badly". Considering the university a liberal enclave, he traveled the country giving lectures; proving popular, he adopted the position of "de facto" cultural attaché. Like France and Sweden, Poland legally tolerated but socially frowned on homosexual activity, and Foucault undertook relationships with a number of men; one was with a Polish security agent who hoped to trap Foucault in an embarrassing situation, which therefore would reflect badly on the French embassy. Wracked in diplomatic scandal, he was ordered to leave Poland for a new destination. Various positions were available in West Germany, and so Foucault relocated to the (where he served as director in 1958–60), teaching the same courses he had given in Uppsala and Warsaw. Spending much time in the Reeperbahn red light district, he entered into a relationship with a transvestite. Growing career (1960–1970). "Madness and Civilization": 1960. In West Germany, Foucault completed in 1960 his primary thesis ("thèse principale") for his State doctorate, titled "Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique" (trans. "Madness and Insanity: History of Madness in the Classical Age"), a philosophical work based upon his studies into the history of medicine. The book discussed how West European society had dealt with madness, arguing that it was a social construct distinct from mental illness. Foucault traces the evolution of the concept of madness through three phases: the Renaissance, the later 17th and 18th centuries, and the modern experience. The work alludes to the work of French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud, who exerted a strong influence over Foucault's thought at the time. "Histoire de la folie" was an expansive work, consisting of 943 pages of text, followed by appendices and a bibliography. Foucault submitted it at the University of Paris, although the university's regulations for awarding a State doctorate required the submission of both his main thesis and a shorter complementary thesis. Obtaining a doctorate in France at the period was a multi-step process. The first step was to obtain a "rapporteur", or "sponsor" for the work: Foucault chose Georges Canguilhem. The second was to find a publisher, and as a result "Folie et déraison" was published in French in May 1961 by the company Plon, whom Foucault chose over Presses Universitaires de France after being rejected by Gallimard. In 1964, a heavily abridged version was published as a mass market paperback, then translated into English for publication the following year as "Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason". "Folie et déraison" received a mixed reception in France and in foreign journals focusing on French affairs. Although it was critically acclaimed by Maurice Blanchot, Michel Serres, Roland Barthes, Gaston Bachelard, and Fernand Braudel, it was largely ignored by the leftist press, much to Foucault's disappointment. It was notably criticised for advocating metaphysics by young philosopher Jacques Derrida in a March 1963 lecture at the University of Paris. Responding with a vicious retort, Foucault criticised Derrida's interpretation of René Descartes. The two remained bitter rivals until reconciling in 1981. In the English-speaking world, the work became a significant influence on the anti-psychiatry movement during the 1960s; Foucault took a mixed approach to this, associating with a number of anti-psychiatrists but arguing that most of them misunderstood his work. Foucault's secondary thesis (), written in Hamburg between 1959 and 1960, was a translation and commentary on German philosopher Immanuel Kant's "Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View" (1798); the thesis was titled "Introduction à l"Anthropologie"." Largely consisting of Foucault's discussion of textual dating—an "archaeology of the Kantian text"—he rounded off the thesis with an evocation of Nietzsche, his biggest philosophical influence. This work's "rapporteur" was Foucault's old tutor and then-director of the ENS, Hyppolite, who was well acquainted with German philosophy. After both theses were championed and reviewed, he underwent his public defense of his doctoral thesis ("soutenance de thèse") on 20 May 1961. The academics responsible for reviewing his work were concerned about the unconventional nature of his major thesis; reviewer Henri Gouhier noted that it was not a conventional work of history, making sweeping generalisations without sufficient particular argument, and that Foucault clearly "thinks in allegories". They all agreed however that the overall project was of merit, awarding Foucault his doctorate "despite reservations." University of Clermont-Ferrand, "The Birth of the Clinic", and "The Order of Things": 1960–1966. In October 1960, Foucault took a tenured post in philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, commuting to the city every week from Paris, where he lived in a high-rise block on the rue du Dr Finlay. Responsible for teaching psychology, which was subsumed within the philosophy department, he was considered a "fascinating" but "rather traditional" teacher at Clermont. The department was run by Jules Vuillemin, who soon developed a friendship with Foucault. Foucault then took Vuillemin's job when the latter was elected to the Collège de France in 1962. In this position, Foucault took a dislike to another staff member whom he considered stupid: Roger Garaudy, a senior figure in the Communist Party. Foucault made life at the university difficult for Garaudy, leading the latter to transfer to Poitiers. Foucault also caused controversy by securing a university job for his lover, the philosopher Daniel Defert, with whom he retained a non-monogamous relationship for the rest of his life. Foucault maintained a keen interest in literature, publishing reviews in literary journals, including "Tel Quel" and "Nouvelle Revue Française", and sitting on the editorial board of "Critique". In May 1963, he published a book devoted to poet, novelist, and playwright Raymond Roussel. It was written in under two months, published by Gallimard, and was described by biographer David Macey as "a very personal book" that resulted from a "love affair" with Roussel's work. It was published in English in 1983 as "Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel". Receiving few reviews, it was largely ignored. That same year he published a sequel to " Folie et déraison", titled "Naissance de la Clinique", subsequently translated as "The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception". Shorter than its predecessor, it focused on the changes that the medical establishment underwent in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Like his preceding work, "Naissance de la Clinique" was largely critically ignored, but later gained a cult following. It was of interest within the field of medical ethics, as it considered the ways in which the history of medicine and hospitals, and the training that those working within them receive, bring about a particular way of looking at the body: the 'medical gaze'. Foucault was also selected to be among the "Eighteen Man Commission" that assembled between November 1963 and March 1964 to discuss university reforms that were to be implemented by Christian Fouchet, the Gaullist Minister of National Education. Implemented in 1967, they brought staff strikes and student protests. In April 1966, Gallimard published Foucault's "Les Mots et les choses" ("Words and Things"), later translated as "The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences". Exploring how man came to be an object of knowledge, it argued that all periods of history have possessed certain underlying conditions of truth that constituted what was acceptable as scientific discourse. Foucault argues that these conditions of discourse have changed over time, from one period's episteme to another. Although designed for a specialist audience, the work gained media attention, becoming a surprise bestseller in France. Appearing at the height of interest in structuralism, Foucault was quickly grouped with scholars such as Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes, as the latest wave of thinkers set to topple the existentialism popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre. Although initially accepting this description, Foucault soon vehemently rejected it. Foucault and Sartre regularly criticised one another in the press. Both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir attacked Foucault's ideas as "bourgeois", while Foucault retaliated against their Marxist beliefs by proclaiming that "Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish exists in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else." University of Tunis and Vincennes: 1966–1970. In September 1966, Foucault took a position teaching psychology at the University of Tunis in Tunisia. His decision to do so was largely because his lover, Defert, had been posted to the country as part of his national service. Foucault moved a few kilometres from Tunis, to the village of Sidi Bou Saïd, where fellow academic Gérard Deledalle lived with his wife. Soon after his arrival, Foucault announced that Tunisia was "blessed by history", a nation which "deserves to live forever because it was where Hannibal and St. Augustine lived." His lectures at the university proved very popular, and were well attended. Although many young students were enthusiastic about his teaching, they were critical of what they believed to be his right-wing political views, viewing him as a "representative of Gaullist technocracy", even though he considered himself a leftist. Foucault was in Tunis during the anti-government and pro-Palestinian riots that rocked the city in June 1967, and which continued for a year. Although highly critical of the violent, ultra-nationalistic and anti-semitic nature of many protesters, he used his status to try to prevent some of his militant leftist students from being arrested and tortured for their role in the agitation. He hid their printing press in his garden, and tried to testify on their behalf at their trials, but was prevented when the trials became closed-door events. While in Tunis, Foucault continued to write. Inspired by a correspondence with the surrealist artist René Magritte, Foucault started to write a book about the impressionist artist Édouard Manet, but never completed it. In 1968, Foucault returned to Paris, moving into an apartment on the Rue de Vaugirard. After the May 1968 student protests, Minister of Education Edgar Faure responded by founding new universities with greater autonomy. Most prominent of these was the Centre Expérimental de Vincennes in Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris. A group of prominent academics were asked to select teachers to run the centre's departments, and Canguilheim recommended Foucault as head of the Philosophy Department. Becoming a tenured professor of Vincennes, Foucault's desire was to obtain "the best in French philosophy today" for his department, employing Michel Serres, Judith Miller, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, François Regnault, Henri Weber, Étienne Balibar, and François Châtelet; most of them were Marxists or ultra-left activists. Lectures began at the university in January 1969, and straight away its students and staff, including Foucault, were involved in occupations and clashes with police, resulting in arrests. In February, Foucault gave a speech denouncing police provocation to protesters at the Maison de la Mutualité. Such actions marked Foucault's embrace of the ultra-left, undoubtedly influenced by Defert, who had gained a job at Vincennes' sociology department and who had become a Maoist. Most of the courses at Foucault's philosophy department were Marxist-Leninist oriented, although Foucault himself gave courses on Nietzsche, "The end of Metaphysics", and "The Discourse of Sexuality", which were highly popular and over-subscribed. While the right-wing press was heavily critical of this new institution, new Minister of Education Olivier Guichard was angered by its ideological bent and the lack of exams, with students being awarded degrees in a haphazard manner. He refused national accreditation of the department's degrees, resulting in a public rebuttal from Foucault. Later life (1970–1984). Collège de France and "Discipline and Punish": 1970–1975. Foucault desired to leave Vincennes and become a fellow of the prestigious Collège de France. He requested to join, taking up a chair in what he called the "history of systems of thought," and his request was championed by members Dumézil, Hyppolite, and Vuillemin. In November 1969, when an opening became available, Foucault was elected to the Collège, though with opposition by a large minority. He gave his inaugural lecture in December 1970, which was subsequently published as "L'Ordre du discours" ("The Discourse of Language"). He was obliged to give 12 weekly lectures a year—and did so for the rest of his life—covering the topics that he was researching at the time; these became "one of the events of Parisian intellectual life" and were repeatedly packed out events. On Mondays, he also gave seminars to a group of students; many of them became a "Foulcauldian tribe" who worked with him on his research. He enjoyed this teamwork and collective research, and together they published a number of short books. Working at the Collège allowed him to travel widely, giving lectures in Brazil, Japan, Canada, and the United States over the next 14 years. In 1970 and 1972, Foucault served as a professor in the French Department of the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York. In May 1971, Foucault co-founded the Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons (GIP) along with historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet and journalist Jean-Marie Domenach. The GIP aimed to investigate and expose poor conditions in prisons and give prisoners and ex-prisoners a voice in French society. It was highly critical of the penal system, believing that it converted petty criminals into hardened delinquents. The GIP gave press conferences and staged protests surrounding the events of the Toul prison riot in December 1971, alongside other prison riots that it sparked off; in doing so it faced a police crackdown and repeated arrests. The group became active across France, with 2,000 to 3,000, members, but disbanded before 1974. Also campaigning against the death penalty, Foucault co-authored a short book on the case of the convicted murderer Pierre Rivière. After his research into the penal system, Foucault published "Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison" ("Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison") in 1975, offering a history of the system in western Europe. In it, Foucault examines the penal evolution away from corporal and capital punishment to the penitentiary system that began in Europe and the United States around the end of the 18th century. Biographer Didier Eribon described it as "perhaps the finest" of Foucault's works, and it was well received. Foucault was also active in anti-racist campaigns; in November 1971, he was a leading figure in protests following the perceived racist killing of Arab migrant Djellali Ben Ali. In this he worked alongside his old rival Sartre, the journalist Claude Mauriac, and one of his literary heroes, Jean Genet. This campaign was formalised as the Committee for the Defence of the Rights of Immigrants, but there was tension at their meetings as Foucault opposed the anti-Israeli sentiment of many Arab workers and Maoist activists. At a December 1972 protest against the police killing of Algerian worker Mohammad Diab, both Foucault and Genet were arrested, resulting in widespread publicity. Foucault was also involved in founding the Agence de Press-Libération (APL), a group of leftist journalists who intended to cover news stories neglected by the mainstream press. In 1973, they established the daily newspaper "Libération", and Foucault suggested that they establish committees across France to collect news and distribute the paper, and advocated a column known as the "Chronicle of the Workers' Memory" to allow workers to express their opinions. Foucault wanted an active journalistic role in the paper, but this proved untenable, and he soon became disillusioned with "Libération", believing that it distorted the facts; he did not publish in it until 1980. In 1975 he had a LSD experience with Simeon Wade and Michael Stoneman in Death Valley, California and later wrote "it was the greatest experience of his life, and that it profoundly changed his life and his work". In front of Zabriskie Point they took LSD while listening to a well-prepared music program: Richard Strauss's "Four Last Songs", followed by Charles Ives's "Three Places in New England", ending with a few avant-garde pieces by Stockhausen. According to Wade, as soon as he came back to Paris, Foucault scrapped the second History of Sexuality's manuscript, and totally rethought the whole project. "The History of Sexuality" and Iranian Revolution: 1976–1979. In 1976, Gallimard published Foucault's "Histoire de la sexualité: la volonté de savoir" ("The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge"), a short book exploring what Foucault called the "repressive hypothesis". It revolved largely around the concept of power, rejecting both Marxist and Freudian theory. Foucault intended it as the first in a seven-volume exploration of the subject. "Histoire de la sexualité" was a best-seller in France and gained positive press, but lukewarm intellectual interest, something that upset Foucault, who felt that many misunderstood his hypothesis. He soon became dissatisfied with Gallimard after being offended by senior staff member Pierre Nora. Along with Paul Veyne and François Wahl, Foucault launched a new series of academic books, known as "Des travaux" ("Some Works"), through the company Seuil, which he hoped would improve the state of academic research in France. He also produced introductions for the memoirs of Herculine Barbin and "My Secret Life". Foucault's "Histoire de la Sexualité: la volonté de savoir" concentrates on the relation between truth and sex. He defines truth as a system of ordered procedures for the production, distribution, regulation, circulation, and operation of statements. Through this system of truth, power structures are created and enforced. Though Foucault's definition of truth may differ from other sociologists before and after him, his work with truth in relation to power structures, such as sexuality, has left a profound mark on social science theory. In his work, he examines the heightened curiosity regarding sexuality that induced a "world of perversion" during the elite, capitalist 18th and 19th century in the western world. According to Foucault in "History of Sexuality", society of the modern age is symbolized by the conception of sexual discourses and their union with the system of truth. In the "world of perversion", including extramarital affairs, homosexual behavior, and other such sexual promiscuities, Foucault concludes that sexual relations of the kind are constructed around producing the truth. Sex became not only a means of pleasure, but an issue of truth. Sex is what confines one to darkness, but also what brings one to light. Similarly, in "The History of Sexuality", society validates and approves people based on how closely they fit the discursive mold of sexual truth. As Foucault reminds us, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Church was the epitome of power structure within society. Thus, many aligned their personal virtues with those of the Church, further internalizing their beliefs on the meaning of sex. However, those who unify their sexual relation to the truth become decreasingly obliged to share their internal views with those of the Church. They will no longer see the arrangement of societal norms as an effect of the Church's deep-seated power structure. Foucault remained a political activist, focusing on protesting government abuses of human rights around the world. He was a key player in the 1975 protests against the Spanish government to execute 11 militants sentenced to death without fair trial. It was his idea to travel to Madrid with six others to give a press conference there; they were subsequently arrested and deported back to Paris. In 1977, he protested the extradition of Klaus Croissant to West Germany, and his rib was fractured during clashes with riot police. In July that year, he organised an assembly of Eastern Bloc dissidents to mark the visit of Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev to Paris. In 1979, he campaigned for Vietnamese political dissidents to be granted asylum in France. In 1977, Italian newspaper "Corriere della sera" asked Foucault to write a column for them. In doing so, in 1978 he travelled to Tehran in Iran, days after the Black Friday massacre. Documenting the developing Iranian Revolution, he met with opposition leaders such as Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari and Mehdi Bazargan, and discovered the popular support for Islamism. Returning to France, he was one of the journalists who visited the Ayatollah Khomeini, before visiting Tehran. His articles expressed awe of Khomeini's Islamist movement, for which he was widely criticised in the French press, including by Iranian expatriates. Foucault's response was that Islamism was to become a major political force in the region, and that the West must treat it with respect rather than hostility. In April 1978, Foucault traveled to Japan, where he studied Zen Buddhism under Omori Sogen at the Seionji temple in Uenohara. Final years: 1980–1984. Although remaining critical of power relations, Foucault expressed cautious support for the Socialist Party government of François Mitterrand following its electoral victory in 1981. But his support soon deteriorated when that party refused to condemn the Polish government's crackdown on the 1982 demonstrations in Poland orchestrated by the Solidarity trade union. He and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu authored a document condemning Mitterrand's inaction that was published in "Libération", and they also took part in large public protests on the issue. Foucault continued to support Solidarity, and with his friend Simone Signoret traveled to Poland as part of a Médecins du Monde expedition, taking time out to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp. He continued his academic research, and in June 1984 Gallimard published the second and third volumes of "Histoire de la sexualité". Volume two, "L'Usage des plaisirs", dealt with the "techniques of self" prescribed by ancient Greek pagan morality in relation to sexual ethics, while volume three, "Le Souci de soi", explored the same theme in the Greek and Latin texts of the first two centuries CE. A fourth volume, "Les Aveux de la chair", was to examine sexuality in early Christianity, but it was not finished. In October 1980, Foucault became a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, giving the Howison Lectures on "Truth and Subjectivity", while in November he lectured at the Humanities Institute at New York University. His growing popularity in American intellectual circles was noted by "Time" magazine, while Foucault went on to lecture at UCLA in 1981, the University of Vermont in 1982, and Berkeley again in 1983, where his lectures drew huge crowds. Foucault spent many evenings in the San Francisco gay scene, frequenting sado-masochistic bathhouses, engaging in unprotected sex. He praised sado-masochistic activity in interviews with the gay press, describing it as "the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously." Foucault contracted HIV and eventually developed AIDS. Little was known of the virus at the time; the first cases had only been identified in 1980. Foucault initially referred to AIDS as a "dreamed-up disease". In summer 1983, he developed a persistent dry cough, which concerned friends in Paris, but Foucault insisted it was just a pulmonary infection. Only when hospitalized was Foucault correctly diagnosed; treated with antibiotics, he delivered a final set of lectures at the Collège de France. Foucault entered Paris' Hôpital de la Salpêtrière—the same institution that he had studied in "Madness and Civilisation"—on 10 June 1984, with neurological symptoms complicated by sepsis. He died in the hospital on 25 June. Death. On 26 June 1984, "Libération" announced Foucault's death, mentioning the rumour that it had been brought on by AIDS. The following day, "Le Monde" issued a medical bulletin cleared by his family that made no reference to HIV/AIDS. On 29 June, Foucault's "la levée du corps" ceremony was held, in which the coffin was carried from the hospital morgue. Hundreds attended, including activists and academic friends, while Gilles Deleuze gave a speech using excerpts from "The History of Sexuality". His body was then buried at Vendeuvre-du-Poitou in a small ceremony. Soon after his death, Foucault's partner Daniel Defert founded the first national HIV/AIDS organisation in France, AIDES; a play on the French language word for "help" ("aide") and the English language acronym for the disease. On the second anniversary of Foucault's death, Defert publicly revealed that Foucault's death was AIDS-related in "The Advocate". Personal life. Foucault's first biographer, Didier Eribon, described the philosopher as "a complex, many-sided character", and that "under one mask there is always another". He also noted that he exhibited an "enormous capacity for work". At the ENS, Foucault's classmates unanimously summed him up as a figure who was both "disconcerting and strange" and "a passionate worker". As he aged, his personality changed: Eribon noted that while he was a "tortured adolescent", post-1960, he had become "a radiant man, relaxed and cheerful", even being described by those who worked with him as a dandy. He noted that in 1969, Foucault embodied the idea of "the militant intellectual". Foucault was an atheist. He loved classical music, particularly enjoying the work of Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and became known for wearing turtleneck sweaters. After his death, Foucault's friend Georges Dumézil described him as having possessed "a profound kindness and goodness", also exhibiting an "intelligence [that] literally knew no bounds." His life-partner Daniel Defert inherited his estate, whose archive was sold to the France's national library, for €3.8m ($4.5m, April 2021). Politics. Politically, Foucault was a leftist throughout much of his life, though his particular stance within the left often changed. In the early 1950s, while never adopting an orthodox Marxist viewpoint, Foucault had been a member of the French Communist Party, leaving the party after three years as he expressed disgust in the prejudice within its ranks against Jews and homosexuals. After spending some time working in Poland, governed at the time as a socialist state by the Polish United Workers' Party, he became further disillusioned with communist ideology. As a result, in the early 1960s, Foucault was considered to be "violently anticommunist" by some of his detractors, even though he was involved in leftist campaigns along with most of his students and colleagues. Underage sex and pedophilia. Foucault was a vocal proponent of consensual adult-child underage sex and pedophilia, considering them signs of liberation of both actors; he argued young children could give consent. In 1977, along with Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and other intellectuals, Foucault signed a petition to the French parliament calling for the decriminalization of all "consensual" sexual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen, the age of consent in France. He also wrote an open letter in the "Le Monde" in defense of three convicted pedophiles. In the second and third volumes of Foucault’s "History of Sexuality", pederasty and “the possibility of the love for boys” serve a “foundational role”. HIV. Two years before his own diagnosis, Foucault expressed denial of HIV, suggesting an ideological motivation behind its correlation with minority groups, especially that with the LGBT community, of which he was a member himself. A frequent visitor of gay saunas and S&M clubs, Foucault's promiscuous sexual practices were criticized for imposing an overall higher risk of HIV transmission, being described as bugchasing and, more controversially, intentional transmission of AIDS. Philosophical work. Foucault's colleague Pierre Bourdieu summarized the philosopher's thought as "a long exploration of transgression, of going beyond social limits, always inseparably linked to knowledge and power." Philosopher Philip Stokes of the University of Reading noted that overall, Foucault's work was "dark and pessimistic." Though it does, however, leave some room for optimism, in that it illustrates how the discipline of philosophy can be used to highlight areas of domination. In doing so, as Stokes claimed, the ways in which we are being dominated become better understood, so that we may strive to build social structures that minimise this risk of domination. In all of this development there had to be close attention to detail; it is the detail which eventually individualizes people. Later in his life, Foucault explained that his work was less about analyzing power as a phenomenon than about trying to characterize the different ways in which contemporary society has expressed the use of power to "objectivise subjects." These have taken three broad forms: one involving scientific authority to classify and 'order' knowledge about human populations; the second has been to categorize and 'normalise' human subjects (by identifying madness, illness, physical features, and so on); and the third relates to the manner in which the impulse to fashion sexual identities and train one's own body to engage in routines and practices ends up reproducing certain patterns within a given society. Literature. In addition to his philosophical work, Foucault also wrote on literature. "Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel," published in 1963 and translated in English in 1986, is Foucault's only book-length work on literature. He described it as "by far the book I wrote most easily, with the greatest pleasure, and most rapidly." Foucault explores theory, criticism, and psychology with reference to the texts of Raymond Roussel, one of the first notable experimental writers. Foucault also gave a lecture responding to Roland Barthes' famous essay "The Death of the Author" titled "What Is an Author?" in 1969, later published in full. According to literary theoretician Kornelije Kvas, for Foucault, "denying the existence of a historical author on account of his/ her irrelevance for interpretation is absurd, for the author is a function of the text that organizes its sense." Theory of power. Foucault's analysis of power comes in two forms: empirical and theoretical. The empirical analyses concern themselves with historical (and modern) forms of power and how these emerged from previous forms of power. Foucault describes three types of power in his empirical analyses: "sovereign" power, "disciplinary" power, and "biopower". Foucault is generally critical of "theories" that try to give absolute answers to "everything." Therefore, he considered his own "theory" of power to be closer to a method than a typical "theory." According to Foucault, most people misunderstand power. For this reason, he makes clear that power cannot be completely described as: Foucault is not critical of considering these phenomena as "power", but claims that these theories of power cannot completely describe "all" forms of power. Foucault also claims that liberal definition of power has effectively hidden other forms of power to the extent that people have uncritically accepted them. Foucault's own theory of power begins on micro-level, with singular "force relations". Richard A. Lynch defines Foucault's concept of "force relation" as "whatever in one's social interactions that pushes, urges or compels one to do something." According to Foucault, force relations are an effect of difference, inequality or unbalance that exists in other forms of relationships (such as sexual or economic). Force, and power, is however not something that a person or group "holds" (such as in the sovereign definition of power), instead power is a complex group of forces that comes from "everything" and therefore exists everywhere. That relations of power always result from inequality, difference or unbalance also means that power always has a goal or purpose. Power comes in two forms: tactics and strategies. Tactics is power on the micro-level, which can for example be how a person chooses to express themselves through their clothes. Strategies on the other hand, is power on macro-level, which can be the state of fashion at any moment. Strategies consist of a combination of tactics. At the same time, power is non-subjective according to Foucault. This posits a paradox, according to Lynch, since "someone" has to exert power, while at the same time there can be no "someone" exerting this power. According to Lynch this paradox can be solved with two observations: According to Foucault, force relations are constantly changing, constantly interacting with other force relations which may weaken, strengthen or change one another. Foucault writes that power always includes resistance, which means there is always a possibility that power and force relations will change in some way. According to Richard A. Lynch, the purpose of Foucault's theory of power is to increase peoples' awareness of how power has shaped their way of being, thinking and acting, and by increasing this awareness making it possible for them to change their way of being, thinking and acting. Sovereign power. With "sovereign power" Foucault alludes to a power structure that is similar to a pyramid, where one person or a group of people (at the top of the pyramid) holds the power, while the "normal" (and oppressed) people are at the bottom of the pyramid. In the middle parts of the pyramid are the people who enforce the sovereign's orders. A typical example of sovereign power is absolute monarchy. In historical absolute monarchies, crimes had been considered a personal offense against the sovereign and his/her power. The punishment was often public and spectacular, partly to deter others from committing crimes, but also to reinstate the sovereign's power. This was however both expensive and ineffective – it led far too often to people sympathizing with the criminal. In modern times, when disciplinary power is dominant, criminals are instead subjected to various disciplinary techniques to "remold" the criminal into a "law abiding citizen". According to Chloë Taylor, a characteristic for sovereign power is that the sovereign has the right to take life, wealth, services, labor and products. The sovereign has a right to subtract – to take life, to enslave life, etc. – but not the right to control life in the way that later happens in disciplinary systems of power. According to Taylor, the form of power that the philosopher Thomas Hobbes is concerned about, is sovereign power. According to Hobbes, people are "free" so long they are not literally placed in chains. Disciplinary power. What Foucault calls "disciplinary power" aims to use bodies' skills as effectively as possible. The more useful the body becomes, the more obedient it also has to become. The purpose of this is not only to use the bodies' skills, but also prevent these skills from being used to revolt against the power. Disciplinary power has "individuals" as its object, target and instrument. According to Foucault, "individual" is however a construct created by disciplinary power. The disciplinary power's techniques create a "rational self-control", which in practice means that the disciplinary power is internalized and therefore doesn't continuously need external force. Foucault says that disciplinary power is primarily not an oppressing form of power, but rather so a productive form of power. Disciplinary power doesn't oppress interests or desires, but instead subjects bodies to reconstructed patterns of behavior to reconstruct their thoughts, desires and interests. According to Foucault this happens in factories, schools, hospitals and prisons. Disciplinary power creates a certain type of individual by producing new movements, habits and skills. It focuses on details, single movements, their timing and speed. It organizes bodies in time and space, and controls every movement for maximal effect. It uses rules, surveillance, exams and controls. The activities follow certain plans, whose purpose it is to lead the bodies to certain pre-determined goals. The bodies are also combined with each other, to reach a productivity that is greater than the sum of all bodies activities. Disciplinary power has according to Foucault been especially successful due to its usage of three technologies: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement and exams. By hierarchical observation, the bodies become constantly visible to the power. The observation is hierarchical since there is not a single observer, but rather so a "hierarchy" of observers. An example of this is mental asylums during the 19th century, when the psychiatrist was not the only observer, but also nurses and auxiliary staff. From these observations and scientific discourses, a norm is established and used to judge the observed bodies. For the disciplinary power to continue to exist, this judgement has to be normalized. Foucault mentions several characteristics of this judgement: (1) all deviations, even small ones, from correct behavior are punished, (2) repeated rule violations are punished extra, (3) exercises are used as a behavior correcting technique and punishment, (4) rewards are used together with punishment to establish a hierarchy of good and bad behavior/people, (5) rank/grades/etc. are used as punishment and reward. Examinations combine the hierarchical observation with judgement. Exams objectify and individualize the observed bodies by creating extensive documentation about every observed body. The purpose of the exams is therefore to gather further information about each individual, track their development and compare their results to the norm. According to Foucault, the "formula" for disciplinary power can be seen in philosopher Jeremy Bentham's plan for the "optimal prison": the panopticon. Such a prison consists of a circle-formed building where every cell is inhabited by only one prisoner. In every cell there are two windows – one to let in light from outside and one pointing to the middle of the circle-formed building. In this middle there is a tower where a guard can be placed to observe the prisoners. Since the prisoners will never be able to know whether they are being watched or not at a given moment, they will internalize the disciplinary power and regulate their own behavior ("as if" they were constantly being watched). Foucault says this construction (1) creates an individuality by separating prisoners from each other in the physical room, (2) since the prisoners cannot know if they are being watched at any given moment, they internalize the disciplinary power and regulate their own behavior as if they were always watched, (3) the surveillance makes it possible to create extensive documentation about each prisoner and their behavior. According to Foucault the panopticon has been used as a model also for other disciplinary institutions, such as mental asylums in the 19th century. F.W. Taylor's "The Principles of Scientific Management". Marcelo Hoffman posits that an example of disciplinary power can be seen in Frederick Winslow Taylor's book "The Principles of Scientific Management". Taylor's purpose was to increase the efficacy of workers by having their behavior controlled by the company's management. He mentions as an example an attempt to increase the amount of pig iron carried by each worker during a day from 12.5 tonnes to 47 tonnes, without causing the workers to strike. Here, Hoffman says, is a clear example of how the disciplinary power tries to make the body more obedient the more useful it becomes. Taylor describes that he started out with observing his 75 workers to pick out the most skilled workers. He had studied the workers history, character, habits and ambitions. Here is an example of how the disciplinary power creates an individuality. One of the selected workers, "Schmidt", was according to Taylor a man with high ambitions that valued a high salary. Schmidt accepted the terms given: He would earn 61% more if he agreed to obey without protest the orders given to him by an appointed instructor. Schmidt was thereafter observed and controlled in every detail of his working day – he was told when and how to work, when to rest, etc. According to Taylor, Schmidt never failed to obey during the three years during which he was subjected to this detailed control and higher workload. Another example mentioned by Taylor is taken from a different industry, where Taylor had calculated the "optimal" workload for each worker. There Taylor had developed a system where every worker was not only continuously observed, but also punished if they had failed to reach up to the daily quota the previous workday. Every day the workers received a yellow or white note at the end of each shift, where yellow notes were given to those who had not reached the daily quota. Those who were given yellow notes were then threatened with redeployment to a "working role better fit for their productive capacities", which according to Taylor effectively led the workers to work harder. According to Taylor, the workers who were given yellow notes were not immediately redeployed. Instead, Taylor writes that a "skilled teacher" were sent to teach the workers how to do the work properly. The teachers job was however not only to "teach" the workers how to work more effectively, but also to observe them and their working capacity. Besides this teacher, Taylor also describes that the workers were observed by others, such as administrators, managers, etc. Biopower. With "biopower" Foucault refers to power over "bios" (life) – power over populations. Biopower primarily rests on norms which are internalized by people, rather than external force. It encourages, strengthens, controls, observes, optimizes and organize the forces below it. Foucault has sometimes described biopower as separate from disciplinary power, but at other times he has described disciplinary power as an expression of biopower. Biopower can use disciplinary techniques, but in contrast to disciplinary power its target is populations rather than individuals. Biopower studies populations regarding (for example) number of births, life expectancy, public health, housing, migration, crime, which social groups are over-represented in deviations from the norm (regarding health, crime, etc.) and tries to adjust, control or eliminate these norm deviations. One example is the age distribution in a population. Biopower is interested in age distribution to compensate for future (or current) lacks of labor power, retirement homes, etc. Yet another example is sex: because sex is connected to population growth, sex and sexuality have been of great interest to biopower. On a disciplinary level, people who engaged in non-reproductive sexual acts have been treated for psychiatric diagnoses such as "perversion", "frigidity" and "sexual dysfunction". On a biopower-level, the usage of contraceptives has been studied, some social groups have (by various means) been encouraged to have children, while others (such as poor, sick, unmarried women, criminals or people with disability) have been discouraged or prevented from having children. In the era of biopower, death has become a scandal and a catastrophe, but despite this biopower has according to Foucault killed more people than any other form of power has ever done before it. Under sovereign power, the sovereign king could kill people to exert his power or start wars simply to extend his kingdom, but during the era of biopower wars have instead been motivated by an ambition to "protect life itself". Similar motivations has also been used for genocide. For example, Nazi Germany motivated its attempt to eradicate Jews, the mentally ill and disabled with the motivation that Jews were "a threat to the German health", and that the money spent on healthcare for mentally ill and disabled would be better spent on "viable Germans". Chloë Taylor also mentions the Iraq War was motivated by similar tenets. The motivation was at first that Iraq was thought to have weapons of mass destruction and connections to Al-Qaeda. However, when the Bush- and Blair-administrations didn't find any evidence to support either of these theories, the motivation for the war was changed. In the new motivation, the cause of the war was said to be that Saddam Hussein had committed crimes against his own population. Taylor means that in modern times, war has to be "concealed" under a rhetoric of humanitarian aid, despite the fact that these wars often cause humanitarian crises. During the 19th-century, slums were increasing in number and size across the western world. Criminality, illness, alcoholism and prostitution was common in these areas, and the middle class considered the people who lived in these slums as "unmoral" and "lazy". The middle class also feared that this underclass sooner or later would "take over" because the population growth was greater in these slums than it was in the middle class. This fear gave rise to the scientific study of eugenics, whose founder Francis Galton had been inspired by Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection. According to Galton, society was preventing natural selection by helping "the weak", thus causing a spread of the "negative qualities" into the rest of the population. Theory of the body and sexuality. According to Foucault, the body is not something objective that stands outside of history and culture. Instead, Foucault argues, the body has been and is continuously shaped by society and history – by work, diet, body ideals, exercise, medical interventions, etc. Foucault presents no "theory" of the body, but does write about it in "Discipline and Punish" as well as in "The History of Sexuality". Foucault was critical of all purely biological explanations of phenomena such as sexuality, madness and criminality. Further, Foucault argues, that the body is not sufficient as a basis for self-understanding and understanding of others. In "Discipline and Punish", Foucault shows how power and the body are tied together, for example by the disciplinary power primarily focusing on individual bodies and their behavior. Foucault argues that power, by manipulating bodies/behavior, also manipulates people's minds. Foucault turns the common saying "the body is the prison of the soul" and instead posits that "the soul is the prison of the body." According to Foucault, sexology has tried to exert itself as a "science" by referring to the material (the body). In contrast to this, Foucault argues that sexology is a pseudoscience, and that "sex" is a pseudo-scientific idea. For Foucault the idea of a natural, biologically grounded and fundamental sexuality is a normative historical construct that has also been used as an instrument of power. By describing sex as the biological and fundamental cause to peoples' gender identity, sexual identity and sexual behavior, power has effectively been able to normalize sexual and gendered behavior. This has made it possible to evaluate, pathologize and "correct" peoples' sexual and gendered behavior, by comparing bodies behaviors to the constructed "normal" behavior. For Foucault, a "normal sexuality" is as much of a construct as a "natural sexuality". Therefore, Foucault was also critical of the popular discourse that dominated the debate over sexuality during the 1960s and 1970s. During this time, the popular discourse argued for a "liberation" of sexuality from a cultural, moral and capitalistic oppression. Foucault, however, argues that peoples' opinions about and experiences of sexuality are "always" a result of cultural and power mechanisms. To "liberate" sexuality from one group of norms only means that another group of norms takes its place. This, however, does not mean that Foucault considers resistance to be futile. What Foucault argues for is rather that it is impossible to become completely free from power, and that there is simply no "natural" sexuality. Power always involves a dimension of resistance, and therefore also a possibility for change. Although Foucault considers it impossible to step outside of power-networks, it is always possible to change these networks or navigate them differently. According to Foucault, the body is not only an "obedient and passive object" that is dominated by discourses and power. The body is also the "seed" to resistance against dominant discourses and power techniques. The body is never fully compliant, and experiences can never fully be reduced to linguistic descriptions. There is always a possibility to experience something that is not possible to describe with words, and in this discrepancy there is also a possibility for resistance against dominant discourses. Foucault's view of the historical construction of the body has influenced many feminist and queer-theorists. According to Johanna Oksala, Foucault's influence on queer theory has been so great than he can be considered one of the founders of queer theory. The fundamental idea behind queer theory is that there is no natural fundament that lies behind identities such as gay, lesbian, heterosexual, etc. Instead these identities are considered cultural constructions that have been constructed through normative discourses and relations of power. Feminists have with the help of Foucault's ideas studied different ways that women form their bodies: through plastic surgery, diet, eating disorders, etc. Foucault's historization of sex has also affected feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, who used Foucault's theories about the relation between subject, power and sex to question gendered subjects. Butler follows Foucault by saying that there is no "true" gender behind gender identity that constitutes its biological and objective fundament. However, Butler is critical of Foucault. She argues Foucault "naively" presents bodies and pleasures as a ground for resistance against power, without extending his historization of sexuality to gendered subjects/bodies. Foucault has received criticism from other feminists, such as Susan Bordo and Kate Soper. Johanna Oksala argues that Foucault, by saying that sex/sexuality are constructed, doesn't deny the existence of sexuality. Oksala also argues that the goal of critical theories such as Foucault is not to liberate the body and sexuality from oppression, but rather to question and deny the identities that are posited as "natural" and "essential" by showing how these identities are historical and cultural constructions. Theory of subjectivity. Foucault considered his primary project to be the investigation of how people through history have been made into "subjects." Subjectivity, for Foucault, is not a state of being, but a practice – an active "being." According to Foucault, "the subject" has, by western philosophers, usually been considered as something given; natural and objective. On the contrary, Foucault considers subjectivity to be a construction created by power. Foucault talks of "assujettissement", which is a French term that for Foucault refers to a process where power creates subjects while also oppressing them using social norms. For Foucault "social norms" are standards that people are encouraged to follow, that are also used to compare and define people. As an example of "assujettissement", Foucault mentions "homosexual", a historically contingent type of subjectivity that was created by sexology. Foucault writes that sodomy was previously considered a serious sexual deviation, but a temporary one. Homosexuality, however, became a "species", a past, a childhood and a type of life. "Homosexuals" has by the same power that created this subjectivity been discriminated against, due to homosexuality being considered as a deviation from the "normal" sexuality. However, Foucault argues, the creation of a subjectivity such as "homosexuality" does not only have negative consequences for the people who are subjectivised – the subjectivity of homosexuality has also led to the creation of gay bars and the pride parade. According to Foucault, scientific discourses have played an important role in the disciplinary power system, by classifying and categorizing people, observing their behavior and "treating" them when their behavior has been considered "abnormal". He defines discourse as a form of oppression that does not require physical force. He identifies its production as "controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures", which are driven by individuals' aspiration of knowledge to create "rules" and "systems" that translate into social codes. Moreover, discourse creates a force that extends beyond societal institutions and could be found in social and formal fields such as health care systems, educational and law enforcement. The formation of these fields may seem to contribute to social development; however, Foucault warns against discourses' harmful aspects on society. Sciences such as psychiatry, biology, medicine, economy, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, ethnology, pedagogy and criminology have all categorized behaviors as rational, irrational, normal, abnormal, human, inhuman, etc. By doing so, they have all created various types of subjectivity and norms, which are then internalized by people as "truths". People have then adapted their behavior to get closer to what these sciences has labeled as "normal". For example, Foucault claims that psychological observation/surveillance and psychological discourses has created a type of psychology-centered subjectivity, which has led to people considering unhappiness a fault in their psychology rather than in society. This has also, according to Foucault, been a way for society to resist criticism – criticism against society has been turned against the individual and their psychological health. Self-constituting subjectivity. According to Foucault, subjectivity is not necessarily something that is forced upon people externally – it is also something that is established in a person's relation to themselves. This can, for example, happen when a person is trying to "find themselves" or "be themselves", something Edward McGushin describes as a typical modern activity. In this quest for the "true self", the self is established in two levels: as a passive object (the "true self" that is searched for) and as an active "searcher". The ancient Cynics and the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche posited that the "true self" can only be found by going through great hardship and/or danger. The ancient Stoics and 17th-century philosopher René Descartes, however, argued that the "self" can be found by quiet and solitary introspection. Yet another example is Socrates, who argued that self-awareness can only be found by having debates with others, where the debaters question each other's foundational views and opinions. Foucault, however, argued that "subjectivity" is a process, rather than a state of being. As such, Foucault argued that there is no "true self" to be found. Rather so, the "self" is constituted/created in activities such as the ones employed to "find" the "self". In other words, exposing oneself to hardships and danger does not "reveal" the "true self", according to Foucault, but rather creates a particular type of self and subjectivity. However, according to Foucault the "form" for the subject is in great part already constituted by power, before these self-constituting practices are employed. Schools, workplaces, households, government institutions, entertainment media and the healthcare sector all, through disciplinary power, contribute to forming people into being particular types of subjects. Theory of freedom. Todd May defines Foucault's concept of freedom as: that which we can do of ourselves within our specific historical context. A condition for this, according to Foucault, is that we are aware of our situation and how it has been created/affected (and is still being affected) by power. According to May, two of the aspects of how power has shaped peoples′ way of being, thinking and acting is described in the books where Foucault describes disciplinary power and the history of sexuality. However, May argues, there will always be aspects of peoples′ formation that will be unknown to them, hence the constant necessity for the type of analyses that Foucault did. Foucault argues that the forces that have affected people can be changed; people always have the capacity to change the factors that limit their freedom. Freedom is thus not a state of being, but a practice – a way of being in relation to oneself, to others and to the world. According to Todd May Foucault's concept of freedom also includes constructing histories like the ones Foucault did about the history of disciplinary power and sexuality – histories that investigate and describe the forces that have influenced people into becoming who they are. From the knowledge that is reached from such investigations, people can thereafter decide which forces they believe are acceptable and which they consider to be intolerable and has to be changed. Freedom is for Foucault a type of "experimentation" with different "transformations". Since these experiments cannot be controlled completely, May argues they may lead to the reconstruction of intolerable power relations or the creation of new ones. Thus, May argues, it is always necessary to continue with such experimentation and Foucauldian analyses. Practice of critique. Foucault's "alternative" to the modern subjectivity is described by Cressida Heyes as "critique." For Foucault there are no "good" and "bad" forms of subjectivity, since they are all a result of power relations. In the same way, Foucault argues there are no "good" and "bad" norms. All norms and institutions are at the same time enabling as they are oppressing. Therefore, Foucault argues, it is always crucial to continue with the practice of "critique". Critique is for Foucault a practice that searches for the processes and events that led to our way of being – a questioning of who we "are" and how this "we" came to be. Such a "critical ontology of the present" shows that peoples′ current "being" is in fact a historically contingent, unstable and changeable construction. Foucault emphasizes that since the current way of being is not a necessity, it is also possible to change it. Critique also includes investigating how and when people are being enabled and when they are being oppressed by the current norms and institutions, finding ways to reduce limitations on freedom, resist normalization and develop new and different way of relating to oneself and others. Foucault argues that it is impossible to go beyond power relations, but that it is always possible to navigate power relations in a different way. "Epimeleia heautou", "care for the self". As an alternative to the modern "search" for the "true self", and as a part of "the work of freedom", Foucault discusses the antique Greek term epimeleia heautou, "care for the self" (ἐπιμέλεια ἑαυτοῦ). According to Foucault, among the ancient Greek philosophers, self-awareness was not a goal in itself, but rather something that was sought after in order to "care for oneself". Care for the self consists of what Foucault calls "the art of living" or "technologies of the self." The goal of these techniques was, according to Foucault, to transform oneself into a more ethical person. As an example of this, Foucault mentions meditation, the stoic activity of contemplating past and future actions and evaluating if these actions are in line with one's values and goals, and "contemplation of nature." Contemplation of nature is another stoic activity, that consists of reflecting on how "small" one's existence is when compared to the greater cosmos. Theory of knowledge. Foucault is described by Mary Beth Mader as an epistemological constructivist and historicist. Foucault is critical of the idea that humans can reach "absolute" knowledge about the world. A fundamental goal in many of Foucault's works is to show how that which has traditionally been considered as absolute, universal and true in fact are historically contingent. To Foucault, even the idea of absolute knowledge is a historically contingent idea. This does however not lead to epistemological nihilism; rather, Foucault argues that we "always begin anew" when it comes to knowledge. At the same time Foucault is critical of modern western philosophy for lacking "spirituality". With "spirituality" Foucault refers to a certain type of ethical being, and the processes that lead to this state of being. Foucault argues that such a spirituality was a natural part of the ancient Greek philosophy, where knowledge was considered as something that was only accessible to those that had an ethical character. According to Foucault this changed in the "cartesian moment", the moment when René Descartes reached the "insight" that self-awareness was something given (Cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am"), and from this "insight" Descartes drew conclusions about God, the world, and knowledge. According to Foucault, since Descartes knowledge has been something separate from ethics. In modern times, Foucault argues, anyone can reach "knowledge", as long as they are rational beings, educated, willing to participate in the scientific community and use a scientific method. Foucault is critical of this "modern" view of knowledge. Foucault describes two types of "knowledge": "savoir" and "connaissance", two French terms that both can be translated as "knowledge" but with separate meanings for Foucault. By "savoir" Foucault is referring to a process where subjects are created, while at the same time these subjects also become objects for knowledge. An example of this can be seen in criminology and psychiatry. In these sciences, subjects such as "the rational person", "the mentally ill person", "the law abiding person", "the criminal", etc. are created, and these sciences center their attention and knowledge on these subjects. The knowledge about these subjects is "connaissance", while the process in which subjects and knowledge is created is "savoir". A similar term in Foucaults corpus is "pouvoir/savoir" (power/knowledge). With this term Foucault is referring to a type of knowledge that is considered "common sense", but that is created and withheld in that position (as "common sense") by power. The term power/knowledge comes from Jeremy Bentham's idea that panopticons wouldn't only be prisons, but would be used for experiments where the criminals′ behaviour would be studied. Power/knowledge thus refers to forms of power where the power compares individuals, measures differences, establishes a norm and then forces this norm unto the subjects. This is especially successful when the established norm is internalized and institutionalized (by "institutionalized" Foucault refers to when the norm is omnipresent). Because then, when the norm is internalized and institutionalized, it has effectively become a part of peoples' "common sense" – the "obvious", the "given", the "natural". When this has happened, this "common sense" also affects the explicit knowledge (scientific knowledge), Foucault argues. Ellen K. Feder states that the premise "the world consists of women and men" is an example of this. This premise, Feder argues, has been considered "common sense", and has led to the creation of the psychiatric diagnosis gender identity disorder (GID). For example, during the 1970s, children with behavior that was not considered appropriate for their gender was diagnosed with GID. The treatment then consisted of trying to make the child adapt to the prevailing gender norms. Feder argues that this is an example of power/knowledge since psychiatry, from the "common sense" premise "the world consists of women and men" (a premise which is upheld in this status by power), created a new diagnosis, a new type of subject and a whole body of knowledge surrounding this new subject. Influence and reception. Foucault's works have exercised a powerful influence over numerous humanistic and social scientific disciplines as one of the most influential and controversial scholars of the post-World War II period. According to a London School of Economics' analysis in 2016, his works "Discipline and Punish" and "The History of Sexuality" were among the 25 most cited books in the social sciences of all time, at just over 100,000 citations. In 2007, Foucault was listed as the single most cited scholar in the humanities by the "ISI Web of Science" among a large quantity of French philosophers, the compilation's author commenting that "What this says of modern scholarship is for the reader to decide—and it is imagined that judgments will vary from admiration to despair, depending on one's view". According to Gary Gutting, Foucault's "detailed historical remarks on the emergence of disciplinary and regulatory biopower have been widely influential." Leo Bersani wrote that:"[Foucault] is our most brilliant philosopher of power. More originally than any other contemporary thinker, he has attempted to define the historical constraints under which we live, at the same time that he has been anxious to account for—if possible, even to locate—the points at which we might resist those constraints and counter some of the moves of power. In the present climate of cynical disgust with the exercise of political power, Foucault's importance can hardly be exaggerated." Foucault's work on "biopower" has been widely influential within the disciplines of philosophy and political theory, particularly for such authors as Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt. His discussions on power and discourse have inspired many critical theorists, who believe that Foucault's analysis of power structures could aid the struggle against inequality. They claim that through discourse analysis, hierarchies may be uncovered and questioned by way of analyzing the corresponding fields of knowledge through which they are legitimated. This is one of the ways that Foucault's work is linked to critical theory. His work "Discipline and Punish" influenced his friend and contemporary Gilles Deleuze, who published the paper "Postscript on the Societies of Control", praising Foucault's work but arguing that contemporary western society has in fact developed from a 'disciplinary society' into a 'society of control'. Deleuze went on to publish a book dedicated to Foucault's thought in 1988 under the title "Foucault". Foucault's discussions of the relationship between power and knowledge has influenced postcolonial critiques in explaining the discursive formation of colonialism, particularly in Edward Said's work "Orientalism." Foucault's work has been compared to that of Erving Goffman by the sociologist Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Soren Kristiansen, who list Goffman as an influence on Foucault. Foucault's writings, particularly "The History of Sexuality", have also been very influential in feminist philosophy and queer theory, particularly the work of the major Feminist scholar Judith Butler due to his theories regarding the genealogy of maleness and femaleness, power, sexuality, and bodies. Critiques and engagements. Crypto-normativity. A prominent critique of Foucault's thought concerns his refusal to propose positive solutions to the social and political issues that he critiques. Since no human relation is devoid of power, freedom becomes elusive—even as an ideal. This stance which critiques normativity as socially constructed and contingent, but which relies on an implicit norm to mount the critique led philosopher Jürgen Habermas to describe Foucault's thinking as "crypto-normativist", covertly reliant on the very Enlightenment principles he attempts to argue against. A similar critique has been advanced by Diana Taylor, and by Nancy Fraser who argues that "Foucault's critique encompasses traditional moral systems, he denies himself recourse to concepts such as 'freedom' and 'justice', and therefore lacks the ability to generate positive alternatives." Genealogy as historical method. The philosopher Richard Rorty has argued that Foucault's "archaeology of knowledge" is fundamentally negative, and thus fails to adequately establish any "new" theory of knowledge "per se". Rather, Foucault simply provides a few valuable maxims regarding the reading of history. Rorty writes: Foucault has frequently been criticized by historians for what they consider to be a lack of rigor in his analyses. For example, Hans-Ulrich Wehler harshly criticized Foucault in 1998. Wehler regards Foucault as a bad philosopher who wrongfully received a good response by the humanities and by social sciences. According to Wehler, Foucault's works are not only insufficient in their empiric historical aspects, but also often contradictory and lacking in clarity. For example, Foucault's concept of power is "desperatingly undifferentiated", and Foucault's thesis of a "disciplinary society" is, according to Wehler, only possible because Foucault does not properly differentiate between authority, force, power, violence and legitimacy. In addition, his thesis is based on a one-sided choice of sources (prisons and psychiatric institutions) and neglects other types of organizations as e.g. factories. Also, Wehler criticizes Foucault's "francocentrism" because he did not take into consideration major German-speaking theorists of social sciences like Max Weber and Norbert Elias. In all, Wehler concludes that Foucault is "because of the endless series of flaws in his so-called empirical studies ... an intellectually dishonest, empirically absolutely unreliable, crypto-normativist seducer of Postmodernism". Feminist critiques. Though American feminists have built on Foucault's critiques of the historical construction of gender roles and sexuality, some feminists note the limitations of the masculinist subjectivity and ethical orientation that he describes. Sexuality. The philosopher Roger Scruton argues in "Sexual Desire" (1986) that Foucault was incorrect to claim, in "The History of Sexuality", that sexual morality is culturally relative. He criticizes Foucault for assuming that there could be societies in which a "problematisation" of the sexual did not occur, concluding that, "No history of thought could show the 'problematisation' of sexual experience to be peculiar to certain specific social formations: it is characteristic of personal experience generally, and therefore of every genuine social order." Foucault's approach to sexuality, which he sees as socially constructed, has become influential in queer theory. Foucault's resistance to identity politics, and his rejection of the psychoanalytic concept of "object choice", stands at odds with some theories of queer identity. Social constructionism and human nature. Foucault is sometimes criticized for his prominent formulation of principles of social constructionism, which some see as an affront to the concept of truth. In Foucault's 1971 televised debate with Noam Chomsky, Foucault argued against the possibility of any fixed human nature, as posited by Chomsky's concept of innate human faculties. Chomsky argued that concepts of justice were rooted in human reason, whereas Foucault rejected the universal basis for a concept of justice. Following the debate, Chomsky was stricken with Foucault's total rejection of the possibility of a universal morality, stating "He struck me as completely amoral, I'd never met anyone who was so totally amoral [...] I mean, I liked him personally, it's just that I couldn't make sense of him. It's as if he was from a different species, or something." Education and authority. Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, while acknowledging that Foucault contributed to give a right of citizenship in cultural life to certain marginal and eccentric experiences (of sexuality, of cultural repression, of madness), asserts that his radical critique of authority was detrimental to education. Psychology of the self One of Foucault's claims regarding the subjectivity of the self has been disputed. Opposing Foucault's view of subjectivity, it is possibly more reasonable to assume that other factors, such as biological, environmental, and cultural are explanations for the self.

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Suzanne Lilar Baroness Suzanne Lilar (née "Suzanne Verbist"; 21 May 1901 – 11 December 1992) was a Flemish Belgian essayist, novelist, and playwright writing in French. She was the wife of the Belgian Minister of Justice Albert Lilar and mother of the writer Françoise Mallet-Joris and the art historian Marie Fredericq-Lilar. She was a member of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature from 1952 to 1992. Life. Lilar's mother was a middle school teacher, her father a railway station master. After having lived her youth in Ghent, and following a brief first marriage, she moved to Antwerp where she became the first woman lawyer, and where in 1929 she married the lawyer Albert Lilar who would later become a Minister of Justice and Minister of State (Liberal Party). She was the mother of the writer Françoise Mallet-Joris (b. 1930) and the 18th century art historian Marie Fredericq-Lilar (b. 1934). After the death of her husband in 1976, she left Antwerp and relocated to Brussels in 1977. Education. In 1919 Lilar attended the State University of Ghent where she studied philosophy and was the first woman to receive a Law degree in 1925. During her studies she attended a seminar on Hadewych. Her interest in the 13th century poet and mystic would play an important role in her later essays, plays and novels. Lilar's historico-cultural insight, her analysis of consciousness and emotion, her search for beauty and love are at the same time current and timeless. Literary career. Applying a strong intellect to her work through precise language, she was a thoroughly modern writer and feminist who nonetheless remained highly versed in many areas of traditional western thought (Encyclopædia Britannica). In 1956 Lilar succeeds Gustave Van Zype as member of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature. Her oeuvre has been translated in numerous languages. Early work. Lilar began her literary career as a journalist, reporting on Republican Spain for the newspaper "L'Indépendance belge" in 1931. She later became a playwright with "Le Burlador" (1946), an original reinterpretation of the myth of Don Juan from the female perspective that revealed a profound capacity for psychological analysis. She wrote two more plays, "Tous les chemins mènent au ciel" (1947), a theological drama set in a 14th-century convent, and "Le Roi lépreux" (1951), a neo-Pirandellian play about the Crusades. Critical essays. Her earliest essays are on the subject of the theatre. "Soixante ans de théâtre belge" (1952), originally published in New York City in 1950 as "The Belgian Theater since 1890", emphasizes the importance of a Flemish tradition. She followed this with "Journal de l'analogiste" (1954), in which the origin of the experience of beauty and poetry was guided by a path of analogies. A short essay "Théâtre et mythomanie" was published in 1958. Transcendence and metamorphosis are central to her seminal work "Le Couple" (1963), translated in 1965 by Jonathan Griffin as "Aspects of Love in Western Society." In writings on Rubens, the Androgyne or homosexuality in Ancient Greece, Lilar meditates on the role of the woman in conjugal love throughout the ages. Translated into Dutch in 1976, it includes an afterword by Marnix Gijsen. In the same vein she later wrote critical essays on Jean-Paul Sartre ("À propos de Sartre et de l'amour", 1967) and Simone de Beauvoir ("Le Malentendu du Deuxième Sexe", 1969). Autobiographical works, novels. Lilar wrote two autobiographical books, "Une Enfance gantoise" (1976) and "À la recherche d'une enfance" (1979), and two novels, both of which date from 1960, "Le Divertissement portugais" and "La Confession anonyme", a neoplatonic idealization of love filtered through personal experience. The Belgian director André Delvaux recreated this novel on film as "Benvenuta" in 1983, transposed as an intense examination of a tortured but exalted relationship between a young Belgian woman and her Italian lover. "Les Moments merveilleux" and "Journal en partie double, I & II" were published as part of "Cahiers Suzanne Lilar" (1986).

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Alexander Dobrokhotov Alexander Dobrokhotov (; born 8 September 1950) is a Russian philosopher, historian of philosophy, historian of culture, and university professor. He specialises in the history of Russian culture, history of philosophy, metaphysics, Russian philosophy, ancient and medieval philosophy, Kant and German Idealism, and philosophy of culture. Alexander Dobrokhotov is a leading Russian philosopher of culture and one of the founders of the Russian discipline within the humanities called ‘culturology’ (kulturologia). Education. From 1967 to 1972, Alexander Dobrokhotov was an undergraduate student in philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, Moscow State University. From 1972 to 1975, he was a graduate student in philosophy at the Department of Western Philosophy History, Faculty of Philosophy, at Moscow State University. In 1978, he defended his PhD dissertation (‘kandidatskaya’) titled 'Parmenides' Teachings on Being’. In 1990, he defended his second dissertation (‘doktorskaya’) titled 'The Category of Being in Ancient Philosophy of the Classical Period’. Academic Life. Alexander Dobrokhotov started his academic career as a historian of Ancient Greek Philosophy and as an interpreter of Parmenides' and Heraclitus’ theories of being. His studies resulted in several books, one of which, ‘The Category of Being in Classical West-European Philosophy’ (1986), summarises his main ideas. From 1988 to 1995, Dobrokhotov was the chair of the Department of Cultural History of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. From 1995 to 2009, Alexander Dobrokhotov was the chair of History and Theory of World Culture of the Faculty of Philosophy, Moscow State University. The chair was created in 1990. Many prominent Soviet and Russian scholars like Viacheslav Ivanov, Sergei Sergejewitsch Awerinzew, Aron Gurevich, Mikhail Gasparov, Georgii Knabe, Yeleazar Meletinsky, Vladimir Romanov, Tatiana Vasilieva, Nina Braginskaia, Vladimir Bibikhin have worked there. From 1995 to 2015, Alexander Dobrokhotov taught at the Graduate School of European Cultures (VSHEK) which is an international training and research centre at Russian State University for the Humanities (VSHEK was established in April 2007 and replaced the Institute of European Cultures). From 2009 until today, Alexander Dobrokhotov is also a professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE), at the School of Cultural Studies. He teaches various courses on philosophy, philosophy of culture, metaphysics and theology, history of Russian culture. In 2010, he became a tenured professor at HSE. Currently, Alexander Dobrokhotov is a member of the editorial board of Arbor Mundi, Transcultural Studies, and Studies in East European Thought. Today, Alexander Dobrokhotov is a leading Russian philosopher of culture and prominent scholar in culturology. He often appears on television and has taught a massive online course on Coursera. Philosophy. In late 1980s and early 1990s, the academic disciplinary landscape on the territory of the former Soviet Union underwent significant changes. Some disciplines based on Marxism–Leninism ceased to exist, and a number of new disciplines in the humanities and social sciences appeared. Among the new fields there was an approach towards culture within the Russian humanities which came to be known as ‘culturology’ (kulturologia). There have been many versions of this discipline, and Alexander Dobrokhotov became the founder of his own original version of culturology, based on the Kantian and Hegelian philosophical traditions and on the Russian philosophy on the Silver Age. He regards studies of culture as a combination of theoretical philosophy of culture on one hand, and empirical studies on the other hand. In his works on philosophy of culture, he argues that ‘Culture’ can be regarded as an independent regional of being, alongside ‘Nature’ and ‘Spirit’. He defines Culture as the universe of artefacts. The artefact is the result of an objectification of Spirit and an anthropomorphization of Nature. In this respect, culture mediates Nature and Spirit. Culture makes obsolete the ontological conflict between Nature and Spirit. In their place, two other ontological conflicts appear: the conflict between Nature and Culture, and between Culture and Spirit. Alexander Dobrokhotov further argues that Culture is not a mechanism of human adaptation to the natural environment, but is rather an ontological wholeness, with its own aim setting, or, in his terms, ‘teleologism’. Pure or transcendental forms set aims for culture. This idea stems from works by Plato, Leibniz, Kant, and Husserl. Each artefact of Culture is created in order to take its place within the ontological wholeness, and thus, alongside its concrete meaning or function, it also contains a latent interpretation of the wholeness. ‘How should the world look like so that I could be a part of it?’ — this is the question which each artefact answers. From this follows an empirical method which forms the foundation of the empirical discipline of culturology. This method involves reconstructing the ontological wholeness from the individual artefact. In other words, the method involves answering the question of how the world should look like so that the artefact could be a part of it. Furthermore, if the wholeness is the same for all its artefacts, an isomorphism of heterogeneous artefacts can be discovered. Hence, the main question of the empirical study of culture is ‘How can we reconcile the heterogeneity and isomorphism of cultural artefacts?’ In his numerous empirical studies of culture, Alexander Dobrokhotov demonstrates how his theory and method work. He reveals the underlying isomorphism in works by Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Pablo Picasso; in quantum mechanics and avant-garde in art; in the 18th-century philosophy of mind and the novel; in theology and Alfred Hitchcock’s films.

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Socrates Socrates (; "Sōkrátēs" ; – 399 BC) was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, and as being the first moral philosopher of the Western ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, he authored no texts, and is known chiefly through the accounts of classical writers composing after his lifetime, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. Other sources include the contemporaneous Antisthenes, Aristippus, and Aeschines of Sphettos. Aristophanes, a playwright, is the main contemporary author to have written plays mentioning Socrates during Socrates' lifetime, although a fragment of Ion of Chios' "Travel Journal" provides important information about Socrates' youth. Plato's dialogues are among the most comprehensive accounts of Socrates to survive from antiquity, from which Socrates has become renowned for his contributions to the fields of ethics and epistemology. It is this who lends his name to the concepts of Socratic irony and the Socratic method, or "elenchus." However, questions remain regarding the distinction between the real-life Socrates and Plato's portrayal of Socrates in his dialogues. Socrates exerted a strong influence on philosophers in later antiquity and in the modern era. Depictions of Socrates in art, literature and popular culture have made him one of the most widely known figures in the Western philosophical tradition. Socratic problem. As Socrates did not write down any of his teachings, secondary sources provide the only information on his life and thought. The sometimes contradictory nature of these sources is known as the "Socratic problem", or "the Socratic question". Plato and Xenophon's dialogues provide the main source of information on Socrates' life and thought. These writings are the "Sokratikoi logoi", or Socratic dialogues, which consist of reports of conversations apparently involving Socrates. As for discovering the real-life Socrates, the difficulty is that ancient sources are mostly philosophical or dramatic texts, apart from Xenophon. There are no straightforward histories, contemporary with Socrates, that dealt with his own time and place. A corollary of this is that sources that do mention Socrates do not necessarily claim to be historically accurate, and are often partisan. For instance, those who prosecuted and convicted Socrates have left no testament. Historians, therefore, face the challenge of reconciling the various evidence from the extant texts in order to attempt an accurate and consistent account of Socrates' life and work. The result of such an effort is not necessarily realistic, even if consistent. Two factors emerge from all sources pertaining to the character of Socrates: that he was “ugly” (at least as an older man), and had a brilliant intellect. He wore tattered clothes and went barefoot (the latter characteristic made its way into the play "The Clouds" by Aristophanes). He lived entirely within ancient Athens (at least from his late 30s, and other than when serving on military campaigns in Potidaea, Delium, etc.); he made no writings; and he was executed by being made to drink hemlock. Socrates as a figure. The character of Socrates as exhibited in "Apology", "Crito", "Phaedo" and "Symposium" concurs with other sources to an extent to which it seems possible to rely on the Platonic Socrates, as demonstrated in the dialogues, as a representation of the actual Socrates as he lived in history. At the same time, however, many scholars believe that in some works, Plato, being a literary artist, pushed his avowedly brightened-up version of "Socrates" far beyond anything the historical Socrates was likely to have done or said. Also, Xenophon, being a historian, is a more reliable witness to the historical Socrates. It is a matter of much debate over which Socrates it is whom Plato is describing at any given point—the historical figure, or Plato's fictionalization. As British philosopher Martin Cohen has put it, "Plato, the idealist, offers an idol [Socrates], a master figure, for philosophy. A Saint, a prophet of 'the Sun-God', a teacher condemned for his teachings as a heretic." It is also clear from other writings and historical artifacts, that Socrates was not simply a character, nor an invention, of Plato. The testimony of Xenophon and Aristotle, alongside some of Aristophanes' work (especially "The Clouds"), is useful in fleshing out a perception of Socrates beyond Plato's work. According to one source, the name (), has the meaning "whole, unwounded, safe" (the part of the name corresponding to , ) and "power" (the part of the name corresponding to , ). Socrates as a philosopher. The problem with discerning Socrates' philosophical views stems from the perception of contradictions in statements made by the "Socrates" in the different dialogues of Plato; in later dialogues Plato used the character, Socrates, to give voice to views that were his own. These contradictions produce doubt as to the actual philosophical doctrines of Socrates, within his milieu and as recorded by other individuals. Aristotle, in his "Magna Moralia", refers to Socrates in words which make it patent that the doctrine "virtue is knowledge" was held by Socrates. Within the "Metaphysics", Aristotle states Socrates was occupied with the search for moral virtues, being the "first to search for universal definitions for them". The problem of understanding Socrates as a philosopher is shown in the following: In Xenophon's "Symposium", Socrates is reported as saying he devotes himself only to what he regards as the most important art or occupation, that of discussing philosophy. However, in "The Clouds", Aristophanes portrays Socrates as running a Sophist school with Chaerephon. Also, in Plato's "Apology" and "Symposium", as well as in Xenophon's accounts, Socrates explicitly denies accepting payment for teaching. More specifically, in the "Apology", Socrates cites his poverty as proof that he is not a teacher. Two fragments are extant of the writings by the Pyrrhonist philosopher Timon of Phlius pertaining to Socrates. Both appear to be from Timon's "Silloi" in which Timon ridiculed and lampooned dogmatic philosophers. Biography. Sources. Details about the life of Socrates are derived from both contemporary sources, and later ancient period sources. Of the contemporary sources, the greater extent of information is taken from the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon (both devotees of Socrates), and the testaments of Antisthenes, Aristippus, and Aeschines of Sphettos, and the lesser from the plays of Aristophanes. Later ancient period sources include Aristoxenus, Apollodorus of Athens (alive during the second century BC), Cicero (alive 106–43 BC), and Diogenes Laërtius (alive probably in the earlier half of the third century AD). The sources are thought to have in part or wholly made use of the factual information of the life of Socrates available to each of them, to give their own interpretation of the nature of his teaching, giving rise to different versions in each case. For example, in Aristophanes' play "The Clouds", Socrates is made into a clown of sorts, particularly inclined toward "sophistry", who teaches his students how to bamboozle their way out of debt. However, since most of Aristophanes' works function as parodies, it is presumed that his characterization in this play was also not literal. In "Phaedo", which is the only attested source describing the death of Socrates, Plato is thought to have selected and omitted details to provide material for his argument for the existence of the liberation of the soul from the body, an argument he possessed from learning of the ideas of Pythagoras (born sometime after 606 and died sometime after 510 BC). Early life and relationships. The stated birth year of Socrates is an assumed date, or estimate, given that the dating of anything in ancient history is in part reliant on argument stemming from the inexact period "floruit" of individuals. Diogenes Laërtius stated Socrates birth date was "the sixth day of Thargelion, the day when the Athenians purify the city". Contemporaneous sources state he was born not very much later than sometime after the year 471, his date of birth is within the period of years ranging 470 to 469 BC, or within a range of 469 to 468 BC (corresponding to the fourth year of the 77th Olympiad). Socrates was born in Alopeke, and belonged to the tribe Antiochis. His father was Sophroniscus, a sculptor, or stonemason. His mother was a midwife named Phaenarete. In his 50s Socrates married Xanthippe, who is especially remembered for having an undesirable temperament. She bore for him three sons: Lamprocles, Sophroniscus and Menexenus; though Aristotle claimed that the latter two were his sons by another (presumably earlier) wife, Myrto, daughter of Lysimachus (a close friend of Socrates' father, which means Myrto is likely to have been roughly Socrates' age). Socrates was said to have been a stonemason, and there was a tradition in antiquity, not credited by modern scholarship, that Socrates crafted the statues of the Charites, which stood near the Acropolis until the 2nd century AD. Xenophon reports that because youths were not allowed to enter the Agora, they used to gather in workshops surrounding it. Socrates frequented these shops in order to converse with the merchants. Most notable among them was Simon the Shoemaker. Socrates was an active wrestler during his youth and into his adult years, although not a competitive one like his student Plato. Socrates frequented the wrestling schools and engaged in light wrestling as a form of physical exercise or to interact with some of his friends. Military service. For a time, Socrates fulfilled the role of hoplite, participating in the Peloponnesian War—a conflict which stretched intermittently over a period spanning 431 to 404 BC. Several of Plato's dialogues refer to Socrates' military service. In the monologue of the "Apology", Socrates states he was active for Athens in the battles of Amphipolis, Delium, and Potidaea. In the "Symposium", Alcibiades describes Socrates' valour in the battles of Potidaea and Delium, recounting how Socrates saved his life in the former battle (219e–221b). Socrates' valour at Potidaea is also mentioned in the beginning of the Charmides. Socrates had just returned from that battle where many Athenians died and Chaerephon runs up to him to ask about the battle. Socrates' exceptional service at Delium is also mentioned in the "Laches" by the General after whom the dialogue is named (181b). In the "Apology," Socrates compares his military service to his courtroom troubles, and says anyone on the jury who thinks he ought to retreat from philosophy must also think soldiers should retreat when it seems likely that they will be killed in battle. Epistates at the trial of the six commanders. During 406, he participated as a member of the "Boule". His tribe, the Antiochis, comprised the prytany on the day when it was debated what fate should befall the generals of the Battle of Arginusae, who had abandoned the slain as well as the survivors of foundered ships to pursue the defeated Spartan navy. According to Xenophon, Socrates was the Epistates for the debate, but Delebecque and Hatzfeld think this is an embellishment because Xenophon composed the information after Socrates' death. The generals were seen by some to have failed to uphold the most basic of duties, and the people decided upon capital punishment. However, when the prytany responded by refusing to vote on the issue, the people reacted with threats of death directed at the prytany itself. They relented, at which point Socrates alone as Epistates blocked the vote, which had been proposed by Callixeinus. The reason he gave was that "in no case would he act except in accordance with the law". The outcome of the trial was ultimately judged to be a miscarriage of justice, or "illegal", but, actually, Socrates' decision had no support from written statutory law, instead of being reliant on favouring a continuation of less strict and less formal nomos law. One of the generals executed was Pericles the Younger, son of Pericles by Aspasia of Miletus. Arrest of Leon. Plato's "Apology", parts 32c to 32d, describes how Socrates and four others were summoned to the Tholos, and told by representatives of the oligarchy of the Thirty (the oligarchy began ruling in 404 BC) to go to Salamis to arrest Leon the Salaminian, who was to be brought back to be subsequently executed. However, Socrates was the only one of the five men who chose not to go to Salamis as he was expected to, because he did not want to be involved in what he considered a crime and despite the risk of subsequent retribution from the tyrants. Trial and death. Causes. Socrates lived during the time of the transition from the height of the Athenian hegemony to its decline after being defeated by Sparta and its allies in the Peloponnesian War. At a time when Athens sought to stabilize and recover from its defeat, the Athenian public may have been entertaining doubts about democracy as an efficient form of government. Socrates appears to have been a critic of democracy, and some scholars interpret his trial as an expression of political infighting. Claiming loyalty to his city, Socrates clashed with the current course of Athenian politics and society. He praised Sparta, archrival to Athens, directly and indirectly in various dialogues. One of Socrates' purported offences to the city was his position as a social and moral critic. Rather than upholding the status quo and accepting the development of what he perceived as immorality within his region, Socrates questioned the collective notion of "might makes right" that he felt was common in Greece during this period. Plato refers to Socrates as the "gadfly" of the state (as the gadfly stings the horse into action, so Socrates stung various Athenians), insofar as he irritated some people with considerations of justice and the pursuit of goodness. According to Plato's "Apology", Socrates' life as the gadfly of Athens began when his friend Chaerephon asked the Oracle at Delphi if anyone were wiser than Socrates; the Oracle responded that no one was wiser. Socrates believed the Oracle's response was not correct, because he believed he possessed no wisdom whatsoever. He proceeded to test the riddle by approaching men considered wise by the people of Athens—statesmen, poets, and artisans—in order to refute the Oracle's pronouncement. Questioning them, however, Socrates concluded that while each man thought he knew a great deal and was wise, in fact, they knew very little and were not wise at all. So Socrates interpreted the meaning of the Oracle thus: while so-called wise men thought themselves wise and yet were not, he himself knew he was not wise at all, which, paradoxically, made him the wiser since he was the only person aware of his own ignorance. Socrates' paradoxical wisdom made the prominent Athenians he publicly questioned look foolish, turning them against him and leading to accusations of wrongdoing. Socrates defended his role as a gadfly until the end: at his trial when Socrates was asked to propose his own punishment, he suggested a wage paid by the government and free dinners for the rest of his life instead, to finance the time he spent as Athens' benefactor. Robin Waterfield suggests that Socrates was a voluntary scapegoat; his death was the purifying remedy for Athens' misfortunes. In this view, the token of appreciation for Asclepius (the Greek god for curing illness) – the cockerel that he speaks of to Crito – would represent a cure for Athens' ailments. However, because a cockerel was a common thanks-offering and of no great value, this interpretation has been disputed; Socrates may only have been asking Crito to remember to fulfill a vow taken for the sake of an (unnamed) friend who had recovered from illness. Trial. In 399 BC, Socrates went on trial and was subsequently found guilty of both corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens and of impiety ("asebeia", "not believing in the gods of the state"). As punishment, he was sentenced to death: the drinking of a mixture containing poison hemlock. Death. Socrates' death is described at the end of Plato's "Phaedo", although Plato was not himself present at the execution. As to the veracity of Plato's account of Socrates' death, it seems possible Plato emphasized certain factors while omitting others, as the "Phaedo" description does not describe progress of the action of the poison (Gill 1973) in concurrence with modern descriptions. Phaedo states, after drinking the poison, Socrates was instructed to walk around until his legs felt numb. After he lay down, the man who administered the poison pinched his foot and Socrates could no longer feel his legs. The numbness slowly crept up his body until it reached his heart. Socrates chose to cover his face during the execution (118 a6 Phaedo). According to "Phaedo" (61c–69e), Socrates stated that "[a]ll of philosophy is training for death". Last words. Socrates' last words are thought to be possibly sincere (J. Crooks 1998), or possibly ironic, in the sense that he was about to be "cured" of the sickness of mortality (C. Gill 1973). Socrates speaks his last words to Crito: There are several different translations: Refusal to escape. Socrates turned down Crito's pleas to attempt an escape from prison. Xenophon and Plato agree that Socrates had an opportunity to escape, as his followers were able to bribe the prison guards. There have been several suggestions offered as reasons why he chose to stay: The full reasoning behind his refusal to flee is the main subject of the "Crito". Inasmuch as Socrates drank hemlock willingly without complaint (having decided against fleeing), R.G. Frey (1978) has suggested that, in truth, Socrates chose to commit suicide. Philosophy. Socratic method. Perhaps his most important contribution to Western thought is his dialectic method of inquiry, known as the Socratic method or method of "elenchus", which he largely applied to the examination of key moral concepts such as the Good and Justice. It was first described by Plato in the "Socratic Dialogues". To solve a problem, it would be broken down into a series of questions, the answers to which gradually distill the answer a person would seek. The development and practice of this method is one of Socrates' most enduring contributions, and is a key factor in him earning his mantle as the father of political philosophy, ethics or moral philosophy, and as a figurehead of all the central themes in Western philosophy. The Socratic method has often been considered a defining element of American legal education. It also has been described as an important component of Cognitive behavioral therapy. To illustrate the use of the Socratic method, a series of questions are posed to help a person or group determine their underlying beliefs and the extent of their knowledge. The Socratic method is a "negative" method of hypothesis elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those that lead to contradictions. It was designed to force one to examine one's own beliefs and the validity of such beliefs. An alternative interpretation of the dialectic is that it is a method for direct perception of the Form of the Good. Philosopher Karl Popper describes the dialectic as "the art of intellectual intuition, of visualising the divine originals, the Forms or Ideas, of unveiling the Great Mystery behind the common man's everyday world of appearances." In a similar vein, French philosopher Pierre Hadot suggests that the dialogues are a type of spiritual exercise. Hadot writes that "in Plato's view, every dialectical exercise, precisely because it is an exercise of pure thought, subject to the demands of the Logos, turns the soul away from the sensible world, and allows it to convert itself towards the Good." Beliefs. The beliefs of Socrates, as distinct from those of Plato, are difficult to discern. Little in the way of concrete evidence exists to demarcate the two. The lengthy presentation of ideas given in most of the dialogues may be the ideas of Socrates himself, but which have been subsequently deformed or changed by Plato, and some scholars think Plato so adapted the Socratic style as to make the literary character and the philosopher himself impossible to distinguish. Others argue that Socrates did have his own theories and beliefs distinct from Plato. There is a degree of controversy inherent in the identifying of what these might have been, owing to the difficulty of separating Socrates from Plato and the difficulty of interpreting even the dramatic writings concerning Socrates. Consequently, distinguishing the philosophical beliefs of Socrates from those of Plato and Xenophon has not proven easy, so it must be remembered that what is attributed to Socrates might actually be more the specific concerns of these two thinkers instead. The matter is complicated because the historical Socrates seems to have been notorious for asking questions but not answering, claiming to lack wisdom concerning the subjects about which he questioned others. If anything in general can be said about the philosophical beliefs of Socrates, it is that he was morally, intellectually, and politically at odds with many of his fellow Athenians. When he is on trial for heresy and corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens, he uses his method of "elenchos" to demonstrate to the jurors that their moral values are wrong-headed. He tells them they are concerned with their families, careers, and political responsibilities when they ought to be worried about the "welfare of their souls". Socrates' assertion that the gods had singled him out as a divine emissary seemed to provoke irritation, if not outright ridicule. Socrates also questioned the Sophistic doctrine that arete (virtue) can be taught. He liked to observe that successful fathers (such as the prominent military general Pericles) did not produce sons of their own quality. Socrates argued that moral excellence was more a matter of divine bequest than parental nurture. This belief may have contributed to his lack of anxiety about the future of his own sons. Also, according to A. A. Long, "There should be no doubt that, despite his claim to know only that he knew nothing, Socrates had strong beliefs about the divine", and, citing Xenophon's "Memorabilia", 1.4, 4.3,: According to Xenophon, he was a teleologist who held that god arranges everything for the best. Socrates frequently says his ideas are not his own, but his teachers'. He mentions several influences: Prodicus the rhetor and Anaxagoras the philosopher. Perhaps surprisingly, Socrates claims to have been deeply influenced by two women besides his mother: he says that Diotima (cf. Plato's "Symposium"), a witch and priestess from Mantinea, taught him all he knows about "eros", or love; and that Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles, taught him the art of rhetoric. John Burnet argued that his principal teacher was the Anaxagorean Archelaus but his ideas were as Plato described them; Eric A. Havelock, on the other hand, did not accept the view that Socrates' view was identical with that of Archelaus, in large part due to the reason of such anomalies "and" contradictions that have surfaced and "post-dated his death." Paradoxes. Many of the beliefs traditionally attributed to the historical Socrates have been characterized as "paradoxical" because they seem to conflict with common sense. The following are among the so-called Socratic paradoxes: The term, "Socratic paradox" can also refer to a self-referential paradox, originating in Socrates' utterance, "what I do not know I do not think I know", often paraphrased as "I know that I know nothing." Knowledge. The statement "I know that I know nothing" is often attributed to Socrates, based on a statement in Plato's "Apology". The conventional interpretation of this is that Socrates' wisdom was limited to an awareness of his own ignorance. During the Academic Skeptic period of the Platonic Academy, the Academics based their philosophical skepticism on Socrates' comments in the "Phaedo", sections 64-67, in which Socrates discusses how knowledge is not accessible to mortals. Socrates considered virtuousness to require or consist of "phronēsis", "thought, sense, judgement, practical wisdom, [and] prudence." Therefore, he believed that wrongdoing and behaviour that was not virtuous resulted from ignorance, and that those who did wrong knew no better. The one thing Socrates claimed to have knowledge of was "the art of love" ("ta erôtikê"). This assertion seems to be associated with the word "erôtan", which means to ask questions. Therefore, Socrates is claiming to know about the art of love, insofar as he knows how to ask questions. The only time he actually claimed to be wise was within "Apology", in which he says he is wise "in the limited sense of having human wisdom". It is debatable whether Socrates believed humans (as opposed to gods like Apollo) could actually become wise. On the one hand, he drew a clear line between human ignorance and ideal knowledge; on the other hand, Plato's "Symposium" (Diotima's Speech) and "Republic" ("Allegory of the Cave") describe a method for ascending to wisdom. In Plato's "Theaetetus" (150a), Socrates compares his treatment of the young people who come to him for philosophical advice to the way midwives treat their patients, and the way matrimonial matchmakers act. He says that he himself is a true matchmaker (προμνηστικός "promnestikós") in that he matches the young man to the best philosopher for his particular mind. However, he carefully distinguishes himself from a panderer (προᾰγωγός "proagogos") or procurer. This distinction is echoed in Xenophon's "Symposium" (3.20), when Socrates jokes about his certainty of being able to make a fortune, if he chose to practice the art of pandering. For his part as a philosophical interlocutor, he leads his respondent to a clearer conception of wisdom, although he claims he is not himself a teacher ("Apology"). His role, he claims, is more properly to be understood as analogous to a "midwife" (μαῖα "maia"). In the "Theaetetus", Socrates explains that he is himself barren of theories, but knows how to bring the theories of others to birth and determine whether they are worthy or mere "wind eggs" (ἀνεμιαῖον "anemiaion"). Perhaps significantly, he points out that midwives are barren due to age, and women who have never given birth are unable to become midwives; they would have no experience or knowledge of birth and would be unable to separate the worthy infants from those that should be left on the hillside to be exposed. To judge this, the midwife must have experience and knowledge of what she is judging. Virtue. Socrates believed the best way for people to live was to focus on the pursuit of virtue rather than the pursuit, for instance, of material wealth. He always invited others to try to concentrate more on friendships and a sense of true community, for Socrates felt this was the best way for people to grow together as a populace. His actions lived up to this standard: in the end, Socrates accepted his death sentence when most thought he would simply leave Athens, as he felt he could not run away from or go against the will of his community; as mentioned above, his reputation for valour on the battlefield was without reproach. The idea that there are certain virtues, formed a common thread in Socrates' teachings. These virtues represented the most important qualities for a person to have, foremost of which were the philosophical or intellectual virtues. Socrates stressed that "the unexamined life is not worth living [and] ethical virtue is the only thing that matters." Politics. It is argued that Socrates believed "ideals belong in a world only the wise man can understand", making the philosopher the only type of person suitable to govern others. In Plato's dialogue the "Republic", Socrates openly objected to the democracy that ran Athens during his adult life. It was not only Athenian democracy: Socrates found short of ideal any government that did not conform to his presentation of a perfect regime led by philosophers, and Athenian government was far from that. It is, however, possible that the Socrates of Plato's "Republic" is colored by Plato's own views. During the last years of Socrates' life, Athens was in continual flux due to political upheaval. Democracy was at last overthrown by a junta known as the Thirty Tyrants, led by Plato's relative, Critias, who had once been a student and friend of Socrates. The Tyrants ruled for about a year before the Athenian democracy was reinstated, at which point it declared an amnesty for all recent events. Socrates' opposition to democracy is often denied, and the question is one of the biggest philosophical debates when trying to determine exactly what Socrates believed. The strongest argument of those who claim Socrates did not actually believe in the idea of philosopher kings is that the view is expressed no earlier than Plato's "Republic", which is widely considered one of Plato's "Middle" dialogues and not representative of the historical Socrates' views. Furthermore, according to Plato's "Apology of Socrates ("an "early" dialogue), Socrates refused to pursue conventional politics; he often stated he could not look into others' matters or tell people how to live their lives when he did not yet understand how to live his own. He believed he was a philosopher engaged in the pursuit of Truth, and did not claim to know it fully. Socrates' acceptance of his death sentence after his conviction can also be seen to support this view. It is often claimed much of the anti-democratic leanings are from Plato, who was never able to overcome his disgust at what was done to his teacher. In any case, it is clear Socrates thought the rule of the Thirty Tyrants was also objectionable; when called before them to assist in the arrest of a fellow Athenian, Socrates refused and narrowly escaped death before the Tyrants were overthrown. He did, however, fulfill his duty to serve as "prytanis" when a trial of a group of Generals who presided over a disastrous naval campaign were judged; even then, he maintained an uncompromising attitude, being one of those who refused to proceed in a manner not supported by the laws, despite intense pressure. Judging by his actions, he considered the rule of the Thirty Tyrants less legitimate than the Democratic Senate that sentenced him to death. Socrates' apparent respect for democracy is one of the themes emphasized in the 2008 play "Socrates on Trial" by Andrew David Irvine. Irvine argues that it was because of his loyalty to Athenian democracy that Socrates was willing to accept the verdict of his fellow citizens. As Irvine puts it, "During a time of war and great social and intellectual upheaval, Socrates felt compelled to express his views openly, regardless of the consequences. As a result, he is remembered today, not only for his sharp wit and high ethical standards, but also for his loyalty to the view that in a democracy the best way for a man to serve himself, his friends, and his city—even during times of war—is by being loyal to, and by speaking publicly about, the truth." Covertness. In the Dialogues of Plato, though Socrates sometimes seems to support a mystical side, discussing reincarnation and the mystery religions, this is generally attributed to Plato. Regardless, this view of Socrates cannot be dismissed out of hand, as we cannot be sure of the differences between the views of Plato and Socrates; in addition, there seem to be some corollaries in the works of Xenophon. In the culmination of the philosophic path as discussed in Plato's "Symposium", one comes to the Sea of Beauty or to the sight of "the beautiful itself" (211C); only then can one become wise. (In the "Symposium", Socrates credits his speech on the philosophic path to his teacher, the priestess Diotima, who is not even sure if Socrates is capable of reaching the highest mysteries.) In the "Meno", he refers to the Eleusinian Mysteries, telling Meno he would understand Socrates' answers better if only he could stay for the initiations next week. Further confusions result from the nature of these sources, insofar as the Platonic Dialogues are arguably the work of an artist-philosopher, whose meaning does not volunteer itself to the passive reader nor again the lifelong scholar. According to Olympiodorus the Younger in his "Life of Plato", Plato himself "received instruction from the writers of tragedy" before taking up the study of philosophy. His works are, indeed, dialogues; Plato's choice of this, the medium of Sophocles, Euripides, and the fictions of theatre, may reflect the ever-interpretable nature of his writings, as he has been called a "dramatist of reason". What is more, the first word of nearly all Plato's works is a significant term for that respective dialogue, and is used with its many connotations in mind. Finally, the "Phaedrus" and the "Symposium" each allude to Socrates' coy delivery of philosophic truths in conversation; the Socrates of the "Phaedrus" goes so far as to demand such dissembling and mystery in all writing. The covertness we often find in Plato, appearing here and there couched in some enigmatic use of symbol and/or irony, may be at odds with the mysticism Plato's Socrates expounds in some other dialogues. These indirect methods may fail to satisfy some readers. Perhaps the most interesting facet of this is Socrates' reliance on what the Greeks called his "daimōnic sign", an averting (ἀποτρεπτικός "apotreptikos") inner voice Socrates heard only when he was about to make a mistake. It was this "sign" that prevented Socrates from entering into politics. In the "Phaedrus", we are told Socrates considered this to be a form of "divine madness", the sort of insanity that is a gift from the gods. Alternately, the "sign" is often taken to be what we would call "intuition"; however, Socrates' characterization of the phenomenon as "daimōnic" may suggest that its origin is divine, mysterious, and independent of his own thoughts. Socrates practiced and advocated divination. Xenophon was thought skilled at foretelling from sacrifices, and attributed many of his knowledges to Socrates within his writing "The Cavalry Commander". Satirical playwrights. He was prominently lampooned in Aristophanes' comedy "The Clouds", produced when Socrates was in his mid-forties; he said at his trial (according to Plato) that the laughter of the theatre was a harder task to answer than the arguments of his accusers. Søren Kierkegaard believed this play was a more accurate representation of Socrates than those of his students. In the play, Socrates is ridiculed for his dirtiness, which is associated with the Laconizing fad; also in plays by Callias, Eupolis, and Telecleides. Other comic poets who lampooned Socrates include Mnesimachus and Ameipsias. In all of these, Socrates and the Sophists were criticized for "the moral dangers inherent in contemporary thought and literature". Prose sources. Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle are the main sources for the historical Socrates; however, Xenophon and Plato were students of Socrates, and they may idealize him; however, they wrote the only extended descriptions of Socrates that have come down to us in their complete form. Aristotle refers frequently, but in passing, to Socrates in his writings. Almost all of Plato's works center on Socrates. However, Plato's later works appear to be more his own philosophy put into the mouth of his mentor. The Socratic dialogues. The "Socratic Dialogues" are a series of dialogues written by Plato and Xenophon in the form of discussions between Socrates and other persons of his time, or as discussions between Socrates' followers over his concepts. Plato's "Phaedo" is an example of this latter category. Although his "Apology" is a monologue delivered by Socrates, it is usually grouped with the Dialogues. The "Apology" professes to be a record of the actual speech Socrates delivered in his own defence at the trial. In the Athenian jury system, an "apology" is composed of three parts: a speech, followed by a counter-assessment, then some final words. "Apology" is an anglicized transliteration, not a translation, of the Greek "apologia", meaning "defense"; in this sense it is not apologetic according to our contemporary use of the term. Plato generally does not place his own ideas in the mouth of a specific speaker; he lets ideas emerge via the Socratic Method, under the guidance of Socrates. Most of the dialogues present Socrates applying this method to some extent, but nowhere as completely as in the "Euthyphro". In this dialogue, Socrates and Euthyphro go through several iterations of refining the answer to Socrates' question, "What is the pious, and what the impious?" (see Euthyphro dilemma). In Plato's Dialogues, learning appears as a process of remembering. The soul, before its incarnation in the body, was in the realm of Ideas (very similar to the Platonic "Forms"). There, it saw things the way they truly are, rather than the pale shadows or copies we experience on earth. By a process of questioning, the soul can be brought to remember the ideas in their pure form, thus bringing wisdom. Especially for Plato's writings referring to Socrates, it is not always clear which ideas brought forward by Socrates (or his friends) actually belonged to Socrates and which of these may have been new additions or elaborations by Plato—this is known as the Socratic Problem. Generally, the early works of Plato are considered to be close to the spirit of Socrates, whereas the later works—including "Phaedo" and "Republic"—are considered to be possibly products of Plato's elaborations. Legacy. Immediate influence. Immediately, the students of Socrates set to work both on exercising their perceptions of his teachings in politics and also on developing many new philosophical schools of thought. Some of Athens' controversial and anti-democratic tyrants were contemporary or posthumous students of Socrates including Alcibiades and Critias. Critias' cousin, Plato, would go on to found the Academy in 385 BC, which gained so much renown that "Academy" became the standard word for educational institutions in later European languages such as English, French, and Italian. While "Socrates dealt with moral matters and took no notice at all of nature in general", in his Dialogues, Plato would emphasize mathematics with metaphysical overtones mirroring that of Pythagoras — the former who would dominate Western thought well into the Renaissance. Plato's protégé, another important figure of the Classical era, Aristotle went on to tutor Alexander the Great and also to found his own school in 335 BC — the Lyceum — whose name also now means an educational institution. Aristotle himself was as much of a philosopher as he was a scientist with extensive work in the fields of biology and physics. Socratic thought which challenged conventions, especially in stressing a simplistic way of living, became divorced from Plato's more detached and philosophical pursuits. This idea was inherited by one of Socrates' older students, Antisthenes, who became the originator of another philosophy in the years after Socrates' death: Cynicism. The idea of asceticism being hand in hand with an ethical life or one with piety, ignored by Plato and Aristotle and somewhat dealt with by the Cynics, formed the core of another philosophy in 281 BC — Stoicism when Zeno of Citium would discover Socrates' works and then learn from Crates, a Cynic philosopher. Socrates' student, Aristippus, rejected the asceticism of the Cynics and instead embraced ethical hedonism, founding Cyrenaicism. Another of Socrates' students, Euclides of Megara, founded the Megarian school of philosophy. Its ethical teachings were derived from Socrates, recognizing a single good, which was apparently combined with the Eleatic doctrine of Unity. Some of Euclides' successors developed logic to such an extent that they became a separate school, known as the "Dialectical school". Their work on modal logic, logical conditionals, and propositional logic played an important role in the development of logic in antiquity. Later historical influence. While some of the later contributions of Socrates to Hellenistic Era culture and philosophy as well as the Roman Era have been lost to time, his teachings began a resurgence in both medieval Europe and the Islamic Middle East alongside those of Aristotle and Stoicism. Socrates is mentioned in the dialogue Kuzari by Jewish philosopher and rabbi Yehuda Halevi in which a Jew instructs the Khazar king about Judaism. Al-Kindi, a well-known Arabic philosopher, introduced and tried to reconcile Socrates and Hellenistic philosophy to an Islamic audience, referring to him by the name 'Suqrat'. Socrates influence grew in Western Europe during the fourteenth century as Plato's dialogues were made available in Latin by Marsilio Ficino and Xenophon's Socratic writings were translated by Basilios Bessarion. Voltaire even went so far as to write a satirical play about the trial of Socrates. There were a number of paintings about his life including "Socrates Tears Alcibiades from the Embrace of Sensual Pleasure" by Jean-Baptiste Regnault and "The Death of Socrates" by Jacques-Louis David in the later 18th century. To this day, different versions of the Socratic method are still used in classroom and law school discourse to expose underlying issues in both subject and the speaker. He has been recognized with accolades ranging from frequent mentions in pop culture (such as the movie "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" and a Greek rock band called Socrates Drank the Conium) to numerous busts in academic institutions in recognition of his contribution to education. Over the past century, numerous plays about Socrates have also focused on Socrates' life and influence. One of the most recent has been "Socrates on Trial", a play based on Aristophanes' "Clouds" and Plato's "Apology", "Crito", and "Phaedo", all adapted for modern performance. Criticism. Evaluation of and reaction to Socrates has been undertaken by both historians and philosophers from the time of his death to the present day with a multitude of conclusions and perspectives. Although he was not directly prosecuted for his connection to Critias, leader of the Spartan-backed Thirty Tyrants, and "showed considerable personal courage in refusing to submit to [them]", he was seen by some as a figure who mentored oligarchs who became abusive tyrants, and undermined Athenian democracy. The Sophistic movement that he railed at in life survived him, but by the 3rd century BC, was rapidly overtaken by the many philosophical schools of thought that Socrates influenced. Socrates' death is considered iconic, and his status as a martyr of philosophy overshadows most contemporary and posthumous criticism. However, Xenophon mentions Socrates' "arrogance" and that he was "an expert in the art of pimping" or "self-presentation". Lactantius wrote: "Socrates therefore had something of human wisdom... But many of his actions are not only undeserving of praise, but also most deserving of censure, in which things he most resembled those of his own class. Out of these I will select one which may be judged of by all. Socrates used this well-known proverb: 'That which is above us is nothing to us.'... The same man swore by a dog and a goose... Oh buffoon (as Zeno the Epicurean says), senseless, abandoned, desperate man! If he wished to scoff at religion — madman, if he did this seriously, so as to esteem a most base animal as God! For who can dare to find fault with the superstitions of the Egyptians, when Socrates confirmed them at Athens by his authority? But was it not a mark of consummate vanity, that before his death he asked his friends to sacrifice for him a cock which he had vowed to Aesculapius? He evidently feared lest he should be put upon his trial before Rhadamanthus, the judge, by Aesculapius on account of the vow. I should consider him most mad if he had died under the influence of disease. But since he did this in his sound mind, he who thinks that he was wise is himself of unsound mind." Direct criticism of Socrates the man almost disappears after his death, but there is a noticeable preference for Plato or Aristotle over the elements of Socratic philosophy distinct from those of his students, even into the Middle Ages. Some modern scholarship holds that, with so much of his own thought obscured and possibly altered by Plato, it is impossible to gain a clear picture of Socrates amid all the contradictory evidence. That both Cynicism and Stoicism, which carried heavy influence from Socratic thought, were unlike or even contrary to Platonism further illustrates this. The ambiguity and lack of reliability serve as the modern basis of criticism — that it is nearly impossible to know the real Socrates. Some controversy also exists about Socrates' attitude towards homosexuality and as to whether or not he believed in the Olympian gods, was monotheistic, or held some other religious viewpoint. However, it is still commonly taught and held with little exception that Socrates is the progenitor of subsequent Western philosophy, to the point that philosophers before him are referred to as pre-Socratic.

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Jun Tsuji , was a Japanese author: a poet, essayist, playwright, and translator. He has also been described as a Dadaist, nihilist, Epicurean, shakuhachi musician, actor, feminist, and bohemian. He translated Max Stirner's "The Ego and Its Own" and Cesare Lombroso's "The Man of Genius" into Japanese. Tōkyō-born Tsuji Jun sought escape in literature from a childhood he described as "nothing but destitution, hardship, and a series of traumatizing difficulties". He became interested in the works of Tolstoy, Kōtoku Shūsui's socialist anarchism, and the literature of Oscar Wilde and Voltaire, among many others. Later, in 1920 Tsuji was introduced to Dada and became a self-proclaimed first Dadaist of Japan, a title also claimed by Tsuji's contemporary, Shinkichi Takahashi. Tsuji became a fervent proponent of Stirnerite egoist anarchism, which would become a point of contention between himself and Takahashi. He wrote one of the prologues for famed feminist poet Hayashi Fumiko's 1929 ( and was active in the radical artistic circles of his time. Individualist anarchism. Tsuji was influenced by the philosophy of Epicurus, and many characteristics of Epicureanism show through his lifestyle. For example, Tsuji avoided active engagement in politics and sought after a form of ataraxia, which he was apparently able to experience through vagabond wandering and Egoism. He also spent his time primarily trying to enjoy a simple life free of suffering (see Aponia). While his writings themselves are significant, it seems Tsuji's own emphasis was on developing an experimental, liberated lifestyle. Most of Tsuji's writings describe the philosophy behind this, as well as the personal process Tsuji went through towards this aim. As Hagiwara Kyōjirō () wrote, “Tsuji chose not to express himself with a pen so much as he chose to express himself through living, as conveyed by his personality. That is, Tsuji himself was his expression's piece of work”. It is no coincidence that this resembles the Egoist anarchism described by Max Stirner, who seems to be the most influential philosopher in Tsuji's development. "Death of an Epicurean". One notable play written by Tsuji is the dadaist/absurdist , in which a figure must confront Panta Rhei (), or the transient nature of all things. Tsuji saw the concept of Panta Rhei to be related to Stirner's Creative Nothing, wherein it is because of the nihility of all things that there is potential for creativity and change. Tsuji also found this relevant to the Buddhist concept of nothingness, sometimes translated as mu. In "Death of an Epicurean", Tsuji comments on the destruction of the Ryōunkaku (Cloud-surpassing Tower) in the area of Tokyo he often called home, Asakusa. This building was a skyscraper that had become very much a symbol of modernity in Japan, and its destruction in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake came as a harrowing omen to many who saw it as reminiscent of the Tower of Babel. This symbol would become a popular one in literature, used by such authors as Ishikawa Takuboku. Written in the wake of this event, Tsuji's "Death of an Epicurean" reads: In this passage Tsuji describes the birth of an Epicurean out of someone who experienced the transience of such eternal-seeming icons as the Ryōunkaku and greater Tokyo. The Epicurean is portrayed here as someone who, in their despair, embraces the Arts in response to tragic ephemerality. For Tsuji, whose residence was reduced by the earthquake to a "monster right out of Cubism", this passage comes off as autobiographical, describing his own turn to revelling in Epicureanism and the Arts. Censorship and vagabondage. Tsuji wrote during the 1920s, a dangerous period in Japanese history for controversial writers, during which he experienced the wages of censorship through police harassment. He also experienced this vicariously through the persecution of close associates such as his former wife, anarcho-feminist Itō Noe, who was murdered in the Amakasu Incident. For being a controversial writer in the heart of Tokyo's radical art scene, Tsuji himself believed that had he been living instead as a peasant in the Soviet Union at the time, he would surely have been shot to death. This political climate exacerbated Tsuji's urges towards vagabondage: Institutionalization, Buddhist renunciation, and death. In 1932 Tsuji was institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital after what would become popularly known as the "Tengu Incident". According to some accounts, one night during a party at a friend's residence, Tsuji climbed to the second floor and began flapping his arms crying "I am the Tengu!", eventually jumping from the building, running around, and jumping onto the table calling "kyaaaaaa, kyaaaa!!" After hospitalization, Tsuji was diagnosed as having experienced a temporary psychosis probably resulting from his chronic alcoholism. During this hospitalization Tsuji came to idealize the Buddhist monk Shinran and read the Tannishō many times over. Thereafter the once prolific Tsuji gave up his writing career, and he returned to his custom of vagabondage in the fashion of a Komusō monk, apparently as a sort of Nekkhamma. For the next few years Tsuji fell into various incidents with police and was readmitted to mental hospitals several times. At the age of 41 Tsuji suffered a major asthma attack and after hospitalization became weighed down with substantial hospital bills. While book royalties and a sort of provided some economic support, Tsuji was caught up in a harsh late World War II economic environment and spent the last few years of his life in vagabond poverty. Tsuji often made ends meet by going door to door as a busking shakuhachi musician. However, in 1944, Tsuji settled down in a friend's one-bedroom apartment in Tokyo, where he was found dead from starvation. Tsuji is now buried in Tokyo's Saifuku Temple. Legacy. Tsuji is remembered for having helped found Dadaism in Japan along with contemporaries such as Murayama Tomoyoshi, MAVO, Yoshiyuki Eisuke, and Takahashi Shinkichi. Moreover, he was one of the most prominent Japanese contributors to Nihilist philosophy prior to World War II. He is also remembered as the father of prominent Japanese painter, Makoto Tsuji (). Tsuji was depicted in the 1969 film "Eros + Massacre" and has been the subject of several Japanese books and articles. Tsuji's friend and contemporary anarchist, Hagiwara Kyōjirō, described Tsuji as follows: This person, "Tsuji Jun", is the most interesting figure in Japan today ... He is like a commandment-breaking monk, like Christ ... Vagrants and labourers of the town gather about him. The defeated unemployed and the penniless find in him their own home and religion ... his disciples are the hungry and the poor of the world. Surrounded by these disciples he passionately preaches the Good News of Nihilism. But he is not Christlike, and he preaches but drunken nonsense. Then the disciples call him merely "Tsuji" without respect and sometimes hit him on the head. This is a strange religion ... <br><br> But here Tsuji has regrettably been portrayed as a religious character. It sounds contradictory, but Tsuji is a religious man without a religion ... As art is not a religion, neither is Tsuji's life religious. But in a sense it is ... Tsuji calls himself an "Unmensch" ... If Nietzsche's Zarathustra is religious ... then Tsuji's teaching would be a better religion than Nietzsche's, for Tsuji lives in accord with his principles as himself ... <br><br> Tsuji is a sacrifice of modern culture... In the Japanese literary world Tsuji can be considered a rebel. But this is not because he is a drunkard, nor because he lacks manners, nor because he is an anarchist. It is because he puts forth his dirty ironies as boldly as a bandit ... Tsuji himself is very shy and timid in person ... but his clarity and self-respect exposes the falsities of the famous in the literary world ... [though] to many he really comes across as an anarchistic rogue ... The literary world only sees him as having been born in this world to provide a source for gossip, but he is like Chaplin producing seeds of humour in their rumours ... The common Japanese literati do not understand that the laugh of Chaplin is a contradictory tragedy ... In a society of base, closed-minded people idealists are always taken as madmen or clowns. <br><br> Tsuji Jun is always drunk. If he doesn't drink he can't stand the suffering and sorrow of life. On the rare occasion he is sober ... he does look the part of an incompetent and "Unmensch"-ian fool. Then his faithful disciples bring him saké in place of a ceremonial offering, pour electricity back into his robot heart, and wait for him to start moving... In this way the teaching of the "Unmensch begins". It is a religion for the weak, the proletariat, the egoists, and those of broken personalities, and at the same time – it is a most pure, a most sorrowful religion for modern intellectuals.

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Denis Diderot Denis Diderot (; ; 5 October 171331 July 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the "Encyclopédie" along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a prominent figure during the Age of Enlightenment. Diderot initially studied philosophy at a Jesuit college, then considered working in the church clergy before briefly studying law. When he decided to become a writer in 1734, his father disowned him. He lived a bohemian existence for the next decade. In the 1740s he wrote many of his best-known works in both fiction and non-fiction, including the 1748 novel "The Indiscreet Jewels". In 1751, Diderot co-created the "Encyclopédie" with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. It was the first encyclopedia to include contributions from many named contributors and the first to describe the mechanical arts. Its secular tone, which included articles skeptical about Biblical miracles, angered both religious and government authorities; in 1758 it was banned by the Catholic Church and in 1759 the French government banned it as well, although this ban was not strictly enforced. Many of the initial contributors to the "Encyclopédie" left the project as a result of its controversies and some were even jailed. d'Alembert left in 1759, making Diderot the sole editor. Diderot also became the main contributor, writing around 7,000 articles. He continued working on the project until 1765. He was increasingly despondent about the "Encyclopédie" by the end of his involvement in it and felt that the entire project may have been a waste. Nevertheless, the "Encyclopédie" is considered one of the forerunners of the French Revolution. Diderot struggled financially throughout most of his career and received very little official recognition of his merit, including being passed over for membership in the Académie française. His fortunes improved significantly in 1766, when Empress Catherine the Great, who heard of his financial troubles, paid him 50,000 francs to serve as her librarian. He remained in this position for the rest of his life, and stayed a few months at her court in Saint Petersburg in 1773 and 1774. Diderot's literary reputation during his life rested primarily on his plays and his contributions to the "Encyclopédie"; many of his most important works, including "Jacques the Fatalist, Rameau's Nephew", "Paradox of the Actor", and "D'Alembert's Dream", were published only after his death. Early life. Denis Diderot was born in Langres, Champagne. His parents were Didier Diderot (1685–1759), a cutler, "maître coutelier", and Angélique Vigneron (1677–1748). Three of five siblings survived to adulthood, Denise Diderot (1715–1797) and their youngest brother Pierre-Didier Diderot (1722–1787), and finally their sister Angélique Diderot (1720–1749). According to Arthur McCandless Wilson, Denis Diderot greatly admired his sister Denise, sometimes referring to her as "a female Socrates". Diderot began his formal education at a Jesuit college in Langres, earning a Master of Arts degree in philosophy in 1732. He then entered the Collège d'Harcourt of the University of Paris. He abandoned the idea of entering the clergy in 1735, and instead decided to study at the Paris Law Faculty. His study of law was short-lived however and in the early 1740s, he decided to become a writer and translator. Because of his refusal to enter one of the learned professions, he was disowned by his father, and for the next ten years he lived a bohemian existence. In 1742, he befriended Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom he met while watching games of chess and drinking coffee at the Café de la Régence. In 1743, he further alienated his father by marrying Antoinette Champion (1710–1796), a devout Roman Catholic. The match was considered inappropriate due to Champion's low social standing, poor education, fatherless status, and lack of a dowry. She was about three years older than Diderot. The marriage, in October 1743, produced one surviving child, a girl. Her name was Angélique, named after both Diderot's dead mother and sister. The death of his sister, a nun, in her convent may have affected Diderot's opinion of religion. She is assumed to have been the inspiration for his novel about a nun, "La Religieuse", in which he depicts a woman who is forced to enter a convent where she suffers at the hands of the other nuns in the community. Diderot had affairs with Mlle. Babuti (who would marry Greuze), Madeleine de Puisieux, Sophie Volland and Mme de Maux. His letters to Sophie Volland are known for their candor and are regarded to be "among the literary treasures of the eighteenth century". Early works. Diderot's earliest works included a translation of Temple Stanyan's "History of Greece" (1743); with two colleagues, François-Vincent Toussaint and Marc-Antoine Eidous, he produced a translation of Robert James's "Medicinal Dictionary" (1746–1748). In 1745, he published a translation of Shaftesbury's "Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit", to which he had added his own "reflections". "Philosophical Thoughts". In 1746, Diderot wrote his first original work: the "Philosophical Thoughts" (French:"Pensées philosophiques"). In this book, Diderot argued for a reconciliation of reason with feeling so as to establish harmony. According to Diderot, without feeling there is a detrimental effect on virtue, and no possibility of creating sublime work. However, since feeling without discipline can be destructive, reason is necessary to control feeling. At the time Diderot wrote this book he was a deist. Hence there is a defense of deism in this book, and some arguments against atheism. The book also contains criticism of Christianity. "The Skeptic's Walk". In 1747, Diderot wrote "The Skeptic's Walk" (French:"Promenade du sceptique") in which a deist, an atheist, and a pantheist have a dialogue on the nature of divinity. The deist gives the argument from design. The atheist says that the universe is better explained by physics, chemistry, matter, and motion. The pantheist says that the cosmic unity of mind and matter, which are co-eternal and comprise the universe, is God. This work remained unpublished till 1830. The local police—warned by the priests of another attack on Christianity—either seized the manuscript, or authorities forced Diderot give an undertaking that he would not publish this work, according to different versions of what happened. "The Indiscreet Jewels". In 1748, Diderot needed to raise money on short notice. He had become a father through his wife, and his mistress Mme. de Puisieux was making financial demands from him. At this time, Diderot had stated to Mme. de Puisieux that writing a novel was a trivial task, whereupon she challenged him to write a novel. In response, Diderot wrote his novel "The Indiscreet Jewels" (French: "Les bijoux indiscrets"). The book is about the magical ring of a Sultan which induces any woman's "discreet jewels" to confess their sexual experiences when the ring is pointed at them. In all, the ring is pointed at thirty different women in the book—usually at a dinner or a social meeting—with the Sultan typically being visible to the woman. However, since the ring has the additional property of making its owner invisible when required, a few of the sexual experiences recounted are through direct observation with the Sultan making himself invisible and placing his person in the unsuspecting woman's boudoir. Besides the bawdiness there are several digressions into philosophy, music, and literature in the book. In one such philosophical digression, the Sultan has a dream in which he sees a child named "Experiment" growing bigger and stronger till it demolishes an ancient temple named "Hypothesis". The book proved to be lucrative for Diderot even though it could only be sold clandestinely. It is Diderot's most published work. The book is believed to be an imitation of . Scientific work. Diderot would keep writing on science in a desultory way all his life. The scientific work of which he was most proud was "Memoires sur differents sujets de mathematique" (1748). This work contains original ideas on acoustics, tension, air resistance, and "a project for a new organ" which could be played by all. Some of Diderot's scientific works were applauded by contemporary publications of his time like "The Gentleman's Magazine", the "Journal des savants"; and the Jesuit publication "Journal de Trevoux," which invited more such work: "on the part of a man as clever and able as M. Diderot seems to be, of whom we should also observe that his style is as elegant, trenchant, and unaffected as it is lively and ingenious." On the unity of nature, Diderot wrote, "Without the idea of the whole, philosophy is no more," and, "Everything changes; everything passes; nothing remains but the whole." He wrote of the temporal nature of molecules, and rejected "emboîtement", the view that organisms are pre-formed in an infinite regression of non-changing germs. He saw minerals and species as part of a spectrum, and was fascinated with hermaphroditism. His answer to the universal attraction in corpuscular physics models was universal elasticity. His view of nature's flexibility foreshadows the discovery of evolution, but it is not Darwinistic in a strict sense. "Letter on the Blind". Diderot's celebrated "Letter on the Blind" ("Lettre sur les aveugles à l'usage de ceux qui voient") (1749) introduced him to the world as an original thinker. The subject is a discussion of the relation between reasoning and the knowledge acquired through perception (the five senses). The title of his book also evoked some ironic doubt about who exactly were "the blind" under discussion. In the essay, blind English mathematician Nicholas Saunderson argues that, since knowledge derives from the senses, mathematics is the only form of knowledge that both he and a sighted person can agree on. It is suggested that the blind could be taught to read through their sense of touch. (A later essay, "Lettre sur les sourds et muets", considered the case of a similar deprivation in the deaf and mute.) According to Jonathan Israel, what makes the "Lettre sur les aveugles" so remarkable, however, is its distinct, if undeveloped, presentation of the theory of variation and natural selection. This powerful essay, for which La Mettrie expressed warm appreciation in 1751, revolves around a remarkable deathbed scene in which a dying blind philosopher, Saunderson, rejects the arguments of a deist clergyman who endeavours to win him round to a belief in a providential God during his last hours. Saunderson's arguments are those of a neo-Spinozist Naturalist and fatalist, using a sophisticated notion of the self-generation and natural evolution of species without Creation or supernatural intervention. The notion of "thinking matter" is upheld and the "argument from design" discarded (following La Mettrie) as hollow and unconvincing. The work appeared anonymously in Paris in June 1749, and was vigorously suppressed by the authorities. Diderot, who had been under police surveillance since 1747, was swiftly identified as the author, had his manuscripts confiscated, and was imprisoned for some months, under a "lettre de cachet", on the outskirts of Paris, in the dungeons at Vincennes where he was visited almost daily by Rousseau, at the time his closest and most assiduous ally. Voltaire wrote an enthusiastic letter to Diderot commending the "Lettre" and stating that he had held Diderot in high regard for a long time to which Diderot had sent a warm response. Soon after this, Diderot was arrested. Science historian Conway Zirkle has written that Diderot was an early evolutionary thinker and noted that his passage that described natural selection was "so clear and accurate that it almost seems that we would be forced to accept his conclusions as a logical necessity even in the absence of the evidence collected since his time." Incarceration and release. Angered by public resentment over the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, the government started incarcerating many of its critics. It was decided at this time to rein in Diderot. On 23 July 1749, the governor of the Vincennes fortress instructed the police to incarcerate Diderot, and the next day he was arrested and placed in solitary confinement in the Vincennes. It is during this time that Jean-Jacques Rousseau came to visit Diderot in prison and came out a changed man, with newfound ideas about the downsides of knowledge, civilization and Enlightenment – the so-called "illumination de Vincennes". Diderot had been permitted to retain one book that he had in his possession at the time of his arrest, "Paradise Lost", which he read during his incarceration. He wrote notes and annotations on the book, using a toothpick as a pen, and ink that he made by scraping slate from the walls and mixing it with wine. In August 1749, Mme du Chatelet, presumably at Voltaire's behest, wrote to the governor of Vincennes, who was her relative, pleading that Diderot be lodged more comfortably while jailed. The governor then offered Diderot access to the great halls of the Vincennes castle and the freedom to receive books and visitors providing he would write a document of submission. On 13 August 1749, Diderot wrote to the governor: On 20 August, Diderot was lodged in a comfortable room in the Vincennes, allowed to meet visitors, and to walk in the gardens of the Vincennes. On 23 August, Diderot signed another letter promising to never leave the Vincennes without permission. On 3 November 1749, Diderot was released from the Vincennes. Subsequently, in 1750, he released the prospectus for the "Encyclopédie". Encyclopédie. Genesis. André le Breton, a bookseller and printer, approached Diderot with a project for the publication of a translation of Ephraim Chambers' "Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences" into French, first undertaken by the Englishman John Mills, and followed by the German Gottfried Sellius. Diderot accepted the proposal, and transformed it. He persuaded Le Breton to publish a new work, which would consolidate ideas and knowledge from the Republic of Letters. The publishers found capital for a larger enterprise than they had first planned. Jean le Rond d'Alembert was persuaded to become Diderot's colleague, and permission was procured from the government. In 1750 an elaborate prospectus announced the project, and in 1751 the first volume was published. This work was unorthodox and advanced for the time. Diderot stated that "An encyclopedia ought to make good the failure to execute such a project hitherto, and should encompass not only the fields already covered by the academies, but each and every branch of human knowledge." Comprehensive knowledge will give "the power to change men's common way of thinking." The work combined scholarship with information on trades. Diderot emphasized the abundance of knowledge within each subject area. Everyone would benefit from these insights. Controversies. Diderot's work, however, was mired in controversy from the beginning; the project was suspended by the courts in 1752. Just as the second volume was completed accusations arose regarding seditious content, concerning the editor's entries on religion and natural law. Diderot was detained and his house was searched for manuscripts for subsequent articles: but the search proved fruitless as no manuscripts could be found. They were hidden in the house of an unlikely confederate—Chretien de Lamoignon Malesherbes, who originally ordered the search. Although Malesherbes was a staunch absolutist, and loyal to the monarchy—he was sympathetic to the literary project. Along with his support, and that of other well-placed influential confederates, the project resumed. Diderot returned to his efforts only to be constantly embroiled in controversy. These twenty years were to Diderot not merely a time of incessant drudgery, but harassing persecution and desertion of friends. The ecclesiastical party detested the "Encyclopédie", in which they saw a rising stronghold for their philosophic enemies. By 1757 they could endure it no longer—the subscribers had grown from 2,000 to 4,000, a measure of the growth of the work in popular influence and power. Diderot wanted the "Encyclopédie" to give all the knowledge of the world to the people of France. However, the "Encyclopédie" threatened the governing social classes of France (aristocracy) because it took for granted the justice of religious tolerance, freedom of thought, and the value of science and industry. It asserted the doctrine that the main concern of the nation's government ought to be the nation's common people. It was believed that the "Encyclopédie" was the work of an organized band of conspirators against society, and that the dangerous ideas they held were made truly formidable by their open publication. In 1759, the "Encyclopédie" was formally suppressed. The decree did not stop the work, which went on, but its difficulties increased by the necessity of being clandestine. Jean le Rond d'Alembert withdrew from the enterprise and other powerful colleagues, including Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune, declined to contribute further to a book which had acquired a bad reputation. Diderot's contribution. Diderot was left to finish the task as best he could. He wrote about 7,000 articles, some very slight, but many of them laborious, comprehensive, and long. He damaged his eyesight correcting proofs and editing the manuscripts of less competent contributors. He spent his days at workshops, mastering manufacturing processes, and his nights writing what he had learned during the day. He was incessantly harassed by threats of police raids. The last copies of the first volume were issued in 1765. In 1764, when his immense work was drawing to an end, he encountered a crowning mortification: he discovered that the bookseller, Le Breton, fearing the government's displeasure, had struck out from the proof sheets, after they had left Diderot's hands, all passages that he considered too dangerous. "He and his printing-house overseer," writes Furbank, "had worked in complete secrecy, and had moreover deliberately destroyed the author's original manuscript so that the damage could not be repaired." The monument to which Diderot had given the labor of twenty long and oppressive years was irreparably mutilated and defaced. It was 12 years, in 1772, before the subscribers received the final 28 folio volumes of the "Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers" since the first volume had been published. When Diderot's work on the "Encyclopédie" project came to an end in 1765, he expressed concerns to his friends that the twenty-five years he had spent on the project had been wasted. Mature works. Although the "Encyclopédie" was Diderot's most monumental product, he was the author of many other works that sowed nearly every intellectual field with new and creative ideas. Diderot's writing ranges from a graceful trifle like the "Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre" ("Regrets for my Old Dressing Gown") up to the heady "D'Alembert's Dream" ("Le Rêve de d'Alembert") (composed 1769), a philosophical dialogue in which he plunges into the depths of the controversy as to the ultimate constitution of matter and the meaning of life. "Jacques le fataliste" (written in 1773, but not published until 1792 in German and 1796 in French) is similar to "Tristram Shandy" and "The Sentimental Journey" in its challenge to the conventional novel's structure and content. "La Religieuse" ("The Nun" or "Memoirs of a Nun"). "La Religieuse" was a novel that claimed to show the corruption of the Catholic Church's institutions. Plot. The novel began not as a work for literary consumption, but as an elaborate practical joke aimed at luring the Marquis de Croismare, a companion of Diderot's, back to Paris. "The Nun" is set in the Eighteenth century, that is, contemporary France. Suzanne Simonin is an intelligent and sensitive sixteen-year-old French girl who is forced against her will into a Catholic convent by her parents. Suzanne's parents initially inform her that she is being sent to the convent for financial reasons. However, while in the convent, she learns that she is actually there because she is an illegitimate child, as her mother committed adultery. By sending Suzanne to the convent, her mother thought she could make amends for her sins by using her daughter as a sacrificial offering. At the convent, Suzanne suffers humiliation, harassment and violence because she refuses to make the vows of the religious community. She eventually finds companionship with the Mother Superior, Sister de Moni, who pities Suzanne's anguish. After Sister de Moni's death, the new Mother Superior, Sister Sainte-Christine, does not share the same empathy for Suzanne that her predecessor had, blaming Suzanne for the death of Sister de Moni. Suzanne is physically and mentally harassed by Sister Sainte-Christine, almost to the point of death. Suzanne contacts her lawyer, Monsieur Manouri, who attempts to legally free her from her vows. Manouri manages to have Suzanne transferred to another convent, Sainte-Eutrope. At the new convent, the Mother Superior is revealed to be a lesbian, and she grows affectionate towards Suzanne. The Mother Superior attempts to seduce Suzanne, but her innocence and chastity eventually drives the Mother Superior to insanity, leading to her death. Suzanne escapes the Sainte-Eutrope convent using the help of a priest. Following her liberation, she lives in fear of being captured and taken back to the convent as she awaits the help from Diderot's friend the Marquis de Croismare. Analysis. Diderot did not use the novel as an outlet to condemn Christianity, but as a way to criticize cloistered life. In Diderot's telling, the Church fostered a hierarchical society, prevalent in the power dynamic between the Mother Superior and the girls in the convent. Girls were forced against their will to take their vows and endure the intolerable life of the convent. Diderot highlighted the victimization of women by the Catholic Church. Their subjection to the convent dehumanized them and represses their sexuality. Furthermore, the novel took place during a time in France when religious vows were regulated and enforced by the government. Through his cross-identification writing style, Diderot manifested the demeaning Catholic standards towards women that forced them to obey their determined fate under the hierarchical society. Posthumous publication. Although "The Nun" was completed in about 1780, the work was not published until 1796, after Diderot's death. "Rameau's Nephew". The dialogue "Rameau's Nephew" (French: "Le Neveu de Rameau") is a "farce-tragedy" reminiscent of the "Satires" of Horace, a favorite classical author of Diderot's whose lines "Vertumnis, quotquot sunt, natus iniquis" ("Born under (the influence of) the unfavorable (gods) Vertumnuses, however many they are") appear as epigraph. According to Nicholas Cronk, "Rameau's Nephew" is "arguably the greatest work of the French Enlightenment's greatest writer." Synopsis. The narrator in the book recounts a conversation with , nephew of the famous Jean-Philippe Rameau. The nephew composes and teaches music with some success but feels disadvantaged by his name and is jealous of his uncle. Eventually he sinks into an indolent and debauched state. After his wife's death, he loses all self-esteem and his brusque manners result in him being ostracized by former friends. A character profile of the nephew is now sketched by Diderot: a man who was once wealthy and comfortable with a pretty wife, who is now living in poverty and decadence, shunned by his friends. And yet this man retains enough of his past to analyze his despondency philosophically and maintains his sense of humor. Essentially he believes in nothing—not in religion, nor in morality; nor in the Roussean view about nature being better than civilization since in his opinion every species in nature consumes one another. He views the same process at work in the economic world where men consume each other through the legal system. The wise man, according to the nephew, will consequently practice hedonism: The dialogue ends with Diderot calling the nephew a wastrel, a coward, and a glutton devoid of spiritual values to which the nephew replies: "I believe you are right." Analysis. Diderot's intention in writing the dialogue—whether as a satire on contemporary manners, a reduction of the theory of self-interest to an absurdity, the application of irony to the ethics of ordinary convention, a mere setting for a discussion about music, or a vigorous dramatic sketch of a parasite and a human original—is disputed. In political terms it explores "the bipolarisation of the social classes under absolute monarchy," and insofar as its protagonist demonstrates how the servant often manipulates the master, "Le Neveu de Rameau" can be seen to anticipate Hegel's master–slave dialectic. Posthumous publication. The publication history of the "Nephew" is circuitous. Written in 1761, Diderot never saw the work through to publication during his lifetime, and apparently did not even share it with his friends. After Diderot's death, a copy of the text reached Schiller, who gave it to Goethe, who, in 1805, translated the work into German. Goethe's translation entered France, and was retranslated into French in 1821. Another copy of the text was published in 1823, but it had been expurgated by Diderot's daughter prior to publication. The original manuscript was only found in 1891. Visual arts. Diderot's most intimate friend was the philologist Friedrich Melchior Grimm. They were brought together by their common friend at that time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In 1753, Grimm began writing a newsletter, the "La Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique", which he would send to various high personages in Europe. In 1759, Grimm asked Diderot to report on the biennial art exhibitions in the Louvre for the "Correspondance". Diderot reported on the Salons between 1759 and 1771 and again in 1775 and 1781. Diderot's reports would become "the most celebrated contributions to La Correspondance." According to Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Diderot's reports initiated the French into a new way of laughing, and introduced people to the mystery and purport of colour by ideas. "Before Diderot", Anne Louise Germaine de Staël wrote, "I had never seen anything in pictures except dull and lifeless colours; it was his imagination that gave them relief and life, and it is almost a new sense for which I am indebted to his genius". Diderot had appended an "Essai sur la peinture" to his report on the 1765 Salon in which he expressed his views on artistic beauty. Goethe described the "Essai sur la peinture" as "a magnificent work; it speaks even more usefully to the poet than to the painter, though for the painter too it is a torch of blazing illumination". Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) was Diderot's favorite contemporary artist. Diderot appreciated Greuze's sentimentality, and more particularly Greuze's portrayals of his wife who had once been Diderot's mistress. Theatre. Diderot wrote sentimental plays, "Le Fils naturel" (1757) and "Le Père de famille" (1758), accompanying them with essays on theatrical theory and practice, including "Les Entretiens sur "Le Fils Naturel"" (Conversations on "The Natural Son"), in which he announced the principles of a new drama: the 'serious genre', a realistic midpoint between comedy and tragedy that stood in opposition to the stilted conventions of the classical French stage. In 1758, Diderot introduced the concept of the fourth wall, the imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play. He also wrote "Paradoxe sur le comédien" ("Paradox of the Actor"), written between 1770 and 1778 but first published after his death in 1830, which is a dramatic essay elucidating a theory of acting in which it is argued that great actors do not experience the emotions they are displaying. That essay is also of note for being where the term "l'esprit de l'escalier" (or "l'esprit d'escalier") comes from. It is a French term used in English for the predicament of thinking of the perfect reply too late. Diderot and Catherine the Great. Journey to Russia. When the Russian Empress Catherine the Great heard that Diderot was in need of money, she arranged to buy his library and appoint him caretaker of it until his death, at a salary of 1,000 livres per year. She even paid him 50 years salary in advance. Although Diderot hated traveling, he was obliged to visit her. On 9 October 1773, he reached St. Petersburg, met Catherine the next day and they had several discussions on various subjects. During his five-month stay at her court, he met her almost every day. During these conversations, he would later state, they spoke 'man to man'. He would occasionally make his point by slapping her thighs. In a letter to Madame Geoffrin, Catherine wrote: One of the topics discussed was Diderot's ideas about how to transform Russia into a utopia. In a letter to Comte de Ségur, the Empress wrote that if she followed Diderot's advice, chaos would ensue in her kingdom. Back in France. When returning, Diderot asked the Empress for 1,500 rubles as reimbursement for his trip. She gave him 3,000 rubles, an expensive ring, and an officer to escort him back to Paris. He wrote a eulogy in her honor upon reaching Paris. In 1766, when Catherine heard that Diderot had not received his annual fee for editing the "Encyclopédie" (an important source of income for the philosopher), she arranged for him to receive a massive sum of 50,000 livres as an advance for his services as her librarian. In July 1784, upon hearing that Diderot was in poor health, Catherine arranged for him to move into a luxurious suite in the "Rue de Richelieu". Diderot died two weeks after moving there—on 31 July 1784. Among Diderot's last works were notes "On the Instructions of her Imperial Majesty...for the Drawing up of Laws". This commentary on Russia included replies to some arguments Catherine had made in the Nakaz. Diderot wrote that Catherine was certainly despotic, due to circumstances and training, but was not inherently tyrannical. Thus, if she wished to destroy despotism in Russia, she should abdicate her throne and destroy anyone who tries to revive the monarchy. She should publicly declare that "there is no true sovereign other than the nation, and there can be no true legislator other than the people." She should create a new Russian legal code establishing an independent legal framework and starting with the text: "We the people, and we the sovereign of this people, swear conjointly these laws, by which we are judged equally." In the "Nakaz", Catherine had written: "It is for legislation to follow the spirit of the nation." Diderot's rebuttal stated that it is for legislation to "make" the spirit of the nation. For instance, he argued, it is not appropriate to make public executions unnecessarily horrific. Ultimately, Diderot decided not to send these notes to Catherine; however, they were delivered to her with his other papers after he died. When she read them, she was furious and commented that they were an incoherent gibberish devoid of prudence, insight, and verisimilitude. Philosophy. In his youth, Diderot was originally a follower of Voltaire and his deist "Anglomanie", but gradually moved away from this line of thought towards materialism and atheism, a move which was finally realised in 1747 in the philosophical debate in the second part of his "The Skeptic's Walk" (1747). Diderot opposed mysticism and occultism, which were highly prevalent in France at the time he wrote, and believed religious truth claims must fall under the domain of reason, not mystical experience or esoteric secrets. However, Diderot showed some interest in the work of Paracelsus. He was "a philosopher in whom all the contradictions of the time struggle with one another" (Rosenkranz). In his 1754 book "On the interpretation of Nature", Diderot expounded on his views about nature, evolution, materialism, mathematics, and experimental science. It is speculated that Diderot may have contributed to his friend Baron d'Holbach's 1770 book "The System of Nature". Diderot had enthusiastically endorsed the book stating that: In conceiving the "Encyclopédie", Diderot had thought of the work as a fight on behalf of posterity and had expressed confidence that posterity would be grateful for his effort. According to Diderot, "posterity is for the philosopher what the 'other world' is for the man of religion." According to Andrew S. Curran, the main questions of Diderot's thought are the following : Death and burial. Diderot died of pulmonary thrombosis in Paris on 31 July 1784, and was buried in the city's Église Saint-Roch. His heirs sent his vast library to Catherine II, who had it deposited at the National Library of Russia. He has several times been denied burial in the Panthéon with other French notables. Diderot's remains were unearthed by grave robbers in 1793, leaving his corpse on the church's floor. His remains were then presumably transferred to a mass grave by the authorities. The French government considered memorializing him on the 300th anniversary of his birth, but this did not come to pass. Appreciation and influence. Marmontel and commented on the great pleasure of having intellectual conversations with Diderot. Morellet, a regular attendee at D'Holbach's salon, wrote: "It is there that I heard...Diderot treat questions of philosophy, art, or literature, and by his wealth of expression, fluency, and inspired appearance, hold our attention for a long stretch of time." Diderot's contemporary, and rival, Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote in his "Confessions" that after a few centuries Diderot would be accorded as much respect by posterity as was given to Plato and Aristotle. In Germany, Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing expressed admiration for Diderot's writings, Goethe pronouncing Diderot's "Rameau's Nephew" to be "the classical work of an outstanding man" and that "Diderot is Diderot, a unique individual; whoever carps at him and his affairs is a philistine." As atheism fell out of favor during the French Revolution, Diderot was vilified and considered responsible for the excessive persecution of the clergy. In the next century, Diderot was admired by Balzac, Delacroix, Stendhal, Zola, and Schopenhauer. According to Comte, Diderot was the foremost intellectual in an exciting age. Historian Michelet described him as "the true Prometheus" and stated that Diderot's ideas would continue to remain influential long into the future. Marx chose Diderot as his "favourite prose-writer." Contemporary tributes. Otis Fellows and Norman Torrey have described Diderot as "the most interesting and provocative figure of the French eighteenth century." In 1993, American writer Cathleen Schine published "Rameau's Niece", a satire of academic life in New York that took as its premise a woman's research into an (imagined) 18th-century pornographic parody of Diderot's "Rameau's Nephew". The book was praised by Michiko Kakutani in the "New York Times" as "a nimble philosophical satire of the academic mind" and "an enchanting comedy of modern manners." French author Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt wrote a play titled "Le Libertin" ("The Libertine") which imagines a day in Diderot's life including a fictional sitting for a woman painter which becomes sexually charged but is interrupted by the demands of editing the "Encyclopédie". It was first staged at Paris' Théâtre Montparnasse in 1997 starring Bernard Giraudeau as Diderot and Christiane Cohendy as Madame Therbouche and was well received by critics. In 2013, the tricentennial of Diderot's birth, his hometown of Langres held a series of events in his honor and produced an audio tour of the town highlighting places that were part of Diderot's past, including the remains of the convent where his sister Angélique took her vows. On 6 October 2013, a museum of the Enlightenment focusing on Diderot's contributions to the movement, the Maison des Lumières Denis Diderot, was inaugurated in Langres.

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Al-Farabi Abu Nasr Al-Farabi (; '; known in the West as Alpharabius"'; c. 872 – between 14 December, 950 and 12 January, 951) was a renowned early Islamic philosopher and jurist who wrote in the fields of political philosophy, metaphysics, ethics and logic. He was also a scientist, cosmologist, mathematician and music theorist. In Islamic philosophical tradition he was often called "the Second Teacher", following Aristotle who was known as "the First Teacher". He is credited with preserving the original Greek texts during the Middle Ages because of his commentaries and treatises, and influencing many prominent philosophers, such as Avicenna and Maimonides. Through his works, he became well-known in the West as well as the East. Biography. The existing variations in the basic accounts of al-Farabi's origins and pedigree indicate that they were not recorded during his lifetime or soon thereafter by anyone with concrete information, but were based on hearsay or guesses (as is the case with other contemporaries of al-Farabi). Little is known about his life. Early sources include an autobiographical passage where al-Farabi traces the history of logic and philosophy up to his time, and brief mentions by Al-Masudi, Ibn al-Nadim and Ibn Hawqal. Said Al-Andalusi wrote a biography of al-Farabi. Arabic biographers of the 12th–13th centuries thus had few facts to hand, and used invented stories about his life. From incidental accounts it is known that he spent significant time (most of his life) in Baghdad with Christian scholars including the cleric Yuhanna ibn Haylan, Yahya ibn Adi, and Abu Ishaq Ibrahim al-Baghdadi. He later spent time in Damascus and in Egypt before returning to Damascus where he died in 950-1. His name was Abū Naṣr Muḥammad b. Muḥammad Farabi, sometimes with the family surname al-Ṭarḵānī, i.e., the element Ṭarḵān appears in a nisba. His grandfather was not known among his contemporaries, but a name, Awzalaḡ, suddenly appears later in the writings of Ibn Abī Uṣaibiʿa, and of his great-grandfather in those of Ibn Khallikan. His birthplace could have been any one of the many places in Central Asia-Khurasan that is known by that name. The name "parab/farab" is a Persian term for a locale that is irrigated by effluent springs or flows from a nearby river. Thus, there are many places that carry the name (or various evolutions of that hydrological/geological toponym) in that general area, such as Fārāb on the Jaxartes (Syr Darya) in modern Kazakhstan, Fārāb (modern Türkmenabat) on the Oxus Amu Darya in Turkmenistan, or Fāryāb in Greater Khorasan (modern day Afghanistan). The older Persian Pārāb (in Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam) or Fāryāb (also Pāryāb), is a common Persian toponym meaning "lands irrigated by diversion of river water". By the 13th century, Fārāb on the Jaxartes was known as Otrār. Scholars largely agree that Farabi's ethnic background is not knowable. Iranian origin theory. Medieval Arab historian Ibn Abī Uṣaibiʿa (died in 1270)—al-Farabi's oldest biographer—mentions in his ʿUyūn that al-Farabi's father was of Persian descent. Al-Shahrazūrī who lived around 1288 A.D. and has written an early biography also states that Farabi hailed from a Persian family. According to Majid Fakhry, an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, Farabi's father "was an army captain of Persian extraction." A Persian origin has been stated by many other sources as well. Dimitri Gutas notes that Farabi's works contain references and glosses in Persian, Sogdian, and even Greek, but not Turkish. Sogdian has also been suggested as his native language and the language of the inhabitants of Fārāb. Muhammad Javad Mashkoor argues for an Iranian-speaking Central Asian origin. Turkic origin theory. The oldest known reference to a Turkic origin is given by the medieval historian Ibn Khallikān (died in 1282), who in his work Wafayāt (completed in 669/1271) states that Farabi was born in the small village of Wasij near Fārāb (in what is today Otrar, Kazakhstan) of Turkic parents. Based on this account, some modern scholars say he is of Turkic origin. Dimitri Gutas, an American Arabist of Greek origin, criticizes this, saying that Ibn Khallikān's account is aimed at the earlier historical accounts by Ibn Abī Uṣaibiʿa, and serves the purpose to "prove" a Turkic origin for al-Farabi, for instance by mentioning the additional nisba (surname) "al-Turk" (arab. "the Turk")—a nisba Farabi never had. However, Abu al-Fedā', who copied Ibn Ḵhallekān, corrected this and changed "al-Torkī" to the phrase "wa-kāna rajolan torkīyan", meaning "he was a Turkish man." In this regard, since works of such supposed Turks lack traces of Turkic nomadic culture, Oxford professor C.E. Bosworth notes that "great figures [such] as al-Farabi, al-Biruni, and ibn Sina have been attached by over enthusiastic Turkish scholars to their race". R.N. Freye and Aydin Sayili on the other hand assert, that Turks lived long before the Seljuks in Transoxiana during the Arab conquest in villages and these Turks had no nomadic life. Life and education. Al-Farabi spent almost his entire life in Baghdad. In the auto-biographical passage preserved by Ibn Abī Uṣaibiʿa, Farabi stated that he had studied logic, medicine and sociology with Yūḥannā bin Ḥaylān up to and including Aristotle's "Posterior Analytics", i.e., according to the order of the books studied in the curriculum, Fārābī was claiming that he had studied Porphyry's "Eisagoge" and Aristotle's "Categories", "De Interpretatione", "Prior and Posterior Analytics". His teacher, bin Ḥaylān, was a Nestorian cleric. This period of study was probably in Baghdad, where Al-Masudi records that Yūḥannā died during the reign of Al-Muqtadir (295-320/908-32). He was in Baghdad at least until the end of September 942, as recorded in notes in his "Mabādeʾ ārāʾ ahl al-madīna al-fāżela". He finished the book in Damascus the following year (331), i.e., by September 943). He also studied in Tétouan, Morocco and lived and taught for some time in Aleppo. Farabi later visited Egypt, finishing six sections summarizing the book "Mabādeʾ" in Egypt in 337/July 948 – June 949 when he returned to Syria, where he was supported by Sayf al-Dawla, the Hamdanid ruler. Al-Masudi, writing barely five years after the fact (955-6, the date of the composition of the Tanbīh), says that Farabi died in Damascus in Rajab 339 (between 14 December 950 and 12 January 951). Religious beliefs. Al-Farabi's religious affiliation within Islam is disputed. While some historians identify him as Sunni, some others assert he was Shia or influenced by Shia. Najjar Fauzi argues that al-Farabi's political philosophy was influenced by Shiite sects. Giving a positive account, Nadia Maftouni describes shi'ite aspects of Farabi's writings. As she put it, Farabi in his Al-Millah, Al-Sīyāsah al-Madanīyah, and Tahsil al-Sa’adah believes in a utopia governed by prophet and his successors: the Imams. Works and contributions. Farabi made contributions to the fields of logic, mathematics, music, philosophy, psychology, and education. Alchemy. Al-Farabi wrote: "The Necessity of the Art of the Elixir" Logic. Though he was mainly an Aristotelian logician, he included a number of non-Aristotelian elements in his works. He discussed the topics of future contingents, the number and relation of the categories, the relation between logic and grammar, and non-Aristotelian forms of inference. He is also credited with categorizing logic into two separate groups, the first being "idea" and the second being "proof". Al-Farabi also considered the theories of conditional syllogisms and analogical inference, which were part of the Stoic tradition of logic rather than the Aristotelian. Another addition al-Farabi made to the Aristotelian tradition was his introduction of the concept of poetic syllogism in a commentary on Aristotle's "Poetics". Music. Al-Farabi wrote a book on music titled "Kitab al-Musiqa" (The Book of Music). In it, he presents philosophical principles about music, its cosmic qualities, and its influences. He also wrote a treatise on the "Meanings of the Intellect", which dealt with music therapy and discussed the therapeutic effects of music on the soul. Philosophy. As a philosopher, Al-Farabi was a founder of his own school of early Islamic philosophy known as "Farabism" or "Alfarabism", though it was later overshadowed by Avicennism. Al-Farabi's school of philosophy "breaks with the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle [... and ...] moves from metaphysics to methodology, a move that anticipates modernity", and "at the level of philosophy, Alfarabi unites theory and practice [... and] in the sphere of the political he liberates practice from theory". His Neoplatonic theology is also more than just metaphysics as rhetoric. In his attempt to think through the nature of a First Cause, Alfarabi discovers the limits of human knowledge". Al-Farabi had great influence on science and philosophy for several centuries, and was widely considered second only to Aristotle in knowledge (alluded to by his title of "the Second Teacher") in his time. His work, aimed at synthesis of philosophy and Sufism, paved the way for the work of Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Al-Farabi also wrote a commentary on Aristotle's work, and one of his most notable works is "Al-Madina al-Fadila" () where he theorized an ideal state as in Plato's "The Republic". Al-Farabi argued that religion rendered truth through symbols and persuasion, and, like Plato, saw it as the duty of the philosopher to provide guidance to the state. Al-Farabi incorporated the Platonic view, drawing a parallel from within the Islamic context, in that he regarded the ideal state to be ruled by the prophet-imam, instead of the philosopher-king envisaged by Plato. Al-Farabi argued that the ideal state was the city-state of Medina when it was governed by the prophet Muhammad as its head of state, as he was in direct communion with Allah whose law was revealed to him. In the absence of the prophet-imam, Al-Farabi considered democracy as the closest to the ideal state, regarding the republican order of the Sunni Rashidun Caliphate as an example within early Muslim history. However, he also maintained that it was from democracy that imperfect states emerged, noting how the republican order of the early Islamic Caliphate of the Rashidun caliphs was later replaced by a form of government resembling a monarchy under the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties. Physics. Al-Farabi wrote a short treatise "On Vacuum", where he thought about the nature of the existence of void. He also may have carried out the first experiments concerning the existence of vacuum, in which he investigated handheld plungers in water. His final conclusion was that air's volume can expand to fill available space, and he suggested that the concept of perfect vacuum was incoherent. Psychology. Al-Farabi wrote "Social Psychology" and "Principles of the Opinions of the Citizens of the Virtuous City", which were the first treatises to deal with social psychology. He stated that "an isolated individual could not achieve all the perfections by himself, without the aid of other individuals," and that it is the "innate disposition of every man to join another human being or other men in the labor he ought to perform." He concluded that to "achieve what he can of that perfection, every man needs to stay in the neighborhood of others and associate with them." In his treatise "On the Cause of Dreams", which appeared as chapter 24 of his "Principles of the Opinions of the Citizens of the Ideal City", he distinguished between dream interpretation and the nature and causes of dreams. Philosophical thought. Influences. The main influence on al-Farabi's philosophy was the neo-Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria. A prolific writer, he is credited with over one hundred works. Amongst these are a number of prolegomena to philosophy, commentaries on important Aristotelian works (such as the Nicomachean Ethics) as well as his own works. His ideas are marked by their coherency, despite drawing together of many different philosophical disciplines and traditions. Some other significant influences on his work were the planetary model of Ptolemy and elements of Neo-Platonism, particularly metaphysics and practical (or political) philosophy (which bears more resemblance to Plato's "Republic" than Aristotle's "Politics"). Al-Farabi, Aristotle, Maimonides. In the handing down of Aristotle’s thought to the Christian west in the middle ages, al-Farabi played an essential part as appears in the translation of Farabi’s "Commentary and Short Treatise on Aristotle’s de Interpretatione" that F.W. Zimmermann published in 1981. Farabi had a great influence on Maimonides, the most important Jewish thinker of the middle ages. Maimonides wrote in Arabic a "Treatise on logic", the celebrated "Maqala fi sina at al-mantiq". In a wonderfully concise way, the work treats of the essentials of Aristotelian logic in the light of comments made by the Persian philosophers: Avicenna and, above all, al-Farabi. Rémi Brague in his book devoted to the Treatise stresses the fact that Farabi is the only thinker mentioned therein. Al-Farabi as well as Ibn Sina and Averroes have been recognized as Peripatetics ("al-Mashsha’iyu"n) or rationalists ("Estedlaliun") among Muslims. However, he tried to gather the ideas of Plato and Aristotle in his book "The gathering of the ideas of the two philosophers". According to Adamson, his work was singularly directed towards the goal of simultaneously reviving and reinventing the Alexandrian philosophical tradition, to which his Christian teacher, Yuhanna bin Haylan belonged. His success should be measured by the honorific title of "the second master" of philosophy (Aristotle being the first), by which he was known. Adamson also says that he does not make any reference to the ideas of either al-Kindi or his contemporary, Abu Bakr al-Razi, which clearly indicates that he did not consider their approach to Philosophy as a correct or viable one. Thought. Metaphysics and cosmology. In contrast to al-Kindi, who considered the subject of metaphysics to be God, al-Farabi believed that it was concerned primarily with being "qua" being (that is, being in and of itself), and this is related to God only to the extent that God is a principle of absolute being. Al-Kindi's view was, however, a common misconception regarding Greek philosophy amongst Muslim intellectuals at the time, and it was for this reason that Avicenna remarked that he did not understand Aristotle's "Metaphysics" properly until he had read a prolegomenon written by al-Farabi. Al-Farabi's cosmology is essentially based upon three pillars: Aristotelian metaphysics of causation, highly developed Plotinian emanational cosmology and the Ptolemaic astronomy. In his model, the universe is viewed as a number of concentric circles; the outermost sphere or "first heaven", the sphere of fixed stars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and finally, the Moon. At the centre of these concentric circles is the sub-lunar realm which contains the material world. Each of these circles represent the domain of the secondary intelligences (symbolized by the celestial bodies themselves), which act as causal intermediaries between the First Cause (in this case, God) and the material world. Furthermore these are said to have emanated from God, who is both their formal and efficient cause. The process of emanation begins (metaphysically, not temporally) with the First Cause, whose principal activity is self-contemplation. And it is this intellectual activity that underlies its role in the creation of the universe. The First Cause, by thinking of itself, "overflows" and the incorporeal entity of the second intellect "emanates" from it. Like its predecessor, the second intellect also thinks about itself, and thereby brings its celestial sphere (in this case, the sphere of fixed stars) into being, but in addition to this it must also contemplate upon the First Cause, and this causes the "emanation" of the next intellect. The cascade of emanation continues until it reaches the tenth intellect, beneath which is the material world. And as each intellect must contemplate both itself and an increasing number of predecessors, each succeeding level of existence becomes more and more complex. This process is based upon necessity as opposed to will. In other words, God does not have a choice whether or not to create the universe, but by virtue of His own existence, He causes it to be. This view also suggests that the universe is eternal, and both of these points were criticized by al-Ghazzali in his attack on the philosophers In his discussion of the First Cause (or God), al-Farabi relies heavily on negative theology. He says that it cannot be known by intellectual means, such as dialectical division or definition, because the terms used in these processes to define a thing constitute its substance. Therefore if one was to define the First Cause, each of the terms used would actually constitute a "part" of its substance and therefore behave as a "cause" for its existence, which is impossible as the First Cause is uncaused; it exists without being caused. Equally, he says it cannot be known according to genus and differentia, as its substance and existence are different from all others, and therefore it has no category to which it belongs. If this were the case, then it would not be the First Cause, because something would be prior in existence to it, which is also impossible. This would suggest that the more philosophically simple a thing is, the more perfect it is. And based on this observation, Adamson says it is possible to see the entire hierarchy of al-Farabi's cosmology according to classification into genus and species. Each succeeding level in this structure has as its principal qualities multiplicity and deficiency, and it is this ever-increasing complexity that typifies the material world. Epistemology and eschatology. Human beings are unique in al-Farabi's vision of the universe because they stand between two worlds: the "higher", immaterial world of the celestial intellects and universal intelligibles, and the "lower", material world of generation and decay; they inhabit a physical body, and so belong to the "lower" world, but they also have a rational capacity, which connects them to the "higher" realm. Each level of existence in al-Farabi's cosmology is characterized by its movement towards perfection, which is to become like the First Cause, i.e. a perfect intellect. Human perfection (or "happiness"), then, is equated with constant intellection and contemplation. Al-Farabi divides intellect into four categories: potential, actual, acquired and the Agent. The first three are the different states of the human intellect and the fourth is the Tenth Intellect (the moon) in his emanational cosmology. The potential intellect represents the capacity to think, which is shared by all human beings, and the actual intellect is an intellect engaged in the act of thinking. By thinking, al-Farabi means abstracting universal intelligibles from the sensory forms of objects which have been apprehended and retained in the individual's imagination. This motion from potentiality to actuality requires the Agent Intellect to act upon the retained sensory forms; just as the Sun illuminates the physical world to allow us to see, the Agent Intellect illuminates the world of intelligibles to allow us to think. This illumination removes all accident (such as time, place, quality) and physicality from them, converting them into primary intelligibles, which are logical principles such as "the whole is greater than the part". The human intellect, by its act of intellection, passes from potentiality to actuality, and as it gradually comprehends these intelligibles, it is identified with them (as according to Aristotle, by knowing something, the intellect becomes like it). Because the Agent Intellect knows all of the intelligibles, this means that when the human intellect knows all of them, it becomes associated with the Agent Intellect's perfection and is known as the acquired Intellect. While this process seems mechanical, leaving little room for human choice or volition, Reisman says that al-Farabi is committed to human voluntarism. This takes place when man, based on the knowledge he has acquired, decides whether to direct himself towards virtuous or unvirtuous activities, and thereby decides whether or not to seek true happiness. And it is by choosing what is ethical and contemplating about what constitutes the nature of ethics, that the actual intellect can become "like" the active intellect, thereby attaining perfection. It is only by this process that a human soul may survive death, and live on in the afterlife. According to al-Farabi, the afterlife is not the personal experience commonly conceived of by religious traditions such as Islam and Christianity. Any individual or distinguishing features of the soul are annihilated after the death of the body; only the rational faculty survives (and then, only if it has attained perfection), which becomes one with all other rational souls within the agent intellect and enters a realm of pure intelligence. Henry Corbin compares this eschatology with that of the Ismaili Neo-Platonists, for whom this process initiated the next grand cycle of the universe. However, Deborah Black mentions we have cause to be skeptical as to whether this was the mature and developed view of al-Farabi, as later thinkers such as Ibn Tufayl, Averroes and Ibn Bajjah would assert that he repudiated this view in his commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, which has been lost to modern experts. Psychology, the soul and prophetic knowledge. In his treatment of the human soul, al-Farabi draws on a basic Aristotelian outline, which is informed by the commentaries of later Greek thinkers. He says it is composed of four faculties: The "appetitive" (the desire for, or aversion to an object of sense), the "sensitive" (the perception by the senses of corporeal substances), the "imaginative" (the faculty which retains images of sensible objects after they have been perceived, and then separates and combines them for a number of ends), and the "rational", which is the faculty of intellection. It is the last of these which is unique to human beings and distinguishes them from plants and animals. It is also the only part of the soul to survive the death of the body. Noticeably absent from these scheme are internal senses, such as common sense, which would be discussed by later philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes. Special attention must be given to al-Farabi's treatment of the soul's "imaginative" faculty, which is essential to his interpretation of prophethood and prophetic knowledge. In addition to its ability to retain and manipulate sensible images of objects, he gives the imagination the function of imitation. By this he means the capacity to represent an object with an image other than its own. In other words, to imitate "x" is to imagine "x" by associating it with sensible qualities that do not describe its own appearance. This extends the representative ability of the imagination beyond sensible forms and to include temperaments, emotions, desires and even immaterial intelligibles or abstract universals, as happens when, for example, one associates "evil" with "darkness". The prophet, in addition to his own intellectual capacity, has a very strong imaginative faculty, which allows him to receive an overflow of intelligibles from the agent intellect (the tenth intellect in the emanational cosmology). These intelligibles are then associated with symbols and images, which allow him to communicate abstract truths in a way that can be understood by ordinary people. Therefore what makes prophetic knowledge unique is not its content, which is also accessible to philosophers through demonstration and intellection, but rather the form that it is given by the prophet's imagination. Practical philosophy (ethics and politics). The practical application of philosophy was a major concern expressed by al-Farabi in many of his works, and while the majority of his philosophical output has been influenced by Aristotelian thought, his practical philosophy was unmistakably based on that of Plato. In a similar manner to Plato's "Republic", al-Farabi emphasized that philosophy was both a theoretical and practical discipline; labeling those philosophers who do not apply their erudition to practical pursuits as "futile philosophers". The ideal society, he wrote, is one directed towards the realization of "true happiness" (which can be taken to mean philosophical enlightenment) and as such, the ideal philosopher must hone all the necessary arts of rhetoric and poetics to communicate abstract truths to the ordinary people, as well as having achieved enlightenment himself. Al-Farabi compared the philosopher's role in relation to society with a physician in relation to the body; the body's health is affected by the "balance of its humours" just as the city is determined by the moral habits of its people. The philosopher's duty, he wrote, was to establish a "virtuous" society by healing the souls of the people, establishing justice and guiding them towards "true happiness". Of course, al-Farabi realized that such a society was rare and required a very specific set of historical circumstances to be realized, which means very few societies could ever attain this goal. He divided those "vicious" societies, which have fallen short of the ideal "virtuous" society, into three categories: ignorant, wicked and errant. "Ignorant" societies have, for whatever reason, failed to comprehend the purpose of human existence, and have supplanted the pursuit of happiness for another (inferior) goal, whether this be wealth, sensual gratification or power. Al-Farabi mentions "weeds" in the virtuous society: those people who try to undermine its progress towards the true human end. The best known Arabic source for al-Farabi's political philosophy is his work titled, "al-Madina al-fadila" ("The Virtuous City"). Whether or not al-Farabi actually intended to outline a political programme in his writings remains a matter of dispute amongst academics. Henry Corbin, who considers al-Farabi to be a crypto-Shi'ite, says that his ideas should be understood as a "prophetic philosophy" instead of being interpreted politically. On the other hand, Charles Butterworth contends that nowhere in his work does al-Farabi speak of a prophet-legislator or revelation (even the word philosophy is scarcely mentioned), and the main discussion that takes place concerns the positions of "king" and "statesmen". Occupying a middle position is David Reisman, who, like Corbin, believes that al-Farabi did not want to expound a political doctrine (although he does not go so far to attribute it to Islamic Gnosticism either). He argues that al-Farabi was using different types of society as examples, in the context of an ethical discussion, to show what effect correct or incorrect thinking could have. Lastly, Joshua Parens argues that al-Farabi was slyly asserting that a pan-Islamic society could not be made, by using reason to show how many conditions (such as moral and deliberative virtue) would have to be met, thus leading the reader to conclude that humans are not fit for such a society. Some other authors such as Mykhaylo Yakubovych argue that for al-Farabi religion ("milla") and philosophy ("falsafa") constituted the same praxeological value (i.e. basis for "amal al-fadhil"—"virtuous deed"), while its epistemological level ("ilm"—"knowledge") was different. Legacy. The main-belt asteroid 7057 Al-Fārābī was named in his honor.

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Richard Rorty Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and contemporary analytic philosophy, the latter of which came to constitute the main focus of his work at Princeton University in the 1960s. He subsequently came to reject the tradition of philosophy according to which knowledge involves correct representation (a "mirror of nature") of a world whose existence remains wholly independent of that representation. Rorty had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative literature at Stanford University. Among his most influential books are "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (1979), "Consequences of Pragmatism" (1982), and "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" (1989). Rorty saw the idea of knowledge as a "mirror of nature" as pervasive throughout the history of western philosophy. Against this approach, Rorty advocated for a novel form of American pragmatism (sometimes called neopragmatism) in which scientific and philosophical methods form merely a set of contingent "vocabularies" which people abandon or adopt over time according to social conventions and usefulness. Rorty believed abandoning representationalist accounts of knowledge and language would lead to a state of mind he referred to as "ironism", in which people become completely aware of the contingency of their placement in history and of their philosophical vocabulary. Rorty tied this brand of philosophy to the notion of "social hope"; he believed that without the representationalist accounts, and without metaphors between the mind and the world, human society would behave more peacefully. He also emphasized the reasons why the interpretation of culture as conversation (Bernstein 1971) constitutes the crucial concept of a "postphilosophical" culture determined to abandon representationalist accounts of traditional epistemology, incorporating American pragmatism with metaphysical naturalism. Biography. Richard Rorty was born on October 4, 1931, in New York City. His parents, James and Winifred Rorty, were activists, writers and social democrats. His maternal grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch, was a central figure in the Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century. His father experienced two nervous breakdowns in his later life. The second breakdown, which he had in the early 1960s, was more serious and "included claims to divine prescience." Consequently, Richard Rorty fell into depression as a teenager and in 1962 began a six-year psychiatric analysis for obsessional neurosis. Rorty wrote about the beauty of rural New Jersey orchids in his short autobiography, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," and his desire to combine aesthetic beauty and social justice. His colleague Jürgen Habermas's obituary for Rorty points out that Rorty's contrasting childhood experiences, such as beautiful orchids versus reading a book in his parents' house that defended Leon Trotsky against Stalin, created an early interest in philosophy. He describes Rorty as an ironist: Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.' Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago shortly before turning 15, where he received a bachelor's and a master's degree in philosophy (studying under Richard McKeon), continuing at Yale University for a PhD in philosophy (1952–1956). He married another academic, Amélie Oksenberg (Harvard University professor), with whom he had a son, Jay Rorty, in 1954. After two years in the United States Army, he taught at Wellesley College for three years until 1961. Rorty divorced his wife and then married Stanford University bioethicist Mary Varney in 1972. They had two children, Kevin and Patricia. While Richard Rorty was a "strict atheist" (Habermas), Mary Varney Rorty was a practicing Mormon. Rorty was a professor of philosophy at Princeton University for 21 years. In 1981, he was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the "Genius Award", in its first year of awarding, and in 1982 he became Kenan Professor of the Humanities at the University of Virginia. In 1998 Rorty became professor of comparative literature (and philosophy, by courtesy), at Stanford University, where he spent the remainder of his academic career. During this period he was especially popular, and once quipped that he had been assigned to the position of "transitory professor of trendy studies." Writer and neuroscientist Sam Harris studied under Rorty as an undergraduate at Stanford; Harris later remarked that "I just argued with him endlessly but found it incredibly useful in refining my own views." Rorty's doctoral dissertation, "The Concept of Potentiality" was an historical study of the concept, completed under the supervision of Paul Weiss, but his first book (as editor), "The Linguistic Turn" (1967), was firmly in the prevailing analytic mode, collecting classic essays on the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy. However, he gradually became acquainted with the American philosophical movement known as pragmatism, particularly the writings of John Dewey. The noteworthy work being done by analytic philosophers such as Willard Van Orman Quine and Wilfrid Sellars caused significant shifts in his thinking, which were reflected in his next book, "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (1979). Pragmatists generally hold that the meaning of a proposition is determined by its use in linguistic practice. Rorty combined pragmatism about truth and other matters with a later Wittgensteinian philosophy of language which declares that meaning is a social-linguistic product, and sentences do not 'link up' with the world in a correspondence relation. Rorty wrote in his "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" (1989): Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own unaided by the describing activities of humans cannot."(5) Views like this led Rorty to question many of philosophy's most basic assumptions—and have also led to him being apprehended as a postmodern/deconstructionist philosopher. Indeed, from the late 1980s through the 1990s, Rorty focused on the continental philosophical tradition, examining the works of Friederich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. His work from this period included: "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" (1989); "Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers" "II" (1991); and "Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III" (1998). The latter two works attempt to bridge the dichotomy between analytic and continental philosophy by claiming that the two traditions complement rather than oppose each other. According to Rorty, analytic philosophy may not have lived up to its pretensions and may not have solved the puzzles it thought it had. Yet such philosophy, in the process of finding reasons for putting those pretensions and puzzles aside, helped earn itself an important place in the history of ideas. By giving up on the quest for apodicticity and finality that Edmund Husserl shared with Rudolf Carnap and Bertrand Russell, and by finding new reasons for thinking that such quest will never succeed, analytic philosophy cleared a path that leads past scientism, just as the German idealists cleared a path that led around empiricism. In the last fifteen years of his life, Rorty continued to publish his writings, including "Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Philosophical Papers IV), and" "Achieving Our Country" (1998), a political manifesto partly based on readings of Dewey and Walt Whitman in which he defended the idea of a progressive, pragmatic left against what he feels are defeatist, anti-liberal, anti-humanist positions espoused by the critical left and continental school. Rorty felt these anti-humanist positions were personified by figures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault. Such theorists were also guilty of an "inverted Platonism" in which they attempted to craft overarching, metaphysical, "sublime" philosophies—which in fact contradicted their core claims to be ironist and contingent. Rorty's last works, after his move to Stanford University concerned the place of religion in contemporary life, liberal communities, comparative literature and philosophy as "cultural politics". Shortly before his death, he wrote a piece called "The Fire of Life", (published in the November 2007 issue of "Poetry" magazine), in which he meditates on his diagnosis and the comfort of poetry. He concludes, "I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts—just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human—farther removed from the beasts—than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses." On June 8, 2007, Rorty died in his home from pancreatic cancer. Major works. "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature". In "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (1979) Rorty argues that the central problems of modern epistemology depend upon a picture of the mind as trying to faithfully represent (or "mirror") a mind-independent, external reality. When we give up this metaphor, the entire enterprise of foundationalist epistemology simply dissolves. An epistemological foundationalist believes that in order to avoid the regress inherent in claiming that all beliefs are justified by other beliefs, some beliefs must be self-justifying and form the foundations to all knowledge. Rorty however criticized both the idea that arguments can be based upon self-evident premises (within language) and the idea that arguments can be based upon noninferential sensations (outside language). The first critique draws on Quine's work on sentences thought to be analytically true – that is, sentences thought to be true solely by virtue of what they mean and independently of fact. Quine argues that the problem with analytically true sentences is the attempt to "convert" identity-based but empty analytical truths like "no unmarried man is married" to synonymity-based analytical truths like "no bachelor is married". When trying to do so, one must first prove that "unmarried man" and "bachelor" means exactly the same, and that is not possible without considering facts – that is, looking towards the domain of synthetic truths. When doing so, one will notice that the two concepts actually differ; "bachelor" sometimes mean "bachelor of arts" for instance. Quine therefore argue that «a boundary between analytic and synthetic statements simply has not been drawn», and concludes that this boundary or distinction «[...] is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith.» The second critique draws on Sellars's work on the empiricist idea that there is a non-linguistic but epistemologically relevant "given" available in sensory perception. Sellars argue that only language can work as a foundation for arguments; non-linguistic sensory perceptions are incompatible with language and are therefore irrelevant. In Sellars' view, the claim that there is an epistemologically relevant "given" in sensory perception is a myth; a fact is not something that is "given" to us, it is something that we as language-users actively "take". Only after we have learned a language is it possible for us to construe as "empirical data" the particulars and arrays of particulars we have come to be able to observe. Each critique, taken alone, provides a problem for a conception of how philosophy ought to proceed, yet leaves enough of the tradition intact to proceed with its former aspirations. Combined, Rorty claimed, the two critiques are devastating. With no privileged realm of truth or meaning that can work as a self-evident foundation for our arguments, we have, instead, only truth defined as beliefs that pay their way, in other words beliefs that are useful to us somehow. The only worthwhile description of the actual process of inquiry, Rorty claimed, was a Kuhnian account of the standard phases of the progress of disciplines, oscillating through normal and abnormal periods, between routine problem-solving and intellectual crises. After rejecting foundationalism, Rorty argues that one of the few roles left for a philosopher is to act as an intellectual gadfly, attempting to induce a revolutionary break with previous practice, a role that Rorty was happy to take on himself. Rorty suggests that each generation tries to subject all disciplines to the model that the most successful discipline of the day employs. In Rorty's view, the success of modern science has led academics in philosophy and the humanities to mistakenly imitate scientific methods. "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity". In "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" (1989), Rorty argues that there is no worthwhile theory of truth, aside from the non-epistemic semantic theory Donald Davidson developed (based on the work of Alfred Tarski). Rorty also suggests that there are two kinds of philosophers; philosophers occupied with "private" or "public" matters. Private philosophers, who provide one with greater abilities to (re)create oneself (a view adapted from Nietzsche and which Rorty also identifies with the novels of Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov) should not be expected to help with public problems. For a public philosophy, one might instead turn to philosophers like Rawls or Habermas. This book also marks his first attempt to specifically articulate a political vision consistent with his philosophy, the vision of a diverse community bound together by opposition to cruelty, and not by abstract ideas such as 'justice' or 'common humanity.' Consistent with his anti-foundationalism, Rorty states that there is «[...] no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible.» Rorty also introduces the terminology of ironism, which he uses to describe his mindset and his philosophy. Rorty describes the ironist as a person who «[...] worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being. But she cannot give a criterion of wrongness.» "Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth". Amongst the essays in "Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1" (1990), is "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in which Rorty defends Rawls against communitarian critics. Rorty argues that liberalism can "get along without philosophical presuppositions," while at the same time conceding to communitarians that "a conception of the self that makes the community constitutive of the self does comport well with liberal democracy." For Rorty, social institutions ought to be thought of as "experiments in cooperation rather than as attempts to embody a universal and ahistorical order." "Essays on Heidegger and Others". In this text, Rorty focuses primarily on the continental philosophers Heidegger and Derrida. He argues that these European "post-Nietzscheans" share much with American pragmatists, in that they critique metaphysics and reject the correspondence theory of truth. When discussing Derrida, Rorty claims that Derrida is most useful when viewed as a funny writer who attempted to circumvent the Western philosophical tradition, rather than the inventor of a philosophical (or literary) "method." In this vein, Rorty criticizes Derrida's followers like Paul de Man for taking deconstructive literary theory too seriously. "Achieving Our Country". In "Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America" (1997), Rorty differentiates between what he sees as the two sides of the Left, a cultural Left and a progressive Left. He criticizes the cultural Left, which is exemplified by post-structuralists such as Foucault and postmodernists such as Lyotard, for offering critiques of society, but no alternatives (or alternatives that are so vague and general as to be abdications). Although these intellectuals make insightful claims about the ills of society, Rorty suggests that they provide no alternatives and even occasionally deny the possibility of progress. On the other hand, the progressive Left, exemplified for Rorty by the pragmatist Dewey, Whitman and James Baldwin, makes hope for a better future its priority. Without hope, Rorty argues, change is spiritually inconceivable and the cultural Left has begun to breed cynicism. Rorty sees the progressive Left as acting in the philosophical spirit of pragmatism. On human rights. Rorty's notion of human rights is grounded on the notion of sentimentality. He contended that throughout history humans have devised various means of construing certain groups of individuals as inhuman or subhuman. Thinking in rationalist (foundationalist) terms will not solve this problem, he claimed. Rorty advocated the creation of a culture of global human rights in order to stop violations from happening through a sentimental education. He argued that we should create a sense of empathy or teach empathy to others so as to understand others' suffering. Reception and criticism. Rorty is among the most widely discussed and controversial contemporary philosophers, and his works have provoked thoughtful responses from many other well-respected figures in the field. In Robert Brandom's anthology "Rorty and His Critics", for example, Rorty's philosophy is discussed by Donald Davidson, Jürgen Habermas, Hilary Putnam, John McDowell, Jacques Bouveresse, and Daniel Dennett, among others. In 2007, Roger Scruton wrote, "Rorty was paramount among those thinkers who advance their own opinion as immune to criticism, by pretending that it is not truth but consensus that counts, while defining the consensus in terms of people like themselves." Ralph Marvin Tumaob concludes that Rorty was really influenced by Jean-François Lyotard's metanarratives, and added that "postmodernism was influenced further by the works of Rorty". McDowell is strongly influenced by Rorty, particularly "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (1979). In continental philosophy, authors such as Jürgen Habermas, Gianni Vattimo, Jacques Derrida, Albrecht Wellmer, Hans Joas, Chantal Mouffe, Simon Critchley, Esa Saarinen, and Mike Sandbothe are influenced in different ways by Rorty's thinking. American novelist David Foster Wallace titled a short story in his collection "" "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature", and critics have identified Rorty's influence in some of Wallace's writings on irony. Susan Haack has been a fierce critic of Rorty's neopragmatism. Haack criticises Rorty's claim to be a pragmatist at all and wrote a short play called "We Pragmatists", where Rorty and Charles Sanders Peirce have a fictional conversation using only accurate quotes from their own writing. For Haack, the only link between Rorty's neopragmatism and Peirce's pragmatism is the name. Haack believes Rorty's neopragmatism is anti-philosophical and anti-intellectual, and exposes people further to rhetorical manipulation. Although Rorty was an avowed liberal, his political and moral philosophies have been attacked by commentators from the Left, some of whom believe them to be insufficient frameworks for social justice. Rorty was also criticized for his rejection of the idea that science can depict the world. One criticism, especially of "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity", is that Rorty's philosophical hero, the ironist, is an elitist figure. Rorty argues that most people would be "commonsensically nominalist and historicist" but not ironist. They would combine an ongoing attention to the particular as opposed to the transcendent (nominalism) with an awareness of their place in a continuum of contingent lived experience alongside other individuals (historicist), without necessarily having continual doubts about the resulting worldview as the ironist does. An ironist is someone who "has radical and continuing doubts about their final vocabulary"; "realizes that argument phrased in their vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts"; and "does not think their vocabulary is closer to reality than others" (all 73, "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity"). On the other hand, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo and the Spanish philosopher Santiago Zabala in their 2011 book "Hermeneutic Communism: from Heidegger to Marx" affirm that together with Richard Rorty we also consider it a flaw that "the main thing contemporary academic Marxists inherit from Marx and Engels is the conviction that the quest for the cooperative commonwealth should be scientific rather than utopian, knowing rather than romantic." As we will show hermeneutics contains all the utopian and romantic features that Rorty refers to because, contrary to the knowledge of science, it does not claim modern universality but rather postmodern particularism. Rorty often draws on a broad range of other philosophers to support his views, and his interpretation of their work has been contested. Since he is working from a tradition of reinterpretation, he is not interested in "accurately" portraying other thinkers, but rather in using it in the same way a literary critic might use a novel. His essay "The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres" is a thorough description of how he treats the greats in the history of philosophy. In "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity", Rorty attempts to disarm those who criticize his writings by arguing that their philosophical criticisms are made using axioms that are explicitly rejected within Rorty's own philosophy. For instance, he defines allegations of irrationality as affirmations of vernacular "otherness", and so—Rorty argues—accusations of irrationality can be expected during "any" argument and must simply be brushed aside.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay "Nature". Following this work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence." Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, ' (1841) and ' (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays "Self-Reliance", "The Over-Soul", "Circles", "The Poet", and "Experience." Together with "Nature", these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." Emerson is one of several figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world." He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him. "In all my lectures," he wrote, "I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man." Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist. in 1867, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society. Early life, family, and education. Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803, a son of Ruth Haskins and the Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian minister. He was named after his mother's brother Ralph and his father's great-grandmother Rebecca Waldo. Ralph Waldo was the second of five sons who survived into adulthood; the others were William, Edward, Robert Bulkeley, and Charles. Three other children—Phebe, John Clarke, and Mary Caroline—died in childhood. Emerson was entirely of English ancestry, and his family had been in New England since the early colonial period. Emerson's father died from stomach cancer on May 12, 1811, less than two weeks before Emerson's eighth birthday. Emerson was raised by his mother, with the help of the other women in the family; his aunt Mary Moody Emerson in particular had a profound effect on him. She lived with the family off and on and maintained a constant correspondence with Emerson until her death in 1863. Emerson's formal schooling began at the Boston Latin School in 1812, when he was nine. In October 1817, at age 14, Emerson went to Harvard College and was appointed freshman messenger for the president, requiring Emerson to fetch delinquent students and send messages to faculty. Midway through his junior year, Emerson began keeping a list of books he had read and started a journal in a series of notebooks that would be called "Wide World". He took outside jobs to cover his school expenses, including as a waiter for the Junior Commons and as an occasional teacher working with his uncle Samuel and aunt Sarah Ripley in Waltham, Massachusetts. By his senior year, Emerson decided to go by his middle name, Waldo. Emerson served as Class Poet; as was custom, he presented an original poem on Harvard's Class Day, a month before his official graduation on August 29, 1821, when he was 18. He did not stand out as a student and graduated in the exact middle of his class of 59 people. In the early 1820s, Emerson was a teacher at the School for Young Ladies (which was run by his brother William). He would next spend two years living in a cabin in the Canterbury section of Roxbury, Massachusetts, where he wrote and studied nature. In his honor, this area is now called Schoolmaster Hill in Boston's Franklin Park. In 1826, faced with poor health, Emerson went to seek a warmer climate. He first went to Charleston, South Carolina, but found the weather was still too cold. He then went farther south, to St. Augustine, Florida, where he took long walks on the beach and began writing poetry. While in St. Augustine he made the acquaintance of Prince Achille Murat, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. Murat was two years his senior; they became good friends and enjoyed each other's company. The two engaged in enlightening discussions of religion, society, philosophy, and government. Emerson considered Murat an important figure in his intellectual education. While in St. Augustine, Emerson had his first encounter with slavery. At one point, he attended a meeting of the Bible Society while a slave auction was taking place in the yard outside. He wrote, "One ear therefore heard the glad tidings of great joy, whilst the other was regaled with 'Going, gentlemen, going!'" Early career. After Harvard, Emerson assisted his brother William in a school for young women established in their mother's house, after he had established his own school in Chelmsford, Massachusetts; when his brother William went to Göttingen to study law in mid-1824, Ralph Waldo closed the school but continued to teach in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until early 1825. Emerson was accepted into the Harvard Divinity School in late 1824, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in 1828. Emerson's brother Edward, two years younger than he, entered the office of the lawyer Daniel Webster, after graduating from Harvard first in his class. Edward's physical health began to deteriorate, and he soon suffered a mental collapse as well; he was taken to McLean Asylum in June 1828 at age 23. Although he recovered his mental equilibrium, he died in 1834, apparently from long-standing tuberculosis. Another of Emerson's bright and promising younger brothers, Charles, born in 1808, died in 1836, also of tuberculosis, making him the third young person in Emerson's innermost circle to die in a period of a few years. Emerson met his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, in Concord, New Hampshire, on Christmas Day, 1827, and married her when she was 18 two years later. The couple moved to Boston, with Emerson's mother, Ruth, moving with them to help take care of Ellen, who was already ill with tuberculosis. Less than two years after that, on February 8, 1831, Ellen died, at the age of 20, after uttering her last words: "I have not forgotten the peace and joy". Emerson was heavily affected by her death and visited her grave in Roxbury daily. In a journal entry dated March 29, 1832, he wrote, "I visited Ellen's tomb & opened the coffin". Boston's Second Church invited Emerson to serve as its junior pastor, and he was ordained on January 11, 1829. His initial salary was $1,200 per year (), increasing to $1,400 in July, but with his church role he took on other responsibilities: he was the chaplain of the Massachusetts legislature and a member of the Boston school committee. His church activities kept him busy, though during this period, facing the imminent death of his wife, he began to doubt his own beliefs. After his wife's death, he began to disagree with the church's methods, writing in his journal in June 1832, "I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers". His disagreements with church officials over the administration of the Communion service and misgivings about public prayer eventually led to his resignation in 1832. As he wrote, "This mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough why I should abandon it". As one Emerson scholar has pointed out, "Doffing the decent black of the pastor, he was free to choose the gown of the lecturer and teacher, of the thinker not confined within the limits of an institution or a tradition". Emerson toured Europe in 1833 and later wrote of his travels in "English Traits" (1856). He left aboard the brig "Jasper" on Christmas Day, 1832, sailing first to Malta. During his European trip, he spent several months in Italy, visiting Rome, Florence and Venice, among other cities. When in Rome, he met with John Stuart Mill, who gave him a letter of recommendation to meet Thomas Carlyle. He went to Switzerland, and had to be dragged by fellow passengers to visit Voltaire's home in Ferney, "protesting all the way upon the unworthiness of his memory". He then went on to Paris, a "loud modern New York of a place", where he visited the Jardin des Plantes. He was greatly moved by the organization of plants according to Jussieu's system of classification, and the way all such objects were related and connected. As Robert D. Richardson says, "Emerson's moment of insight into the interconnectedness of things in the Jardin des Plantes was a moment of almost visionary intensity that pointed him away from theology and toward science". Moving north to England, Emerson met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle in particular was a strong influence on him; Emerson would later serve as an unofficial literary agent in the United States for Carlyle, and in March 1835, he tried to persuade Carlyle to come to America to lecture. The two maintained a correspondence until Carlyle's death in 1881. Emerson returned to the United States on October 9, 1833, and lived with his mother in Newton, Massachusetts. In October 1834, he moved to Concord, Massachusetts, to live with his step-grandfather, Dr. Ezra Ripley, at what was later named The Old Manse. Given the budding Lyceum movement, which provided lectures on all sorts of topics, Emerson saw a possible career as a lecturer. On November 5, 1833, he made the first of what would eventually be some 1,500 lectures, "The Uses of Natural History", in Boston. This was an expanded account of his experience in Paris. In this lecture, he set out some of his important beliefs and the ideas he would later develop in his first published essay, "Nature": On January 24, 1835, Emerson wrote a letter to Lidian Jackson proposing marriage. Her acceptance reached him by mail on the 28th. In July 1835, he bought a house on the Cambridge and Concord Turnpike in Concord, Massachusetts, which he named Bush; it is now open to the public as the Ralph Waldo Emerson House. Emerson quickly became one of the leading citizens in the town. He gave a lecture to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the town of Concord on September 12, 1835. Two days later, he married Lidian Jackson in her home town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and moved to the new home in Concord together with Emerson's mother on September 15. Emerson quickly changed his wife's name to Lidian, and would call her Queenie, and sometimes Asia, and she called him Mr. Emerson. Their children were Waldo, Ellen, Edith, and Edward Waldo Emerson. Edward Waldo Emerson was the father of Raymond Emerson. Ellen was named for his first wife, at Lidian's suggestion. Emerson was poor when he was at Harvard, but was later able to support his family for much of his life. He inherited a fair amount of money after his first wife's death, though he had to file a lawsuit against the Tucker family in 1836 to get it. He received $11,600 in May 1834 (), and a further $11,674.49 in July 1837 (). In 1834, he considered that he had an income of $1,200 a year from the initial payment of the estate, equivalent to what he had earned as a pastor. Literary career and transcendentalism. On September 8, 1836, the day before the publication of "Nature", Emerson met with Frederic Henry Hedge, George Putnam, and George Ripley to plan periodic gatherings of other like-minded intellectuals. This was the beginning of the Transcendental Club, which served as a center for the movement. Its first official meeting was held on September 19, 1836. On September 1, 1837, women attended a meeting of the Transcendental Club for the first time. Emerson invited Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Hoar, and Sarah Ripley for dinner at his home before the meeting to ensure that they would be present for the evening get-together. Fuller would prove to be an important figure in transcendentalism. Emerson anonymously published his first essay, "Nature", on September 9, 1836. A year later, on August 31, 1837, he delivered his now-famous Phi Beta Kappa address, "The American Scholar", then entitled "An Oration, Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge"; it was renamed for a collection of essays (which included the first general publication of "Nature") in 1849. Friends urged him to publish the talk, and he did so at his own expense, in an edition of 500 copies, which sold out in a month. In the speech, Emerson declared literary independence in the United States and urged Americans to create a writing style all their own, free from Europe. James Russell Lowell, who was a student at Harvard at the time, called it "an event without former parallel on our literary annals". Another member of the audience, Reverend John Pierce, called it "an apparently incoherent and unintelligible address". In 1837, Emerson befriended Henry David Thoreau. Though they had likely met as early as 1835, in the fall of 1837, Emerson asked Thoreau, "Do you keep a journal?" The question went on to be a lifelong inspiration for Thoreau. Emerson's own journal was published in 16 large volumes, in the definitive Harvard University Press edition issued between 1960 and 1982. Some scholars consider the journal to be Emerson's key literary work. In March 1837, Emerson gave a series of lectures on the philosophy of history at the Masonic Temple in Boston. This was the first time he managed a lecture series on his own, and it was the beginning of his career as a lecturer. The profits from this series of lectures were much larger than when he was paid by an organization to talk, and he continued to manage his own lectures often throughout his lifetime. He eventually gave as many as 80 lectures a year, traveling across the northern United States as far as St. Louis, Des Moines, Minneapolis, and California. On July 15, 1838, Emerson was invited to Divinity Hall, Harvard Divinity School, to deliver the school's graduation address, which came to be known as the "Divinity School Address". Emerson discounted biblical miracles and proclaimed that, while Jesus was a great man, he was not God: historical Christianity, he said, had turned Jesus into a "demigod, as the Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo". His comments outraged the establishment and the general Protestant community. He was denounced as an atheist and a poisoner of young men's minds. Despite the roar of critics, he made no reply, leaving others to put forward a defense. He was not invited back to speak at Harvard for another thirty years. The transcendental group began to publish its flagship journal, "The Dial", in July 1840. They planned the journal as early as October 1839, but work did not begin until the first week of 1840. George Ripley was the managing editor. Margaret Fuller was the first editor, having been approached by Emerson after several others had declined the role. Fuller stayed on for about two years, when Emerson took over, using the journal to promote talented young writers including Ellery Channing and Thoreau. In 1841 Emerson published "Essays", his second book, which included the famous essay "Self-Reliance". His aunt called it a "strange medley of atheism and false independence", but it gained favorable reviews in London and Paris. This book, and its popular reception, more than any of Emerson's contributions to date laid the groundwork for his international fame. In January 1842 Emerson's first son, Waldo, died of scarlet fever. Emerson wrote of his grief in the poem "Threnody" ("For this losing is true dying"), and the essay "Experience". In the same month, William James was born, and Emerson agreed to be his godfather. Bronson Alcott announced his plans in November 1842 to find "a farm of a hundred acres in excellent condition with good buildings, a good orchard and grounds". Charles Lane purchased a farm in Harvard, Massachusetts, in May 1843 for what would become Fruitlands, a community based on Utopian ideals inspired in part by transcendentalism. The farm would run based on a communal effort, using no animals for labor; its participants would eat no meat and use no wool or leather. Emerson said he felt "sad at heart" for not engaging in the experiment himself. Even so, he did not feel Fruitlands would be a success. "Their whole doctrine is spiritual", he wrote, "but they always end with saying, Give us much land and money". Even Alcott admitted he was not prepared for the difficulty in operating Fruitlands. "None of us were prepared to actualize practically the ideal life of which we dreamed. So we fell apart", he wrote. After its failure, Emerson helped buy a farm for Alcott's family in Concord which Alcott named "Hillside". "The Dial" ceased publication in April 1844; Horace Greeley reported it as an end to the "most original and thoughtful periodical ever published in this country". In 1844, Emerson published his second collection of essays, "Essays: Second Series". This collection included "The Poet", "Experience", "Gifts", and an essay entitled "Nature", a different work from the 1836 essay of the same name. Emerson made a living as a popular lecturer in New England and much of the rest of the country. He had begun lecturing in 1833; by the 1850s he was giving as many as 80 lectures per year. He addressed the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and the Gloucester Lyceum, among others. Emerson spoke on a wide variety of subjects, and many of his essays grew out of his lectures. He charged between $10 and $50 for each appearance, bringing him as much as $2,000 in a typical winter lecture season. This was more than his earnings from other sources. In some years, he earned as much as $900 for a series of six lectures, and in another, for a winter series of talks in Boston, he netted $1,600. He eventually gave some 1,500 lectures in his lifetime. His earnings allowed him to expand his property, buying of land by Walden Pond and a few more acres in a neighboring pine grove. He wrote that he was "landlord and waterlord of 14 acres, more or less". Emerson was introduced to Indian philosophy through the works of the French philosopher Victor Cousin. In 1845, Emerson's journals show he was reading the "Bhagavad Gita" and Henry Thomas Colebrooke's "Essays on the Vedas". He was strongly influenced by Vedanta, and much of his writing has strong shades of nondualism. One of the clearest examples of this can be found in his essay "The Over-soul": The central message Emerson drew from his Asian studies was that "the purpose of life was spiritual transformation and direct experience of divine power, here and now on earth." In 1847–48, he toured the British Isles. He also visited Paris between the French Revolution of 1848 and the bloody June Days. When he arrived, he saw the stumps of trees that had been cut down to form barricades in the February riots. On May 21, he stood on the Champ de Mars in the midst of mass celebrations for concord, peace and labor. He wrote in his journal, "At the end of the year we shall take account, & see if the Revolution was worth the trees." The trip left an important imprint on Emerson's later work. His 1856 book "English Traits" is based largely on observations recorded in his travel journals and notebooks. Emerson later came to see the American Civil War as a "revolution" that shared common ground with the European revolutions of 1848. In a speech in Concord, Massachusetts on May 3, 1851, Emerson denounced the Fugitive Slave Act: That summer, he wrote in his diary: In February 1852 Emerson and James Freeman Clarke and William Henry Channing edited an edition of the works and letters of Margaret Fuller, who had died in 1850. Within a week of her death, her New York editor, Horace Greeley, suggested to Emerson that a biography of Fuller, to be called "Margaret and Her Friends", be prepared quickly "before the interest excited by her sad decease has passed away". Published under the title "The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli", Fuller's words were heavily censored or rewritten. The three editors were not concerned about accuracy; they believed public interest in Fuller was temporary and that she would not survive as a historical figure. Even so, it was the best-selling biography of the decade and went through thirteen editions before the end of the century. Walt Whitman published the innovative poetry collection "Leaves of Grass" in 1855 and sent a copy to Emerson for his opinion. Emerson responded positively, sending Whitman a flattering five-page letter in response. Emerson's approval helped the first edition of "Leaves of Grass" stir up significant interest and convinced Whitman to issue a second edition shortly thereafter. This edition quoted a phrase from Emerson's letter, printed in gold leaf on the cover: "I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career". Emerson took offense that this letter was made public and later was more critical of the work. Philosophers Camp at Follensbee Pond – Adirondacks. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the summer of 1858, would venture into the great wilderness of upstate New York. Joining him were nine of the most illustrious intellectuals ever to camp out in the Adirondacks to connect with nature: Louis Agassiz, James Russell Lowell, John Holmes, Horatio Woodman, Ebenezer Rockwell Hoar, Jeffries Wyman, Estes Howe, Amos Binney, and William James Stillman. Invited, but unable to make the trip for diverse reasons, were: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Charles Eliot Norton, all members of the Saturday Club (Boston, Massachusetts). This social club was mostly a literary membership that met the last Saturday of the month at the Boston Parker House Hotel (Omni Parker House). William James Stillman was a painter and founding editor of an art journal called the Crayon. Stillman was born and grew up in Schenectady which was just south of the Adirondack mountains. He would later travel there to paint the wilderness landscape and to fish and hunt. He would share his experiences in this wilderness to the members of the Saturday Club, raising their interest in this unknown region. James Russell Lowell and William Stillman would lead the effort to organize a trip to the Adirondacks. They would begin their journey on August 2, 1858, traveling by train, steam boat, stagecoach, and canoe guide boats. News that these cultured men were living like "Sacs and Sioux" in the wilderness appeared in newspapers across the nation. This would become known as the "Philosophers Camp". This event was a landmark in the nineteenth-century intellectual movement, linking nature with art and literature. Although much has been written over many years by scholars and biographers of Emerson's life, little has been written of what has become known as the "Philosophers Camp" at Follensbee Pond. Yet, his epic poem "Adirondac" reads like a journal of his day to day detailed description of adventures in the wilderness with his fellow members of the Saturday Club. This two week camping excursion (1858 in the Adirondacks) brought him face to face with a true wilderness, something he spoke of in his essay "Nature" published in 1836. He said, "in the wilderness I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages". Civil War years. Emerson was staunchly opposed to slavery, but he did not appreciate being in the public limelight and was hesitant about lecturing on the subject. In the years leading up to the Civil War, he did give a number of lectures, however, beginning as early as November 1837. A number of his friends and family members were more active abolitionists than he, at first, but from 1844 on he more actively opposed slavery. He gave a number of speeches and lectures, and welcomed John Brown to his home during Brown's visits to Concord. He voted for Abraham Lincoln in 1860, but was disappointed that Lincoln was more concerned about preserving the Union than eliminating slavery outright. Once the American Civil War broke out, Emerson made it clear that he believed in immediate emancipation of the slaves. Around this time, in 1860, Emerson published "The Conduct of Life", his seventh collection of essays. It "grappled with some of the thorniest issues of the moment," and "his experience in the abolition ranks is a telling influence in his conclusions." In these essays Emerson strongly embraced the idea of war as a means of national rebirth: "Civil war, national bankruptcy, or revolution, [are] more rich in the central tones than languid years of prosperity." Emerson visited Washington, D.C, at the end of January 1862. He gave a public lecture at the Smithsonian on January 31, 1862, and declared:, "The South calls slavery an institution ... I call it destitution ... Emancipation is the demand of civilization". The next day, February 1, his friend Charles Sumner took him to meet Lincoln at the White House. Lincoln was familiar with Emerson's work, having previously seen him lecture. Emerson's misgivings about Lincoln began to soften after this meeting. In 1865, he spoke at a memorial service held for Lincoln in Concord: "Old as history is, and manifold as are its tragedies, I doubt if any death has caused so much pain as this has caused, or will have caused, on its announcement." Emerson also met a number of high-ranking government officials, including Salmon P. Chase, the secretary of the treasury; Edward Bates, the attorney general; Edwin M. Stanton, the secretary of war; Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy; and William Seward, the secretary of state. On May 6, 1862, Emerson's protégé Henry David Thoreau died of tuberculosis at the age of 44. Emerson delivered his eulogy. He often referred to Thoreau as his best friend, despite a falling-out that began in 1849 after Thoreau published "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers". Another friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, died two years after Thoreau, in 1864. Emerson served as a pallbearer when Hawthorne was buried in Concord, as Emerson wrote, "in a pomp of sunshine and verdure". He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1864. Final years and death. Starting in 1867, Emerson's health began declining; he wrote much less in his journals. Beginning as early as the summer of 1871 or in the spring of 1872, he started experiencing memory problems and suffered from aphasia. By the end of the decade, he forgot his own name at times and, when anyone asked how he felt, he responded, "Quite well; I have lost my mental faculties, but am perfectly well". In the spring of 1871, Emerson took a trip on the transcontinental railroad, barely two years after its completion. Along the way and in California he met a number of dignitaries, including Brigham Young during a stopover in Salt Lake City. Part of his California visit included a trip to Yosemite, and while there he met a young and unknown John Muir, a signature event in Muir's career. Emerson's Concord home caught fire on July 24, 1872. He called for help from neighbors and, giving up on putting out the flames, all tried to save as many objects as possible. The fire was put out by Ephraim Bull Jr., the one-armed son of Ephraim Wales Bull. Donations were collected by friends to help the Emersons rebuild, including $5,000 gathered by Francis Cabot Lowell, another $10,000 collected by LeBaron Russell Briggs, and a personal donation of $1,000 from George Bancroft. Support for shelter was offered as well; though the Emersons ended up staying with family at the Old Manse, invitations came from Anne Lynch Botta, James Elliot Cabot, James T. Fields and Annie Adams Fields. The fire marked an end to Emerson's serious lecturing career; from then on, he would lecture only on special occasions and only in front of familiar audiences. While the house was being rebuilt, Emerson took a trip to England, continental Europe, and Egypt. He left on October 23, 1872, along with his daughter Ellen, while his wife Lidian spent time at the Old Manse and with friends. Emerson and his daughter Ellen returned to the United States on the ship "Olympus" along with friend Charles Eliot Norton on April 15, 1873. Emerson's return to Concord was celebrated by the town, and school was canceled that day. In late 1874, Emerson published an anthology of poetry entitled "Parnassus", which included poems by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Julia Caroline Dorr, Jean Ingelow, Lucy Larcom, Jones Very, as well as Thoreau and several others. Originally, the anthology had been prepared as early as the fall of 1871, but it was delayed when the publishers asked for revisions. The problems with his memory had become embarrassing to Emerson and he ceased his public appearances by 1879. In reply to an invitation to a retirement celebration for Octavius B. Frothingham, he wrote, "“I am not in condition to make visits, or take any part in conversation. Old age has rushed on me in the last year, and tied my tongue, and hid my memory, and thus made it a duty to stay at home.”" The New York Times quoted his reply and noted that his regrets were read aloud at the celebration. Holmes wrote of the problem saying, "Emerson is afraid to trust himself in society much, on account of the failure of his memory and the great difficulty he finds in getting the words he wants. It is painful to witness his embarrassment at times". On April 21, 1882, Emerson was found to be suffering from pneumonia. He died six days later. Emerson is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. He was placed in his coffin wearing a white robe given by the American sculptor Daniel Chester French. Lifestyle and beliefs. Emerson's religious views were often considered radical at the time. He believed that all things are connected to God and, therefore, all things are divine. Critics believed that Emerson was removing the central God figure; as Henry Ware Jr. said, Emerson was in danger of taking away "the Father of the Universe" and leaving "but a company of children in an orphan asylum". Emerson was partly influenced by German philosophy and Biblical criticism. His views, the basis of Transcendentalism, suggested that God does not have to reveal the truth, but that the truth could be intuitively experienced directly from nature. When asked his religious belief, Emerson stated, "I am more of a Quaker than anything else. I believe in the 'still, small voice,' and that voice is Christ within us." Emerson was a supporter of the spread of community libraries in the 19th century, having this to say of them: "Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom." Emerson may have had erotic thoughts about at least one man. During his early years at Harvard, he found himself attracted to a young freshman named Martin Gay about whom he wrote sexually charged poetry. He also had a number of romantic interests in various women throughout his life, such as Anna Barker and Caroline Sturgis. Race and slavery. Emerson did not become an ardent abolitionist until 1844, though his journals show he was concerned with slavery beginning in his youth, even dreaming about helping to free slaves. In June 1856, shortly after Charles Sumner, a United States Senator, was beaten for his staunch abolitionist views, Emerson lamented that he himself was not as committed to the cause. He wrote, "There are men who as soon as they are born take a bee-line to the axe of the inquisitor. ... Wonderful the way in which we are saved by this unfailing supply of the moral element". After Sumner's attack, Emerson began to speak out about slavery. "I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom", he said at a meeting at Concord that summer. Emerson used slavery as an example of a human injustice, especially in his role as a minister. In early 1838, provoked by the murder of an abolitionist publisher from Alton, Illinois named Elijah Parish Lovejoy, Emerson gave his first public antislavery address. As he said, "It is but the other day that the brave Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to live". John Quincy Adams said the mob-murder of Lovejoy "sent a shock as of any earthquake throughout this continent". However, Emerson maintained that reform would be achieved through moral agreement rather than by militant action. By August 1, 1844, at a lecture in Concord, he stated more clearly his support for the abolitionist movement: "We are indebted mainly to this movement, and to the continuers of it, for the popular discussion of every point of practical ethics". Emerson is often known as one of the most liberal democratic thinkers of his time who believed that through the democratic process, slavery should be abolished. While being an avid abolitionist who was known for his criticism of the legality of slavery, Emerson struggled with the implications of race. His usual liberal leanings did not clearly translate when it came to believing that all races had equal capability or function, which was a common conception for the period in which he lived. Many critics believe that it was his views on race that inhibited him from becoming an abolitionist earlier in his life and also inhibited him from being more active in the antislavery movement. Much of his early life, he was silent on the topic of race and slavery. Not until he was well into his 30s did Emerson begin to publish writings on race and slavery, and not until he was in his late 40s and 50s did he became known as an antislavery activist. During his early life, Emerson seemed to develop a hierarchy of races based on faculty to reason or rather, whether African slaves were distinguishably equal to white men based on their ability to reason. In a journal entry written in 1822, Emerson wrote about a personal observation: "It can hardly be true that the difference lies in the attribute of reason. I saw ten, twenty, a hundred large lipped, lowbrowed black men in the streets who, except in the mere matter of language, did not exceed the sagacity of the elephant. Now is it true that these were created superior to this wise animal, and designed to control it? And in comparison with the highest orders of men, the Africans will stand so low as to make the difference which subsists between themselves & the sagacious beasts inconsiderable." As with many supporters of slavery, during his early years, Emerson seems to have thought that the faculties of African slaves were not equal to those of white slave-owners. But this belief in racial inferiorities did not make Emerson a supporter of slavery. Emerson wrote later that year that "No ingenious sophistry can ever reconcile the unperverted mind to the pardon of Slavery; nothing but tremendous familiarity, and the bias of private interest". Emerson saw the removal of people from their homeland, the treatment of slaves, and the self-seeking benefactors of slaves as gross injustices. For Emerson, slavery was a moral issue, while superiority of the races was an issue he tried to analyze from a scientific perspective based what he believed to be inherited traits. Emerson saw himself as a man of "Saxon descent". In a speech given in 1835 titled "Permanent Traits of the English National Genius", he said, "The inhabitants of the United States, especially of the Northern portion, are descended from the people of England and have inherited the traits of their national character". He saw direct ties between race based on national identity and the inherent nature of the human being. White Americans who were native-born in the United States and of English ancestry were categorized by him as a separate "race", which he thought had a position of being superior to other nations. His idea of race was based on a shared culture, environment, and history. He believed that native-born Americans of English descent were superior to European immigrants, including the Irish, French, and Germans, and also as being superior to English people from England, whom he considered a close second and the only really comparable group. Later in his life, Emerson's ideas on race changed when he became more involved in the abolitionist movement while at the same time he began to more thoroughly analyze the philosophical implications of race and racial hierarchies. His beliefs shifted focus to the potential outcomes of racial conflicts. Emerson's racial views were closely related to his views on nationalism and national superiority, which was a common view in the United States at that time. Emerson used contemporary theories of race and natural science to support a theory of race development. He believed that the current political battle and the current enslavement of other races was an inevitable racial struggle, one that would result in the inevitable union of the United States. Such conflicts were necessary for the dialectic of change that would eventually allow the progress of the nation. In much of his later work, Emerson seems to allow the notion that different races will eventually mix in America. This hybridization process would lead to a superior race that would be to the advantage of the superiority of the United States. Legacy. As a lecturer and orator, Emerson—nicknamed the Sage of Concord—became the leading voice of intellectual culture in the United States. James Russell Lowell, editor of the "Atlantic Monthly" and the "North American Review", commented in his book "My Study Windows" (1871), that Emerson was not only the "most steadily attractive lecturer in America," but also "one of the pioneers of the lecturing system." Herman Melville, who had met Emerson in 1849, originally thought he had "a defect in the region of the heart" and a "self-conceit so intensely intellectual that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name", though he later admitted Emerson was "a great man". Theodore Parker, a minister and transcendentalist, noted Emerson's ability to influence and inspire others: "the brilliant genius of Emerson rose in the winter nights, and hung over Boston, drawing the eyes of ingenuous young people to look up to that great new star, a beauty and a mystery, which charmed for the moment, while it gave also perennial inspiration, as it led them forward along new paths, and towards new hopes". Emerson's work not only influenced his contemporaries, such as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, but would continue to influence thinkers and writers in the United States and around the world down to the present. Notable thinkers who recognize Emerson's influence include Nietzsche and William James, Emerson's godson. There is little disagreement that Emerson was the most influential writer of 19th-century America, though these days he is largely the concern of scholars. Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and William James were all positive Emersonians, while Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James were Emersonians in denial—while they set themselves in opposition to the sage, there was no escaping his influence. To T. S. Eliot, Emerson's essays were an "encumbrance". Waldo the Sage was eclipsed from 1914 until 1965, when he returned to shine, after surviving in the work of major American poets like Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. In his book "The American Religion", Harold Bloom repeatedly refers to Emerson as "The prophet of the American Religion", which in the context of the book refers to indigenously American religions such as Mormonism and Christian Science, which arose largely in Emerson's lifetime, but also to mainline Protestant churches that Bloom says have become in the United States more gnostic than their European counterparts. In "The Western Canon", Bloom compares Emerson to Michel de Montaigne: "The only equivalent reading experience that I know is to reread endlessly in the notebooks and journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American version of Montaigne." Several of Emerson's poems were included in Bloom's "The Best Poems of the English Language", although he wrote that none of the poems are as outstanding as the best of Emerson's essays, which Bloom listed as "Self-Reliance", "Circles", "Experience", and "nearly all of "Conduct of Life"". In his belief that line lengths, rhythms, and phrases are determined by breath, Emerson's poetry foreshadowed the theories of Charles Olson. Selected works. Collections Individual essays Poems Letters

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Valentino Annibale Pastore Valentino Annibale Pastore (13 November 1868 - 27 February 1956) was an Italian philosopher and logician. Pastore was born in Orbassano. He studied literature at the University of Turin under Arturo Graf. His thesis "La vita delle forme letterarie" (The life of literary forms) was published in 1892 in Turin. Pastore then turned to philosophy, influenced by the works of Pasquale d'Ercole, Friedrich Kiesow, Antonio Garbasso, and Giuseppe Peano, publishing his own thesis "Sopra le teorie della scienza: logica, matematica, fisica" (On the theories of science: logic, mathematics, physics) in 1903. He was professor in Turin from 1913 until 1939, leading a laboratory of "experimental logic". He eventually focused on logical aspects and procedures in science. Pastore died in Turin.

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Arthur Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer (; ; 22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work "The World as Will and Representation" (expanded in 1844), which characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and insatiable noumenal will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism. He was among the first thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Indian philosophy, such as asceticism, denial of the self, and the notion of the world-as-appearance. His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism. Though his work failed to garner substantial attention during his lifetime, Schopenhauer had a posthumous impact across various disciplines, including philosophy, literature, and science. His writing on aesthetics, morality, and psychology have influenced many thinkers and artists. Those who have cited his influence include philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Anthony Ludovici, scientists such as Erwin Schrödinger and Albert Einstein, psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, George Bernard Shaw, Machado de Assis, Jorge Luis Borges, John Patric, Marcel Proust, Thomas Hardy, Rainer Maria Rilke and Samuel Beckett as well as composers such as Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Arnold Schoenberg and Gustav Mahler. Life. Early life. Schopenhauer was born on 22 February 1788, in Danzig (then part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; present-day Gdańsk, Poland) on Heiligegeistgasse (present day Św. Ducha 47), the son of Johanna Schopenhauer (née Trosiener) (1766-1838) and Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer (1747-1805), both descendants of wealthy German-Dutch patrician families. Neither of them was very religious; both supported the French Revolution, and were republicans, cosmopolitans and Anglophiles. When Danzig became part of Prussia in 1793, Heinrich moved to Hamburg—a free city with a republican constitution —although his firm continued trading in Danzig where most of their extended families remained. Adele, Arthur's only sibling, was born on 12 July 1797. In 1797 Arthur was sent to Le Havre to live for two years with the family of his father's business associate, Grégoire de Blésimaire. He seemed to enjoy his stay there, learned to speak French fluently and started a friendship with Jean Anthime Grégoire de Blésimaire, his peer, which lasted for a large part of their lives. As early as 1799, Arthur started playing the flute. In 1803 he joined his parents on their long tour of Holland, Britain, France, Switzerland, Austria and Prussia; it was mostly a pleasure tour although Heinrich also visited some of his business associates. Heinrich gave his son a choice: he could stay at home and start preparations for university education, or he could travel with them and then continue his merchant education. Arthur later deeply regretted his choice because he found his merchant training tedious. He spent twelve weeks of the tour attending a school in Wimbledon where he was very unhappy and appalled by strict but intellectually shallow Anglican religiosity, which he continued to sharply criticize later in life despite his general Anglophilia. He was also under pressure from his father, who became very critical of his educational results. Heinrich became so fussy that even his wife started to doubt his mental health. In 1805, Heinrich died by drowning in a canal by their home in Hamburg. Although it was possible that his death was accidental, his wife and son believed that it was suicide because he was very prone to unsociable behavior, anxiety and depression which became especially pronounced in his last months of life. Arthur showed similar moodiness since his youth and often acknowledged that he inherited it from his father; there were also several other instances of serious mental health issues on his father's side of the family. His mother Johanna was generally described as vivacious and sociable. Despite the hardships, Schopenhauer seemed to like his father and later always mentioned him in a positive light. Heinrich Schopenhauer left the family with a significant inheritance that was split in three among Johanna and the children. Arthur Schopenhauer was entitled to control of his part when he reached the age of majority. He invested it conservatively in government bonds and earned annual interest that was more than double the salary of a university professor. Arthur spent two years as a merchant in honor of his dead father, and because of his own doubts about being too old to start a life of a scholar. Most of his prior education was practical merchant training and he had some trouble with learning Latin, which was a prerequisite for any academic career. His mother moved, with her daughter Adele, to Weimarthen the centre of German literatureto enjoy social life among writers and artists. Arthur and his mother were not on good terms. In one letter to him she wrote: "You are unbearable and burdensome, and very hard to live with; all your good qualities are overshadowed by your conceit, and made useless to the world simply because you cannot restrain your propensity to pick holes in other people." Arthur left his mother, and they never met again before she died 24 years later. Some negative opinions of the later philosopher about women may be rooted in his troubled relationship with his mother. Arthur lived in Hamburg with his friend Jean Anthime, who was also studying to become a merchant. After quitting his merchant apprenticeship, with some encouragement from his mother, he dedicated himself to studies at the Ernestine Gymnasium, Gotha, in Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, but he also enjoyed social life among the local nobility, spending large amounts of money, which caused concern to his frugal mother. He left the Gymnasium after writing a satirical poem about one of the schoolmasters. Although Arthur claimed that he left voluntarily, his mother's letter indicates that he was expelled. Education. He moved to Weimar but did not live with his mother, who even tried to discourage him from coming by explaining that they would not get along very well. Their relationship deteriorated even further due to their temperamental differences. He accused his mother of being financially irresponsible, flirtatious and seeking to remarry, which he considered an insult to his father's memory. His mother, while professing her love to him, criticized him sharply for being moody, tactless, and argumentative, and urged him to improve his behavior so that he would not alienate people. Arthur concentrated on his studies, which were now going very well, and he also enjoyed the usual social life such as balls, parties and theater. By that time Johanna's famous salon was well established among local intellectuals and dignitaries, the most celebrated of them being Goethe. Arthur attended her parties, usually when he knew that Goethe would be therealthough the famous writer and statesman seemed not even to notice the young and unknown student. It is possible that Goethe kept a distance because Johanna warned him about her son's depressive and combative nature, or because Goethe was then on bad terms with Arthur's language instructor and roommate, Franz Passow. Schopenhauer was also captivated by the beautiful Karoline Jagemann, mistress of Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and he wrote to her his only known love poem. Despite his later celebration of asceticism and negative views of sexuality, Schopenhauer occasionally had sexual affairsusually with women of lower social status, such as servants, actresses, and sometimes even paid prostitutes. In a letter to his friend Anthime he claims that such affairs continued even in his mature age and admits that he had two out-of-wedlock daughters (born in 1819 and 1836), both of whom died in infancy. In their youthful correspondence Arthur and Anthime were somewhat boastful and competitive about their sexual exploits—but Schopenhauer seemed aware that women usually didn't find him very charming or physically attractive, and his desires often remained unfulfilled. He left Weimar to become a student at the University of Göttingen in 1809. There are no written reasons about why Schopenhauer chose that university instead of the then more famous University of Jena, but Göttingen was known as more modern and scientifically oriented, with less attention given to theology. Law or medicine were usual choices for young men of Schopenhauer's status who also needed career and income; he chose medicine due to his scientific interests. Among his notable professors were Bernhard Friedrich Thibaut, Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Friedrich Stromeyer, Heinrich Adolf Schrader, Johann Tobias Mayer and Konrad Johann Martin Langenbeck. He studied metaphysics, psychology and logic under Gottlob Ernst Schulze, the author of "Aenesidemus", who made a strong impression and advised him to concentrate on Plato and Immanuel Kant. He decided to switch from medicine to philosophy around 1810–11 and he left Göttingen, which did not have a strong philosophy program: besides Schulze, the only other philosophy professor was Friedrich Bouterwek, whom Schopenhauer disliked. He did not regret his medicinal and scientific studies; he claimed that they were necessary for a philosopher, and even in Berlin he attended more lectures in sciences than in philosophy. During his days at Göttingen, he spent considerable time studying, but also continued his flute playing and social life. His friends included Friedrich Gotthilf Osann, Karl Witte, Christian Charles Josias von Bunsen, and William Backhouse Astor Sr. He arrived at the newly founded University of Berlin for the winter semester of 1811–12. At the same time, his mother had just begun her literary career; she published her first book in 1810, a biography of her friend Karl Ludwig Fernow, which was a critical success. Arthur attended lectures by the prominent post-Kantian philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, but quickly found many points of disagreement with his "Wissenschaftslehre"; he also found Fichte's lectures tedious and hard to understand. He later mentioned Fichte only in critical, negative termsseeing his philosophy as a lower quality version of Kant's and considering it useful only because Fichte's poor arguments unintentionally highlighted some failings of Kantianism. He also attended the lectures of the famous Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom he also quickly came to dislike. His notes and comments on Schleiermacher's lectures show that Schopenhauer was becoming very critical of religion and moving towards atheism. He learned by self-directed reading; besides Plato, Kant and Fichte he also read the works of Schelling, Fries, Jacobi, Bacon, Locke, and much current scientific literature. He attended philological courses by August Böckh and Friedrich August Wolf and continued his naturalistic interests with courses by Martin Heinrich Klaproth, Paul Erman, Johann Elert Bode, Ernst Gottfried Fischer, Johann Horkel, Friedrich Christian Rosenthal and Hinrich Lichtenstein (Lichtenstein was also a friend whom he met at one of his mother's parties in Weimar). Early work. Schopenhauer left Berlin in a rush in 1813, fearing that the city could be attacked and that he could be pressed into military service as Prussia had just joined the war against France. He returned to Weimar, but left after less than a month disgusted by the fact that his mother was now living with her supposed lover, Georg Friedrich Konrad Ludwig Müller von Gerstenbergk (1778–1838), a civil servant twelve years younger than her; he considered the relationship an act of infidelity to his father's memory. He settled for a while in Rudolstadt, hoping that no army would pass through the small town. He spent his time in solitude, hiking in the mountains and the Thuringian forest and writing his dissertation, "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason". He completed his dissertation at about the same time as the French army was defeated at the Battle of Leipzig. He became irritated by the arrival of soldiers in the town and accepted his mother's invitation to visit her in Weimar. She tried to convince him that her relationship with Gerstenbergk was platonic and that she had no intention of remarrying. But Schopenhauer remained suspicious and often came in conflict with Gerstenbergk because he considered him untalented, pretentious, and nationalistic. His mother had just published her second book, "Reminiscences of a Journey in the Years 1803, 1804, and 1805", a description of their family tour of Europe, which quickly became a hit. She found his dissertation incomprehensible and said it was unlikely that anyone would ever buy a copy. In a fit of temper Arthur told her that people would read his work long after the "rubbish" she wrote was totally forgotten. In fact, although they considered her novels of dubious quality, the Brockhaus publishing firm held her in high esteem because they consistently sold well. Hans Brockhaus (1888–1965) later claimed that his predecessors "saw nothing in this manuscript, but wanted to please one of our best-selling authors by publishing her son's work. We published more and more of her son Arthur's work and today nobody remembers Johanna, but her son's works are in steady demand and contribute to Brockhaus'[s] reputation." He kept large portraits of the pair in his office in Leipzig for the edification of his new editors. Also contrary to his mother's prediction, Schopenhauer's dissertation made an impression on Goethe, to whom he sent it as a gift. Although it is doubtful that Goethe agreed with Schopenhauer's philosophical positions, he was impressed by his intellect and extensive scientific education. Their subsequent meetings and correspondence were a great honor to a young philosopher, who was finally acknowledged by his intellectual hero. They mostly discussed Goethe's newly published (and somewhat lukewarmly received) work on color theory. Schopenhauer soon started writing his own treatise on the subject, "On Vision and Colors", which in many points differed from his teacher's. Although they remained polite towards each other, their growing theoretical disagreementsand especially Schopenhauer's extreme self-confidence and tactless criticismssoon made Goethe become distant again and after 1816 their correspondence became less frequent. Schopenhauer later admitted that he was greatly hurt by this rejection, but he continued to praise Goethe, and considered his color theory a great introduction to his own. Another important experience during his stay in Weimar was his acquaintance with Friedrich Majera historian of religion, orientalist and disciple of Herderwho introduced him to Eastern philosophy (see also Indology). Schopenhauer was immediately impressed by the "Upanishads" (he called them "the production of the highest human wisdom", and believed that they contained superhuman concepts) and the Buddha, and put them on a par with Plato and Kant. He continued his studies by reading the "Bhagavad Gita", an amateurish German journal "Asiatisches Magazin" and "Asiatick Researches" by the Asiatic Society. Schopenhauer held a profound respect for Indian philosophy; although he loved Hindu texts, he was more interested in Buddhism, which he came to regard as the best religion. However, his studies on Hindu and Buddhist texts were constrained by the lack of adequate literature, and the latter were mostly restricted to Early Buddhism. He also claimed that he formulated most of his ideas independently, and only later realized the similarities with Buddhism. Schopenhauer read the Latin translation and praised the Upanishads in his main work, "The World as Will and Representation" (1819), as well as in his "Parerga and Paralipomena" (1851) and commented,In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death. As the relationship with his mother fell to a new low, in May 1814 he left Weimar and moved to Dresden. He continued his philosophical studies, enjoyed the cultural life, socialized with intellectuals and engaged in sexual affairs. His friends in Dresden were Johann Gottlob von Quandt, Friedrich Laun, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause and Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl, a young painter who made a romanticized portrait of him in which he improved some of Schopenhauer's unattractive physical features. His criticisms of local artists occasionally caused public quarrels when he ran into them in public. However, his main occupation during his stay in Dresden was his seminal philosophical work, "The World as Will and Representation", which he started writing in 1814 and finished in 1818. He was recommended to the publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus by Baron Ferdinand von Biedenfeld, an acquaintance of his mother. Although Brockhaus accepted his manuscript, Schopenhauer made a poor impression because of his quarrelsome and fussy attitude, as well as very poor sales of the book after it was published in December 1818. In September 1818, while waiting for his book to be published and conveniently escaping an affair with a maid that caused an unwanted pregnancy, Schopenhauer left Dresden for a year-long vacation in Italy. He visited Venice, Bologna, Florence, Naples and Milan, travelling alone or accompanied by mostly English tourists he met. He spent the winter months in Rome, where he accidentally met his acquaintance Karl Witte and engaged in numerous quarrels with German tourists in Caffe Greco, among them Johann Friedrich Böhmer, who also mentioned his insulting remarks and unpleasant character. He enjoyed art, architecture, and ancient ruins, attended plays and operas, and continued his philosophical contemplation and love affairs. One of his affairs supposedly became serious, and for a while he contemplated marriage to a rich Italian noblewomanbut, despite his mentioning this several times, no details are known and it may have been Schopenhauer exaggerating. He corresponded regularly with his sister Adele and became close to her as her relationship with Johanna and Gerstenbergk also deteriorated. She informed him about their financial troubles as the banking house of A. L. Muhl in Danzigin which her mother invested their whole savings and Arthur a third of hiswas near bankruptcy. Arthur offered to share his assets, but his mother refused and became further enraged by his insulting comments. The women managed to receive only thirty percent of their savings while Arthur, using his business knowledge, took a suspicious and aggressive stance towards the banker and eventually received his part in full. The affair additionally worsened the relationships among all three members of the Schopenhauer family. He shortened his stay in Italy because of the trouble with Muhl and returned to Dresden. Disturbed by the financial risk and the lack of responses to his book he decided to take an academic position since it provided him with both income and an opportunity to promote his views. He contacted his friends at universities in Heidelberg, Göttingen and Berlin and found Berlin most attractive. He scheduled his lectures to coincide with those of the famous philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, whom Schopenhauer described as a "clumsy charlatan". He was especially appalled by Hegel's supposedly poor knowledge of natural sciences and tried to engage him in a quarrel about it already at his test lecture in March 1820. Hegel was also facing political suspicions at the time, when many progressive professors were fired, while Schopenhauer carefully mentioned in his application that he had no interest in politics. Despite their differences and the arrogant request to schedule lectures at the same time as his own, Hegel still voted to accept Schopenhauer to the university. However, only five students turned up to Schopenhauer's lectures, and he dropped out of academia. A late essay, "On University Philosophy", expressed his resentment towards the work conducted in academies. Later life. After his academic failure he continued to travel extensively, visiting Leipzig, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Schaffhausen, Vevey, Milan and spending eight months in Florence. However, before he left for his three-year travel, he had an incident with his Berlin neighbor, 47-year-old seamstress Caroline Louise Marquet. The details of the August 1821 incident are unknown. He claimed that he had just pushed her from his entrance after she had rudely refused to leave, and that she had purposely fallen to the ground so that she could sue him. She claimed that he had attacked her so violently that she had become paralyzed on her right side and unable to work. She immediately sued him, and the process lasted until May 1827, when a court found Schopenhauer guilty and forced him to pay her an annual pension until her death in 1842. Schopenhauer enjoyed Italy, where he studied art and socialized with Italian and English nobles. It was his last visit to the country. He left for Munich and stayed there for a year, mostly recuperating from various health issues, some of them possibly caused by venereal diseases (the treatment his doctor used suggests syphilis). He contacted publishers, offering to translate Hume into German and Kant into English, but his proposals were declined. Returning to Berlin, he began to study Spanish so he could read some of his favorite authors in their original language. He liked Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Miguel de Cervantes, and especially Baltasar Gracián. He also made failed attempts to publish his translations of their works. Few attempts to revive his lecturesagain scheduled at the same time as Hegel'salso failed, as did his inquiries about relocating to other universities. During his Berlin years, Schopenhauer occasionally mentioned his desire to marry and have a family. For a while he was unsuccessfully courting 17-year-old Flora Weiss, who was 22 years younger than himself. His unpublished writings from that time show that he was already very critical of monogamy but still not advocating polygynyinstead musing about a polyamorous relationship that he called "tetragamy". He had an on-and-off relationship with a young dancer, Caroline Richter (she also used the surname Medon after one of her ex-lovers). They met when he was 33 and she was 19 and working at the Berlin Opera. She had already had numerous lovers and a son out of wedlock, and later gave birth to another son, this time to an unnamed foreign diplomat (she soon had another pregnancy but the child was stillborn). As Schopenhauer was preparing to escape from Berlin in 1831, due to a cholera epidemic, he offered to take her with him on the condition that she left her young son behind. She refused and he went alone; in his will he left her a significant sum of money, but insisted that it should not be spent in any way on her second son. Schopenhauer claimed that, in his last year in Berlin, he had a prophetic dream that urged him to escape from the city. As he arrived in his new home in Frankfurt, he supposedly had another supernatural experience, an apparition of his dead father and his mother, who was still alive. This experience led him to spend some time investigating paranormal phenomena and magic. He was quite critical of the available studies and claimed that they were mostly ignorant or fraudulent, but he did believe that there are authentic cases of such phenomena and tried to explain them through his metaphysics as manifestations of the will. Upon his arrival in Frankfurt, he experienced a period of depression and declining health. He renewed his correspondence with his mother, and she seemed concerned that he might commit suicide like his father. By now Johanna and Adele were living very modestly. Johanna's writing did not bring her much income, and her popularity was waning. Their correspondence remained reserved, and Arthur seemed undisturbed by her death in 1838. His relationship with his sister grew closer and he corresponded with her until she died in 1849. In July 1832 Schopenhauer left Frankfurt for Mannheim but returned in July 1833 to remain there for the rest of his life, except for a few short journeys. He lived alone except for a succession of pet poodles named Atman and Butz. In 1836, he published "On the Will in Nature". In 1836 he sent his essay "On the Freedom of the Will" to the contest of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and won the prize for the following year. He sent another essay, "On the Basis of Morality", to the Royal Danish Society for Scientific Studies, but did not win the prize despite being the only contestant. The Society was appalled that several distinguished contemporary philosophers were mentioned in a very offensive manner, and claimed that the essay missed the point of the set topic and that the arguments were inadequate. Schopenhauer, who had been very confident that he would win, was enraged by this rejection. He published both essays as "The Two Basic Problems of Ethics". The first edition, published in 1841, again failed to draw attention to his philosophy. In the preface to the second edition, in 1860, he was still pouring insults on the Royal Danish Society. Two years later, after some negotiations, he managed to convince his publisher, Brockhaus, to print the second, updated edition of "The World as Will and Representation". That book was again mostly ignored and the few reviews were mixed or negative. However, Schopenhauer did start to attract some followers, mostly outside academia, among practical professionals (several of them were lawyers) who pursued private philosophical studies. He jokingly referred to them as "evangelists" and "apostles". One of the most active early followers was Julius Frauenstädt, who wrote numerous articles promoting Schopenhauer's philosophy. He was also instrumental in finding another publisher after Brockhaus declined to publish "Parerga and Paralipomena", believing that it would be another failure. Though Schopenhauer later stopped corresponding with him, claiming that he did not adhere closely enough to his ideas, Frauenstädt continued to promote Schopenhauer's work. They renewed their communication in 1859 and Schopenhauer named him heir for his literary estate. Frauenstädt also became the editor of the first collected works of Schopenhauer. In 1848 Schopenhauer witnessed violent upheaval in Frankfurt after General Hans Adolf Erdmann von Auerswald and Prince Felix Lichnowsky were murdered. He became worried for his own safety and property. Even earlier in life he had had such worries and kept a sword and loaded pistols near his bed to defend himself from thieves. He gave a friendly welcome to Austrian soldiers who wanted to shoot revolutionaries from his window and as they were leaving he gave one of the officers his opera glasses to help him monitor rebels. The rebellion passed without any loss to Schopenhauer and he later praised Alfred I, Prince of Windisch-Grätz for restoring order. He even modified his will, leaving a large part of his property to a Prussian fund that helped soldiers who became invalids while fighting rebellion in 1848 or the families of soldiers who died in battle. As Young Hegelians were advocating change and progress, Schopenhauer claimed that misery is natural for humans and that, even if some utopian society were established, people would still fight each other out of boredom, or would starve due to overpopulation. In 1851 Schopenhauer published "Parerga and Paralipomena", which, as the title says, contains essays that are supplementary to his main work. It was his first successful, widely read book, partly due to the work of his disciples who wrote praising reviews. The essays that proved most popular were the ones that actually did not contain the basic philosophical ideas of his system. Many academic philosophers considered him a great stylist and cultural critic but did not take his philosophy seriously. His early critics liked to point out similarities of his ideas to those Fichte and Schelling, or to claim that there were numerous contradictions in his philosophy. Both criticisms enraged Schopenhauer. However, he was becoming less interested in intellectual fights, but encouraged his disciples to do so. His private notes and correspondence show that he acknowledged some of the criticisms regarding contradictions, inconsistencies, and vagueness in his philosophy, but claimed that he was not concerned about harmony and agreement in his propositions and that some of his ideas should not be taken literally but instead as metaphors. Academic philosophers were also starting to notice his work. In 1856 the University of Leipzig sponsored an essay contest about Schopenhauer's philosophy, which was won by Rudolf Seydel's very critical essay. Schopenhauer's friend Jules Lunteschütz made the first of his four portraits of himwhich Schopenhauer did not particularly likewhich was soon sold to a wealthy landowner, Carl Ferdinand Wiesike, who built a house to display it. Schopenhauer seemed flattered and amused by this, and would claim that it was his first chapel. As his fame increased, copies of paintings and photographs of him were being sold and admirers were visiting the places where he had lived and written his works. People visited Frankfurt's "Englischer Hof" to observe him dining. Admirers gave him gifts and asked for autographs. He complained, however, that he still felt isolated due to his not very social nature and the fact that many of his good friends had already died from old age. He remained healthy in his own old age, which he attributed to regular walks no matter the weather and always getting enough sleep. He had a great appetite and could read without glasses, but his hearing had been declining since his youth and he developed problems with rheumatism. He remained active and lucid, continued his reading, writing and correspondence until his death. The numerous notes that he made during these years, amongst others on aging, were published posthumously under the title "Senilia". In the spring of 1860 his health began to decline, and he experienced shortness of breath and heart palpitations; in September he suffered inflammation of the lungs and, although he was starting to recover, he remained very weak. The last friend to visit him was Wilhelm Gwinner; according to him, Schopenhauer was concerned that he would not be able to finish his planned additions to "Parerga and Paralipomena" but was at peace with dying. He died of pulmonary-respiratory failure on 21 September 1860 while sitting at home on his couch. He was 72. Philosophy. The world as representation. Schopenhauer saw his philosophy as a continuation of Kant's, and used the results of Kantian epistemological investigation (transcendental idealism) as starting point for his own. Kant had argued that the empirical world is merely a complex of appearances whose existence and connection occur only in our mental representations. Schopenhauer reiterates this in the first sentence of his main work: "The world is my representation ("Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung")". Everything that there is for cognition (the entire world) exists simply as an object in relation to a subjecta 'representation' to a subject. Everything that belongs to the world is, therefore, 'subject-dependent'. In Book One of "The World as Will and Representation," Schopenhauer considers the world from this anglethat is, insofar as it is representation. Theory of perception. In November 1813 Goethe invited Schopenhauer to help him on his Theory of Colours. Although Schopenhauer considered colour theory a minor matter, he accepted the invitation out of admiration for Goethe. Nevertheless, these investigations led him to his most important discovery in epistemology: finding a demonstration for the "a priori" nature of causality. Kant openly admitted that it was Hume's skeptical assault on causality that motivated the critical investigations in his "Critique of Pure Reason" and gave an elaborate proof to show that causality is "a priori". After G. E. Schulze had made it plausible that Kant had not disproven Hume's skepticism, it was up to those loyal to Kant's project to prove this important matter. The difference between the approaches of Kant and Schopenhauer was this: Kant simply declared that the empirical content of perception is "given" to us from outside, an expression with which Schopenhauer often expressed his dissatisfaction. He, on the other hand, was occupied with the questions: how do we get this empirical content of perception; how is it possible to comprehend subjective sensations "limited to my skin" as the objective perception of things that lie "outside" of me? Causality is therefore not an empirical concept drawn from objective perceptions, as Hume had maintained; instead, as Kant had said, objective perception presupposes knowledge of causality. By this intellectual operation, comprehending every effect in our sensory organs as having an external cause, the external world arises. With vision, finding the cause is essentially simplified due to light acting in straight lines. We are seldom conscious of the process that interprets the double sensation in both eyes as coming from one object, that inverts the impressions on the retinas, and that uses the change in the apparent position of an object relative to more distant objects provided by binocular vision to perceive depth and distance. Schopenhauer stresses the importance of the intellectual nature of perception; the senses furnish the raw material by which the intellect produces the world as representation. He set out his theory of perception for the first time in "On Vision and Colors", and, in the subsequent editions of "Fourfold Root", an extensive exposition is given in § 21. The world as will. In Book Two of "The World as Will and Representation," Schopenhauer considers what the world is beyond the aspect of it that appears to usthat is, the aspect of the world beyond representation, the world considered "in-itself" or "noumena", its inner essence. The very being in-itself of all things, Schopenhauer argues, is will ("Wille"). The empirical world that appears to us as representation has plurality and is ordered in a spatio-temporal framework. The world as thing in-itself must exist outside the subjective forms of space and time. Although the world manifests itself to our experience as a multiplicity of objects (the "objectivation" of the will), each element of this multiplicity has the same blind essence striving towards existence and life. Human rationality is merely a secondary phenomenon that does not distinguish humanity from the rest of nature at the fundamental, essential level. The advanced cognitive abilities of human beings, Schopenhauer argues, serve the ends of willingan illogical, directionless, ceaseless striving that condemns the human individual to a life of suffering unredeemed by any final purpose. Schopenhauer's philosophy of the will as the essential reality behind the world as representation is often called metaphysical voluntarism. For Schopenhauer, understanding the world as will leads to ethical concerns (see the ethics section below for further detail), which he explores in the Fourth Book of "The World as Will and Representation" and again in his two prize essays on ethics, "On the Freedom of the Will" and "On the Basis of Morality". No individual human actions are free, Schopenhauer argues, because they are events in the world of appearance and thus are subject to the principle of sufficient reason: a person's actions are a necessary consequence of motives and the given character of the individual human. Necessity extends to the actions of human beings just as it does to every other appearance, and thus we cannot speak of freedom of individual willing. Albert Einstein quoted the Schopenhauerian idea that "a man can "do" as he will, but not "will" as he will." Yet the will as thing in-itself is free, as it exists beyond the realm of representation and thus is not constrained by any of the forms of necessity that are part of the principle of sufficient reason. According to Schopenhauer, salvation from our miserable existence can come through the will's being 'tranquillized' by the metaphysical insight that reveals individuality to be merely an illusion. The saint or 'great soul' intuitively "recognizes the whole, comprehends its essence, and finds that it is constantly passing away, caught up in vain strivings, inner conflict, and perpetual suffering". The negation of the will, in other words, stems from the insight that the world in-itself (free from the forms of space and time) is one. Ascetic practices, Schopenhauer remarks, are used to aid the will's 'self-abolition', which brings about a blissful, redemptive 'will-less' state of emptiness that is free from striving or suffering. Art and aesthetics. For Schopenhauer, human "willing"—desiring, craving, etc.—is at the root of suffering. A temporary way to escape this pain is through aesthetic contemplation. Here one moves away from ordinary cognizance of individual things to cognizance of eternal Platonic "Ideas"—in other words, cognizance that is free from the service of will. In aesthetic contemplation, one no longer perceives an object of perception as something from which one is separated; rather "it is as if the object alone existed without anyone perceiving it, and one can thus no longer separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, the entirety of consciousness entirely filled and occupied by a single perceptual image". Subject and object are no longer distinguishable, and the "Idea" comes to the fore. From this aesthetic immersion, one is no longer an individual who suffers as a result of servitude to one's individual will but, rather, becomes a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless, subject of cognition". The pure, will-less subject of cognition is cognizant only of Ideas, not individual things: this is a kind of cognition that is unconcerned with relations between objects according to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (time, space, cause and effect) and instead involves complete absorption in the object. Art is the practical consequence of this brief aesthetic contemplation, since it attempts to depict the essence/pure Ideas of the world. Music, for Schopenhauer, is the purest form of art because it is the one that depicts the will itself without it appearing as subject to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, therefore as an individual object. According to Daniel Albright, "Schopenhauer thought that music was the only art that did not merely copy ideas, but actually embodied the will itself". He deemed music a timeless, universal language comprehended everywhere, that can imbue global enthusiasm, if in possession of a significant melody. Mathematics. Schopenhauer's realist views on mathematics are evident in his criticism of contemporaneous attempts to prove the parallel postulate in Euclidean geometry. Writing shortly before the discovery of hyperbolic geometry demonstrated the logical independence of the axiom—and long before the general theory of relativity revealed that it does not necessarily express a property of physical space—Schopenhauer criticized mathematicians for trying to use indirect concepts to prove what he held was directly evident from intuitive perception. Throughout his writings, Schopenhauer criticized the logical derivation of philosophies and mathematics from mere concepts, instead of from intuitive perceptions. Although Schopenhauer could see no justification for trying to prove Euclid's parallel postulate, he did see a reason for examining another of Euclid's axioms. This follows Kant's reasoning. Ethics. Schopenhauer asserts that the task of ethics is not to prescribe moral actions that ought to be done, but to investigate moral actions. As such, he states that philosophy is always theoretical: its task to explain what is given. According to Kant's transcendental idealism, space and time are forms of our sensibility in which phenomena appear in multiplicity. Reality in itself is free from multiplicity, not in the sense that an object is one, but that it is outside the "possibility" of multiplicity. Two individuals, though they appear distinct, are in-themselves not distinct. Appearances are entirely subordinated to the principle of sufficient reason. The egoistic individual who focuses his aims on his own interests has to deal with empirical laws as well as he can. What is relevant for ethics are individuals who can act against their own self-interest. If we take a man who suffers when he sees his fellow men living in poverty and consequently uses a significant part of his income to support "their" needs instead of his "own" pleasures, then the simplest way to describe this is that he makes "less distinction between himself" and others than is usually made. Regarding how things "appear" to us, the egoist asserts a gap between two individuals, but the altruist experiences the sufferings of others as his own. In the same way a compassionate man cannot hurt animals, though they appear as distinct from himself. What motivates the altruist is compassion. The suffering of others is for him not a cold matter to which he is indifferent, but he feels connectiveness to all beings. Compassion is thus the basis of morality. Eternal justice. Schopenhauer calls the principle through which multiplicity appears the "principium individuationis". When we behold nature we see that it is a cruel battle for existence. Individual manifestations of the will can maintain themselves only at the expense of others—the will, as the only thing that exists, has no other option but to devour itself to experience pleasure. This is a fundamental characteristic of the will, and cannot be circumvented. Unlike temporal or human justice, which requires time to repay an evil deed and "has its seat in the state, as requiting and punishing", eternal justice "rules not the state but the world, is not dependent upon human institutions, is not subject to chance and deception, is not uncertain, wavering, and erring, but infallible, fixed, and sure". Eternal justice is not retributive, because retribution requires time. There are no delays or reprieves. Instead, punishment is tied to the offence, "to the point where the two become one. ... Tormenter and tormented are one. The [Tormenter] errs in that he believes he is not a partaker in the suffering; the [tormented], in that he believes he is not a partaker in the guilt." Suffering is the moral outcome of our attachment to pleasure. Schopenhauer deemed that this truth was expressed by the Christian dogma of original sin and, in Eastern religions, by the dogma of rebirth. Quietism. He who sees through the "principium individuationis" and comprehends suffering "in general" as his own will see suffering everywhere and, instead of fighting for the happiness of his individual manifestation, will abhor life itself since he knows that it is inseparably connected with suffering. For him, a happy individual life in a world of suffering is like a beggar who dreams one night that he is a king. Those who have experienced this intuitive knowledge cannot affirm life, but exhibit asceticism and quietism, meaning that they are no longer sensitive to motives, are not concerned about their individual welfare, and accept without resistance the evil that others inflict on them. They welcome poverty and neither seek nor flee death. Schopenhauer referred to asceticism as the denial of the will to live. Human life is a ceaseless struggle for satisfaction and, instead of continuing their struggle, ascetics break it. It does not matter if these ascetics adhere to the dogmata of Christianity or to Dharmic religions, since their way of living is the result of intuitive knowledge. Psychology. Philosophers have not traditionally been impressed by the necessity of sex, but Schopenhauer addressed sex and related concepts forthrightly: He named a force within man that he felt took invariable precedence over reason: the Will to Live or Will to Life ("Wille zum Leben"), defined as an inherent drive within human beings, and all creatures, to stay alive; a force that inveigles us into reproducing. Schopenhauer refused to conceive of love as either trifling or accidental, but rather understood it as an immensely powerful force that lay unseen within man's psyche, guaranteeing the quality of the human race: It has often been argued that Schopenhauer's thoughts on sexuality foreshadowed the theory of evolution, a claim met with satisfaction by Darwin as he included a quotation from Schopenhauer in his "Descent of Man". This has also been noted about Freud's concepts of the libido and the unconscious mind, and evolutionary psychology in general. Political and social thought. Politics. Schopenhauer's politics were an echo of his system of ethics, which he elucidated in detail in his "Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik" (the two essays "On the Freedom of the Will" and "On the Basis of Morality"). In occasional political comments in his "Parerga and Paralipomena" and "Manuscript Remains", Schopenhauer described himself as a proponent of limited government. Schopenhauer shared the view of Thomas Hobbes on the necessity of the state and state action to check the innate destructive tendencies of our species. He also defended the independence of the legislative, judicial and executive branches of power, and a monarch as an impartial element able to practise justice (in a practical and everyday sense, not a cosmological one). He declared that monarchy is "natural to man in almost the same way as it is to bees and ants, to cranes in flight, to wandering elephants, to wolves in a pack in search of prey, and to other animals". Intellect in monarchies, he writes, always has "much better chances against stupidity, its implacable and ever-present foe, than it has in republics; but this is a great advantage." On the other hand, Schopenhauer disparaged republicanism as being "as unnatural to man as it is unfavorable to higher intellectual life and thus to the arts and sciences". By his own admission, Schopenhauer did not give much thought to politics, and several times he wrote proudly of how little attention he paid "to political affairs of [his] day". In a life that spanned several revolutions in French and German government, and a few continent-shaking wars, he maintained his position of "minding not the times but the eternities". He wrote many disparaging remarks about Germany and the Germans. A typical example is: "For a German it is even good to have somewhat lengthy words in his mouth, for he thinks slowly, and they give him time to reflect." Punishment. The State, Schopenhauer claimed, punishes criminals to prevent future crimes. It places "beside every possible motive for committing a wrong a more powerful motive for leaving it undone, in the inescapable punishment. Accordingly, the criminal code is as complete a register as possible of counter-motives to all criminal actions that can possibly be imagined ..." He claimed that this doctrine was not original to him but had appeared in the writings of Plato, Seneca, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Anselm Feuerbach. Races and religions. Schopenhauer attributed civilizational primacy to the northern "white races" due to their sensitivity and creativity (except for the ancient Egyptians and Hindus, whom he saw as equal): The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmans, the Incas, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want and misery, which in their many forms were brought about by the climate. This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature and out of it all came their high civilization. Schopenhauer was fervently opposed to slavery. Speaking of the treatment of slaves in the slave-holding states of the United States, he condemned "those devils in human form, those bigoted, church-going, strict sabbath-observing scoundrels, especially the Anglican parsons among them" for how they "treat their innocent black brothers who through violence and injustice have fallen into their devil's claws". The slave-holding states of North America, Schopenhauer writes, are a "disgrace to the whole of humanity". In his "Metaphysics of Sexual Love", Schopenhauer wrote: Further, the consideration as to the complexion is very decided. Blondes prefer dark persons, or brunettes; but the latter seldom prefer the former. The reason is, that fair hair and blue eyes are in themselves a variation from the type, almost an abnormity, analogous to white mice, or at least to grey horses. In no part of the world, not even in the vicinity of the pole, are they indigenous, except in Europe, and are clearly of Scandinavian origin. I may here express my opinion in passing that the white colour of the skin is not natural to man, but that by nature he has a black or brown skin, like our forefathers the Hindus; that consequently a white man has never originally sprung from the womb of nature, and that thus there is no such thing as a white race, much as this is talked of, but every white man is a faded or bleached one. Forced into the strange world, where he only exists like an exotic plant, and like this requires in winter the hothouse, in the course of thousands of years man became white. The gipsies, an Indian race which immigrated only about four centuries ago, show the transition from the complexion of the Hindu to our own. Therefore in sexual love nature strives to return to dark hair and brown eyes as the primitive type; but the white colour of the skin has become a second nature, though not so that the brown of the Hindu repels us. Finally, each one also seeks in the particular parts of the body the corrective of his own defects and aberrations, and does so the more decidedly the more important the part is. Schopenhauer also maintained a marked metaphysical and political anti-Judaism. He argued that Christianity constituted a revolt against what he styled the materialistic basis of Judaism, exhibiting an Indian-influenced ethics reflecting the Aryan-Vedic theme of spiritual self-conquest. He saw this as opposed to the ignorant drive toward earthly utopianism and superficiality of a worldly "Jewish" spirit: [Judaism] is, therefore, the crudest and poorest of all religions and consists merely in an absurd and revolting theism. It amounts to this that the "κύριος" ['Lord'], who has created the world, desires to be worshipped and adored; and so above all he is jealous, is envious of his colleagues, of all the other gods; if sacrifices are made to them he is furious and his Jews have a bad time ... It is most deplorable that this religion has become the basis of the prevailing religion of Europe; for it is a religion without any metaphysical tendency. While all other religions endeavor to explain to the people by symbols the metaphysical significance of life, the religion of the Jews is entirely immanent and furnishes nothing but a mere war-cry in the struggle with other nations. Women. In his 1851 essay "On Women", Schopenhauer expressed opposition to what he called "Teutonico-Christian stupidity" of "reflexive, unexamined reverence for the female ("abgeschmackten Weiberveneration")". He wrote: "Women are directly fitted for acting as the nurses and teachers of our early childhood by the fact that they are themselves childish, frivolous and short-sighted." He opined that women are deficient in artistic faculties and sense of justice, and expressed his opposition to monogamy. He claimed that "woman is by nature meant to obey". The essay does give some compliments, however: "women are decidedly more sober in their judgment than [men] are", and are more sympathetic to the suffering of others. Schopenhauer's writings influenced many, from Friedrich Nietzsche to nineteenth-century feminists. His biological analysis of the difference between the sexes, and their separate roles in the struggle for survival and reproduction, anticipates some of the claims that were later ventured by sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists. When the elderly Schopenhauer sat for a sculpture portrait by the Prussian sculptor Elisabet Ney in 1859, he was much impressed by the young woman's wit and independence, as well as by her skill as a visual artist. After his time with Ney, he told Richard Wagner's friend Malwida von Meysenbug: "I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man." Pederasty. In the third, expanded edition of "The World as Will and Representation" (1859), Schopenhauer added an appendix to his chapter on the "Metaphysics of Sexual Love". He wrote that pederasty has the benefit of preventing ill-begotten children. Concerning this, he stated that "the vice we are considering appears to work directly against the aims and ends of nature, and that in a matter that is all important and of the greatest concern to her it must in fact serve these very aims, although only indirectly, as a means for preventing greater evils". Schopenhauer ends the appendix with the statement that "by expounding these paradoxical ideas, I wanted to grant to the professors of philosophy a small favour. I have done so by giving them the opportunity of slandering me by saying that I defend and commend pederasty." Heredity and eugenics. Schopenhauer viewed personality and intellect as inherited. He quotes Horace's saying, "From the brave and good are the brave descended" ("Odes", iv, 4, 29) and Shakespeare's line from "Cymbeline", "Cowards father cowards, and base things sire base" (IV, 2) to reinforce his hereditarian argument. Mechanistically, Schopenhauer believed that a person inherits his intellect through his mother, and personal character through the father. This belief in heritability of traits informed Schopenhauer's view of loveplacing it at the highest level of importance. For Schopenhauer the "final aim of all love intrigues, be they comic or tragic, is really of more importance than all other ends in human life. What it all turns upon is nothing less than the composition of the next generation. ... It is not the weal or woe of any one individual, but that of the human race to come, which is here at stake." This view of the importance for the species of whom we choose to love was reflected in his views on eugenics or good breeding. Here Schopenhauer wrote: With our knowledge of the complete unalterability both of character and of mental faculties, we are led to the view that a real and thorough improvement of the human race might be reached not so much from outside as from within, not so much by theory and instruction as rather by the path of generation. Plato had something of the kind in mind when, in the fifth book of his "Republic", he explained his plan for increasing and improving his warrior caste. If we could castrate all scoundrels and stick all stupid geese in a convent, and give men of noble character a whole harem, and procure men, and indeed thorough men, for all girls of intellect and understanding, then a generation would soon arise which would produce a better age than that of Pericles. In another context, Schopenhauer reiterated his eugenic thesis: "If you want Utopian plans, I would say: the only solution to the problem is the despotism of the wise and noble members of a genuine aristocracy, a genuine nobility, achieved by mating the most magnanimous men with the cleverest and most gifted women. This proposal constitutes my Utopia and my Platonic Republic." Analysts (e.g., Keith Ansell-Pearson) have suggested that Schopenhauer's anti-egalitarianist sentiment and his support for eugenics influenced the neo-aristocratic philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who initially considered Schopenhauer his mentor. Animal welfare. As a consequence of his monistic philosophy, Schopenhauer was very concerned about animal welfare. For him, all individual animals, including humans, are essentially phenomenal manifestations of the one underlying Will. For him the word "will" designates force, power, impulse, energy, and desire; it is the closest word we have that can signify both the essence of all external things and our own direct, inner experience. Since every living thing possesses will, humans and animals are fundamentally the same and can recognize themselves in each other. For this reason, he claimed that a good person would have sympathy for animals, who are our fellow sufferers. In 1841, he praised the establishment in London of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and in Philadelphia of the Animals' Friends Society. Schopenhauer went so far as to protest using the pronoun "it" in reference to animals because that led to treatment of them as though they were inanimate things. To reinforce his points, Schopenhauer referred to anecdotal reports of the look in the eyes of a monkey who had been shot and also the grief of a baby elephant whose mother had been killed by a hunter. Schopenhauer was very attached to his succession of pet poodles. He criticized Spinoza's belief that animals are a mere means for the satisfaction of humans. Intellectual interests and affinities. Indology. Schopenhauer read the Latin translation of the ancient Hindu texts, the "Upanishads", translated by French writer Anquetil du Perron from the Persian translation of Prince Dara Shukoh entitled "Sirre-Akbar" ("The Great Secret"). He was so impressed by its philosophy that he called it "the production of the highest human wisdom", and believed it contained superhuman concepts. Schopenhauer considered India as "the land of the most ancient and most pristine wisdom, the place from which Europeans could trace their descent and the tradition by which they had been influenced in so many decisive ways", and regarded the "Upanishads" as "the most profitable and elevating reading which [...] is possible in the world. It has been the solace of my life, and will be the solace of my death." Schopenhauer was first introduced to Anquetil du Perron's translation by Friedrich Majer in 1814. They met during the winter of 1813–1814 in Weimar at the home of Schopenhauer's mother, according to the biographer Safranski. Majer was a follower of Herder, and an early Indologist. Schopenhauer did not begin serious study of the Indic texts, however, until the summer of 1814. Safranski maintains that, between 1815 and 1817, Schopenhauer had another important cross-pollination with Indian thought in Dresden. This was through his neighbor of two years, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause. Krause was then a minor and rather unorthodox philosopher who attempted to mix his own ideas with ancient Indian wisdom. Krause had also mastered Sanskrit, unlike Schopenhauer, and they developed a professional relationship. It was from Krause that Schopenhauer learned meditation and received the closest thing to expert advice concerning Indian thought. The book "Oupnekhat" (Upanishad) always lay open on his table, and he invariably studied it before going to bed. He called the opening up of Sanskrit literature "the greatest gift of our century", and predicted that the philosophy and knowledge of the Upanishads would become the cherished faith of the West. Most noticeable, in the case of Schopenhauer's work, was the significance of the "Chandogya Upanishad", whose Mahāvākya, Tat Tvam Asi, is mentioned throughout "The World as Will and Representation". Buddhism. Schopenhauer noted a correspondence between his doctrines and the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. Similarities centered on the principles that life involves suffering, that suffering is caused by desire (taṇhā), and that the extinction of desire leads to liberation. Thus three of the four "truths of the Buddha" correspond to Schopenhauer's doctrine of the will. In Buddhism, however, while greed and lust are always unskillful, desire is ethically variable – it can be skillful, unskillful, or neutral. For Schopenhauer, will had ontological primacy over the intellect; desire is prior to thought. Schopenhauer felt this was similar to notions of puruṣārtha or goals of life in Vedānta Hinduism. In Schopenhauer's philosophy, denial of the will is attained by: However, Buddhist nirvāṇa is not equivalent to the condition that Schopenhauer described as denial of the will. Nirvāṇa is not the extinguishing of the "person" as some Western scholars have thought, but only the "extinguishing" (the literal meaning of nirvana) of the flames of greed, hatred, and delusion that assail a person's character. Schopenhauer made the following statement in his discussion of religions: If I wished to take the results of my philosophy as the standard of truth, I should have to concede to Buddhism pre-eminence over the others. In any case, it must be a pleasure to me to see my doctrine in such close agreement with a religion that the majority of men on earth hold as their own, for this numbers far more followers than any other. And this agreement must be yet the more pleasing to me, inasmuch as "in my philosophizing I have certainly not been under its influence" [emphasis added]. For up till 1818, when my work appeared, there was to be found in Europe only a very few accounts of Buddhism. Buddhist philosopher Nishitani Keiji, however, sought to distance Buddhism from Schopenhauer. While Schopenhauer's philosophy may sound rather mystical in such a summary, his methodology was resolutely empirical, rather than speculative or transcendental: Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions. Also note: This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration. The argument that Buddhism affected Schopenhauer's philosophy more than any other Dharmic faith loses credence since he did not begin a serious study of Buddhism until after the publication of "The World as Will and Representation" in 1818. Scholars have started to revise earlier views about Schopenhauer's discovery of Buddhism. Proof of early interest and influence, however, appears in Schopenhauer's 1815/16 notes (transcribed and translated by Urs App) about Buddhism. They are included in a recent case study that traces Schopenhauer's interest in Buddhism and documents its influence. Other scholarly work questions how similar Schopenhauer's philosophy actually is to Buddhism. Magic and occultism. Some traditions in Western esotericism and parapsychology interested Schopenhauer and influenced his philosophical theories. He praised animal magnetism as evidence for the reality of magic in his "On the Will in Nature", and went so far as to accept the division of magic into left-hand and right-hand magic, although he doubted the existence of demons. Schopenhauer grounded magic in the Will and claimed all forms of magical transformation depended on the human Will, not on ritual. This theory notably parallels Aleister Crowley's system of magick and its emphasis on human will. Given the importance of the Will to Schopenhauer's overarching system, this amounts to "suggesting his whole philosophical system had magical powers." Schopenhauer rejected the theory of disenchantment and claimed philosophy should synthesize itself with magic, which he believed amount to "practical metaphysics." Neoplatonism, including the traditions of Plotinus and to a lesser extent Marsilio Ficino, has also been cited as an influence on Schopenhauer. Interests. Schopenhauer had a wide range of interests, from science and opera to occultism and literature. In his student years, Schopenhauer went more often to lectures in the sciences than philosophy. He kept a strong interest as his personal library contained near to 200 books of scientific literature at his death, and his works refer to scientific titles not found in the library. Many evenings were spent in the theatre, opera and ballet; Schopenhauer especially liked the operas of Mozart, Rossini and Bellini. Schopenhauer considered music the highest art, and played the flute during his whole life. As a polyglot, he knew German, Italian, Spanish, French, English, Latin and ancient Greek, and was an avid reader of poetry and literature. He particularly revered Goethe, Petrarch, Calderón and Shakespeare. If Goethe had not been sent into the world simultaneously with Kant in order to counterbalance him, so to speak, in the spirit of the age, the latter would have been haunted like a nightmare many an aspiring mind and would have oppressed it with great affliction. But now the two have an infinitely wholesome effect from opposite directions and will probably raise the German spirit to a height surpassing even that of antiquity. In philosophy, his most important influences were, according to himself, Kant, Plato and the Upanishads. Concerning the Upanishads and Vedas, he writes in "The World as Will and Representation": If the reader has also received the benefit of the Vedas, the access to which by means of the Upanishads is in my eyes the greatest privilege which this still young century (1818) may claim before all previous centuries, if then the reader, I say, has received his initiation in primeval Indian wisdom, and received it with an open heart, he will be prepared in the very best way for hearing what I have to tell him. It will not sound to him strange, as to many others, much less disagreeable; for I might, if it did not sound conceited, contend that every one of the detached statements which constitute the Upanishads, may be deduced as a necessary result from the fundamental thoughts which I have to enunciate, though those deductions themselves are by no means to be found there. Thoughts on other philosophers. Giordano Bruno and Spinoza. Schopenhauer saw Bruno and Spinoza as philosophers not bound to their age or nation. "Both were fulfilled by the thought, that as manifold the appearances of the world may be, it is still "one" being, that appears in all of them. ... Consequently, there is no place for God as creator of the world in their philosophy, but God is the world itself." Schopenhauer expressed regret that Spinoza stuck for the presentation of his philosophy with the concepts of scholasticism and Cartesian philosophy, and tried to use geometrical proofs that do not hold because of vague and overly broad definitions. Bruno on the other hand, who knew much about nature and ancient literature, presented his ideas with Italian vividness, and is amongst philosophers the only one who comes near Plato's poetic and dramatic power of exposition. Schopenhauer noted that their philosophies do not provide any ethics, and it is therefore very remarkable that Spinoza called his main work "Ethics". In fact, it could be considered complete from the standpoint of life-affirmation, if one completely ignores morality and self-denial. It is yet even more remarkable that Schopenhauer mentions Spinoza as an example of the denial of the will, if one uses the French biography by Jean Maximilien Lucas as the key to "Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione". Immanuel Kant. The importance of Kant for Schopenhauer, in philosophy as well as on a personal level, cannot be overstated. Kant's philosophy was the foundation of Schopenhauer's, and he had high praise for the Transcendental Aesthetic section of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." Schopenhauer maintained that Kant stands in the same relation to philosophers such as Berkeley and Plato, as Copernicus to Hicetas, Philolaus, and Aristarchus: Kant succeeded in demonstrating what previous philosophers merely asserted. Schopenhauer writes about Kant's influence on his work in the preface to the second edition of "The World as Will and Representation": In his study room, one bust was of Buddha, the other was of Kant. The bond which Schopenhauer felt with the philosopher of Königsberg is demonstrated in an unfinished poem he dedicated to Kant (included in volume 2 of the "Parerga"): Schopenhauer dedicated one fifth of his main work, "The World as Will and Representation", to a detailed criticism of the Kantian philosophy. Schopenhauer praised Kant for his distinction between appearance and the thing-in-itself, whereas the general consensus in German Idealism was that this was the weakest spot of Kant's theory, since, according to Kant, causality can find application on objects of experience only, and consequently, things-in-themselves cannot be the cause of appearances. The inadmissibility of this reasoning was also acknowledged by Schopenhauer. He insisted that this was a true conclusion, drawn from false premises. Post-Kantian school. The leading figures of post-Kantian philosophy—Johann Gottlieb Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling and G. W. F. Hegel—were not respected by Schopenhauer. He argued that they were not philosophers at all, for they lacked "the first requirement of a philosopher, namely a seriousness and honesty of inquiry." Rather, they were merely sophists who, excelling in the art of beguiling the public, pursued their own selfish interests (such as professional advancement within the university system). Diatribes against the vacuity, dishonesty, pomposity, and self-interest of these contemporaries are to be found throughout Schopenhauer's published writings. The following passage is an example: Schopenhauer deemed Schelling the most talented of the three and wrote that he would recommend his "elucidatory paraphrase of the highly important doctrine of Kant" concerning the intelligible character, if he had been honest enough to admit he was parroting Kant, instead of hiding this relation in a cunning manner. Schopenhauer reserved his most unqualified damning condemnation for Hegel, whom he considered less worthy than Fichte or Schelling. Whereas Fichte was merely a windbag ("Windbeutel"), Hegel was a "commonplace, inane, loathsome, repulsive, and ignorant charlatan." The philosophers Karl Popper and Mario Bunge agreed with this distinction. Hegel, Schopenhauer wrote in the preface to his "Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics," not only "performed no service to philosophy, but he has had a detrimental influence on philosophy, and thereby on German literature in general, really a downright stupefying, or we could even say a pestilential influence, which it is therefore the duty of everyone capable of thinking for himself and judging for himself to counteract in the most express terms at every opportunity." Influence. Schopenhauer remained the most influential German philosopher until the First World War. His philosophy was a starting point for a new generation of philosophers including Julius Bahnsen, Paul Deussen, Lazar von Hellenbach, Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann, Ernst Otto Lindner, Philipp Mainländer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Olga Plümacher and Agnes Taubert. His legacy shaped the intellectual debate, and forced movements that were utterly opposed to him, neo-Kantianism and positivism, to address issues they would otherwise have completely ignored, and in doing so he changed them markedly. The French writer Maupassant commented that "to-day even those who execrate him seem to carry in their own souls particles of his thought". Other philosophers of the 19th century who cited his influence include Hans Vaihinger, Volkelt, Solovyov and Weininger. Schopenhauer was well read by physicists, most notably Einstein, Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, and Majorana. Einstein described Schopenhauer's thoughts as a "continual consolation" and called him a genius. In his Berlin study three figures hung on the wall: Faraday, Maxwell, Schopenhauer. Konrad Wachsmann recalled: "He often sat with one of the well-worn Schopenhauer volumes, and as he sat there, he seemed so pleased, as if he were engaged with a serene and cheerful work." When Erwin Schrödinger discovered Schopenhauer ("the greatest savant of the West") he considered switching his study of physics to philosophy. He maintained the idealistic views during the rest of his life. Wolfgang Pauli accepted the main tenet of Schopenhauer's metaphysics, that the thing-in-itself is will. But most of all Schopenhauer is famous for his influence on artists. Richard Wagner became one of the earliest and most famous adherents of the Schopenhauerian philosophy. The admiration was not mutual, and Schopenhauer proclaimed: "I remain faithful to Rossini and Mozart!" So he has been nicknamed "the artist's philosopher". See also Influence of Schopenhauer on Tristan und Isolde. Under the influence of Schopenhauer, Leo Tolstoy became convinced that the truth of all religions lies in self-renunciation. When he read Schopenhauer's, philosophy Tolstoy exclaimed "at present I am convinced that Schopenhauer is the greatest genius among men. ... It is the whole world in an incomparably beautiful and clear reflection." He said that what he has written in "War and Peace" is also said by Schopenhauer in "The World as Will and Representation". Jorge Luis Borges remarked that the reason he had never attempted to write a systematic account of his world view, despite his penchant for philosophy and metaphysics in particular, was because Schopenhauer had already written it for him. Other figures in literature who were strongly influenced by Schopenhauer were Thomas Mann, Thomas Hardy, Afanasy Fet, J.-K. Huysmans and George Santayana. In Herman Melville's final years, while he wrote "Billy Budd", he read Schopenhauer's essays and marked them heavily. Scholar Brian Yothers notes that Melville "marked numerous misanthropic and even suicidal remarks, suggesting an attraction to the most extreme sorts of solitude, but he also made note of Schopenhauer's reflection on the moral ambiguities of genius." Schopenhauer's attraction to and discussions of both Eastern and Western religions in conjunction with each other made an impression on Melville in his final years. Sergei Prokofiev, although initially reluctant to engage with works noted for their pessimism, became fascinated with Schopenhauer after reading "Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life" in "Parerga and Paralipomena." "With his truths Schopenhauer gave me a spiritual world and an awareness of happiness." Friedrich Nietzsche owed the awakening of his philosophical interest to reading "The World as Will and Representation" and admitted that he was one of the few philosophers that he respected, dedicating to him his essay "Schopenhauer als Erzieher" one of his "Untimely Meditations". Early in his career, Ludwig Wittgenstein adopted Schopenhauer's epistemological idealism, and some traits of Schopenhauer's influence (particularly Schopenhauerian transcendentalism) can be observed in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. However, later on, Wittgenstein rejected epistemological transcendental idealism for Gottlob Frege's conceptual realism. In later years, Wittgenstein became highly dismissive of Schopenhauer, describing him as an ultimately shallow thinker. His friend Bertrand Russell had a low opinion on the philosopher, and even came to attack him in his "History of Western Philosophy" for hypocritically praising asceticism yet not acting upon it. Opposite to Russell on the foundations of mathematics, the Dutch mathematician L. E. J. Brouwer incorporated Kant's and Schopenhauer's ideas in the philosophical school of intuitionism, where mathematics is considered as a purely mental activity instead of an analytic activity wherein objective properties of reality are revealed. Brouwer was also influenced by Schopenhauer's metaphysics, and wrote an essay on mysticism. Schopenhauer's philosophy has made its way into a novel "The Schopenhauer Cure" by American existential psychiatrist and emeritus professor of psychiatry Irvin Yalom.

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Stuart Hampshire Sir Stuart Newton Hampshire (1 October 1914 – 13 June 2004) was an English philosopher, literary critic and university administrator. He was one of the antirationalist Oxford thinkers who gave a new direction to moral and political thought in the post-World War II era. Biography. Hampshire was born in Healing, Lincolnshire, the son of George Newton Hampshire, a fish merchant in nearby Grimsby. Hampshire was educated at Lockers Park School (where he overlapped with Guy Burgess), Repton School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he matriculated as a history scholar. He did not confine himself to history, switching instead to the study of Greats and immersing himself in the study of painting and literature. As was the culture at Balliol, his intellectual development owed more to his gifted contemporaries than to academic tutors. Having taken a first class degree, in 1936 he was elected to a Fellowship of All Souls College, Oxford, where he researched and taught philosophy initially as an adherent of logical positivism. He participated in an informal discussion group with some of the leading philosophers of his day, including J. L. Austin, H. L. A. Hart, and Isaiah Berlin. In 1940, at the outbreak of World War II he enlisted in the army and was given a commission. Due to his lack of physical aptitude he was seconded to a position in military intelligence near London where he worked with Oxford colleagues such as Gilbert Ryle and Hugh Trevor-Roper. His encounters as interrogator with Nazi officers at the end of the war led to his insistence on the reality of evil. After the war, he worked for the government before resuming his career in philosophy. From 1947 to 1950, he taught at University College, London, and was subsequently a fellow of New College, Oxford. His study "Spinoza" was first published in 1951. In 1955, he returned to All Souls, as a resident fellow and domestic bursar. His innovative book "Thought and Action" (1959) attracted much attention, notably from his Oxford colleague Iris Murdoch. It propounded an "intentionalist" theory of the philosophy of mind taking account of developments in psychology. Although he considered most continental philosophy vulgar and fraudulent, Hampshire was much influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He insisted that philosophy of mind "has been distorted by philosophers when they think of persons only as passive observers and not as self-willed agents". In his subsequent books, Hampshire sought to shift moral philosophy from its focus on the logical properties of moral statements to what he considered the crucial question of "moral problems as they present themselves to us as practical agents." In 1960, Stuart Hampshire was elected a member of the British Academy and became Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London, succeeding A. J. Ayer. His international reputation was growing and from 1963 to 1970 he chaired the department of philosophy at Princeton University to which he had happily escaped from the robust atmosphere of London to which his mandarin style, conveyed in a rather preposterous growling accent, was ill-suited, as Ayer implied in his memoirs. In 1970, he returned to Oxford as Warden of Wadham College, Oxford. His liberal and socialist views were apparent when Wadham was in the first group of men-only Oxford colleges to admit women in 1974. Hampshire considered his wardenship to be one of his most significant achievements in reviving the fortunes of the college. He was knighted in 1979 and retired from Wadham in 1984, when he accepted a professorship at Stanford University. His last book, "Justice Is Conflict" (1999), inaugurated the "Princeton Monographs in Philosophy" series. Stuart Hampshire wrote extensively on literature and other topics for the "Times Literary Supplement" and the "New York Review of Books" amongst others. He was head of the literary panel of the Arts Council for many years. In 1965–66, he was selected by the UK government to conduct a review of the effectiveness of GCHQ. He married his first wife, Renée Ayer, the former wife of the philosopher A. J. Ayer, in 1961. She died in 1980, and in 1985 he married Nancy Cartwright, who was then his colleague at Stanford and is now Professor of Philosophy at Durham University and at the University of California, San Diego.

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Brian Herbert Medlin Brian Herbert Medlin (1927 - 2004) was Foundation Professor of Philosophy at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, from 1967 to 1988. He pioneered radical philosophy in Australian universities and played an active role in the campaign against the Vietnam War. Early life. Medlin was born in 1927 in Orroroo, South Australia. He was the younger brother of Harry Medlin, who became the Deputy Chancellor of Adelaide University. Medlin attended Richmond Primary School and Adelaide Technical High School. While at high school, Medlin was introduced to the philosophy of Bertrand Russell. He worked in the Northern Territory after graduating from secondary school, working in the pastoral industry in various capacities. He returned to Adelaide in the mid-1950s and while working as a teacher he studied English, Latin and Philosophy at the University of Adelaide, graduating in 1958 with first-class honours. During his university years he associated with writers such as John Bray, Charles Jury, Max Harris and Mary Martin. He received a scholarship to attend Oxford University, where he spent several years. He met the British writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch in the early 1960s and on his return to Australia corresponded with her for several decades. Their correspondence was a significant influence on Murdoch's depiction of Australia in her novels. During his Oxford years, he spent a year teaching philosophy in Ghana. Academic career. On his return to Australia in 1964, Medlin initially worked as a Reader at the University of Queensland. His early interests included the identity theory of mind and the nature of egoism. In 1967 he was appointed to the newly established Flinders University of South Australia as the Foundation Professor of Philosophy. In 1970, he adopted revolutionary socialism and with colleagues introduced new topics concerned with "applying philosophical methods to current problems and social issues". He developed innovative courses in women's studies, and politics and art, and instituted a student-staff consultative committee. He became known nationally as “an early leader in the ‘red shift’ in academic philosophy.” In 1971 he was described as "spearheading the revolution" in philosophy which polarised academics in Australia when he draped a red flag over the podium at the conference of the Australian Association of Philosophers. He retired from Flinders in 1988, after a serious motorcycle accident in 1983 had long-term effects on his health. He was awarded the title of Emeritus Professor. Medlin's influence is attested by obituaries published in the national daily "Australian" newspaper and in the Australian Federal Senate. Activism. Medlin was strongly opposed to Australia's participation in the Vietnam War. He was chairman of the campaign for peace movement in South Australia. Medlin played a leading role with other activists such as Lynn Arnold in the anti-war campaign. He was arrested during a moratorium march in September 1970 and imprisoned for three weeks. During this time, his supporters kept a candelit vigil outside Adelaide jail. These experiences contributed to his influential course on politics and the arts taught at Flinders University, which prompted the formation of the well-known Australian progressive rock band Redgum. Over many years Medlin was subject to covert surveillance by ASIO for his activism and radicalism. Later career. After his retirement from Flinders University, Medlin moved to Victoria with his wife, Christine Vick, and spent some years regenerating a 10-acre property at Wimmera with native vegetation. He retained an interest in many subjects including natural history, literature, current affairs and photography. He died in 2004. Writings. In 1957, while still studying at Adelaide University, Medlin published an article titled "Ultimate principles and ethical egoism" that continues to be seen as a significant contribution to debates about egoism. For example In 2007, Stephen R.C. Hicks wrote, in reference to this essay, “Brian Medlin was representative” of his generation in tending to scepticism and non-naturalism. His 1963 article “The origin of motion” is discussed in detail in N. Strobach's “The Moment of Change” (2013). Medlin also wrote poetry, which was widely published in Australian periodicals through the 1950s and 1960s, and short fiction, often using the pseudonym Timothy Tregonning. Many unpublished works are in the Brian Medlin Collection at Flinders University. , a collection of his essays, stories and poems is forthcoming from Wakefield Press in 2021. Bibliography. Archive. "Brian Medlin Collection", Special Collections, Flinders University Library, Bedford Park, South Australia. Books. "Human Nature Human Survival". Adelaide: Board of Research, Flinders University, 1992. "Never Mind about the Bourgeoisie: The Correspondence between Iris Murdoch and Brian Medlin 1976-1995." Edited by Gillian Dooley and Graham Nerlich. Newcastle on Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014. "The Level-Headed Revolutionary: Essays, Stories and Poems by Brian Medlin." Edited by Gillian Dooley, Wallace McKitrick and Susan Petrilli. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, Forthcoming 2021.

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John Passmore John Passmore AC (9 September 1914 – 25 July 2004) was an Australian philosopher. Life. John Passmore was born on 9 September 1914 in Manly, Sydney, where he grew up. He was educated at Sydney Boys High School. He subsequently graduated from the University of Sydney with first-class honours in English literature and philosophy whilst studying with a view to become a secondary-school teacher. In 1934 he accepted the position of assistant lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sydney, continuing teaching there until 1949. In 1948 he went to study at the University of London. From 1950 to 1955 he was (the first) professor of philosophy at the University of Otago in New Zealand. In 1955 he spent a year at the University of Oxford on a Carnegie grant. Upon his return to Australia he took up a post at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University, where he was professor of Philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences from 1958 to 1979. In 1960 he was Ziskind visiting professor at Brandeis University in the United States. He subsequently lectured in England, the United States, Mexico, Japan, and in various European countries. He also served as a director and then later as governor of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust. In 1994 he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC), Australia's highest civilian honour. He died on 25 July 2004 and was survived by his wife Doris and two daughters. Work. Passmore was as much a historian of ideas as a philosopher, and his scholarship always paid careful attention to the complex historical context of philosophical problems. He published about twenty books, many of which have been translated. Philosopher Frank Jackson notes that Passmore "shaped public debate and opened up philosophy and history of ideas to the wider world". In his book "Man's Responsibility for Nature" (1974) Passmore argued that there is urgent need to change our attitude to the environment, and that humans cannot continue unconstrained exploitation of the biosphere. However, he rejected the view that we need to abandon the Western tradition of scientific rationalism, and was unsympathetic towards attempts to articulate environmental concern through radical revisions of our ethical framework, as advocated by deep ecologists, which he conceived as misguided mysticism or irrationalism. Passmore was very skeptical about attempts to attribute intrinsic value to nature, and his preferred position was of valuing nature in terms of what it contributes to the flourishing of sentient creatures (including humans). According to William Grey of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, his "unequivocal anthropocentrism made him a reference point in the discourse of environmental ethics and many treatises in field begin with (or include) a refutation of his views". Passmore described himself as a "pessimistic humanist" who regarded neither human beings nor human societies as perfectible. Bibliography. Books Select Articles "For a more complete list of publications see PhilPapers"

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Galen Johnson Galen A. Johnson (born 1948) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Rhode Island and the General Secretary of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle. Education and background. Johnson received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston University in 1977. He has been teaching at the University of Rhode Island since 1976. His research interests include phenomenology, aesthetics, American philosophy, and recent French philosophy. He is the author of numerous articles in contemporary continental philosophy and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society. He has published four books that deal with aesthetics. Johnson convened over the URI Center for the Humanities from 1994-1996, and was Director of the Center from 2007-2013.

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George Orwell Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English essayist, journalist and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, biting social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism. As a writer, Orwell produced literary criticism and poetry, fiction and polemical journalism; and is best known for the allegorical novella "Animal Farm" (1945) and the dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1949). His non-fiction works, including "The Road to Wigan Pier" (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the north of England, and "Homage to Catalonia" (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics and literature, language and culture. In 2008, "The Times" ranked George Orwell second among "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Two Minutes Hate", "Room 101", "memory hole", "Newspeak", "doublethink", "proles", "unperson", and "thoughtcrime". Life. Early years. Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bihar, British India. His great-grandfather, Charles Blair, was a wealthy country gentleman in Dorset who married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of the Earl of Westmorland, and had income as an absentee landlord of plantations in Jamaica. His grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair, was a clergyman. Eric Blair described his family as "lower-upper-middle class". His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair ("née" Limouzin), grew up in Moulmein, Burma, where her French father was involved in speculative ventures. Eric had two sisters: Marjorie, five years older; and Avril, five years younger. When Eric was one year old, his mother took him and Marjorie to England. His birthplace and ancestral house in Motihari is now a historical monument. In 1904, Ida Blair settled with her children at Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. Eric was brought up in the company of his mother and sisters, and apart from a brief visit in mid-1907, he did not see his father until 1912. Aged five, Eric was sent as a day-boy to a convent school in Henley-on-Thames, which Marjorie also attended. It was a Roman Catholic convent run by French Ursuline nuns. His mother wanted him to have a public school education, but his family could not afford the fees. Through the social connections of Ida Blair's brother Charles Limouzin, Blair gained a scholarship to St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, East Sussex. Arriving in September 1911, he boarded at the school for the next five years, returning home only for school holidays. Although he knew nothing of the reduced fees, he "soon recognised that he was from a poorer home". Blair hated the school and many years later wrote an essay "Such, Such Were the Joys", published posthumously, based on his time there. At St Cyprian's, Blair first met Cyril Connolly, who became a writer and who, as the editor of "Horizon", published several of Orwell's essays. Before the First World War, the family moved to Shiplake, Oxfordshire, where Eric became friendly with the Buddicom family, especially their daughter Jacintha. When they first met, he was standing on his head in a field. Asked why, he said, "You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up." Jacintha and Eric read and wrote poetry, and dreamed of becoming famous writers. He said that he might write a book in the style of H. G. Wells's "A Modern Utopia". During this period, he also enjoyed shooting, fishing and birdwatching with Jacintha's brother and sister. While at St Cyprian's, Blair wrote two poems that were published in the "Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard". He came second to Connolly in the Harrow History Prize, had his work praised by the school's external examiner, and earned scholarships to Wellington and Eton. But inclusion on the Eton scholarship roll did not guarantee a place, and none was immediately available for Blair. He chose to stay at St Cyprian's until December 1916, in case a place at Eton became available. In January, Blair took up the place at Wellington, where he spent the Spring term. In May 1917 a place became available as a King's Scholar at Eton. At this time the family lived at Mall Chambers, Notting Hill Gate. Blair remained at Eton until December 1921, when he left midway between his 18th and 19th birthday. Wellington was "beastly", Orwell told his childhood friend Jacintha Buddicom, but he said he was "interested and happy" at Eton. His principal tutor was A. S. F. Gow, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who also gave him advice later in his career. Blair was briefly taught French by Aldous Huxley. Steven Runciman, who was in College at Eton with Blair, noted that he and his contemporaries appreciated Huxley's linguistic flair. Cyril Connolly followed Blair to Eton, but because they were in separate years, they did not associate with each other. Blair's academic performance reports suggest that he neglected his academic studies, but during his time at Eton he worked with Roger Mynors to produce a College magazine, "The Election Times", joined in the production of other publications—"College Days" and "Bubble and Squeak"—and participated in the Eton Wall Game. His parents could not afford to send him to a university without another scholarship, and they concluded from his poor results that he would not be able to win one. Runciman noted that he had a romantic idea about the East, and the family decided that Blair should join the Imperial Police, the precursor of the Indian Police Service. For this he had to pass an entrance examination. In December 1921 he left Eton and travelled to join his retired father, mother, and younger sister Avril, who that month had moved to 40 Stradbroke Road, Southwold, Suffolk, the first of their four homes in the town. Blair was enrolled at a crammer there called Craighurst, and brushed up on his Classics, English, and History. He passed the entrance exam, coming seventh out of the 26 candidates who exceeded the pass mark. Policing in Burma. Blair's maternal grandmother lived at Moulmein, so he chose a posting in Burma, then still a province of British India. In October 1922 he sailed on board SS "Herefordshire" via the Suez Canal and Ceylon to join the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. A month later, he arrived at Rangoon and travelled to the police training school in Mandalay. He was appointed an Assistant District Superintendent (on probation) on 29 November 1922, with effect from 27 November and at the pay of Rs. 525 per month, equivalent to £ in . After a short posting at Maymyo, Burma's principal hill station, he was posted to the frontier outpost of Myaungmya in the Irrawaddy Delta at the beginning of 1924. Working as an imperial police officer gave him considerable responsibility while most of his contemporaries were still at university in England. When he was posted farther east in the Delta to Twante as a sub-divisional officer, he was responsible for the security of some 200,000 people. At the end of 1924, he was posted to Syriam, closer to Rangoon. Syriam had the refinery of the Burmah Oil Company, "the surrounding land a barren waste, all vegetation killed off by the fumes of sulphur dioxide pouring out day and night from the stacks of the refinery." But the town was near Rangoon, a cosmopolitan seaport, and Blair went into the city as often as he could, "to browse in a bookshop; to eat well-cooked food; to get away from the boring routine of police life". In September 1925 he went to Insein, the home of Insein Prison, the second largest prison in Burma. In Insein, he had "long talks on every conceivable subject" with Elisa Maria Langford-Rae (who later married Kazi Lhendup Dorjee). She noted his "sense of utter fairness in minutest details". By this time, Blair had completed his training and was receiving a monthly salary of Rs. 740, including allowances (equivalent to £ in ). In Burma, Blair acquired a reputation as an outsider. He spent much of his time alone, reading or pursuing non-"pukka" activities, such as attending the churches of the Karen ethnic group. A colleague, Roger Beadon, recalled (in a 1969 recording for the BBC) that Blair was fast to learn the language and that before he left Burma, "was able to speak fluently with Burmese priests in 'very high-flown Burmese'." Blair made changes to his appearance in Burma that remained for the rest of his life, including adopting a pencil moustache. Emma Larkin writes in the introduction to "Burmese Days", "While in Burma, he acquired a moustache similar to those worn by officers of the British regiments stationed there. [He] also acquired some tattoos; on each knuckle he had a small untidy blue circle. Many Burmese living in rural areas still sport tattoos like this—they are believed to protect against bullets and snake bites." In April 1926 he moved to Moulmein, where his maternal grandmother lived. At the end of that year, he was assigned to Katha in Upper Burma, where he contracted dengue fever in 1927. Entitled to a leave in England that year, he was allowed to return in July due to his illness. While on leave in England and on holiday with his family in Cornwall in September 1927, he reappraised his life. Deciding against returning to Burma, he resigned from the Indian Imperial Police to become a writer, with effect from 12 March 1928 after five-and-a-half years of service. He drew on his experiences in the Burma police for the novel "Burmese Days" (1934) and the essays "A Hanging" (1931) and "Shooting an Elephant" (1936). London and Paris. In England, he settled back in the family home at Southwold, renewing acquaintance with local friends and attending an Old Etonian dinner. He visited his old tutor Gow at Cambridge for advice on becoming a writer. In 1927 he moved to London. Ruth Pitter, a family acquaintance, helped him find lodgings, and by the end of 1927 he had moved into rooms in Portobello Road; a blue plaque commemorates his residence there. Pitter's involvement in the move "would have lent it a reassuring respectability in Mrs Blair's eyes." Pitter had a sympathetic interest in Blair's writing, pointed out weaknesses in his poetry, and advised him to write about what he knew. In fact he decided to write of "certain aspects of the present that he set out to know" and ventured into the East End of London—the first of the occasional sorties he would make to discover for himself the world of poverty and the down-and-outers who inhabit it. He had found a subject. These sorties, explorations, expeditions, tours or immersions were made intermittently over a period of five years. In imitation of Jack London, whose writing he admired (particularly "The People of the Abyss"), Blair started to explore the poorer parts of London. On his first outing he set out to Limehouse Causeway, spending his first night in a common lodging house, possibly George Levy's "kip". For a while he "went native" in his own country, dressing like a tramp, adopting the name P.S. Burton and making no concessions to middle-class "mores" and expectations; he recorded his experiences of the low life for use in "The Spike", his first published essay in English, and in the second half of his first book, "Down and Out in Paris and London" (1933). In early 1928 he moved to Paris. He lived in the rue du Pot de Fer, a working class district in the 5th Arrondissement. His aunt Nellie Limouzin also lived in Paris and gave him social and, when necessary, financial support. He began to write novels, including an early version of "Burmese Days", but nothing else survives from that period. He was more successful as a journalist and published articles in "Monde", a political/literary journal edited by Henri Barbusse (his first article as a professional writer, "La Censure en Angleterre", appeared in that journal on 6 October 1928); "G. K.'s Weekly", where his first article to appear in England, "A Farthing Newspaper", was printed on 29 December 1928; and "Le Progrès Civique" (founded by the left-wing coalition Le Cartel des Gauches). Three pieces appeared in successive weeks in "Le Progrès Civique": discussing unemployment, a day in the life of a tramp, and the beggars of London, respectively. "In one or another of its destructive forms, poverty was to become his obsessive subject—at the heart of almost everything he wrote until "Homage to Catalonia"." He fell seriously ill in February 1929 and was taken to the Hôpital Cochin in the 14th arrondissement, a free hospital where medical students were trained. His experiences there were the basis of his essay "How the Poor Die", published in 1946. He chose not to identify the hospital, and indeed was deliberately misleading about its location. Shortly afterwards, he had all his money stolen from his lodging house. Whether through necessity or to collect material, he undertook menial jobs such as dishwashing in a fashionable hotel on the rue de Rivoli, which he later described in "Down and Out in Paris and London". In August 1929, he sent a copy of "The Spike" to John Middleton Murry's "New Adelphi" magazine in London. The magazine was edited by Max Plowman and Sir Richard Rees, and Plowman accepted the work for publication. Southwold. In December 1929 after nearly two years in Paris, Blair returned to England and went directly to his parents' house in Southwold, a coastal town in Suffolk, which remained his base for the next five years. The family was well established in the town, and his sister Avril was running a tea-house there. He became acquainted with many local people, including Brenda Salkeld, the clergyman's daughter who worked as a gym-teacher at St Felix Girls' School in the town. Although Salkeld rejected his offer of marriage, she remained a friend and regular correspondent for many years. He also renewed friendships with older friends, such as Dennis Collings, whose girlfriend Eleanor Jacques was also to play a part in his life. In early 1930 he stayed briefly in Bramley, Leeds, with his sister Marjorie and her husband Humphrey Dakin, who was as unappreciative of Blair as when they knew each other as children. Blair was writing reviews for "Adelphi" and acting as a private tutor to a disabled child at Southwold. He then became tutor to three young brothers, one of whom, Richard Peters, later became a distinguished academic. "His history in these years is marked by dualities and contrasts. There is Blair leading a respectable, outwardly eventless life at his parents' house in Southwold, writing; then in contrast, there is Blair as Burton (the name he used in his down-and-out episodes) in search of experience in the kips and spikes, in the East End, on the road, and in the hop fields of Kent." He went painting and bathing on the beach, and there he met Mabel and Francis Fierz, who later influenced his career. Over the next year he visited them in London, often meeting their friend Max Plowman. He also often stayed at the homes of Ruth Pitter and Richard Rees, where he could "change" for his sporadic tramping expeditions. One of his jobs was domestic work at a lodgings for half a crown (two shillings and sixpence, or one-eighth of a pound) a day. Blair now contributed regularly to "Adelphi", with "A Hanging" appearing in August 1931. From August to September 1931 his explorations of poverty continued, and, like the protagonist of "A Clergyman's Daughter", he followed the East End tradition of working in the Kent hop fields. He kept a diary about his experiences there. Afterwards, he lodged in the Tooley Street kip, but could not stand it for long, and with financial help from his parents moved to Windsor Street, where he stayed until Christmas. "Hop Picking", by Eric Blair, appeared in the October 1931 issue of "New Statesman", whose editorial staff included his old friend Cyril Connolly. Mabel Fierz put him in contact with Leonard Moore, who became his literary agent. At this time Jonathan Cape rejected "A Scullion's Diary", the first version of "Down and Out". On the advice of Richard Rees, he offered it to Faber and Faber, but their editorial director, T. S. Eliot, also rejected it. Blair ended the year by deliberately getting himself arrested, so that he could experience Christmas in prison, but the authorities did not regard his "drunk and disorderly" behaviour as imprisonable, and he returned home to Southwold after two days in a police cell. Teaching career. In April 1932 Blair became a teacher at The Hawthorns High School, a school for boys, in Hayes, West London. This was a small school offering private schooling for children of local tradesmen and shopkeepers, and had only 14 or 16 boys aged between ten and sixteen, and one other master. While at the school he became friendly with the curate of the local parish church and became involved with activities there. Mabel Fierz had pursued matters with Moore, and at the end of June 1932, Moore told Blair that Victor Gollancz was prepared to publish "A Scullion's Diary" for a £40 advance, through his recently founded publishing house, Victor Gollancz Ltd, which was an outlet for radical and socialist works. At the end of the summer term in 1932, Blair returned to Southwold, where his parents had used a legacy to buy their own home. Blair and his sister Avril spent the holidays making the house habitable while he also worked on "Burmese Days". He was also spending time with Eleanor Jacques, but her attachment to Dennis Collings remained an obstacle to his hopes of a more serious relationship. "Clink", an essay describing his failed attempt to get sent to prison, appeared in the August 1932 number of "Adelphi". He returned to teaching at Hayes and prepared for the publication of his book, now known as "Down and Out in Paris and London". He wished to publish under a different name to avoid any embarrassment to his family over his time as a "tramp". In a letter to Moore (dated 15 November 1932), he left the choice of pseudonym to Moore and to Gollancz. Four days later, he wrote to Moore, suggesting the pseudonyms P. S. Burton (a name he used when tramping), Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, and H. Lewis Allways. He finally adopted the "nom de plume" George Orwell because "It is a good round English name." "Down and Out in Paris and London" was published on 9 January 1933 as Orwell continued to work on "Burmese Days". "Down and Out" was modestly successful and was next published by Harper & Brothers in New York. In mid-1933 Blair left Hawthorns to become a teacher at Frays College, in Uxbridge, Middlesex. This was a much larger establishment with 200 pupils and a full complement of staff. He acquired a motorcycle and took trips through the surrounding countryside. On one of these expeditions he became soaked and caught a chill that developed into pneumonia. He was taken to Uxbridge Cottage Hospital, where for a time his life was believed to be in danger. When he was discharged in January 1934, he returned to Southwold to convalesce and, supported by his parents, never returned to teaching. He was disappointed when Gollancz turned down "Burmese Days", mainly on the grounds of potential suits for libel, but Harper were prepared to publish it in the United States. Meanwhile, Blair started work on the novel "A Clergyman's Daughter", drawing upon his life as a teacher and on life in Southwold. Eleanor Jacques was now married and had gone to Singapore and Brenda Salkeld had left for Ireland, so Blair was relatively isolated in Southwold—working on the allotments, walking alone and spending time with his father. Eventually in October, after sending "A Clergyman's Daughter" to Moore, he left for London to take a job that had been found for him by his aunt Nellie Limouzin. Hampstead. This job was as a part-time assistant in Booklovers' Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead run by Francis and Myfanwy Westrope, who were friends of Nellie Limouzin in the Esperanto movement. The Westropes were friendly and provided him with comfortable accommodation at Warwick Mansions, Pond Street. He was sharing the job with Jon Kimche, who also lived with the Westropes. Blair worked at the shop in the afternoons and had his mornings free to write and his evenings free to socialise. These experiences provided background for the novel "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" (1936). As well as the various guests of the Westropes, he was able to enjoy the company of Richard Rees and the "Adelphi" writers and Mabel Fierz. The Westropes and Kimche were members of the Independent Labour Party, although at this time Blair was not seriously politically active. He was writing for the "Adelphi" and preparing "A Clergyman's Daughter" and "Burmese Days" for publication. At the beginning of 1935 he had to move out of Warwick Mansions, and Mabel Fierz found him a flat in Parliament Hill. "A Clergyman's Daughter" was published on 11 March 1935. In early 1935 Blair met his future wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy, when his landlady, Rosalind Obermeyer, who was studying for a master's degree in psychology at University College London, invited some of her fellow students to a party. One of these students, Elizaveta Fen, a biographer and future translator of Chekhov, recalled Blair and his friend Richard Rees "draped" at the fireplace, looking, she thought, "moth-eaten and prematurely aged." Around this time, Blair had started to write reviews for "The New English Weekly". In June, "Burmese Days" was published and Cyril Connolly's review in the "New Statesman" prompted Blair to re-establish contact with his old friend. In August, he moved into a flat, at 50 Lawford Road, Kentish Town, which he shared with Michael Sayers and Rayner Heppenstall. The relationship was sometimes awkward and Blair and Heppenstall even came to blows, though they remained friends and later worked together on BBC broadcasts. Blair was now working on "Keep the Aspidistra Flying", and also tried unsuccessfully to write a serial for the "News Chronicle". By October 1935 his flatmates had moved out and he was struggling to pay the rent on his own. He remained until the end of January 1936, when he stopped working at Booklovers' Corner. In 1980, English Heritage honoured Orwell with a blue plaque at his Kentish Town residence. "The Road to Wigan Pier". At this time, Victor Gollancz suggested Orwell spend a short time investigating social conditions in economically depressed Northern England. Two years earlier, J. B. Priestley had written about England north of the Trent, sparking an interest in reportage. The depression had also introduced a number of working-class writers from the North of England to the reading public. It was one of these working-class authors, Jack Hilton, whom Orwell sought for advice. Orwell had written to Hilton seeking lodging and asking for recommendations on his route. Hilton was unable to provide him lodging, but suggested that he travel to Wigan rather than Rochdale, "for there are the colliers and they're good stuff." On 31 January 1936, Orwell set out by public transport and on foot, reaching Manchester via Coventry, Stafford, the Potteries and Macclesfield. Arriving in Manchester after the banks had closed, he had to stay in a common lodging-house. The next day he picked up a list of contacts sent by Richard Rees. One of these, the trade union official Frank Meade, suggested Wigan, where Orwell spent February staying in dirty lodgings over a tripe shop. At Wigan, he visited many homes to see how people lived, took detailed notes of housing conditions and wages earned, went down Bryn Hall coal mine, and used the local public library to consult public health records and reports on working conditions in mines. During this time, he was distracted by concerns about style and possible libel in "Keep the Aspidistra Flying". He made a quick visit to Liverpool and during March, stayed in south Yorkshire, spending time in Sheffield and Barnsley. As well as visiting mines, including Grimethorpe, and observing social conditions, he attended meetings of the Communist Party and of Oswald Mosley ("his speech the usual claptrap—The blame for everything was put upon mysterious international gangs of Jews") where he saw the tactics of the Blackshirts ("...one is liable to get both a hammering and a fine for asking a question which Mosley finds it difficult to answer."). He also made visits to his sister at Headingley, during which he visited the Brontë Parsonage at Haworth, where he was "chiefly impressed by a pair of Charlotte Brontë's cloth-topped boots, very small, with square toes and lacing up at the sides." Orwell needed somewhere he could concentrate on writing his book, and once again help was provided by Aunt Nellie, who was living at Wallington, Hertfordshire in a very small 16th-century cottage called the "Stores". Wallington was a tiny village 35 miles north of London, and the cottage had almost no modern facilities. Orwell took over the tenancy and moved in on 2 April 1936. He started work on "The Road to Wigan Pier" by the end of April, but also spent hours working on the garden and testing the possibility of reopening the Stores as a village shop. "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" was published by Gollancz on 20 April 1936. On 4 August, Orwell gave a talk at the Adelphi Summer School held at Langham, entitled "An Outsider Sees the Distressed Areas"; others who spoke at the school included John Strachey, Max Plowman, Karl Polanyi and Reinhold Niebuhr. The result of his journeys through the north was "The Road to Wigan Pier", published by Gollancz for the Left Book Club in 1937. The first half of the book documents his social investigations of Lancashire and Yorkshire, including an evocative description of working life in the coal mines. The second half is a long essay on his upbringing and the development of his political conscience, which includes an argument for socialism (although he goes to lengths to balance the concerns and goals of socialism with the barriers it faced from the movement's own advocates at the time, such as "priggish" and "dull" socialist intellectuals and "proletarian" socialists with little grasp of the actual ideology). Gollancz feared the second half would offend readers and added a disculpatory preface to the book while Orwell was in Spain. Orwell's research for "The Road to Wigan Pier" led to him being placed under surveillance by the Special Branch from 1936, for 12 years, until one year before the publication of "Nineteen Eighty-Four". Orwell married Eileen O'Shaughnessy on 9 June 1936. Shortly afterwards, the political crisis began in Spain and Orwell followed developments there closely. At the end of the year, concerned by Francisco Franco's military uprising (supported by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and local groups such as Falange), Orwell decided to go to Spain to take part in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side. Under the erroneous impression that he needed papers from some left-wing organisation to cross the frontier, on John Strachey's recommendation he applied unsuccessfully to Harry Pollitt, leader of the British Communist Party. Pollitt was suspicious of Orwell's political reliability; he asked him whether he would undertake to join the International Brigade and advised him to get a safe-conduct from the Spanish Embassy in Paris. Not wishing to commit himself until he had seen the situation "in situ", Orwell instead used his Independent Labour Party contacts to get a letter of introduction to John McNair in Barcelona. Spanish Civil War. Orwell set out for Spain on about 23 December 1936, dining with Henry Miller in Paris on the way. Miller told Orwell that going to fight in the Civil War out of some sense of obligation or guilt was "sheer stupidity" and that the Englishman's ideas "about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney." A few days later in Barcelona, Orwell met John McNair of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) Office who quoted him: "I've come to fight against Fascism". Orwell stepped into a complex political situation in Catalonia. The Republican government was supported by a number of factions with conflicting aims, including the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM – Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (a wing of the Spanish Communist Party, which was backed by Soviet arms and aid). The ILP was linked to the POUM so Orwell joined the POUM. After a time at the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona he was sent to the relatively quiet Aragon Front under Georges Kopp. By January 1937 he was at Alcubierre above sea level, in the depth of winter. There was very little military action and Orwell was shocked by the lack of munitions, food and firewood as well as other extreme deprivations. With his Cadet Corps and police training, Orwell was quickly made a corporal. On the arrival of a British ILP Contingent about three weeks later, Orwell and the other English militiaman, Williams, were sent with them to Monte Oscuro. The newly arrived ILP contingent included Bob Smillie, Bob Edwards, Stafford Cottman and Jack Branthwaite. The unit was then sent on to Huesca. Meanwhile, back in England, Eileen had been handling the issues relating to the publication of "The Road to Wigan Pier" before setting out for Spain herself, leaving Nellie Limouzin to look after The Stores. Eileen volunteered for a post in John McNair's office and with the help of Georges Kopp paid visits to her husband, bringing him English tea, chocolate and cigars. Orwell had to spend some days in hospital with a poisoned hand and had most of his possessions stolen by the staff. He returned to the front and saw some action in a night attack on the Nationalist trenches where he chased an enemy soldier with a bayonet and bombed an enemy rifle position. In April, Orwell returned to Barcelona. Wanting to be sent to the Madrid front, which meant he "must join the International Column", he approached a Communist friend attached to the Spanish Medical Aid and explained his case. "Although he did not think much of the Communists, Orwell was still ready to treat them as friends and allies. That would soon change." This was the time of the Barcelona May Days and Orwell was caught up in the factional fighting. He spent much of the time on a roof, with a stack of novels, but encountered Jon Kimche from his Hampstead days during the stay. The subsequent campaign of lies and distortion carried out by the Communist press, in which the POUM was accused of collaborating with the fascists, had a dramatic effect on Orwell. Instead of joining the International Brigades as he had intended, he decided to return to the Aragon Front. Once the May fighting was over, he was approached by a Communist friend who asked if he still intended transferring to the International Brigades. Orwell expressed surprise that they should still want him, because according to the Communist press he was a fascist. "No one who was in Barcelona then, or for months later, will forget the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues and prowling gangs of armed men." After his return to the front, he was wounded in the throat by a sniper's bullet. At 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m), Orwell was considerably taller than the Spanish fighters and had been warned against standing against the trench parapet. Unable to speak, and with blood pouring from his mouth, Orwell was carried on a stretcher to Siétamo, loaded on an ambulance and after a bumpy journey via Barbastro arrived at the hospital in Lleida. He recovered sufficiently to get up and on 27 May 1937 was sent on to Tarragona and two days later to a POUM sanatorium in the suburbs of Barcelona. The bullet had missed his main artery by the barest margin and his voice was barely audible. It had been such a clean shot that the wound immediately went through the process of cauterisation. He received electrotherapy treatment and was declared medically unfit for service. By the middle of June the political situation in Barcelona had deteriorated and the POUM—painted by the pro-Soviet Communists as a Trotskyist organisation—was outlawed and under attack. The Communist line was that the POUM were "objectively" Fascist, hindering the Republican cause. "A particularly nasty poster appeared, showing a head with a POUM mask being ripped off to reveal a Swastika-covered face beneath." Members, including Kopp, were arrested and others were in hiding. Orwell and his wife were under threat and had to lie low, although they broke cover to try to help Kopp. Finally with their passports in order, they escaped from Spain by train, diverting to Banyuls-sur-Mer for a short stay before returning to England. In the first week of July 1937 Orwell arrived back at Wallington; on 13 July 1937 a deposition was presented to the Tribunal for Espionage & High Treason in Valencia, charging the Orwells with "rabid Trotskyism", and being agents of the POUM. The trial of the leaders of the POUM and of Orwell (in his absence) took place in Barcelona in October and November 1938. Observing events from French Morocco, Orwell wrote that they were "only a by-product of the Russian Trotskyist trials and from the start every kind of lie, including flagrant absurdities, has been circulated in the Communist press." Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War gave rise to "Homage to Catalonia" (1938). In his book, "The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War," Giles Tremlett writes that according to Soviet files, Orwell and his wife Eileen were spied on in Barcelona in May 1937. "The papers are documentary evidence that not only Orwell, but also his wife Eileen, were being watched closely". Rest and recuperation. Orwell returned to England in June 1937, and stayed at the O'Shaughnessy home at Greenwich. He found his views on the Spanish Civil War out of favour. Kingsley Martin rejected two of his works and Gollancz was equally cautious. At the same time, the communist "Daily Worker" was running an attack on "The Road to Wigan Pier", taking out of context Orwell writing that "the working classes smell"; a letter to Gollancz from Orwell threatening libel action brought a stop to this. Orwell was also able to find a more sympathetic publisher for his views in Fredric Warburg of Secker & Warburg. Orwell returned to Wallington, which he found in disarray after his absence. He acquired goats, a cockerel (rooster) he called Henry Ford and a poodle puppy he called Marx; and settled down to animal husbandry and writing "Homage to Catalonia". There were thoughts of going to India to work on "The Pioneer", a newspaper in Lucknow, but by March 1938 Orwell's health had deteriorated. He was admitted to Preston Hall Sanatorium at Aylesford, Kent, a British Legion hospital for ex-servicemen to which his brother-in-law Laurence O'Shaughnessy was attached. He was thought initially to be suffering from tuberculosis and stayed in the sanatorium until September. A stream of visitors came to see him, including Common, Heppenstall, Plowman and Cyril Connolly. Connolly brought with him Stephen Spender, a cause of some embarrassment as Orwell had referred to Spender as a "pansy friend" some time earlier. "Homage to Catalonia" was published by Secker & Warburg and was a commercial flop. In the latter part of his stay at the clinic, Orwell was able to go for walks in the countryside and study nature. The novelist L. H. Myers secretly funded a trip to French Morocco for half a year for Orwell to avoid the English winter and recover his health. The Orwells set out in September 1938 via Gibraltar and Tangier to avoid Spanish Morocco and arrived at Marrakech. They rented a villa on the road to Casablanca and during that time Orwell wrote "Coming Up for Air". They arrived back in England on 30 March 1939 and "Coming Up for Air" was published in June. Orwell spent time in Wallington and Southwold working on a Dickens essay and it was in June 1939 that Orwell's father, Richard Blair, died. Second World War and "Animal Farm". At the outbreak of the Second World War, Orwell's wife Eileen started working in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in central London, staying during the week with her family in Greenwich. Orwell also submitted his name to the Central Register for war work, but nothing transpired. "They won't have me in the army, at any rate at present, because of my lungs", Orwell told Geoffrey Gorer. He returned to Wallington, and in late 1939 he wrote material for his first collection of essays, "Inside the Whale". For the next year he was occupied writing reviews for plays, films and books for "The Listener", "Time and Tide" and "New Adelphi". On 29 March 1940 his long association with "Tribune" began with a review of a sergeant's account of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. At the beginning of 1940, the first edition of Connolly's "Horizon" appeared, and this provided a new outlet for Orwell's work as well as new literary contacts. In May the Orwells took lease of a flat in London at Dorset Chambers, Chagford Street, Marylebone. It was the time of the Dunkirk evacuation and the death in France of Eileen's brother Lawrence caused her considerable grief and long-term depression. Throughout this period Orwell kept a wartime diary. Orwell was declared "unfit for any kind of military service" by the Medical Board in June, but soon afterwards found an opportunity to become involved in war activities by joining the Home Guard. He shared Tom Wintringham's socialist vision for the Home Guard as a revolutionary People's Militia. His lecture notes for instructing platoon members include advice on street fighting, field fortifications, and the use of mortars of various kinds. Sergeant Orwell managed to recruit Fredric Warburg to his unit. During the Battle of Britain he used to spend weekends with Warburg and his new Zionist friend, Tosco Fyvel, at Warburg's house at Twyford, Berkshire. At Wallington he worked on "England Your England" and in London wrote reviews for various periodicals. Visiting Eileen's family in Greenwich brought him face-to-face with the effects of the Blitz on East London. In mid-1940, Warburg, Fyvel and Orwell planned Searchlight Books. Eleven volumes eventually appeared, of which Orwell's "", published on 19 February 1941, was the first. Early in 1941 he began to write for the American "Partisan Review" which linked Orwell with The New York Intellectuals who were also anti-Stalinist, and contributed to the Gollancz anthology "The Betrayal of the Left", written in the light of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (although Orwell referred to it as the Russo-German Pact and the Hitler-Stalin Pact). He also applied unsuccessfully for a job at the Air Ministry. Meanwhile, he was still writing reviews of books and plays and at this time met the novelist Anthony Powell. He also took part in a few radio broadcasts for the Eastern Service of the BBC. In March the Orwells moved to a seventh-floor flat at Langford Court, St John's Wood, while at Wallington Orwell was "digging for victory" by planting potatoes. In August 1941, Orwell finally obtained "war work" when he was taken on full-time by the BBC's Eastern Service. When interviewed for the job he indicated that he "accept[ed] absolutely the need for propaganda to be directed by the government" and stressed his view that, in wartime, discipline in the execution of government policy was essential. He supervised cultural broadcasts to India to counter propaganda from Nazi Germany designed to undermine imperial links. This was Orwell's first experience of the rigid conformity of life in an office, and it gave him an opportunity to create cultural programmes with contributions from T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, E. M. Forster, Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, and William Empson among others. At the end of August he had a dinner with H. G. Wells which degenerated into a row because Wells had taken offence at observations Orwell made about him in a "Horizon" article. In October Orwell had a bout of bronchitis and the illness recurred frequently. David Astor was looking for a provocative contributor for "The Observer" and invited Orwell to write for him—the first article appearing in March 1942. In early 1942 Eileen changed jobs to work at the Ministry of Food and in mid-1942 the Orwells moved to a larger flat, a ground floor and basement, 10a Mortimer Crescent in Maida Vale/Kilburn—"the kind of lower-middle-class ambience that Orwell thought was London at its best." Around the same time Orwell's mother and sister Avril, who had found work in a sheet-metal factory behind King's Cross Station, moved into a flat close to George and Eileen. At the BBC, Orwell introduced "Voice", a literary programme for his Indian broadcasts, and by now was leading an active social life with literary friends, particularly on the political left. Late in 1942, he started writing regularly for the left-wing weekly "Tribune" directed by Labour MPs Aneurin Bevan and George Strauss. In March 1943 Orwell's mother died and around the same time he told Moore he was starting work on a new book, which turned out to be "Animal Farm". In September 1943, Orwell resigned from the BBC post that he had occupied for two years. His resignation followed a report confirming his fears that few Indians listened to the broadcasts, but he was also keen to concentrate on writing "Animal Farm". Just six days before his last day of service, on 24 November 1943, his adaptation of the fairy tale, Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes" was broadcast. It was a genre in which he was greatly interested and which appeared on "Animal Farm"s title-page. At this time he also resigned from the Home Guard on medical grounds. In November 1943, Orwell was appointed literary editor at "Tribune", where his assistant was his old friend Jon Kimche. Orwell was on staff until early 1945, writing over 80 book reviews and on 3 December 1943 started his regular personal column, "As I Please", usually addressing three or four subjects in each. He was still writing reviews for other magazines, including "Partisan Review", "Horizon", and the New York "Nation" and becoming a respected pundit among left-wing circles but also a close friend of people on the right such as Powell, Astor and Malcolm Muggeridge. By April 1944 "Animal Farm" was ready for publication. Gollancz refused to publish it, considering it an attack on the Soviet regime which was a crucial ally in the war. A similar fate was met from other publishers (including T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber) until Jonathan Cape agreed to take it. In May the Orwells had the opportunity to adopt a child, thanks to the contacts of Eileen's sister Gwen O'Shaughnessy, then a doctor in Newcastle upon Tyne. In June a V-1 flying bomb struck Mortimer Crescent and the Orwells had to find somewhere else to live. Orwell had to scrabble around in the rubble for his collection of books, which he had finally managed to transfer from Wallington, carting them away in a wheelbarrow. Another blow was Cape's reversal of his plan to publish "Animal Farm". The decision followed his personal visit to Peter Smollett, an official at the Ministry of Information. Smollett was later identified as a Soviet agent. The Orwells spent some time in the North East, near Carlton, County Durham, dealing with matters in the adoption of a boy whom they named Richard Horatio Blair. By September 1944 they had set up home in Islington, at 27b Canonbury Square. Baby Richard joined them there, and Eileen gave up her work at the Ministry of Food to look after her family. Secker & Warburg had agreed to publish "Animal Farm", planned for the following March, although it did not appear in print until August 1945. By February 1945 David Astor had invited Orwell to become a war correspondent for the "Observer". Orwell had been looking for the opportunity throughout the war, but his failed medical reports prevented him from being allowed anywhere near action. He went to Paris after the liberation of France and to Cologne once it had been occupied by the Allies. It was while he was there that Eileen went into hospital for a hysterectomy and died under anaesthetic on 29 March 1945. She had not given Orwell much notice about this operation because of worries about the cost and because she expected to make a speedy recovery. Orwell returned home for a while and then went back to Europe. He returned finally to London to cover the 1945 general election at the beginning of July. "Animal Farm: A Fairy Story" was published in Britain on 17 August 1945, and a year later in the US, on 26 August 1946. Jura and "Nineteen Eighty-Four". "Animal Farm" had particular resonance in the post-war climate and its worldwide success made Orwell a sought-after figure. For the next four years, Orwell mixed journalistic work—mainly for "Tribune", "The Observer" and the "Manchester Evening News", though he also contributed to many small-circulation political and literary magazines—with writing his best-known work, "Nineteen Eighty-Four", which was published in 1949. He was a leading figure in the so-called Shanghai Club (named after a restaurant in Soho) of left-leaning and émigré journalists, among them E. H. Carr, Sebastian Haffner, Isaac Deutscher, Barbara Ward and Jon Kimche. In the year following Eileen's death he published around 130 articles and a selection of his "Critical Essays", while remaining active in various political lobbying campaigns. He employed a housekeeper, Susan Watson, to look after his adopted son at the Islington flat, which visitors now described as "bleak". In September he spent a fortnight on the island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides and saw it as a place to escape from the hassle of London literary life. David Astor was instrumental in arranging a place for Orwell on Jura. Astor's family owned Scottish estates in the area and a fellow Old Etonian, Robin Fletcher, had a property on the island. In late 1945 and early 1946 Orwell made several hopeless and unwelcome marriage proposals to younger women, including Celia Kirwan (who later became Arthur Koestler's sister-in-law); Ann Popham who happened to live in the same block of flats; and Sonia Brownell, one of Connolly's coterie at the "Horizon" office. Orwell suffered a tubercular haemorrhage in February 1946 but disguised his illness. In 1945 or early 1946, while still living at Canonbury Square, Orwell wrote an article on "British Cookery", complete with recipes, commissioned by the British Council. Given the post-war shortages, both parties agreed not to publish it. His sister Marjorie died of kidney disease in May, and soon afterwards, on 22 May 1946, Orwell set off to live on the Isle of Jura at a house known as Barnhill. This was an abandoned farmhouse with outbuildings near the northern end of the island, at the end of a five-mile (8 km) heavily rutted track from Ardlussa, where the owners lived. Conditions at the farmhouse were primitive but the natural history and the challenge of improving the place appealed to Orwell. His sister Avril accompanied him there and young novelist Paul Potts made up the party. In July Susan Watson arrived with Orwell's son Richard. Tensions developed and Potts departed after one of his manuscripts was used to light the fire. Orwell meanwhile set to work on "Nineteen Eighty-Four". Later Susan Watson's boyfriend David Holbrook arrived. A fan of Orwell since school days, he found the reality very different, with Orwell hostile and disagreeable probably because of Holbrook's membership of the Communist Party. Susan Watson could no longer stand being with Avril and she and her boyfriend left. Orwell returned to London in late 1946 and picked up his literary journalism again. Now a well-known writer, he was swamped with work. Apart from a visit to Jura in the new year he stayed in London for one of the coldest British winters on record and with such a national shortage of fuel that he burnt his furniture and his child's toys. The heavy smog in the days before the Clean Air Act 1956 did little to help his health, about which he was reticent, keeping clear of medical attention. Meanwhile, he had to cope with rival claims of publishers Gollancz and Warburg for publishing rights. About this time he co-edited a collection titled "British Pamphleteers" with Reginald Reynolds. As a result of the success of "Animal Farm", Orwell was expecting a large bill from the Inland Revenue and he contacted a firm of accountants whose senior partner was Jack Harrison. The firm advised Orwell to establish a company to own his copyright and to receive his royalties and set up a "service agreement" so that he could draw a salary. Such a company, "George Orwell Productions Ltd" (GOP Ltd) was set up on 12 September 1947, although the service agreement was not then put into effect. Jack Harrison left the details at this stage to junior colleagues. Orwell left London for Jura on 10 April 1947. In July he ended the lease on the Wallington cottage. Back on Jura he worked on "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and made good progress. During that time his sister's family visited, and Orwell led a disastrous boating expedition, on 19 August, which nearly led to loss of life whilst trying to cross the notorious Gulf of Corryvreckan and gave him a soaking which was not good for his health. In December a chest specialist was summoned from Glasgow who pronounced Orwell seriously ill, and a week before Christmas 1947 he was in Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride, then a small village in the countryside, on the outskirts of Glasgow. Tuberculosis was diagnosed and the request for permission to import streptomycin to treat Orwell went as far as Aneurin Bevan, then Minister of Health. David Astor helped with supply and payment and Orwell began his course of streptomycin on 19 or 20 February 1948. By the end of July 1948 Orwell was able to return to Jura and by December he had finished the manuscript of "Nineteen Eighty-Four". In January 1949, in a very weak condition, he set off for a sanatorium at Cranham, Gloucestershire, escorted by Richard Rees. The sanatorium at Cranham consisted of a series of small wooden chalets or huts in a remote part of the Cotswolds near Stroud. Visitors were shocked by Orwell's appearance and concerned by the shortcomings and ineffectiveness of the treatment. Friends were worried about his finances, but by now he was comparatively well off. He was writing to many of his friends, including Jacintha Buddicom, who had "rediscovered" him, and in March 1949, was visited by Celia Kirwan. Kirwan had just started working for a Foreign Office unit, the Information Research Department, set up by the Labour government to publish anti-communist propaganda, and Orwell gave her a list of people he considered to be unsuitable as IRD authors because of their pro-communist leanings. Orwell's list, not published until 2003, consisted mainly of writers but also included actors and Labour MPs. Orwell received more streptomycin treatment and improved slightly. In June 1949 "Nineteen Eighty-Four" was published, to immediate critical and popular acclaim. Final months and death. Orwell's health continued to decline after the diagnosis of tuberculosis in December 1947. In mid-1949, he courted Sonia Brownell, and they announced their engagement in September, shortly before he was removed to University College Hospital in London. Sonia took charge of Orwell's affairs and attended him diligently in the hospital. In September 1949, Orwell invited his accountant Harrison to visit him in hospital, and Harrison claimed that Orwell then asked him to become director of GOP Ltd and to manage the company, but there was no independent witness. Orwell's wedding took place in the hospital room on 13 October 1949, with David Astor as best man. Orwell was in decline and was visited by an assortment of visitors including Muggeridge, Connolly, Lucian Freud, Stephen Spender, Evelyn Waugh, Paul Potts, Anthony Powell, and his Eton tutor Anthony Gow. Plans to go to the Swiss Alps were mooted. Further meetings were held with his accountant, at which Harrison and Mr and Mrs Blair were confirmed as directors of the company, and at which Harrison claimed that the "service agreement" was executed, giving copyright to the company. Orwell's health was in decline again by Christmas. On the evening of 20 January 1950, Potts visited Orwell and slipped away on finding him asleep. Jack Harrison visited later and claimed that Orwell gave him 25% of the company. Early on the morning of 21 January, an artery burst in Orwell's lungs, killing him at age 46. Orwell had requested to be buried in accordance with the Anglican rite in the graveyard of the closest church to wherever he happened to die. The graveyards in central London had no space, and so in an effort to ensure his last wishes could be fulfilled, his widow appealed to his friends to see whether any of them knew of a church with space in its graveyard. David Astor lived in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, and arranged for Orwell to be interred in the churchyard of All Saints' there. Orwell's gravestone bears the epitaph: "Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25th 1903, died January 21st 1950"; no mention is made on the gravestone of his more famous pen name. Orwell's adopted son, Richard Horatio Blair, was brought up by Orwell's sister Avril. He is patron of The Orwell Society. In 1979, Sonia Brownell brought a High Court action against Harrison when he declared an intention to subdivide his 25 percent share of the company between his three children. For Sonia, the consequence of this manoeuvre would have made getting overall control of the company three times more difficult. She was considered to have a strong case, but was becoming increasingly ill and eventually was persuaded to settle out of court on 2 November 1980. She died on 11 December 1980, aged 62. Literary career and legacy. During most of his career, Orwell was best known for his journalism, in essays, reviews, columns in newspapers and magazines and in his books of reportage: "Down and Out in Paris and London" (describing a period of poverty in these cities), "The Road to Wigan Pier" (describing the living conditions of the poor in northern England, and class division generally) and "Homage to Catalonia". According to Irving Howe, Orwell was "the best English essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr Johnson." Modern readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four". The former is often thought to reflect degeneration in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism; the latter, life under totalitarian rule. "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is often compared to "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley; both are powerful dystopian novels warning of a future world where the state machine exerts complete control over social life. In 1984, "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" were honoured with the Prometheus Award for their contributions to dystopian literature. In 2011 he received it again for "Animal Farm". "Coming Up for Air", his last novel before World War II, is the most "English" of his novels; alarms of war mingle with images of idyllic Thames-side Edwardian childhood of protagonist George Bowling. The novel is pessimistic; industrialism and capitalism have killed the best of Old England, and there were great, new external threats. In homely terms, its protagonist George Bowling posits the totalitarian hypotheses of Franz Borkenau, Orwell, Ignazio Silone and Koestler: "Old Hitler's something different. So's Joe Stalin. They aren't like these chaps in the old days who crucified people and chopped their heads off and so forth, just for the fun of it ... They're something quite new—something that's never been heard of before". Literary influences. In an autobiographical piece that Orwell sent to the editors of "Twentieth Century Authors" in 1940, he wrote: "The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills." Elsewhere, Orwell strongly praised the works of Jack London, especially his book "The Road". Orwell's investigation of poverty in "The Road to Wigan Pier" strongly resembles that of Jack London's "The People of the Abyss", in which the American journalist disguises himself as an out-of-work sailor to investigate the lives of the poor in London. In his essay "Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels" (1946) Orwell wrote: "If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put "Gulliver's Travels" among them." Orwell was an admirer of Arthur Koestler and became a close friend during the three years that Koestler and his wife Mamain spent at the cottage of Bwlch Ocyn, a secluded farmhouse that belonged to Clough Williams-Ellis, in the Vale of Ffestiniog. Orwell reviewed Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" for the "New Statesman" in 1941, saying: Brilliant as this book is as a novel, and a piece of brilliant literature, it is probably most valuable as an interpretation of the Moscow "confessions" by someone with an inner knowledge of totalitarian methods. What was frightening about these trials was not the fact that they happened—for obviously such things are necessary in a totalitarian society—but the eagerness of Western intellectuals to justify them. Other writers admired by Orwell included: Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Gissing, Graham Greene, Herman Melville, Henry Miller, Tobias Smollett, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and Yevgeny Zamyatin. He was both an admirer and a critic of Rudyard Kipling, praising Kipling as a gifted writer and a "good bad poet" whose work is "spurious" and "morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting," but undeniably seductive and able to speak to certain aspects of reality more effectively than more enlightened authors. He had a similarly ambivalent attitude to G. K. Chesterton, whom he regarded as a writer of considerable talent who had chosen to devote himself to "Roman Catholic propaganda", and to Evelyn Waugh, who was, he wrote, "ab[ou]t as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions". Orwell as literary critic. Throughout his life Orwell continually supported himself as a book reviewer. His reviews are well known and have had an influence on literary criticism. He wrote in the conclusion to his 1940 essay on Charles Dickens, George Woodcock suggested that the last two sentences also describe Orwell. Orwell wrote a critique of George Bernard Shaw's play "Arms and the Man". He considered this Shaw's best play and the most likely to remain socially relevant, because of its theme that war is not, generally speaking, a glorious romantic adventure. His 1945 essay "In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse" contains an amusing assessment of Wodehouse's writing and also argues that his broadcasts from Germany (during the war) did not really make him a traitor. He accused The Ministry of Information of exaggerating Wodehouse's actions for propaganda purposes. Food writing. In 1946, the British Council commissioned Orwell to write an essay on British food as part of a drive to promote British relations abroad. In the essay titled "British Cookery," Orwell described the British diet as "a simple, rather heavy, perhaps slightly barbarous diet" and where "hot drinks are acceptable at most hours of the day". He discusses the ritual of breakfast in the UK, "this is not a snack but a serious meal. The hour at which people have their breakfast is of course governed by the time at which they go to work." He wrote that high tea in the United Kingdom consisted of a variety of savoury and sweet dishes, but "no tea would be considered a good one if it did not include at least one kind of cake.” Orwell also added a recipe for marmalade, a popular British spread on bread. However, the British Council declined to publish the essay on the grounds that it was too problematic to write about food at the time of strict rationing in the UK. In 2019, the essay was discovered in the British Council's archives along with the rejection letter. The British Council issued an official apology to Orwell over the rejection of the commissioned essay. Reception and evaluations of Orwell's works. Arthur Koestler said that Orwell's "uncompromising intellectual honesty made him appear almost inhuman at times." Ben Wattenberg stated: "Orwell's writing pierced intellectual hypocrisy wherever he found it." According to historian Piers Brendon, "Orwell was the saint of common decency who would in earlier days, said his BBC boss Rushbrook Williams, 'have been either canonised—or burnt at the stake'". Raymond Williams in describes Orwell as a "successful impersonation of a plain man who bumps into experience in an unmediated way and tells the truth about it." Christopher Norris declared that Orwell's "homespun empiricist outlook—his assumption that the truth was just there to be told in a straightforward common-sense way—now seems not merely naïve but culpably self-deluding". The American scholar Scott Lucas has described Orwell as an enemy of the Left. John Newsinger has argued that Lucas could only do this by portraying "all of Orwell's attacks on Stalinism [–] as if they were attacks on socialism, despite Orwell's continued insistence that they were not." Orwell's work has taken a prominent place in the school literature curriculum in England, with "Animal Farm" a regular examination topic at the end of secondary education (GCSE), and "Nineteen Eighty-Four" a topic for subsequent examinations below university level (A Levels). A 2016 UK poll saw "Animal Farm" ranked the nation's favourite book from school. Historian John Rodden stated: "John Podhoretz did claim that if Orwell were alive today, he'd be standing with the neo-conservatives and against the Left. And the question arises, to what extent can you even begin to predict the political positions of somebody who's been dead three decades and more by that time?" In "Orwell's Victory", Christopher Hitchens argues: "In answer to the accusation of inconsistency Orwell as a writer was forever taking his own temperature. In other words, here was someone who never stopped testing and adjusting his intelligence". John Rodden points out the "undeniable conservative features in the Orwell physiognomy" and remarks on how "to some extent Orwell facilitated the kinds of uses and abuses by the Right that his name has been put to. In other ways there has been the politics of selective quotation." Rodden refers to the essay "Why I Write", in which Orwell refers to the Spanish Civil War as being his "watershed political experience", saying: "The Spanish War and other events in 1936–37, turned the scale. Thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and "for" Democratic Socialism as I understand it." (emphasis in original) Rodden goes on to explain how, during the McCarthy era, the introduction to the Signet edition of "Animal Farm", which sold more than 20 million copies, makes use of "the politics of ellipsis": "If the book itself, "Animal Farm", had left any doubt of the matter, Orwell dispelled it in his essay "Why I Write": 'Every line of serious work that I've written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against Totalitarianism ... dot, dot, dot, dot.' 'For Democratic Socialism' is vaporised, just like Winston Smith did it at the Ministry of Truth, and that's very much what happened at the beginning of the McCarthy era and just continued, Orwell being selectively quoted." Fyvel wrote about Orwell: "His crucial experience [...] was his struggle to turn himself into a writer, one which led through long periods of poverty, failure and humiliation, and about which he has written almost nothing directly. The sweat and agony was less in the slum-life than in the effort to turn the experience into literature." In October 2015 Finlay Publisher, for the Orwell Society, published "George Orwell 'The Complete Poetry"', compiled and presented by Dione Venables. Influence on language and writing. In his essay "Politics and the English Language" (1946), Orwell wrote about the importance of precise and clear language, arguing that vague writing can be used as a powerful tool of political manipulation because it shapes the way we think. In that essay, Orwell provides six rules for writers: Andrew N. Rubin argues that "Orwell claimed that we should be attentive to how the use of language has limited our capacity for critical thought just as we should be equally concerned with the ways in which dominant modes of thinking have reshaped the very language that we use." The adjective "Orwellian" connotes an attitude and a policy of control by propaganda, surveillance, misinformation, denial of truth and manipulation of the past. In "Nineteen Eighty-Four", Orwell described a totalitarian government that controlled thought by controlling language, making certain ideas literally unthinkable. Several words and phrases from "Nineteen Eighty-Four" have entered popular language. "Newspeak" is a simplified and obfuscatory language designed to make independent thought impossible. "Doublethink" means holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously. The "Thought Police" are those who suppress all dissenting opinion. "Prolefeed" is homogenised, manufactured superficial literature, film and music used to control and indoctrinate the populace through docility. "Big Brother" is a supreme dictator who watches everyone. Orwell may have been the first to use the term "cold war" to refer to the state of tension between powers in the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc that followed World War II in his essay, "You and the Atom Bomb", published in "Tribune" on 19 October 1945. He wrote: "We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications—this is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a State which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbours." Modern culture. In 2014, a play written by playwright Joe Sutton titled "Orwell in America" was first performed by the Northern Stage theatre company in White River Junction, Vermont. It is a fictitious account of Orwell doing a book tour in the United States (something he never did in his lifetime). It moved to off-Broadway in 2016. Orwell's birthplace, a bungalow in Motihari, Bihar, India, was opened as a museum in May 2015. Statue. A statue of George Orwell, sculpted by the British sculptor Martin Jennings, was unveiled on 7 November 2017 outside Broadcasting House, the headquarters of the BBC. The wall behind the statue is inscribed with the following phrase: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear". These are words from his proposed preface to "Animal Farm" and a rallying cry for the idea of free speech in an open society. Personal life. Childhood. Jacintha Buddicom's account, "Eric & Us", provides an insight into Blair's childhood. She quoted his sister Avril that "he was essentially an aloof, undemonstrative person" and said herself of his friendship with the Buddicoms: "I do not think he needed any other friends beyond the schoolfriend he occasionally and appreciatively referred to as 'CC'". She could not recall his having schoolfriends to stay and exchange visits as her brother Prosper often did in holidays. Cyril Connolly provides an account of Blair as a child in "Enemies of Promise". Years later, Blair mordantly recalled his prep school in the essay "Such, Such Were the Joys", claiming among other things that he "was made to study like a dog" to earn a scholarship, which he alleged was solely to enhance the school's prestige with parents. Jacintha Buddicom repudiated Orwell's schoolboy misery described in the essay, stating that "he was a specially happy child". She noted that he did not like his name because it reminded him of a book he greatly disliked—"Eric, or, Little by Little", a Victorian boys' school story. Connolly remarked of him as a schoolboy, "The remarkable thing about Orwell was that alone among the boys he was an intellectual and not a parrot for he thought for himself". At Eton, John Vaughan Wilkes, his former headmaster's son at St Cyprians, recalled that "he was extremely argumentative—about anything—and criticising the masters and criticising the other boys [...] We enjoyed arguing with him. He would generally win the arguments—or think he had anyhow." Roger Mynors concurs: "Endless arguments about all sorts of things, in which he was one of the great leaders. He was one of those boys who thought for himself." Blair liked to carry out practical jokes. Buddicom recalls him swinging from the luggage rack in a railway carriage like an orangutan to frighten a woman passenger out of the compartment. At Eton, he played tricks on John Crace, his housemaster, among which was to enter a spoof advertisement in a College magazine implying pederasty. Gow, his tutor, said he "made himself as big a nuisance as he could" and "was a very unattractive boy". Later Blair was expelled from the crammer at Southwold for sending a dead rat as a birthday present to the town surveyor. In one of his "As I Please" essays he refers to a protracted joke when he answered an advertisement for a woman who claimed a cure for obesity. Blair had an interest in natural history which stemmed from his childhood. In letters from school he wrote about caterpillars and butterflies, and Buddicom recalls his keen interest in ornithology. He also enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits, and conducting experiments as in cooking a hedgehog or shooting down a jackdaw from the Eton roof to dissect it. His zeal for scientific experiments extended to explosives—again Buddicom recalls a cook giving notice because of the noise. Later in Southwold, his sister Avril recalled him blowing up the garden. When teaching he enthused his students with his nature-rambles both at Southwold and at Hayes. His adult diaries are permeated with his observations on nature. Relationships and marriage. Buddicom and Blair lost touch shortly after he went to Burma and she became unsympathetic towards him. She wrote that it was because of the letters he wrote complaining about his life, but an addendum to "Eric & Us" by Venables reveals that he may have lost her sympathy through an incident which was, at best, a clumsy attempt at seduction. Mabel Fierz, who later became Blair's confidante, said: "He used to say the one thing he wished in this world was that he'd been attractive to women. He liked women and had many girlfriends I think in Burma. He had a girl in Southwold and another girl in London. He was rather a womaniser, yet he was afraid he wasn't attractive." Brenda Salkield (Southwold) preferred friendship to any deeper relationship and maintained a correspondence with Blair for many years, particularly as a sounding board for his ideas. She wrote: "He was a great letter writer. Endless letters, and I mean when he wrote you a letter he wrote pages." His correspondence with Eleanor Jacques (London) was more prosaic, dwelling on a closer relationship and referring to past rendezvous or planning future ones in London and Burnham Beeches. When Orwell was in the sanatorium in Kent, his wife's friend Lydia Jackson visited. He invited her for a walk and out of sight "an awkward situation arose." Jackson was to be the most critical of Orwell's marriage to Eileen O'Shaughnessy, but their later correspondence hints at a complicity. Eileen at the time was more concerned about Orwell's closeness to Brenda Salkield. Orwell had an affair with his secretary at "Tribune" which caused Eileen much distress, and others have been mooted. In a letter to Ann Popham he wrote: "I was sometimes unfaithful to Eileen, and I also treated her badly, and I think she treated me badly, too, at times, but it was a real marriage, in the sense that we had been through awful struggles together and she understood all about my work, etc." Similarly he suggested to Celia Kirwan that they had both been unfaithful. There are several testaments that it was a well-matched and happy marriage. In June 1944, Orwell and Eileen adopted a three-week-old boy they named Richard Horatio. According to Richard, Orwell was a wonderful father who gave him devoted, if rather rugged, attention and a great degree of freedom. After Orwell's death Richard went to live with Orwell's sister and her husband. Blair was very lonely after Eileen's death in 1945, and desperate for a wife, both as companion for himself and as mother for Richard. He proposed marriage to four women, including Celia Kirwan, and eventually Sonia Brownell accepted. Orwell had met her when she was assistant to Cyril Connolly, at "Horizon" literary magazine. They were married on 13 October 1949, only three months before Orwell's death. Some maintain that Sonia was the model for Julia in "Nineteen Eighty-Four". Social interactions. Orwell was noted for very close and enduring friendships with a few friends, but these were generally people with a similar background or with a similar level of literary ability. Ungregarious, he was out of place in a crowd and his discomfort was exacerbated when he was outside his own class. Though representing himself as a spokesman for the common man, he often appeared out of place with real working people. His brother-in-law Humphrey Dakin, a "Hail fellow, well met" type, who took him to a local pub in Leeds, said that he was told by the landlord: "Don't bring that bugger in here again." Adrian Fierz commented "He wasn't interested in racing or greyhounds or pub crawling or shove ha'penny. He just did not have much in common with people who did not share his intellectual interests." Awkwardness attended many of his encounters with working-class representatives, as with Pollitt and McNair, but his courtesy and good manners were often commented on. Jack Common observed on meeting him for the first time, "Right away manners, and more than manners—breeding—showed through." In his tramping days, he did domestic work for a time. His extreme politeness was recalled by a member of the family he worked for; she declared that the family referred to him as "Laurel" after the film comedian. With his gangling figure and awkwardness, Orwell's friends often saw him as a figure of fun. Geoffrey Gorer commented "He was awfully likely to knock things off tables, trip over things. I mean, he was a gangling, physically badly co-ordinated young man. I think his feeling [was] that even the inanimate world was against him." When he shared a flat with Heppenstall and Sayer, he was treated in a patronising manner by the younger men. At the BBC in the 1940s, "everybody would pull his leg" and Spender described him as having real entertainment value "like, as I say, watching a Charlie Chaplin movie." A friend of Eileen's reminisced about her tolerance and humour, often at Orwell's expense. One biography of Orwell accused him of having had an authoritarian streak. In Burma, he struck out at a Burmese boy who, while "fooling around" with his friends, had "accidentally bumped into him" at a station, resulting in Orwell falling "heavily" down some stairs. One of his former pupils recalled being beaten so hard he could not sit down for a week. When sharing a flat with Orwell, Heppenstall came home late one night in an advanced stage of loud inebriation. The upshot was that Heppenstall ended up with a bloody nose and was locked in a room. When he complained, Orwell hit him across the legs with a shooting stick and Heppenstall then had to defend himself with a chair. Years later, after Orwell's death, Heppenstall wrote a dramatic account of the incident called "The Shooting Stick" and Mabel Fierz confirmed that Heppenstall came to her in a sorry state the following day. Orwell got on well with young people. The pupil he beat considered him the best of teachers and the young recruits in Barcelona tried to drink him under the table without success. His nephew recalled Uncle Eric laughing louder than anyone in the cinema at a Charlie Chaplin film. In the wake of his most famous works, he attracted many uncritical hangers-on, but many others who sought him found him aloof and even dull. With his soft voice, he was sometimes shouted down or excluded from discussions. At this time, he was severely ill; it was wartime or the austerity period after it; during the war his wife suffered from depression; and after her death he was lonely and unhappy. In addition to that, he always lived frugally and seemed unable to care for himself properly. As a result of all this, people found his circumstances bleak. Some, like Michael Ayrton, called him "Gloomy George", but others developed the idea that he was an "English secular saint". Although Orwell was frequently heard on the BBC for panel discussion and one-man broadcasts, no recorded copy of his voice is known to exist. Lifestyle. Orwell was a heavy smoker, who rolled his own cigarettes from strong shag tobacco, despite his bronchial condition. His penchant for the rugged life often took him to cold and damp situations, both in the long term, as in Catalonia and Jura, and short term, for example, motorcycling in the rain and suffering a shipwreck. Described by "The Economist" as "perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture", Orwell considered fish and chips, football, the pub, strong tea, cut price chocolate, the movies, and radio among the chief comforts for the working class. He advocated a patriotic defence of a British way of life that could not be trusted to intellectuals or, by implication, the state: Orwell enjoyed strong tea—he had Fortnum & Mason's tea brought to him in Catalonia. His 1946 essay, "A Nice Cup of Tea", appeared in the "London Evening Standard" article on how to make tea, with Orwell writing, "tea is one of the mainstays of civilisation in this country and causes violent disputes over how it should be made", with the main issue being whether to put tea in the cup first and add the milk afterward, or the other way round, on which he states, "in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject". He appreciated English beer, taken regularly and moderately, despised drinkers of lager and wrote about an imagined, ideal British pub in his 1946 "Evening Standard" article, "The Moon Under Water". Not as particular about food, he enjoyed the wartime "Victory Pie" and extolled canteen food at the BBC. He preferred traditional English dishes, such as roast beef, and kippers. His 1945 essay, "In Defence of English Cooking", included Yorkshire pudding, crumpets, muffins, innumerable biscuits, Christmas pudding, shortbread, various British cheeses and Oxford marmalade. Reports of his Islington days refer to the cosy afternoon tea table. His dress sense was unpredictable and usually casual. In Southwold, he had the best cloth from the local tailor but was equally happy in his tramping outfit. His attire in the Spanish Civil War, along with his size-12 boots, was a source of amusement. David Astor described him as looking like a prep school master, while according to the Special Branch dossier, Orwell's tendency to dress "in Bohemian fashion" revealed that the author was "a Communist". Orwell's confusing approach to matters of social decorum—on the one hand expecting a working-class guest to dress for dinner, and on the other, slurping tea out of a saucer at the BBC canteen—helped stoke his reputation as an English eccentric. Views. Religion. Orwell was an atheist who identified himself with the humanist outlook on life. Despite this, and despite his criticisms of both religious doctrine and religious organisations, he nevertheless regularly participated in the social and civic life of the church, including by attending Church of England Holy Communion. Acknowledging this contradiction, he once said: "It seems rather mean to go to HC [Holy Communion] when one doesn't believe, but I have passed myself off for pious & there is nothing for it but to keep up with the deception." He had two Anglican marriages and left instructions for an Anglican funeral. Orwell was also extremely well-read in Biblical literature and could quote lengthy passages from the Book of Common Prayer from memory. His extensive knowledge of the Bible came coupled with unsparing criticism of its philosophy, and as an adult he could not bring himself to believe in its tenets. He said in part V of his essay, "Such, Such Were the Joys", that "Till about the age of fourteen I believed in God, and believed that the accounts given of him were true. But I was well aware that I did not love him." Orwell directly contrasted Christianity with secular humanism in his essay "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool", finding the latter philosophy more palatable and less "self-interested". Literary critic James Wood wrote that in the struggle, as he saw it, between Christianity and humanism, "Orwell was on the humanist side, of course—basically an unmetaphysical, English version of Camus's philosophy of perpetual godless struggle." Orwell's writing was often explicitly critical of religion, and Christianity in particular. He found the church to be a "selfish [...] church of the landed gentry" with its establishment "out of touch" with the majority of its communicants and altogether a pernicious influence on public life. In their 1972 study, "The Unknown Orwell", the writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams noted that at Eton Blair displayed a "sceptical attitude" to Christian belief. Crick observed that Orwell displayed "a pronounced anti-Catholicism". Evelyn Waugh, writing in 1946, acknowledged Orwell's high moral sense and respect for justice but believed "he seems never to have been touched at any point by a conception of religious thought and life." His contradictory and sometimes ambiguous views about the social benefits of religious affiliation mirrored the dichotomies between his public and private lives: Stephen Ingle wrote that it was as if the writer George Orwell "vaunted" his unbelief while Eric Blair the individual retained "a deeply ingrained religiosity". Politics. Orwell liked to provoke arguments by challenging the status quo, but he was also a traditionalist with a love of old English values. He criticised and satirised, from the inside, the various social milieux in which he found himself—provincial town life in "A Clergyman's Daughter"; middle-class pretension in "Keep the Aspidistra Flying"; preparatory schools in "Such, Such Were the Joys"; colonialism in "Burmese Days", and some socialist groups in "The Road to Wigan Pier". In his "Adelphi" days, he described himself as a "Tory-anarchist". In 1928, Orwell began his career as a professional writer in Paris at a journal owned by the French Communist Henri Barbusse. His first article, "La Censure en Angleterre" ("Censorship in England"), was an attempt to account for the "extraordinary and illogical" moral censorship of plays and novels then practised in Britain. His own explanation was that the rise of the "puritan middle class", who had stricter morals than the aristocracy, tightened the rules of censorship in the 19th century. Orwell's first published article in his home country, "A Farthing Newspaper", was a critique of the new French daily the "Ami de Peuple". This paper was sold much more cheaply than most others, and was intended for ordinary people to read. Orwell pointed out that its proprietor François Coty also owned the right-wing dailies "Le Figaro" and "Le Gaulois", which the "Ami de Peuple" was supposedly competing against. Orwell suggested that cheap newspapers were no more than a vehicle for advertising and anti-leftist propaganda, and predicted the world might soon see free newspapers which would drive legitimate dailies out of business. Writing for "Le Progrès Civique", Orwell described the British colonial government in Burma and India: Spanish Civil War and socialism. The Spanish Civil War played the most important part in defining Orwell's socialism. He wrote to Cyril Connolly from Barcelona on 8 June 1937: "I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before." Having witnessed the success of the anarcho-syndicalist communities, for example in Anarchist Catalonia, and the subsequent brutal suppression of the anarcho-syndicalists, anti-Stalin communist parties and revolutionaries by the Soviet Union-backed Communists, Orwell returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and joined the British Independent Labour Party, his card being issued on 13 June 1938. Although he was never a Trotskyist, he was strongly influenced by the Trotskyist and anarchist critiques of the Soviet regime, and by the anarchists' emphasis on individual freedom. In Part 2 of "The Road to Wigan Pier", published by the Left Book Club, Orwell stated that "a real Socialist is one who wishes—not merely conceives it as desirable, but actively wishes—to see tyranny overthrown". Orwell stated in "Why I Write" (1946): "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." Orwell's conception of socialism was of a planned economy alongside democracy, which was the common notion of socialism in the early and middle 20th century. Orwell's emphasis on "democracy" primarily referred to a strong emphasis on civil liberties within a socialist economy as opposed to majoritarian rule, though he was not necessarily opposed to majority rule. Orwell was a proponent of a federal socialist Europe, a position outlined in his 1947 essay "Toward European Unity", which first appeared in "Partisan Review". According to biographer John Newsinger: In his 1938 essay "Why I joined the Independent Labour Party," published in the ILP-affiliated "New Leader", Orwell wrote: Towards the end of the essay, he wrote: "I do not mean I have lost all faith in the Labour Party. My most earnest hope is that the Labour Party will win a clear majority in the next General Election." The Second World War. Orwell was opposed to rearmament against Nazi Germany and at the time of the Munich Agreement he signed a manifesto entitled "If War Comes We Shall Resist"—but he changed his view after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the outbreak of the war. He left the ILP because of its opposition to the war and adopted a political position of "revolutionary patriotism". In December 1940 he wrote in "Tribune" (the Labour left's weekly): "We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary." During the war, Orwell was highly critical of the popular idea that an Anglo-Soviet alliance would be the basis of a post-war world of peace and prosperity. In 1942, commenting on London "Times" editor E. H. Carr's pro-Soviet views, Orwell stated that "all the appeasers, e.g. Professor E.H. Carr, have switched their allegiance from Hitler to Stalin". On anarchism, Orwell wrote in "The Road to Wigan Pier": "I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone." He continued and argued that "it is always necessary to protect peaceful people from violence. In any state of society where crime can be profitable you have got to have a harsh criminal law and administer it ruthlessly." In his reply (dated 15 November 1943) to an invitation from the Duchess of Atholl to speak for the British League for European Freedom, he stated that he did not agree with their objectives. He admitted that what they said was "more truthful than the lying propaganda found in most of the press", but added that he could not "associate himself with an essentially Conservative body" that claimed to "defend democracy in Europe" but had "nothing to say about British imperialism". His closing paragraph stated: "I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country." "Tribune" and post-war Britain. Orwell joined the staff of "Tribune" magazine as literary editor, and from then until his death, was a left-wing (though hardly orthodox) Labour-supporting democratic socialist. On 1 September 1944, about the Warsaw uprising, Orwell expressed in "Tribune" his hostility against the influence of the alliance with the USSR over the allies: "Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Do not imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the sovietic regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly return to honesty and reason. Once a whore, always a whore." According to Newsinger, although Orwell "was always critical of the 1945–51 Labour government's moderation, his support for it began to pull him to the right politically. This did not lead him to embrace conservatism, imperialism or reaction, but to defend, albeit critically, Labour reformism." Between 1945 and 1947, with A. J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell, he contributed a series of articles and essays to "Polemic", a short-lived British "Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics" edited by the ex-Communist Humphrey Slater. Writing in early 1945 a long essay titled "Antisemitism in Britain", for the "Contemporary Jewish Record", Orwell stated that antisemitism was on the increase in Britain and that it was "irrational and will not yield to arguments". He argued that it would be useful to discover why anti-Semites could "swallow such absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others". He wrote: "For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. ... Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own anti-Semitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness." In "Nineteen Eighty-Four", written shortly after the war, Orwell portrayed the Party as enlisting anti-Semitic passions against their enemy, Goldstein. Orwell publicly defended P. G. Wodehouse against charges of being a Nazi sympathiser—occasioned by his agreement to do some broadcasts over the German radio in 1941—a defence based on Wodehouse's lack of interest in and ignorance of politics. Special Branch, the intelligence division of the Metropolitan Police, maintained a file on Orwell for more than 20 years of his life. The dossier, published by The National Archives, states that, according to one investigator, Orwell had "advanced Communist views and several of his Indian friends say that they have often seen him at Communist meetings". MI5, the intelligence department of the Home Office, noted: "It is evident from his recent writings—'The Lion and the Unicorn'—and his contribution to Gollancz's symposium "The Betrayal of the Left" that he does not hold with the Communist Party nor they with him." Sexuality. Sexual politics plays an important role in "Nineteen Eighty-Four". In the novel, people's intimate relationships are strictly governed by the party's Junior Anti-Sex League, by opposing sexual relations and instead encouraging artificial insemination. Personally, Orwell disliked what he thought as misguided middle-class revolutionary emancipatory views, expressing disdain for "every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniacs." Orwell was also openly against homosexuality, at a time when such prejudice was common. Speaking at the 2003 George Orwell Centenary Conference, Daphne Patai said: "Of course he was homophobic. That has nothing to do with his relations with his homosexual friends. Certainly, he had a negative attitude and a certain kind of anxiety, a denigrating attitude towards homosexuality. That is definitely the case. I think his writing reflects that quite fully." Orwell used the homophobic epithets "nancy" and "pansy", such in his expressions of contempt for what he called the "pansy Left", and "nancy poets", i.e. left-wing homosexual or bisexual writers and intellectuals such as Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden. The protagonist of "Keep the Aspidistra Flying", Gordon Comstock, conducts an internal critique of his customers when working in a bookshop, and there is an extended passage of several pages in which he concentrates on a homosexual male customer, and sneers at him for his "nancy" characteristics, including a lisp, which he identifies in detail, with some disgust. Stephen Spender "thought Orwell's occasional homophobic outbursts were part of his rebellion against the public school". Biographies of Orwell. Orwell's will requested that no biography of him be written, and his widow, Sonia Brownell, repelled every attempt by those who tried to persuade her to let them write about him. Various recollections and interpretations were published in the 1950s and 1960s, but Sonia saw the 1968 "Collected Works" as the record of his life. She did appoint Malcolm Muggeridge as official biographer, but later biographers have seen this as deliberate spoiling as Muggeridge eventually gave up the work. In 1972, two American authors, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, produced "The Unknown Orwell", an unauthorised account of his early years that lacked any support or contribution from Sonia Brownell. Sonia Brownell then commissioned Bernard Crick, a professor of politics at the University of London, to complete a biography and asked Orwell's friends to co-operate. Crick collated a considerable amount of material in his work, which was published in 1980, but his questioning of the factual accuracy of Orwell's first-person writings led to conflict with Brownell, and she tried to suppress the book. Crick concentrated on the facts of Orwell's life rather than his character, and presented primarily a political perspective on Orwell's life and work. After Sonia Brownell's death, other works on Orwell were published in the 1980s, particularly in 1984. These included collections of reminiscences by Coppard and Crick and Stephen Wadhams. In 1991, Michael Shelden, an American professor of literature, published a biography. More concerned with the literary nature of Orwell's work, he sought explanations for Orwell's character and treated his first-person writings as autobiographical. Shelden introduced new information that sought to build on Crick's work. Shelden speculated that Orwell possessed an obsessive belief in his failure and inadequacy. Peter Davison's publication of the "Complete Works of George Orwell", completed in 2000, made most of the Orwell Archive accessible to the public. Jeffrey Meyers, a prolific American biographer, was first to take advantage of this and published a book in 2001 that investigated the darker side of Orwell and questioned his saintly image. "Why Orwell Matters" (released in the United Kingdom as "Orwell's Victory") was published by Christopher Hitchens in 2002. In 2003, the centenary of Orwell's birth resulted in biographies by Gordon Bowker and D. J. Taylor, both academics and writers in the United Kingdom. Taylor notes the stage management which surrounds much of Orwell's behaviour and Bowker highlights the essential sense of decency which he considers to have been Orwell's main motivation. External links. Works: Catalogs and further links:

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Alan H. Goldman Alan Harris Goldman (born 1945) is an American philosopher and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Philosophy at the College of William & Mary. He is known for his works on philosophy and popular culture, literature, morality, love, and beauty.

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Samuel von Pufendorf Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf (8 January 1632 – 26 October 1694) was a German jurist, political philosopher, economist and historian. He was born Samuel Pufendorf and ennobled in 1694; he was made a baron by Charles XI of Sweden a few months before his death at age 62. Among his achievements are his commentaries and revisions of the natural law theories of Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius. His political concepts are part of the cultural background of the American Revolution. Pufendorf is seen as an important precursor of Enlightenment in Germany. He was involved in constant quarrels with clerical circles and frequently had to defend himself against accusations of heresy, despite holding largely traditional Christian views on matters of dogma and doctrine. Biography. Early life. He was born at Dorfchemnitz in the Electorate of Saxony. His father Esaias Elias Pufendorf from Glauchau was a Lutheran pastor, and Samuel Pufendorf himself was destined for the ministry. Educated at the ducal school (Fürstenschule) at Grimma, he was sent to study theology at the University of Leipzig. The narrow and dogmatic teaching was repugnant to Pufendorf, and he soon abandoned it for the study of public law. Leaving Leipzig altogether, Pufendorf relocated to University of Jena, where he formed an intimate friendship with Erhard Weigel, the mathematician, whose influence helped to develop his remarkable independence of character. Under the influence of Weigel, he started to read Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes. Pufendorf left Jena in 1658 as Magister and became a tutor in the family of Peter Julius Coyet, one of the resident ministers of King Charles X Gustav of Sweden, at Copenhagen with the help of his brother , a diplomat in the Swedish service. At this time, Charles was endeavoring to impose an unwanted alliance on Denmark. In the middle of the negotiations he opened hostilities and the Danes turned with anger against his envoys. Coyet succeeded in escaping, but the second minister, Steno Bielke, and the rest of the staff were arrested and thrown into prison. Pufendorf shared this misfortune, and was held in captivity for eight months. He occupied himself in meditating upon what he had read in the works of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, and mentally constructed a system of universal law. At the end of his captivity, he accompanied his pupils, the sons of Coyet, to the University of Leiden. Career as author. At Leiden, he was permitted to publish, in 1660, the fruits of his reflections under the title of "Elementa jurisprudentiae universalis libri duo". The work was dedicated to Charles Louis, elector palatine, who created for Pufendorf a new chair at the University of Heidelberg, that of the law of nature and nations. This professorship was first of its kind in the world. Pufendorf married Katharina Elisabeth von Palthen, the widow of a colleague, in 1665. In 1667 he wrote, with the assent of the elector palatine, a tract "De statu imperii germanici liber unus" ("On the Present State of the German Empire"). Published under the cover of a pseudonym at Geneva in 1667, it was supposed to be addressed by a gentleman of Verona, Severinus de Monzambano, to his brother Laelius. The pamphlet caused a sensation. Its author directly challenged the organization of the Holy Roman Empire, denounced in the strongest terms the faults of the house of Austria, and attacked with vigour the politics of the ecclesiastical princes. Before Pufendorf, , publicist and soldier, had written, under the pseudonym of "Hippolytus a Lapide", "De ratione status in imperio nostro romano-germanico". Inimical, like Pufendorf, to the Austrian House of Habsburg, Chemnitz had gone so far as to make an appeal to France and Sweden. Pufendorf, on the contrary, rejected all idea of foreign intervention, and advocated that of national initiative. When Pufendorf went on to criticise a new tax on official documents, he did not get the chair of law and had to leave Heidelberg in 1668. Chances for advancement were few in a Germany that still suffered from the ravages of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), so Pufendorf went to Sweden where that year he was called to the University of Lund. His sojourn there was fruitful. In 1672 appeared "De jure naturae et gentium libri octo", and in 1673 a résumé of it under the title "De officio hominis et civis" ("On the Duty of Man and Citizen"), which, among other topics, gave his analysis of just war theory. In "De jure naturae et gentium" Pufendorf took up in great measure the theories of Grotius and sought to complete them by means of the doctrines of Hobbes and of his own ideas on jus gentium. His first important point was that natural law does not extend beyond the limits of this life and that it confines itself to regulating external acts. He disputed Hobbes's conception of the state of nature and concluded that the state of nature is not one of war but of peace. But this peace is feeble and insecure, and if something else does not come to its aid it can do very little for the preservation of mankind. As regards public law Pufendorf, while recognizing in the state ("civitas") a moral person ("persona moralis"), teaches that the will of the state is but the sum of the individual wills that constitute it, and that this association explains the state. In this "a priori" conception, in which he scarcely gives proof of historical insight, he shows himself as one of the precursors of Rousseau and of the "Contrat social". Pufendorf powerfully defends the idea that international law is not restricted to Christendom, but constitutes a common bond between all nations because all nations form part of humanity. In 1677 Pufendorf was called to Stockholm as Historiographer Royal. To this new period belong "Einleitung zur Historie der vornehmsten Reiche und Staaten" as well as "Commentarium de rebus suecicis libri XXVI., ab expeditione Gustavi Adolphi regis in Germaniam ad abdicationem usque Christinae" and "De rebus a Carolo Gustavo gestis". In his historical works, Pufendorf wrote in a very dry style, but he professed a great respect for truth and generally drew from archival sources. In "De habitu religionis christianae ad vitam civilem" he traces the limits between ecclesiastical and civil power. This work propounded for the first time the so-called "collegial" theory of church government ("Kollegialsystem"), which, developed later by the learned Lutheran theologian , formed the basis of the relations of church and state in Germany and more especially in Prussia. This theory makes a fundamental distinction between the supreme jurisdiction in ecclesiastical matters ("Kirchenhoheit" or "jus circa sacra"), which it conceives as inherent in the power of the state in respect of every religious communion, and the ecclesiastical power ("Kirchengewalt" or "jus in sacra") inherent in the church, but in some cases vested in the state by tacit or expressed consent of the ecclesiastical body. The theory was of importance because, by distinguishing church from state while preserving the essential supremacy of the latter, it prepared the way for the principle of toleration. It was put into practice to a certain extent in Prussia in the 18th century; but it was not till the political changes of the 19th century led to a great mixture of confessions under the various state governments that it found universal acceptance in Germany. The theory, of course, has found no acceptance in the Roman Catholic Church, but it nonetheless made it possible for the Protestant governments to make a working compromise with Rome in respect of the Roman Catholic Church established in their states. In 1688 Pufendorf was called into the service of Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg. He accepted the call, but he had no sooner arrived than the elector died. His son Frederick III fulfilled the promises of his father; and Pufendorf, historiographer and privy councillor, was instructed to write a history of the Elector Frederick William ("De rebus gestis Frederici Wilhelmi Magni"). The King of Sweden continued to testify his goodwill towards Pufendorf, and in 1694 created him a baron. In the same year while still in Sweden, Pufendorf suffered a stroke, and died on 26 October 1694 in Berlin. He was buried in the church of St Nicholas, where an inscription to his memory is still to be seen. He was succeeded as historiographer in Berlin by Charles Ancillon. "De iure naturae et gentium". In 1672 appeared "De iure naturae et gentium". This work took largely the theories of Grotius and many ideas from Hobbes, adding to them Pufendorf's own ideas to develop the law of nations. Pufendorf argues that natural law does not extend beyond the limits of this life and merely regulates only external acts. He also challenges the Hobbesian thesis of a state of nature which is a state of war or conflict. For Pufendorf too there is a state of nature, but it is a state of peace. This natural peace, however, is weak and uncertain. In terms of public law, which recognizes the state ("civitas") as a moral person ("persona moralis"), Pufendorf argues that the will of the state is nevertheless nothing more than the sum of the individual wills that are associated within it; hence the state needs to submit to a discipline essential for human safety. This 'submission', in the sense of obedience and mutual respect, is for Pufendorf the fundamental law of reason, which is the basis of natural law. He adds that international law should not be limited or restricted only to the Christian nations, but must create a common link between all peoples, since all nations are part of humanity. "De Officio Hominis et Civis Juxta Legem Naturalem". In "De Officio Hominis et Civis Juxta Legem Naturalem" ("On the Duty of Man and Citizen"), Pufendorf divides duties into several categories: duties towards God, duties towards oneself, and various forms of duty towards others. Duties towards oneself were classified as "duties of the soul", such as developing skills and talents, and "duties of the body", which involve not doing harm to oneself. Legacy and reputation. John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Denis Diderot all recommended Pufendorf's inclusion in law curricula, and he greatly influenced Blackstone and Montesquieu. Pufendorf's feuds with Leibniz diminished his reputation. Pufendorf and Leibniz shared many theological views, but differed in their philosophical foundation, with Pufendorf leaning toward Biblical fundamentalism. It was on the subject of the pamphlet of "Severinus de Monzambano" that their quarrel began. Leibniz once dismissed him as "Vir parum jurisconsultus, "minime philosophus"" ("A man who is a small jurist, "and a very small philosopher"").

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Walter Kaufmann (philosopher) Walter Arnold Kaufmann (July 1, 1921 – September 4, 1980) was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet. A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature. He served more than 30 years as a professor at Princeton University. He is renowned as a scholar and translator of Friedrich Nietzsche. He also wrote a 1965 book on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and published a translation of Goethe's "Faust". Biography. Walter Kaufmann was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, on 1 July 1921. Kaufmann was raised a Lutheran. At age 11, finding that he believed neither in the Trinity nor in the divinity of Jesus, he converted to Judaism. Kaufmann subsequently discovered that his grandparents were all Jewish. Being both descended from Jews and a convert to Judaism placed Kaufmann in real danger in the rabidly antisemitic Nazi Germany. In 1939 Kaufmann emigrated to the United States and began studying at Williams College. Stanley Corngold records that there he "abandoned his commitment to Jewish ritual while developing a deeply critical attitude toward all established religions." Kaufmann graduated from Williams College in 1941, then went to Harvard University, receiving an MA degree in Philosophy in 1942. His studies were, however, interrupted by the war. He enlisted with the US Army Air Force and would go on to serve as an interrogator for the Military Intelligence Service in Germany. Kaufmann became a citizen of the United States in 1944. In 1947 he was awarded his PhD by Harvard. His dissertation, written in under a year, was titled "Nietzsche's Theory of Values." That same year he joined the Philosophy Department at Princeton University. And, although he would hold visiting appointments in both the US and abroad, he would remain based at Princeton for the rest of his academic career. His students over the years included Nietzsche scholars Frithjof Bergmann, Richard Schacht, Alexander Nehamas, and Ivan Soll. Kaufmann died, aged 59, on 4 September 1980. Philosophical work. In a 1959 article in "Harper's Magazine", he summarily rejected all religious values and practice, especially the liberal Protestantism of continental Europe that began with Schleiermacher and culminated in the writings of Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann. In their place, he praised moralists such as the biblical prophets, the Buddha, and Socrates. He argued that critical analysis and the acquisition of knowledge were liberating and empowering forces. He forcefully criticized the fashionable liberal Protestantism of the 20th century as filled with contradictions and evasions, preferring the austerity of the book of Job and the Jewish existentialism of Martin Buber. Kaufmann discussed many of these issues in his 1958 "Critique of Religion and Philosophy". Kaufmann wrote a good deal on the existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Jaspers. Kaufmann had great admiration for Kierkegaard's passion and his insights on freedom, anxiety, and individualism. Kaufmann wrote: "Nobody before Kierkegaard had seen so clearly that the freedom to make a fateful decision that may change our character and future breeds anxiety." Although Kaufmann did not share Kierkegaard's religious outlook and was critical of his Protestant theology, Kaufmann was nevertheless sympathetic and impressed with the depth of Kierkegaard's thinking: Kaufmann edited the anthology "Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre". Kaufmann disliked Martin Heidegger's thinking, along with his unclear writing. Kaufmann is renowned for his translations and exegesis of Nietzsche, whom he saw as gravely misunderstood by English speakers, as a major early existentialist, and as an unwitting precursor, in some respects, to Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Michael Tanner called Kaufmann's commentaries on Nietzsche "obtrusive, self-referential, and lacking insight", but Llewellyn Jones wrote that Kaufmann's "fresh insights into ... Nietzsche ... can deepen the insights of every discriminating student of literature," and "The New Yorker" wrote that Kaufmann "has produced what may be the definitive study of Nietzsche's ... thought—an informed, scholarly, and lustrous work." Kaufmann wrote that Kaufmann also sympathized with Nietzsche's acerbic criticisms of Christianity. However, Kaufmann faulted much in Nietzsche, writing that "my disagreements with [Nietzsche] are legion." Regarding style, Kaufmann argued that Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", for example, is in parts badly written, melodramatic, or verbose, yet concluded that the book "is not only a mine of ideas, but also a major work of literature and a personal triumph." Kaufmann described his own ethic and his own philosophy of living in his books, including "The Faith of a Heretic: What Can I Believe? How Should I Live? What Do I Hope?" (1961) and "Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy" (1973). In the former work he advocated living in accordance with what he proposed as the four cardinal virtues: "humbition" (a fusion of humility and ambition), love, courage, and honesty. Partial bibliography. Translations. As written or published by Friedrich Nietzsche in chronological order:

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Yan Zhitui Yan Zhitui (, 531–591) courtesy name Jie () was a Chinese calligrapher, painter, musician, writer and politician who served four different Chinese states during the late Southern and Northern Dynasties: the Liang Dynasty in southern China, the Northern Qi and Northern Zhou Dynasties of northern China, and their successor state that reunified China, the Sui Dynasty. Yan Zhitui was a supporter of Buddhism in China despite criticism by many of his Confucian-taught peers. Yan was also the first person in history to mention the use of toilet paper. Family background. Yan Zhitui's ancestors were originally from Linyi in modern-day Shandong Province. His family belonged to the aristocratic Yan clan of Langya 琅邪顏氏. After the fall of the Jin Dynasty's capital city of Chang'an during the Uprising of the Five Barbarians, the Yan family migrated south below the Yangtze River in the year 317. At the Eastern Jin's new capital of Jiankang (modern-day Nanjing) the Yan family became prominent amongst the elite families. The Yan family provided many officials that served the governments of the Eastern Jin Dynasty and the succeeding Liang Dynasty in southern China. There was one dissident of the Yan family, though; upon the transition of the Southern Qi to Liang regimes in the year 502, Yan Zhitui's grandfather refused to serve the Liang court out of continuing loyalty to the Southern Qi. When Emperor Wu of Liang assumed the throne and control over southern China, Zhitui's grandfather starved himself to death in an act of piety towards the dynasty he once served. Despite this act of devotion from his grandfather, Zhitui's father decided to serve Emperor Wu and the new Liang Dynasty. Life. Yan Zhitui's father died when he was only nine years old. Without a father figure to guide or support him, Zhitui was raised largely by the efforts of his elder brother. In his teenage years, Zhitui served as a lowly court attendant in the southern capital at Jiankang. Yet when he was eighteen years old the infamous military general Hou Jing came to power in southern China in a rebellion against the Liang Dynasty. Zhitui and a royal prince narrowly escaped execution once they were made prisoners of Hou Jing. In the year 552 Yan Zhitui fled to Jiangling in what is today modern Hubei, accompanying the Liang prince who he served prior to Hou Jing's revolt. This Liang prince established a rival court, yet it was destroyed when Western Wei invaded from the north and captured Jiangling in the year 554. At age twenty-four, Yan Zhitui now had become an enslaved prisoner of war, carted off with 100,000 others to the Western Wei capital of Chang'an. In 556 his family managed to escape Chang'an, and prepared to move east in hopes of returning to the Liang Dynasty over southern China. However, the Chen Dynasty had since overthrown the Liang Dynasty in the south with the ascension of Emperor Wu of Chen. Much like his grandfather who had refused to serve Liang once it usurped control from the Southern Qi state, Yan Zhitui decided not to serve the new Chen regime. Instead, Yan Zhitui was accepted in several court positions serving the Northern Qi Dynasty in northeastern China. Yet fate would have it that Yan would be forced to move again, this time after the Northern Zhou defeated the Northern Qi in the year 577, supplanting it as the ruling dynasty over northern China. At age forty-six, Yan Zhitui moved back to Chang'an where he had once spent time in captivity. For the next several years he was not appointed to any governmental posts, and suffered for a brief time in a state of poverty. When the Sui Dynasty headed by Emperor Wen of Sui usurped control in the north from the Northern Zhou Dynasty, Yan Zhitui was once again given recognition and appointed to several scholarly and ministerial posts. Written works. In his old age Yan also found time to work on a dictionary and related literary projects. In his 26 chapter book "Yanshi jiaxun" (《顏氏家訓》 "The Family Instructions of Master Yan") Yan Zhitui left an entire written compendium of his own philosophy and life-advice to his sons, advising them on which paths to take and which paths to avoid in order to gain success in life. In addition, he also made observations about the differences between Northern and Southern China of his time, especially in regards to language, customs, and culture. He wrote that he formed many bad habits in life that took years to overcome because his elder brother had not been strict enough with him in the absence of their father. He stressed the need to acquire a good education, since well-educated ministers were chosen for posts, while others who had prestigious family lines for centuries wound up working on farms or tending to horses in the stable if they were not properly educated. Although he stressed the need for mastering calligraphy, painting, and playing the musical instrument of the lute (guqin), he warned against them from practicing too much and gaining too much skill. This was because those of higher rank, in a degrading and humiliating fashion, could easily call upon them to constantly entertain and produce fanciful calligraphy, poetry, or a musical song on the spot. Yan Zhitui was an antiquarian when it came to the prized calligraphy in his family's collection, with written pieces in his possession that were originally penned by the masters of early calligraphy, Wang Xizhi and his son Wang Xianzhi. In his writing, Yan Zhitui also supported Buddhism. Yan defended it against many of his fellow peers who were staunch critics of the religion, despite Yan's own strong emphasis on Confucian learning and education. Yan also required of his sons that his funeral should be accompanied by Buddhist services, and persuaded his sons not to offer meat in traditional ancestral offerings. Although he called upon his sons to observe and respect the teachings of Buddhism, he did not want them to lead a remote and isolated monastic life, as he still had expectations that his sons should marry and have families of their own. He did, however, encourage them to: Although paper had been known as a wrapping and padding material in China since the 2nd century BC, the first reference to the use of toilet paper in human history was made by Yan Zhitui. In 589 AD Yan Zhitui wrote:

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Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, writer, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24. Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900. Nietzsche's writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favor of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and related theory of master–slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the "death of God" and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. He also developed influential concepts such as the "" and the doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from figures such as Socrates, Zoroaster, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Wagner and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. After his death, his sister Elisabeth became the curator and editor of Nietzsche's manuscripts. She edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology while often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Nietzsche's work became associated with fascism and Nazism; 20th-century scholars contested this interpretation, and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available. Nietzsche's thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th and early-21st century thinkers across philosophy—especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism and post-structuralism—as well as art, literature, psychology, politics, and popular culture. Life. Youth (1844–1868). Born on 15 October 1844, Nietzsche grew up in the town of Röcken (now part of Lützen), near Leipzig, in the Prussian Province of Saxony. He was named after King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who turned 49 on the day of Nietzsche's birth (Nietzsche later dropped his middle name Wilhelm). Nietzsche's parents, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche (1813–1849), a Lutheran pastor and former teacher; and Franziska Nietzsche ("née" Oehler) (1826–1897), married in 1843, the year before their son's birth. They had two other children: a daughter, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, born in 1846; and a second son, Ludwig Joseph, born in 1848. Nietzsche's father died from a brain ailment in 1849; Ludwig Joseph died six months later at age two. The family then moved to Naumburg, where they lived with Nietzsche's maternal grandmother and his father's two unmarried sisters. After the death of Nietzsche's grandmother in 1856, the family moved into their own house, now Nietzsche-Haus, a museum and Nietzsche study center. Nietzsche attended a boys' school and then a private school, where he became friends with Gustav Krug and Wilhelm Pinder, all three of whom came from highly respected families. Academic records from one of the schools attended by Nietzsche noted that he excelled in Christian theology. In 1854, he began to attend Domgymnasium in Naumburg. Because his father had worked for the state (as a pastor) the now-fatherless Nietzsche was offered a scholarship to study at the internationally recognized Schulpforta (the claim that Nietzsche was admitted on the strength of his academic competence has been debunked: his grades were not near the top of the class). He studied there from 1858 to 1864, becoming friends with Paul Deussen and Carl von Gersdorff. He also found time to work on poems and musical compositions. Nietzsche led "Germania", a music and literature club, during his summers in Naumburg. At Schulpforta, Nietzsche received an important grounding in languages—Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French—so as to be able to read important primary sources; he also experienced for the first time being away from his family life in a small-town conservative environment. His end-of-semester exams in March 1864 showed a 1in Religion and German; a 2a in Greek and Latin; a 2b in French, History, and Physics; and a "lackluster" 3in Hebrew and Mathematics. While at Schulpforta, Nietzsche pursued subjects that were considered unbecoming. He became acquainted with the work of the then almost-unknown poet Friedrich Hölderlin, calling him "my favorite poet" and composing an essay in which he said that the mad poet raised consciousness to "the most sublime ideality". The teacher who corrected the essay gave it a good mark but commented that Nietzsche should concern himself in the future with healthier, more lucid, and more "German" writers. Additionally, he became acquainted with Ernst Ortlepp, an eccentric, blasphemous, and often drunken poet who was found dead in a ditch weeks after meeting the young Nietzsche but who may have introduced Nietzsche to the music and writing of Richard Wagner. Perhaps under Ortlepp's influence, he and a student named Richter returned to school drunk and encountered a teacher, resulting in Nietzsche's demotion from first in his class and the end of his status as a prefect. After graduation in September 1864, Nietzsche began studying theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn in the hope of becoming a minister. For a short time, he and Deussen became members of the Burschenschaft "Frankonia". After one semester (and to the anger of his mother), he stopped his theological studies and lost his faith. As early as his 1862 essay "Fate and History", Nietzsche had argued that historical research had discredited the central teachings of Christianity, but David Strauss's "Life of Jesus" also seems to have had a profound effect on the young man. In addition, Ludwig Feuerbach's "The Essence of Christianity" influenced young Nietzsche with its argument that people created God, and not the other way around. In June 1865, at the age of 20, Nietzsche wrote to his sister Elisabeth, who was deeply religious, a letter regarding his loss of faith. This letter contains the following statement: Hence the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire... Nietzsche subsequently concentrated on studying philology under Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, whom he followed to the University of Leipzig in 1865. There, he became close friends with his fellow student Erwin Rohde. Nietzsche's first philological publications appeared soon after. In 1865, Nietzsche thoroughly studied the works of Arthur Schopenhauer. He owed the awakening of his philosophical interest to reading Schopenhauer's "The World as Will and Representation" and later admitted that Schopenhauer was one of the few thinkers whom he respected, dedicating the essay "" in the "Untimely Meditations" to him. In 1866, he read Friedrich Albert Lange's "History of Materialism". Lange's descriptions of Kant's anti-materialistic philosophy, the rise of European Materialism, Europe's increased concern with science, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and the general rebellion against tradition and authority intrigued Nietzsche greatly. Nietzsche would ultimately argue the impossibility of an evolutionary explanation of the human aesthetic sense. In 1867, Nietzsche signed up for one year of voluntary service with the Prussian artillery division in Naumburg. He was regarded as one of the finest riders among his fellow recruits, and his officers predicted that he would soon reach the rank of captain. However, in March 1868, while jumping into the saddle of his horse, Nietzsche struck his chest against the pommel and tore two muscles in his left side, leaving him exhausted and unable to walk for months. Consequently, he turned his attention to his studies again, completing them in 1868. Nietzsche also met Richard Wagner for the first time later that year. Professor at Basel (1869–1878). In 1869, with Ritschl's support, Nietzsche received an offer to become a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He was only 24 years old and had neither completed his doctorate nor received a teaching certificate ("habilitation"). He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Leipzig University in March 1869, again with Ritschl's support. Despite his offer coming at a time when he was considering giving up philology for science, he accepted. To this day, Nietzsche is still among the youngest of the tenured Classics professors on record. Nietzsche's 1870 projected doctoral thesis, "Contribution toward the Study and the Critique of the Sources of Diogenes Laertius" ("Beiträge zur Quellenkunde und Kritik des Laertius Diogenes"), examined the origins of the ideas of Diogenes Laërtius. Though never submitted, it was later published as a ('congratulatory publication') in Basel. Before moving to Basel, Nietzsche renounced his Prussian citizenship: for the rest of his life he remained officially stateless. Nevertheless, Nietzsche served in the Prussian forces during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) as a medical orderly. In his short time in the military, he experienced much and witnessed the traumatic effects of battle. He also contracted diphtheria and dysentery. Walter Kaufmann speculates that he might also have contracted syphilis at a brothel along with his other infections at this time. On returning to Basel in 1870, Nietzsche observed the establishment of the German Empire and Otto von Bismarck's subsequent policies as an outsider and with a degree of skepticism regarding their genuineness. His inaugural lecture at the university was "". Nietzsche also met Franz Overbeck, a professor of theology who remained his friend throughout his life. Afrikan Spir, a little-known Russian philosopher responsible for the 1873 "Thought and Reality" and Nietzsche's colleague, the famed historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose lectures Nietzsche frequently attended, began to exercise significant influence on him. Nietzsche had already met Richard Wagner in Leipzig in 1868 and later Wagner's wife, Cosima. Nietzsche admired both greatly and during his time at Basel frequently visited Wagner's house in Tribschen in Lucerne. The Wagners brought Nietzsche into their most intimate circle—including Franz Liszt, of whom Nietzsche colloquially described: "Liszt or the art of running after women!" Nietzsche enjoyed the attention he gave to the beginning of the Bayreuth Festival. In 1870, he gave Cosima Wagner the manuscript of "The Genesis of the Tragic Idea" as a birthday gift. In 1872, Nietzsche published his first book, "The Birth of Tragedy". However, his colleagues within his field, including Ritschl, expressed little enthusiasm for the work in which Nietzsche eschewed the classical philologic method in favor of a more speculative approach. In his polemic "Philology of the Future", Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff damped the book's reception and increased its notoriety. In response, Rohde (then a professor in Kiel) and Wagner came to Nietzsche's defense. Nietzsche remarked freely about the isolation he felt within the philological community and attempted unsuccessfully to transfer to a position in philosophy at Basel. In 1873, Nietzsche began to accumulate notes that would be posthumously published as "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks". Between 1873 and 1876, he published four separate long essays: "David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer", "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life", "Schopenhauer as Educator", and "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth". These four later appeared in a collected edition under the title "Untimely Meditations". The essays shared the orientation of a cultural critique, challenging the developing German culture suggested by Schopenhauer and Wagner. During this time in the circle of the Wagners, he met Malwida von Meysenbug and Hans von Bülow. He also began a friendship with Paul Rée who, in 1876, influenced him into dismissing the pessimism in his early writings. However, he was deeply disappointed by the Bayreuth Festival of 1876, where the banality of the shows and baseness of the public repelled him. He was also alienated by Wagner's championing of "German culture", which Nietzsche felt a contradiction in terms as well as by Wagner's celebration of his fame among the German public. All this contributed to his subsequent decision to distance himself from Wagner. With the publication in 1878 of "Human, All Too Human" (a book of aphorisms ranging from metaphysics to morality to religion), a new style of Nietzsche's work became clear, highly influenced by Afrikan Spir's "Thought and Reality" and reacting against the pessimistic philosophy of Wagner and Schopenhauer. Nietzsche's friendship with Deussen and Rohde cooled as well. In 1879, after a significant decline in health, Nietzsche had to resign his position at Basel. Since his childhood, various disruptive illnesses had plagued him, including moments of shortsightedness that left him nearly blind, migraine headaches, and violent indigestion. The 1868 riding accident and diseases in 1870 may have aggravated these persistent conditions, which continued to affect him through his years at Basel, forcing him to take longer and longer holidays until regular work became impractical. Independent philosopher (1879–1888). Living off his pension from Basel and aid from friends, Nietzsche traveled frequently to find climates more conducive to his health and lived until 1889 as an independent author in different cities. He spent many summers in Sils Maria near St. Moritz in Switzerland. He spent his winters in the Italian cities of Genoa, Rapallo, and Turin and the French city of Nice. In 1881, when France occupied Tunisia, he planned to travel to Tunis to view Europe from the outside but later abandoned that idea, probably for health reasons. Nietzsche occasionally returned to Naumburg to visit his family, and, especially during this time, he and his sister had repeated periods of conflict and reconciliation. While in Genoa, Nietzsche's failing eyesight prompted him to explore the use of typewriters as a means of continuing to write. He is known to have tried using the Hansen Writing Ball, a contemporary typewriter device. In the end, a past student of his, Heinrich Köselitz or Peter Gast, became a private secretary to Nietzsche. In 1876, Gast transcribed the crabbed, nearly illegible handwriting of Nietzsche's first time with Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. He subsequently transcribed and proofread the galleys for almost all of Nietzsche's work. On at least one occasion, on 23 February 1880, the usually poor Gast received 200 marks from their mutual friend, Paul Rée. Gast was one of the very few friends Nietzsche allowed to criticize him. In responding most enthusiastically to "Also Sprach Zarathustra" ("'Thus Spoke Zarathustra"'), Gast did feel it necessary to point out that what were described as "superfluous" people were in fact quite necessary. He went on to list the number of people Epicurus, for example, had to rely on to supply his simple diet of goat cheese. To the end of his life, Gast and Overbeck remained consistently faithful friends. Malwida von Meysenbug remained like a motherly patron even outside the Wagner circle. Soon Nietzsche made contact with the music-critic Carl Fuchs. Nietzsche stood at the beginning of his most productive period. Beginning with "Human, All Too Human" in 1878, Nietzsche published one book or major section of a book each year until 1888, his last year of writing; that year, he completed five. In 1882, Nietzsche published the first part of "The Gay Science". That year he also met Lou Andreas-Salomé, through Malwida von Meysenbug and Paul Rée. Salomé's mother took her to Rome when Salomé was 21. At a literary salon in the city, Salomé became acquainted with Paul Rée. Rée proposed marriage to her, but she, instead, proposed that they should live and study together as "brother and sister", along with another man for company, where they would establish an academic commune. Rée accepted the idea and suggested that they be joined by his friend Nietzsche. The two met Nietzsche in Rome in April 1882, and Nietzsche is believed to have instantly fallen in love with Salomé, as Rée had done. Nietzsche asked Rée to propose marriage to Salomé, which she rejected. She had been interested in Nietzsche as a friend, but not as a husband. Nietzsche nonetheless was content to join together with Rée and Salomé touring through Switzerland and Italy together, planning their commune. The three traveled with Salomé's mother through Italy and considered where they would set up their "Winterplan" commune. They intended to set up their commune in an abandoned monastery, but no suitable location was found. On 13 May, in Lucerne, when Nietzsche was alone with Salomé, he earnestly proposed marriage to her again, which she rejected. He nonetheless was happy to continue with the plans for an academic commune. After discovering the situation, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth became determined to get Nietzsche away from the "immoral woman". Nietzsche and Salomé spent the summer together in Tautenburg in Thuringia, often with Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth as a chaperone. Salomé reports that he asked her to marry him on three separate occasions and that she refused, though the reliability of her reports of events is questionable. Arriving in Leipzig, (Germany) in October, Salomé and Rée separated from Nietzsche after a falling-out between Nietzsche and Salomé, in which Salomé believed that Nietzsche was desperately in love with her. While the three spent a number of weeks together in Leipzig in October 1882, the following month Rée and Salomé ditched Nietzsche, leaving for Stibbe (today Zdbowo in Poland) without any plans to meet again. Nietzsche soon fell into a period of mental anguish, although he continued to write to Rée, stating "We shall see one another from time to time, won't we?" In later recriminations, Nietzsche would blame on separate occasions the failure in his attempts to woo Salomé on Salomé, Rée, and on the intrigues of his sister (who had written letters to the families of Salomé and Rée to disrupt the plans for the commune). Nietzsche wrote of the affair in 1883, that he now felt "genuine hatred for my sister". Amidst renewed bouts of illness, living in near-isolation after a falling out with his mother and sister regarding Salomé, Nietzsche fled to Rapallo, where he wrote the first part of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" in only ten days. By 1882, Nietzsche was taking huge doses of opium, but he was still having trouble sleeping. In 1883, while staying in Nice, he was writing out his own prescriptions for the sedative chloral hydrate, signing them "Dr. Nietzsche". He turned away from the influence of Schopenhauer, and after he severed his social ties with Wagner, Nietzsche had few remaining friends. Now, with the new style of "Zarathustra", his work became even more alienating, and the market received it only to the degree required by politeness. Nietzsche recognized this and maintained his solitude, though he often complained. His books remained largely unsold. In 1885, he printed only 40 copies of the fourth part of "Zarathustra" and distributed a fraction of them among close friends, including Helene von Druskowitz. In 1883, he tried and failed to obtain a lecturing post at the University of Leipzig. According to a letter he wrote to Peter Gast, this was due to his "attitude towards Christianity and the concept of God". In 1886, Nietzsche broke with his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner, disgusted by his antisemitic opinions. Nietzsche saw his own writings as "completely buried and in this anti-Semitic dump" of Schmeitzner—associating the publisher with a movement that should be "utterly rejected with cold contempt by every sensible mind." He then printed "Beyond Good and Evil" at his own expense. He also acquired the publication rights for his earlier works and over the next year issued second editions of "The Birth of Tragedy", "Human, All Too Human", "Daybreak", and of "The Gay Science" with new prefaces placing the body of his work in a more coherent perspective. Thereafter, he saw his work as completed for a time and hoped that soon a readership would develop. In fact, interest in Nietzsche's thought did increase at this time, if rather slowly and hardly perceptibly to him. During these years Nietzsche met Meta von Salis, Carl Spitteler, and Gottfried Keller. In 1886, his sister Elisabeth married the antisemite Bernhard Förster and travelled to Paraguay to found Nueva Germania, a "Germanic" colony Through correspondence, Nietzsche's relationship with Elisabeth continued through cycles of conflict and reconciliation, but they met again only after his collapse. He continued to have frequent and painful attacks of illness, which made prolonged work impossible. In 1887, Nietzsche wrote the polemic "On the Genealogy of Morality". During the same year, he encountered the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, to whom he felt an immediate kinship. He also exchanged letters with Hippolyte Taine and Georg Brandes. Brandes, who had started to teach the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard in the 1870s, wrote to Nietzsche asking him to read Kierkegaard, to which Nietzsche replied that he would come to Copenhagen and read Kierkegaard with him. However, before fulfilling this promise, Nietzsche slipped too far into illness. At the beginning of 1888, Brandes delivered in Copenhagen one of the first lectures on Nietzsche's philosophy. Although Nietzsche had previously announced at the end of "On the Genealogy of Morality" a new work with the title "The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values", he seems to have abandoned this idea and, instead, used some of the draft passages to compose "Twilight of the Idols" and "The Antichrist" in 1888. His health improved and he spent the summer in high spirits. In the fall of 1888, his writings and letters began to reveal a higher estimation of his own status and "fate". He overestimated the increasing response to his writings, however, especially to the recent polemic, "The Case of Wagner". On his 44th birthday, after completing "Twilight of the Idols" and "The Antichrist", he decided to write the autobiography "Ecce Homo". In its preface—which suggests Nietzsche was well aware of the interpretive difficulties his work would generate—he declares, "Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else." In December, Nietzsche began a correspondence with August Strindberg and thought that, short of an international breakthrough, he would attempt to buy back his older writings from the publisher and have them translated into other European languages. Moreover, he planned the publication of the compilation "Nietzsche contra Wagner" and of the poems that made up his collection "Dionysian-Dithyrambs". Mental illness and death (1889–1900). On 3 January 1889, Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown. Two policemen approached him after he caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin. What happened remains unknown, but an often-repeated tale from shortly after his death states that Nietzsche witnessed the flogging of a horse at the other end of the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms around its neck to protect it, then collapsed to the ground. In the following few days, Nietzsche sent short writings—known as the "Wahnzettel" (literally "Delusion notes")—to a number of friends including Cosima Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt. Most of them were signed "Dionysus", though some were also signed "der Gekreuzigte" meaning "the crucified one". To his former colleague Burckhardt, Nietzsche wrote:I have had Caiaphas put in fetters. Also, last year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner. Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites abolished.Additionally, he commanded the German emperor to go to Rome to be shot and summoned the European powers to take military action against Germany, that the pope should be put in jail and that he, Nietzsche, created the world and was in the process of having all anti-Semites shot dead. On 6 January 1889, Burckhardt showed the letter he had received from Nietzsche to Overbeck. The following day, Overbeck received a similar letter and decided that Nietzsche's friends had to bring him back to Basel. Overbeck traveled to Turin and brought Nietzsche to a psychiatric clinic in Basel. By that time Nietzsche appeared fully in the grip of a serious mental illness, and his mother Franziska decided to transfer him to a clinic in Jena under the direction of Otto Binswanger. In January 1889, they proceeded with the planned release of "Twilight of the Idols", by that time already printed and bound. From November 1889 to February 1890, the art historian Julius Langbehn attempted to cure Nietzsche, claiming that the methods of the medical doctors were ineffective in treating Nietzsche's condition. Langbehn assumed progressively greater control of Nietzsche until his secretiveness discredited him. In March 1890, Franziska removed Nietzsche from the clinic and, in May 1890, brought him to her home in Naumburg. During this process Overbeck and Gast contemplated what to do with Nietzsche's unpublished works. In February, they ordered a fifty-copy private edition of "Nietzsche contra Wagner", but the publisher C. G. Naumann secretly printed one hundred. Overbeck and Gast decided to withhold publishing "The Antichrist" and "Ecce Homo" because of their more radical content. Nietzsche's reception and recognition enjoyed their first surge. In 1893, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth returned from Nueva Germania in Paraguay following the suicide of her husband. She studied Nietzsche's works and, piece by piece, took control of their publication. Overbeck was dismissed and Gast finally co-operated. After the death of Franziska in 1897, Nietzsche lived in Weimar, where Elisabeth cared for him and allowed visitors, including Rudolf Steiner (who in 1895 had written "Friedrich Nietzsche: a Fighter Against His Time," one of the first books praising Nietzsche), to meet her uncommunicative brother. Elisabeth employed Steiner as a tutor to help her to understand her brother's philosophy. Steiner abandoned the attempt after only a few months, declaring that it was impossible to teach her anything about philosophy. Nietzsche's mental illness was originally diagnosed as tertiary syphilis, in accordance with a prevailing medical paradigm of the time. Although most commentators regard his breakdown as unrelated to his philosophy, Georges Bataille dropped dark hints ("'Man incarnate' must also go mad") and René Girard's postmortem psychoanalysis posits a worshipful rivalry with Richard Wagner. Nietzsche had previously written, "All superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad." (Daybreak, 14) The diagnosis of syphilis has since been challenged and a diagnosis of "manic-depressive illness with periodic psychosis followed by vascular dementia" was put forward by Cybulska prior to Schain's study. Leonard Sax suggested the slow growth of a right-sided retro-orbital meningioma as an explanation of Nietzsche's dementia; Orth and Trimble postulated frontotemporal dementia while other researchers have proposed a hereditary stroke disorder called CADASIL. Poisoning by mercury, a treatment for syphilis at the time of Nietzsche's death, has also been suggested. In 1898 and 1899, Nietzsche suffered at least two strokes. They partially paralyzed him, leaving him unable to speak or walk. He likely suffered from clinical hemiparesis/hemiplegia on the left side of his body by 1899. After contracting pneumonia in mid-August 1900, he had another stroke during the night of 24–25 August and died at about noon on 25 August. Elisabeth had him buried beside his father at the church in Röcken Lützen. His friend and secretary Gast gave his funeral oration, proclaiming: "Holy be your name to all future generations!" Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche compiled "The Will to Power" from Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks and published it posthumously. Because his sister arranged the book based on her own conflation of several of Nietzsche's early outlines and took liberties with the material, the scholarly consensus has been that it does not reflect Nietzsche's intent. (For example, Elisabeth removed aphorism 35 of "The Antichrist", where Nietzsche rewrote a passage of the Bible.) Indeed, Mazzino Montinari, the editor of Nietzsche's "Nachlass", called it a forgery. Yet, the endeavour to rescue Nietzsche’s reputation by discrediting "The Will to Power" often leads to a scepticism about the value of his late notes, even of the whole "Nachlass". People often forget the simple fact that the "Nachlass" and "The Will to Power" are two different things. Citizenship, nationality and ethnicity. General commentators and Nietzsche scholars, whether emphasizing his cultural background or his language, overwhelmingly label Nietzsche as a "German philosopher." Others do not assign him a national category. Germany had not yet been unified into a nation-state, but Nietzsche was born a citizen of Prussia, which was then part of the German Confederation. His birthplace, Röcken, is in the modern German state of Saxony-Anhalt. When he accepted his post at Basel, Nietzsche applied for annulment of his Prussian citizenship. The official revocation of his citizenship came in a document dated 17 April 1869, and for the rest of his life he remained officially stateless. At least toward the end of his life, Nietzsche believed his ancestors were Polish. He wore a signet ring bearing the Radwan coat of arms, traceable back to Polish nobility of medieval times and the surname "Nicki" of the Polish noble (szlachta) family bearing that coat of arms. Gotard Nietzsche, a member of the Nicki family, left Poland for Prussia. His descendants later settled in the Electorate of Saxony circa the year 1700. Nietzsche wrote in 1888, "My ancestors were Polish noblemen (Nietzky); the type seems to have been well preserved despite three generations of German mothers." At one point, Nietzsche becomes even more adamant about his Polish identity. "I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, certainly not German blood." On yet another occasion, Nietzsche stated, "Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins... I am proud of my Polish descent." Nietzsche believed his name might have been Germanized, in one letter claiming, "I was taught to ascribe the origin of my blood and name to Polish noblemen who were called Niëtzky and left their home and nobleness about a hundred years ago, finally yielding to unbearable suppression: they were Protestants." Most scholars dispute Nietzsche's account of his family's origins. Hans von Müller debunked the genealogy put forward by Nietzsche's sister in favor of Polish noble heritage. Max Oehler, Nietzsche's cousin and curator of the Nietzsche Archive at Weimar, argued that all of Nietzsche's ancestors bore German names, including the wives' families. Oehler claims that Nietzsche came from a long line of German Lutheran clergymen on both sides of his family, and modern scholars regard the claim of Nietzsche's Polish ancestry as "pure invention." Colli and Montinari, the editors of Nietzsche's assembled letters, gloss Nietzsche's claims as a "mistaken belief" and "without foundation." The name "Nietzsche" itself is not a Polish name, but an exceptionally common one throughout central Germany, in this and cognate forms (such as "Nitsche" and "Nitzke"). The name derives from the forename "Nikolaus," abbreviated to "Nick"; assimilated with the Slavic "Nitz"; it first became "Nitsche" and then "Nietzsche". It is not known why Nietzsche wanted to be thought of as Polish nobility. According to biographer R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche's propagation of the Polish ancestry myth may have been part of his "campaign against Germany." Relationships and sexuality. Nietzsche never married. He proposed to Lou Salomé three times and each time was rejected. One theory blames Salomé's view on sexuality as one of the reasons for her alienation from Nietzsche. As articulated in her 1898 novella "Fenitschka," Salomé viewed the idea of sexual intercourse as prohibitive and marriage as a violation, with some suggesting that they indicated sexual repression and neurosis. Reflecting on unrequited love, Nietzsche considered that "indispensable ... to the lover is his unrequited love, which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference." Deussen cited the episode of Cologne's brothel in February 1865 as instrumental to understand the philosopher's way of thinking, mostly about women. Nietzsche was surreptitiously accompanied to a "call house" from which he clumsily escaped upon seeing "a half dozen apparitions dressed in sequins and veils." According to Deussen, Nietzsche "never decided to remain unmarried all his life. For him, women had to sacrifice themselves to the care and benefit of men." Nietzsche scholar has attempted to explain Nietzsche's life history and philosophy by claiming that he was homosexual. Köhler argues that Nietzsche's syphilis, which is "...usually considered to be the product of his encounter with a prostitute in a brothel in Cologne or Leipzig, is equally likely. Some maintain that Nietzsche contracted it in a male brothel in Genoa." The acquisition of the infection from a homosexual brothel was confirmed by Sigmund Freud, who cited Otto Binswanger as his source. Köhler also suggests Nietzsche may have had a romantic relationship, as well as a friendship, with Paul Rée. There is the claim that Nietzsche's homosexuality was widely known in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, with Nietzsche's friend Paul Deussen claiming that "he was a man who had never touched a woman." Köhler's views have not found wide acceptance among Nietzsche scholars and commentators. Allan Megill argues that, while Köhler's claim that Nietzsche was conflicted about his homosexual desire cannot simply be dismissed, "the evidence is very weak," and Köhler may be projecting twentieth-century understandings of sexuality on nineteenth-century notions of friendship. It is also known that Nietzsche frequented heterosexual brothels. Nigel Rodgers and Mel Thompson have argued that continuous sickness and headaches hindered Nietzsche from engaging much with women. Yet they offer other examples in which Nietzsche expressed his affections to women, including Wagner's wife Cosima Wagner. Other scholars have argued that Köhler's sexuality-based interpretation is not helpful in understanding Nietzsche's philosophy. However, there are also those who stress that, if Nietzsche preferred men—with this preference constituting his psycho-sexual make-up—but could not admit his desires to himself, it meant he acted in conflict with his philosophy. Composer. Nietzsche composed several works for voice, piano, and violin beginning in 1858 at the Schulpforta in Naumburg when he started to work on musical compositions. Richard Wagner was dismissive of Nietzsche's music, allegedly mocking a birthday gift of a piano composition sent by Nietzsche in 1871 to his wife Cosima. German conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow also described another of Nietzsche's pieces as "the most undelightful and the most antimusical draft on musical paper that I have faced in a long time." In a letter of 1887, Nietzsche claimed, "There has never been a philosopher who has been in essence a musician to such an extent as I am," although he also admitted that he "might be a thoroughly unsuccessful musician." Philosophy. Because of Nietzsche's evocative style and provocative ideas, his philosophy generates passionate reactions. His works remain controversial, due to varying interpretations and misinterpretations. In Western philosophy, Nietzsche's writings have been described as a case of free revolutionary thought, that is, revolutionary in its structure and problems, although not tied to any revolutionary project. His writings have also been described as a revolutionary project in which his philosophy serves as the foundation of a European cultural rebirth. Apollonian and Dionysian. The "Apollonian and Dionysian" is a two-fold philosophical concept, based on features of ancient Greek mythology: Apollo and Dionysus. Even though the concept is famously related to "The Birth of Tragedy," the poet Hölderlin had already spoken of it, and Winckelmann had talked of Bacchus. Nietzsche found in classical Athenian tragedy an art form that transcended the pessimism found in the so-called wisdom of Silenus. The Greek spectators, by looking into the abyss of human suffering depicted by characters on stage, passionately and joyously affirmed life, finding it worth living. The main theme in "The Birth of Tragedy" is that the fusion of Dionysian and Apollonian "Kunsttriebe" ("artistic impulses") forms dramatic arts or tragedies. He argued that this fusion has not been achieved since the ancient Greek tragedians. Apollo represents harmony, progress, clarity, logic and the principle of individuation, whereas Dionysus represents disorder, intoxication, emotion, ecstasy and unity (hence the omission of the principle of individuation). Nietzsche used these two forces because, for him, the world of mind and order on one side, and passion and chaos on the other, formed principles that were fundamental to the Greek culture: the Apollonian a dreaming state, full of illusions; and Dionysian a state of intoxication, representing the liberations of instinct and dissolution of boundaries. In this mold, a man appears as the satyr. He is the horror of the annihilation of the principle of individuality and at the same time someone who delights in its destruction. Both of these principles are meant to represent cognitive states that appear through art as the power of nature in man. Apollonian and Dionysian juxtapositions appear in the interplay of tragedy: the tragic hero of the drama, the main protagonist, struggles to make (Apollonian) order of his unjust and chaotic (Dionysian) fate, though he dies unfulfilled. Elaborating on the conception of Hamlet as an intellectual who cannot make up his mind, and is a living antithesis to the man of action, Nietzsche argues that a Dionysian figure possesses the knowledge that his actions cannot change the eternal balance of things, and it disgusts him enough not to act at all. Hamlet falls under this category—he glimpsed the supernatural reality through the Ghost, he has gained true knowledge and knows that no action of his has the power to change this. For the audience of such drama, this tragedy allows them to sense what Nietzsche called the "Primordial Unity," which revives Dionysian nature. He describes primordial unity as the increase of strength, the experience of fullness and plenitude bestowed by frenzy. Frenzy acts as intoxication and is crucial for the physiological condition that enables the creation of any art. Stimulated by this state, a person's artistic will is enhanced: In this state one enriches everything out of one's own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever wills is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power—until they are reflections of his perfection. This having to transform into perfection is—art. Nietzsche is adamant that the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles represent the apex of artistic creation, the true realization of tragedy; it is with Euripides, that tragedy begins its "Untergang" (literally 'going under' or 'downward-way;' meaning decline, deterioration, downfall, death, etc.). Nietzsche objects to Euripides' use of Socratic rationalism and morality in his tragedies, claiming that the infusion of ethics and reason robs tragedy of its foundation, namely the fragile balance of the Dionysian and Apollonian. Socrates emphasized reason to such a degree that he diffused the value of myth and suffering to human knowledge. Plato continued along this path in his dialogues, and the modern world eventually inherited reason at the expense of artistic impulses found in the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy. This leads to his conclusion that European culture, from the time of Socrates, had always been only Apollonian, thus decadent and unhealthy. He notes that without the Apollonian, the Dionysian lacks the form and structure to make a coherent piece of art, and without the Dionysian, the Apollonian lacks the necessary vitality and passion. Only the fertile interplay of these two forces brought together as an art represented the best of Greek tragedy. An example of the impact of this idea can be seen in the book "Patterns of Culture," where anthropologist Ruth Benedict acknowledges Nietzschean opposites of "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" as the stimulus for her thoughts about Native American cultures. Carl Jung has written extensively on the dichotomy in "Psychological Types". Michel Foucault commented that his own book "Madness and Civilization" should be read "under the sun of the great Nietzschean inquiry". Here Foucault referenced Nietzsche's description of the birth and death of tragedy and his explanation that the subsequent tragedy of the Western world was the refusal of the tragic and, with that, refusal of the sacred. Painter Mark Rothko was influenced by Nietzsche's view of tragedy presented in "The Birth of Tragedy." Perspectivism. Nietzsche claimed the death of God would eventually lead to the loss of any universal perspective on things and any coherent sense of objective truth. Nietzsche rejected the idea of objective reality, arguing that knowledge is contingent and conditional, relative to various fluid perspectives or interests. This leads to constant reassessment of rules (i.e., those of philosophy, the scientific method, etc.) according to the circumstances of individual perspectives. This view has acquired the name "perspectivism." In "Also Sprach Zarathustra," Nietzsche proclaimed that a table of values hangs above every great person. He pointed out that what is common among different peoples is the act of esteeming, of creating values, even if the values are different from one person to the next. Nietzsche asserted that what made people great was not the content of their beliefs, but the act of valuing. Thus the values a community strives to articulate are not as important as the collective will to see those values come to pass. The willingness is more essential than the merit of the goal itself, according to Nietzsche. "A thousand goals have there been so far", says Zarathustra, "for there are a thousand peoples. Only the yoke for the thousand necks is still lacking: the one goal is lacking. Humanity still has no goal." Hence, the title of the aphorism, "On The Thousand And One Goal". The idea that one value-system is no more worthy than the next, although it may not be directly ascribed to Nietzsche, has become a common premise in modern social science. Max Weber and Martin Heidegger absorbed it and made it their own. It shaped their philosophical and cultural endeavors, as well as their political understanding. Weber, for example, relied on Nietzsche's perspectivism by maintaining that objectivity is still possible—but only after a particular perspective, value, or end has been established. Among his critique of traditional philosophy of Kant, Descartes, and Plato in "Beyond Good and Evil," Nietzsche attacked the "thing in itself" and "cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am") as unfalsifiable beliefs based on naive acceptance of previous notions and fallacies. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre put Nietzsche in a high place in the history of philosophy. While criticizing nihilism and Nietzsche together as a sign of general decay, he still commended him for recognizing psychological motives behind Kant and Hume's moral philosophy: For it was Nietzsche's historic achievement to understand more clearly than any other philosopher ... not only that what purported to be appeals of objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will, but also the nature of the problems that this posed for philosophy. Slave revolt in morals. In "Beyond Good and Evil" and "On the Genealogy of Morality," Nietzsche's genealogical account of the development of modern moral systems occupies a central place. For Nietzsche, a fundamental shift took place during human history from thinking in terms of "good and bad" toward "good and evil." The initial form of morality was set by a warrior aristocracy and other ruling castes of ancient civilizations. Aristocratic values of good and bad coincided with and reflected their relationship to lower castes such as slaves. Nietzsche presented this "master morality" as the original system of morality—perhaps best associated with Homeric Greece. To be "good" was to be happy and to have the things related to happiness: wealth, strength, health, power, etc. To be "bad" was to be like the slaves over whom the aristocracy ruled: poor, weak, sick, pathetic—objects of pity or disgust rather than hatred. "Slave morality" developed as a reaction to master morality. Value emerges from the contrast between good and evil: good being associated with other-worldliness, charity, piety, restraint, meekness, and submission; while evil is worldly, cruel, selfish, wealthy, and aggressive. Nietzsche saw slave morality as pessimistic and fearful, its values emerging to improve the self-perception of slaves. He associated slave morality with the Jewish and Christian traditions, as it is born out of the "ressentiment" of slaves. Nietzsche argued that the idea of equality allowed slaves to overcome their own conditions without despising themselves. By denying the inherent inequality of people—in success, strength, beauty, and intelligence—slaves acquired a method of escape, namely by generating new values on the basis of rejecting master morality, which frustrated them. It was used to overcome the slave's sense of inferiority before their (better-off) masters. It does so by making out slave weakness, for example, to be a matter of choice, by relabeling it as "meekness". The "good man" of master morality is precisely the "evil man" of slave morality, while the "bad man" is recast as the "good man". Nietzsche saw slave morality as a source of the nihilism that has overtaken Europe. Modern Europe and Christianity exist in a hypocritical state due to a tension between master and slave morality, both contradictory values determining, to varying degrees, the values of most Europeans (who are "motley"). Nietzsche called for exceptional people not to be ashamed in the face of a supposed morality-for-all, which he deems to be harmful to the flourishing of exceptional people. He cautioned, however, that morality, per se, is not bad; it is good for the masses and should be left to them. Exceptional people, on the other hand, should follow their own "inner law". A favorite motto of Nietzsche, taken from Pindar, reads: "Become what you are." A long-standing assumption about Nietzsche is that he preferred master over slave morality. However, eminent Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann rejected this interpretation, writing that Nietzsche's analyses of these two types of morality were used only in a descriptive and historic sense; they were not meant for any kind of acceptance or glorification. On the other hand, Nietzsche called master morality "a higher order of values, the noble ones, those that say Yes to life, those that guarantee the future." Just as "there is an order of rank between man and man", there is also an order of rank "between morality and morality." Nietzsche waged a philosophic war against the slave morality of Christianity in his "revaluation of all values" to bring about the victory of a new master morality that he called the "philosophy of the future" ("Beyond Good and Evil" is subtitled "Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future"). In "Daybreak," Nietzsche began his "Campaign against Morality". He called himself an "immoralist" and harshly criticized the prominent moral philosophies of his day: Christianity, Kantianism, and utilitarianism. Nietzsche's concept "God is dead" applies to the doctrines of Christendom, though not to all other faiths: he claimed that Buddhism is a successful religion that he complimented for fostering critical thought. Still, Nietzsche saw his philosophy as a counter-movement to nihilism through appreciation of art: Nietzsche claimed that the Christian faith as practiced was not a proper representation of Jesus' teachings, as it forced people merely to believe in the way of Jesus but not to act as Jesus did; in particular, his example of refusing to judge people, something that Christians constantly did. He condemned institutionalized Christianity for emphasizing a morality of pity ("Mitleid"), which assumes an inherent illness in society: In "Ecce Homo" Nietzsche called the establishment of moral systems based on a dichotomy of good and evil a "calamitous error", and wished to initiate a re-evaluation of the values of the Christian world. He indicated his desire to bring about a new, more naturalistic source of value in the vital impulses of life itself. While Nietzsche attacked the principles of Judaism, he was not antisemitic: in his work "On the Genealogy of Morality," he explicitly condemned antisemitism and pointed out that his attack on Judaism was not an attack on contemporary Jewish people but specifically an attack upon the ancient Jewish priesthood who he claimed antisemitic Christians paradoxically based their views upon. An Israeli historian who performed a statistical analysis of everything Nietzsche wrote about Jews claims that cross-references and context make clear that 85% of the negative comments are attacks on Christian doctrine or, sarcastically, on Richard Wagner. Nietzsche felt that modern antisemitism was "despicable" and contrary to European ideals. Its cause, in his opinion, was the growth in European nationalism and the endemic "jealousy and hatred" of Jewish success. He wrote that Jews should be thanked for helping uphold a respect for the philosophies of ancient Greece, and for giving rise to "the noblest human being (Christ), the purest philosopher (Baruch Spinoza), the mightiest book, and the most effective moral code in the world." Death of God and nihilism. The statement "God is dead," occurring in several of Nietzsche's works (notably in "The Gay Science"), has become one of his best-known remarks. On the basis of it, many commentators regard Nietzsche as an atheist; others (such as Kaufmann) suggest that this statement reflects a more subtle understanding of divinity. Scientific developments and the increasing secularization of Europe had effectively 'killed' the Abrahamic God, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than a thousand years. The death of God may lead beyond bare perspectivism to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing has any inherent importance and that life lacks purpose. Nietzsche believed that Christian moral doctrine provides people with intrinsic value, belief in God (which justifies the evil in the world), and a basis for objective knowledge. In constructing a world where objective knowledge is possible, Christianity is an antidote to a primal form of nihilism—the despair of meaninglessness. As Heidegger put the problem, "If God as the supra sensory ground and goal of all reality is dead if the supra sensory world of the ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself." One such reaction to the loss of meaning is what Nietzsche called "passive nihilism," which he recognized in the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer's doctrine—which Nietzsche also referred to as Western Buddhism—advocates separating oneself from will and desires to reduce suffering. Nietzsche characterized this ascetic attitude as a "will to nothingness". Life turns away from itself as there is nothing of value to be found in the world. This moving away of all value in the world is characteristic of the nihilist, although, in this, the nihilist appears to be inconsistent; this "will to nothingness" is still a (disavowed) form of willing. Nietzsche approached the problem of nihilism as a deeply personal one, stating that this problem of the modern world had "become conscious" in him. Furthermore, he emphasized the danger of nihilism and the possibilities it offers, as seen in his statement that "I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes a master of this crisis, is a question of his strength!" According to Nietzsche, it is only when nihilism is "overcome" that a culture can have a true foundation on which to thrive. He wished to hasten its coming only so that he could also hasten its ultimate departure. Heidegger interpreted the death of God with what he explained as the death of metaphysics. He concluded that metaphysics has reached its potential and that the ultimate fate and downfall of metaphysics was proclaimed with the statement "God is dead." Will to power. A basic element in Nietzsche's philosophical outlook is the "will to power" ("der Wille zur Macht"), which he maintained provides a basis for understanding human behavior—more so than competing explanations, such as the ones based on pressure for adaptation or survival. As such, according to Nietzsche, the drive for conservation appears as the major motivator of human or animal behavior only in exceptions, as the general condition of life is not one of a 'struggle for existence.' More often than not, self-conservation is a consequence of a creature's will to exert its strength on the outside world. In presenting his theory of human behavior, Nietzsche also addressed and attacked concepts from philosophies then popularly embraced, such as Schopenhauer's notion of an aimless will or that of utilitarianism. Utilitarians claim that what moves people is the desire to be happy and accumulate pleasure in their lives. But such a conception of happiness Nietzsche rejected as something limited to, and characteristic of, the bourgeois lifestyle of the English society, and instead put forth the idea that happiness is not an aim "per se". It is a consequence of overcoming hurdles to one's actions and the fulfillment of the will. Related to his theory of the will to power is his speculation, which he did not deem final, regarding the reality of the physical world, including inorganic matter—that, like man's affections and impulses, the material world is also set by the dynamics of a form of the will to power. At the core of his theory is a rejection of atomism—the idea that matter is composed of stable, indivisible units (atoms). Instead, he seemed to have accepted the conclusions of Ruđer Bošković, who explained the qualities of matter as a result of an interplay of forces. One study of Nietzsche defines his fully developed concept of the will to power as "the element from which derive both the quantitative difference of related forces and the quality that devolves into each force in this relation" revealing the will to power as "the principle of the synthesis of forces." Of such forces Nietzsche said they could perhaps be viewed as a primitive form of the will. Likewise, he rejected the view that the movement of bodies is ruled by inexorable laws of nature, positing instead that movement was governed by the power relations between bodies and forces. Other scholars disagree that Nietzsche considered the material world to be a form of the will to power: Nietzsche thoroughly criticized metaphysics, and by including the will to power in the material world, he would simply be setting up a new metaphysics. Other than Aphorism 36 in "Beyond Good and Evil," where he raised a question regarding will to power as being in the material world, they argue, it was only in his notes (unpublished by himself), where he wrote about a metaphysical will to power. And they also claim that Nietzsche directed his landlord to burn those notes in 1888 when he left Sils Maria. According to these scholars, the 'burning' story supports their thesis that, at the end of his lucid life, Nietzsche rejected his project on the will to power. However, a recent study (Huang 2019) shows that although it is true that in 1888 Nietzsche wanted some of his notes burned, the 'burning' story indicates little about his project on the will to power, not only because only 11 'aphorisms' saved from the flames were ultimately incorporated into "The Will to Power" (this book contains 1067 'aphorisms'), but also because these abandoned notes mainly focus on topics such as the critique of morality while touching upon the 'feeling of power' only once. Eternal return. "Eternal return" (also known as "eternal recurrence") is a hypothetical concept that posits that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, for an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. It is a purely physical concept, involving no supernatural reincarnation, but the return of beings in the same bodies. Nietzsche first proposed the idea of eternal return in a parable in Section 341 of "The Gay Science", and also in the chapter "Of the Vision and the Riddle" in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", among other places. Nietzsche considered it as potentially "horrifying and paralyzing", and said that its burden is the "heaviest weight" imaginable (" das schwerste Gewicht"). The wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life, a reaction to Schopenhauer's praise of denying the will‐to‐live. To comprehend eternal recurrence, and to not only come to peace with it but to embrace it, requires "amor fati", "love of fate". As Heidegger pointed out in his lectures on Nietzsche, Nietzsche's first mention of eternal recurrence presents this concept as a hypothetical "question" rather than stating it as fact. According to Heidegger, it is the burden imposed by the "question" of eternal recurrence—whether it could possibly be true—that is so significant in modern thought: "The way Nietzsche here patterns the first communication of the thought of the 'greatest burden' [of eternal recurrence] makes it clear that this 'thought of thoughts' is at the same time 'the most burdensome thought.'" Nietzsche suggests that the universe is recurring over infinite time and space and that different versions of events that have occurred in the past may take place again, hence "all configurations that have previously existed on this earth must yet meet". With each repeat of events is the hope that some knowledge or awareness is gained to better the individual, hence "And thus it will happen one day that a man will be born again, just like me and a woman will be born, just like Mary—only that it is hoped to be that the head of this man may contain a little less foolishness..." Alexander Nehamas writes in "Nietzsche: Life as Literature" of three ways of seeing the eternal recurrence: Nehamas concluded that, if individuals constitute themselves through their actions, they can only maintain themselves in their current state by living in a recurrence of past actions (Nehamas, 153). Nietzsche's thought is the negation of the idea of a history of salvation. Übermensch. Another concept important to understanding Nietzsche is the "Übermensch" (Overman). Writing about nihilism in "Also Sprach Zarathustra", Nietzsche introduced a value-creating Übermensch, not as a project, but as an anti-project, the absence of any project. According to Laurence Lampert, "the death of God must be followed by a long twilight of piety and nihilism (II. 19; III. 8). Zarathustra's gift of the overman is given to mankind not aware of the problem to which the overman is the solution." Zarathustra presents the overman as the creator of new values, and he appears as a solution to the problem of the death of God and nihilism. The overman does not follow the morality of common people since that favors mediocrity but rises above the notion of good and evil and above the "herd". In this way Zarathustra proclaims his ultimate goal as the journey towards the state of overman. He wants a kind of spiritual evolution of self-awareness and overcoming of traditional views on morality and justice that stem from the superstition beliefs still deeply rooted or related to the notion of God and Christianity. From "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (Prologue, §§ 3–4): Zarathustra contrasts the overman with the last man of egalitarian modernity (the most obvious example being democracy), an alternative goal humanity might set for itself. The last man is possible only by mankind's having bred an apathetic creature who has no great passion or commitment, who is unable to dream, who merely earns his living and keeps warm. This concept appears only in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", and is presented as a condition that would render the creation of the overman impossible. Some have suggested that the eternal return is related to the overman, since willing the eternal return of the same is a necessary step if the overman is to create new values untainted by the spirit of gravity or asceticism. Values involve a rank-ordering of things, and so are inseparable from approval and disapproval, yet it was dissatisfaction that prompted men to seek refuge in other-worldliness and embrace other-worldly values. It could seem that the overman, in being devoted to any values at all, would necessarily fail to create values that did not share some bit of asceticism. Willing the eternal recurrence is presented as accepting the existence of the low while still recognizing it as the low, and thus as overcoming the spirit of gravity or asceticism. One must have the strength of the overman to will the eternal recurrence. Only the overman will have the strength to fully accept all of his past life, including his failures and misdeeds, and to truly will their eternal return. This action nearly kills Zarathustra, for example, and most human beings cannot avoid other-worldliness because they really are sick, not because of any choice they made. The Nazis tried to incorporate the concept into their ideology. After his death, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche became the curator and editor of her brother's manuscripts. She reworked Nietzsche's unpublished writings to fit her own German nationalist ideology while often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Nietzsche's work became associated with fascism and Nazism; 20th-century scholars contested this interpretation of his work and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available. Although Nietzsche has famously been misrepresented as a predecessor to Nazism, he criticized anti-Semitism, pan-Germanism and, to a lesser extent, nationalism. Thus, he broke with his editor in 1886 because of his opposition to his editor's anti-Semitic stances, and his rupture with Richard Wagner, expressed in "The Case of Wagner" and "Nietzsche contra Wagner," both of which he wrote in 1888, had much to do with Wagner's endorsement of pan-Germanism and anti-Semitism—and also of his rallying to Christianity. In a 29 March 1887 letter to Theodor Fritsch, Nietzsche mocked anti-Semites, Fritsch, Eugen Dühring, Wagner, Ebrard, Wahrmund, and the leading advocate of pan-Germanism, Paul de Lagarde, who would become, along with Wagner and Houston Chamberlain, the main official influences of Nazism. This 1887 letter to Fritsch ended by: "And finally, how do you think I feel when the name Zarathustra is mouthed by anti-Semites?" Critique of mass culture. Friedrich Nietzsche held a pessimistic view of modern society and culture. He believed the press and mass culture led to conformity, brought about mediocrity, and the lack of intellectual progress was leading to the decline of the human species. In his opinion, some people would be able to become superior individuals through the use of will power. By rising above mass culture, those persons would produce higher, brighter, and healthier human beings. Reading and influence. A trained philologist, Nietzsche had a thorough knowledge of Greek philosophy. He read Kant, Plato, Mill, Schopenhauer and Spir, who became the main opponents in his philosophy, and later engaged, via the work of Kuno Fischer in particular, with the thought of Baruch Spinoza, whom he saw as his "precursor" in many respects but as a personification of the "ascetic ideal" in others. However, Nietzsche referred to Kant as a "moral fanatic", Plato as "boring", Mill as a "blockhead", and of Spinoza, he asked: "How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray?" He likewise expressed contempt for British author George Eliot. Nietzsche's philosophy, while innovative and revolutionary, was indebted to many predecessors. While at Basel, Nietzsche lectured on pre-Platonic philosophers for several years, and the text of this lecture series has been characterized as a "lost link" in the development of his thought. "In it, concepts such as the will to power, the eternal return of the same, the overman, gay science, self-overcoming and so on receive rough, unnamed formulations and are linked to specific pre-Platonic, especially Heraclitus, who emerges as a pre-Platonic Nietzsche." The pre-Socratic thinker Heraclitus was known for rejecting the concept of being as a constant and eternal principle of the universe and embracing "flux" and incessant change. His symbolism of the world as "child play" marked by amoral spontaneity and lack of definite rules was appreciated by Nietzsche. Due to his Heraclitean sympathies, Nietzsche was also a vociferous critic of Parmenides, who, in contrast to Heraclitus, viewed the world as a single, unchanging Being. In his "Egotism in German Philosophy", Santayana claimed that Nietzsche's whole philosophy was a reaction to Schopenhauer. Santayana wrote that Nietzsche's work was "an emendation of that of Schopenhauer. The will to live would become the will to dominate; pessimism founded on reflection would become optimism founded on courage; the suspense of the will in contemplation would yield to a more biological account of intelligence and taste; finally in the place of pity and asceticism (Schopenhauer's two principles of morals) Nietzsche would set up the duty of asserting the will at all costs and being cruelly but beautifully strong. These points of difference from Schopenhauer cover the whole philosophy of Nietzsche." Nietzsche expressed admiration for 17th-century French moralists such as La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Vauvenargues, as well as for Stendhal. The organicism of Paul Bourget influenced Nietzsche, as did that of Rudolf Virchow and Alfred Espinas. In 1867 Nietzsche wrote in a letter that he was trying to improve his German style of writing with the help of Lessing, Lichtenberg and Schopenhauer. It was probably Lichtenberg (along with Paul Rée) whose aphoristic style of writing contributed to Nietzsche's own use of aphorism. Nietzsche early learned of Darwinism through Friedrich Albert Lange. The essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson had a profound influence on Nietzsche, who "loved Emerson from first to last", wrote "Never have I felt so much at home in a book", and called him "[the] author who has been richest in ideas in this century so far". Hippolyte Taine influenced Nietzsche's view on Rousseau and Napoleon. Notably, he also read some of the posthumous works of Charles Baudelaire, Tolstoy's "My Religion", Ernest Renan's "Life of Jesus", and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Demons". Nietzsche called Dostoyevsky "the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn." While Nietzsche never mentions Max Stirner, the similarities in their ideas have prompted a minority of interpreters to suggest a relationship between the two. In 1861 Nietzsche wrote an enthusiastic essay on his "favorite poet," Friedrich Hölderlin, mostly forgotten at that time. He also expressed deep appreciation for Stifter's "Indian Summer", Byron's "Manfred" and Twain's "Tom Sawyer". Reception and legacy. Nietzsche's works did not reach a wide readership during his active writing career. However, in 1888 the influential Danish critic Georg Brandes aroused considerable excitement about Nietzsche through a series of lectures he gave at the University of Copenhagen. In the years after Nietzsche's death in 1900, his works became better known, and readers have responded to them in complex and sometimes controversial ways. Many Germans eventually discovered his appeals for greater individualism and personality development in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", but responded to them divergently. He had some following among left-wing Germans in the 1890s; in 1894–1895 German conservatives wanted to ban his work as subversive. During the late 19th century Nietzsche's ideas were commonly associated with anarchist movements and appear to have had influence within them, particularly in France and the United States. H.L. Mencken produced the first book on Nietzsche in English in 1907, "The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche", and in 1910 a book of translated paragraphs from Nietzsche, increasing knowledge of his philosophy in the United States. Nietzsche is known today as a precursor to existentialism, post-structuralism and postmodernism. W. B. Yeats and Arthur Symons described Nietzsche as the intellectual heir to William Blake. Symons went on to compare the ideas of the two thinkers in "The Symbolist Movement in Literature", while Yeats tried to raise awareness of Nietzsche in Ireland. A similar notion was espoused by W. H. Auden who wrote of Nietzsche in his "New Year Letter" (released in 1941 in "The Double Man"): "O masterly debunker of our liberal fallacies ... all your life you stormed, like your English forerunner Blake." Nietzsche made an impact on composers during the 1890s. Writer Donald Mitchell noted that Gustav Mahler was "attracted to the poetic fire of Zarathustra, but repelled by the intellectual core of its writings." He also quoted Mahler himself, and adds that he was influenced by Nietzsche's conception and affirmative approach to nature, which Mahler presented in his Third Symphony using Zarathustra's roundelay. Frederick Delius produced a piece of choral music, "A Mass of Life", based on a text of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", while Richard Strauss (who also based his "Also sprach Zarathustra" on the same book), was only interested in finishing "another chapter of symphonic autobiography." Famous writers and poets influenced by Nietzsche include André Gide, August Strindberg, Robinson Jeffers, Pío Baroja, D.H. Lawrence, Edith Södergran and Yukio Mishima. Nietzsche was an early influence on the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Knut Hamsun counted Nietzsche, along with Strindberg and Dostoyevsky, as his primary influences. Author Jack London wrote that he was more stimulated by Nietzsche than by any other writer. Critics have suggested that the character of David Grief in "A Son of the Sun" was based on Nietzsche. Nietzsche's influence on Muhammad Iqbal is most evidenced in "Asrar-i-Khudi" ("The Secrets of the Self"). Wallace Stevens was another reader of Nietzsche, and elements of Nietzsche's philosophy were found throughout Stevens's poetry collection "Harmonium". Olaf Stapledon was influenced by the idea of the "Übermensch" and it is a central theme in his books "Odd John" and "Sirius". In Russia, Nietzsche influenced Russian symbolism and figures such as Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Andrei Bely, Vyacheslav Ivanov and Alexander Scriabin incorporated or discussed parts of Nietzsche philosophy in their works. Thomas Mann's novel "Death in Venice" shows a use of Apollonian and Dionysian, and in "Doctor Faustus" Nietzsche was a central source for the character of Adrian Leverkühn. Hermann Hesse, similarly, in his "Narcissus and Goldmund" presents two main characters as opposite yet intertwined Apollonian and Dionysian spirits. Painter Giovanni Segantini was fascinated by "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", and he drew an illustration for the first Italian translation of the book. The Russian painter Lena Hades created the oil painting cycle "Also Sprach Zarathustra" dedicated to the book "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". By World War I, Nietzsche had acquired a reputation as an inspiration for right-wing German militarism and leftist politics. German soldiers received copies of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" as gifts during World War I. The Dreyfus affair provided a contrasting example of his reception: the French antisemitic Right labelled the Jewish and leftist intellectuals who defended Alfred Dreyfus as "Nietzscheans". Nietzsche had a distinct appeal for many Zionist thinkers around the start of the 20th century, most notable being Ahad Ha'am, Hillel Zeitlin, Micha Josef Berdyczewski, A.D. Gordon and Martin Buber, who went so far as to extoll Nietzsche as a "creator" and "emissary of life". Chaim Weizmann was a great admirer of Nietzsche; the first president of Israel sent Nietzsche's books to his wife, adding a comment in a letter that "This was the best and finest thing I can send to you." Israel Eldad, the ideological chief of the Stern Gang that fought the British in Palestine in the 1940s, wrote about Nietzsche in his underground newspaper and later translated most of Nietzsche's books into Hebrew. Eugene O'Neill remarked that "Zarathustra" influenced him more than any other book he ever read. He also shared Nietzsche's view of tragedy. The plays "The Great God Brown" and "Lazarus Laughed" are examples of Nietzsche's influence on him. Nietzsche's influence on the works of Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno can be seen in the "Dialectic of Enlightenment". Adorno summed up Nietzsche's philosophy as expressing the "humane in a world in which humanity has become a sham." Nietzsche's growing prominence suffered a severe setback when his works became closely associated with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Many political leaders of the twentieth century were at least superficially familiar with Nietzsche's ideas, although it is not always possible to determine whether they actually read his work. It is debated among scholars whether Hitler read Nietzsche, although if he did, it may not have been extensively. He was a frequent visitor to the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and used expressions of Nietzsche's, such as "lords of the earth" in "Mein Kampf". The Nazis made selective use of Nietzsche's philosophy. Mussolini, Charles de Gaulle and Huey P. Newton read Nietzsche. Richard Nixon read Nietzsche with "curious interest", and his book "Beyond Peace" might have taken its title from Nietzsche's book "Beyond Good and Evil" which Nixon read beforehand. Bertrand Russell wrote that Nietzsche had exerted great influence on philosophers and on people of literary and artistic culture, but warned that the attempt to put Nietzsche's philosophy of aristocracy into practice could only be done by an organization similar to the Fascist or the Nazi party. A decade after World War II, there was a revival of Nietzsche's philosophical writings thanks to translations and analyses by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. Georges Bataille was also influential in this revival, defending Nietzsche against appropriation by the Nazis with his notable 1937 essay "Nietzsche and Fascists". Others, well known philosophers in their own right, wrote commentaries on Nietzsche's philosophy, including Martin Heidegger, who produced a four-volume study, and Lev Shestov, who wrote a book called "Dostoyevski, Tolstoy and Nietzsche" where he portrays Nietzsche and Dostoyevski as the "thinkers of tragedy". Georg Simmel compares Nietzsche's importance to ethics to that of Copernicus for cosmology. Sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies read Nietzsche avidly from his early life, and later frequently discussed many of his concepts in his own works. Nietzsche has influenced philosophers such as Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Oswald Spengler, George Grant, Emil Cioran, Albert Camus, Ayn Rand, Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Leo Strauss, Max Scheler, Michel Foucault, Bernard Williams, and Nick Land. Camus described Nietzsche as "the only artist to have derived the extreme consequences of an aesthetics of the absurd". Paul Ricœur called Nietzsche one of the masters of the "school of suspicion", alongside Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Carl Jung was also influenced by Nietzsche. In "Memories, Dreams, Reflections", a biography transcribed by his secretary, he cites Nietzsche as a large influence. Aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy, especially his ideas of the self and his relation to society, run through much of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century thought. Nietzsche's writings have also been influential to some advancers of Accelerationist thought through his influence on Deleuze and Guattari. His deepening of the romantic-heroic tradition of the nineteenth century, for example, as expressed in the ideal of the "grand striver" appears in the work of thinkers from Cornelius Castoriadis to Roberto Mangabeira Unger. For Nietzsche, this grand striver overcomes obstacles, engages in epic struggles, pursues new goals, embraces recurrent novelty, and transcends existing structures and contexts.

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Graham Harman Graham Harman (born May 9, 1968) is an American philosopher. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. His work on the metaphysics of objects led to the development of object-oriented ontology. He is a central figure in the speculative realism trend in contemporary philosophy. Biography. Harman was born in Iowa City and raised in Mount Vernon, Iowa. He received a B.A. from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland in 1990 and went on to graduate school at Penn State University to earn a master's degree, studying under philosopher Alphonso Lingis, in 1991. While pursuing a Ph.D. at DePaul University, Harman worked as an online sports reporter, an experience which he credits for developing his writing style and productivity. After finishing his degree in 1999 he joined the Department of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo, where he taught from 2000-2016, leaving at the rank of Distinguished University Professor. He has also been a visiting faculty member at the University of Amsterdam, University of Turin, and Yale University. Since 2013 he has been a faculty member at the European Graduate School. Philosophical work. Harman starts the development of his work with Martin Heidegger's concept of "tool-analysis" from "Being and Time". To Harman, tool-analysis was a key discovery which establishes the groundwork for taking seriously the autonomous existence of objects and, in doing so, highlights deficiencies in phenomenology due to its subordination of objects to their use by or relationship with humans. Harman is considered part of the speculative realism trend, a nebulous grouping of philosophers united by two perspectives: a rejection of anthropocentric "philosophies of access" which privilege the perspective of humans in relation to objects, and a support of metaphysical realism via rejection of "correlationism", an assumption in Post-Kantian philosophy that fellow speculative realist Quentin Meillassoux defines as "the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other." Harman's object-oriented approach considers the life of objects to be fertile ground for a metaphysics that works to overcome anthropocentrism and correlationism. According to Harman, everything is an object, whether it be a mailbox, a shadow, spacetime, a fictional character, or the Commonwealth of Nations. However, drawing on phenomenology, he does distinguish between two categories of objects: real objects and sensual objects (or intentional objects), which sets his philosophy apart from the flat ontology of Bruno Latour. Harman defines real objects as inaccessible and infinitely withdrawn from all relations and then puzzles over how such objects can be accessed or enter into relations: "by definition, there is no direct access to real objects. Real objects are incommensurable with our knowledge, untranslatable into any relational access of any sort, cognitive or otherwise. Objects can only be known indirectly. And this is not just the fate of humans — it’s the fate of everything." Central to Harman's philosophy is the idea that real objects are inexhaustible: "A police officer eating a banana reduces this fruit to a present-at-hand profile of its elusive depth, as do a monkey eating the same banana, a parasite infecting it, or a gust of wind blowing it from a tree. Banana-being is a genuine reality in the world, a reality never exhausted by any relation to it by humans or other entities." (Harman 2005: 74). Because of this inexhaustibility, claims Harman, there is a metaphysical problem regarding how two objects can ever interact. His solution is to introduce the notion of "vicarious causation", according to which objects can only ever interact on the inside of an "intention" (which is also an object). Cutting across the phenomenological tradition, and especially its linguistic turn, Harman deploys a brand of metaphysical realism that attempts to extricate objects from their human captivity and metaphorically allude to a strange subterranean world of "vacuum-sealed" objects-in-themselves: "The comet itself, the monkey itself, Coca-Cola itself, resonate in cellars of being where no relation reaches." Strongly sympathetic to panpsychism, Harman proposes a new philosophical discipline called "speculative psychology" dedicated to investigating the "cosmic layers of psyche" and "ferreting out the specific psychic reality of earthworms, dust, armies, chalk, and stone." Harman does not, however, unreservedly endorse an all-encompassing panpsychism and instead proposes a sort of 'polypsychism' that nonetheless must "balloon beyond all previous limits, but without quite extending to all entities". He continues by stating that "perceiving" and "non-perceiving" are not different kinds of objects, but can be found in the same entity at different times: "The important point is that objects do not perceive insofar as they exist, as panpsychism proclaims. Instead they perceive insofar as they relate." Harman rejects scientism on account of its anthropocentrism: "For them, raindrops know nothing and lizards know very little, and some humans are more knowledgeable than others."

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Marsilio Ficino Marsilio Ficino (; Latin name: "Marsilius Ficinus"; 19 October 1433 – 1 October 1499) was an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance. He was an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism in touch with the major academics of his day and the first translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin. His Florentine Academy, an attempt to revive Plato's Academy, influenced the direction and tenor of the Italian Renaissance and the development of European philosophy. Biography. Ficino was born at Figline Valdarno. His father Diotifeci d'Agnolo was a physician under the patronage of Cosimo de' Medici, who took the young man into his household and became the lifelong patron of Marsilio, who was made tutor to his grandson, Lorenzo de' Medici. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the Italian humanist philosopher and scholar was another of his student. During the sessions at Florence of the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–1445, during the failed attempts to heal the schism of the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) churches, Cosimo de' Medici and his intellectual circle had made acquaintance with the Neoplatonic philosopher George Gemistos Plethon, whose discourses upon Plato and the Alexandrian mystics so fascinated the learned society of Florence that they named him the second Plato. In 1459 John Argyropoulos was lecturing on Greek language and literature at Florence, and Ficino became his pupil. When Cosimo decided to refound Plato's Academy at Florence he chose Ficino as its head. In 1462, Cosimo supplied Ficino with Greek manuscripts of Plato's work, whereupon Ficino started translating the entire corpus into Latin (draft translation of the dialogues finished 1468–9; published 1484). Ficino also produced a translation of a collection of Hellenistic Greek documents found by Leonardo da Pistoia later called Hermetica, and the writings of many of the Neoplatonists, including Porphyry, Iamblichus and Plotinus. Among his many students was Francesco Cattani da Diacceto, who was considered by Ficino to be his successor as the head of the Florentine Platonic Academy. Diacceto's student, Giovanni di Bardo Corsi, produced a short biography of Ficino in 1506. Though trained as a physician, Ficino became a priest in 1473. Work. In 1474 Ficino completed his treatise on the immortality of the soul, "Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animae" (Platonic Theology). In the rush of enthusiasm for every rediscovery from Antiquity, he exhibited a great interest in the arts of astrology, which landed him in trouble with the Catholic Church. In 1489 he was accused of heresy before Pope Innocent VIII and needed strong defense to preserve him from condemnation. Writing in 1492 Ficino proclaimed: "This century, like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music ... this century appears to have perfected astrology." Ficino's letters, extending over the years 1474–1494, survive and have been published. He wrote "De amore" (1484). "De vita libri tres" (Three books on life), or "De triplici vita", published in 1489, provides a great deal of medical and astrological advice for maintaining health and vigor, as well as espousing the Neoplatonist view of the world's ensoulment and its integration with the human soul: One metaphor for this integrated "aliveness" is Ficino's astrology. In the "Book of Life", he details the interlinks between behavior and consequence. It talks about a list of things that hold sway over a man's destiny. Probably due to early influences from his father Diotifeci, who was a doctor to Cosimo de' Medici, Ficino published Latin and Italian treatises on medical subjects such as "Consiglio contro la pestilenza" (Recommendations for the treatment of the plague) and "De vita libri tres" (Three books on life). His medical works exerted considerable influence on Renaissance physicians such as Paracelsus, with whom he shared the perception on the unity of the micro- and macrocosmos, and their interactions, through somatic and psychological manifestations, with the aim to investigate their signatures to cure diseases. Those works, which were very popular at the time, dealt with astrological and alchemical concepts. Thus Ficino came under the suspicion of heresy; especially after the publication of the third book in 1489, which contained specific instructions on healthful living. Notably, Ficino coined the term Platonic love, which first appeared in his letter to Alamanno Donati in 1476. In 1492, Ficino published "Epistulae" (Epistles), which contained Platonic love letters, written in Latin, to his academic colleague and life-long friend Giovanni Cavalcanti concerning the nature of Platonic love. Importantly, Ficino's letters to Cavalcanti resulted in the popularization of the term Platonic love in Western Europe. Death. Ficino died on 1 October 1499 at Careggi. In 1521 his memory was honored with a bust sculpted by Andrea Ferrucci, which is located in the south side of the nave in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.

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Babette Babich Babette Babich (born 14 November 1956, in New York City) is an American philosopher who writes on philosophy of science and technology. Career. Following research work at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), Université François-Rabelais, Tours (France), Freie Universität Berlin and Universität Tübingen (Germany) Babich has a doctoral degree from Boston College. She taught at Denison University and Marquette University before her current position at Fordham University in New York City in addition to In addition to an honorary appointment as Visiting Professor of Theology, Religion and Philosophy, University of Winchester, England. She has also taught, as visiting professor, at the Eberhard-Karls Universität, Tübingen, The University at Stony Brook (both Manhattan and Long Island Campuses), Georgetown University, the [Humboldt University, Berlin, the School of Visual Arts, NYC, University of California at San Diego, and the Juilliard School. Work. Babich writes on aesthetics, including philosophy of music, museum culture and poetics, film, television, and digital media, as well as life-size bronzes in antiquity (Greek sculpture), and the stylistic difference between analytic and continental philosophy. She also writes on contemporary debates in philosophy of science as well as the history of science and sociology of philosophy and has written on ecology, especially aether, and animal philosophy. She specializes in the writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hölderlin and she engages the work of Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Günther Anders, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, Ludwik Fleck, Ivan Illich, Paul Virilio, Peter Sloterdijk, and Slavoj Žižek. Babich is the author of a range of studies foregrounding the role of politics in institutional philosophy. A student of Hans-Georg Gadamer, she also worked with Jacob Taubes and Paul Feyerabend among others. In 1996, she founded the journal "New Nietzsche Studies", echoing the title of the 1974 book, "The New Nietzsche," the collection edited by David Blair Allison (1944-2016).

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Emil Cioran Emil Mihai Cioran (, ; 8 April 1911 – 20 June 1995) was a Romanian-born philosopher and essayist, who published works in both Romanian and French. His work has been noted for its pervasive philosophical pessimism, style, and aphorisms. His works frequently engaged with issues of suffering, decay, and nihilism. In 1937, Cioran moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris, which became his permanent residence, wherein he lived in seclusion with his partner, Simone Boué. Early life. Cioran was born in Resinár, Szeben County, Kingdom of Hungary (today Rășinari, Sibiu County, Romania). His father, Emilian Cioran, was an Orthodox priest, and his mother, Elvira, was the head of the "Christian Women's League." At 10, Cioran moved to Sibiu to attend school, and at 17, he was enrolled in the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Bucharest, where he met Eugène Ionesco and Mircea Eliade, who became his friends. Future Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica and future Romanian thinker Petre Țuțea became his closest academic colleagues; all three studied under Tudor Vianu and Nae Ionescu. Cioran, Eliade, and Țuțea became supporters of Ionescu's ideas, known as "." Cioran had a good command of German, learning the language at an early age, and proceeded to read philosophy that was available in German, but not in Romanian. Notes from Cioran's adolescence indicated a study of Friedrich Nietzsche, Honoré de Balzac, Arthur Schopenhauer and Fyodor Dostoevsky, among others. He became an agnostic, taking as an axiom "the inconvenience of existence". While at the University, he was influenced by Georg Simmel, Ludwig Klages and Martin Heidegger, but also by the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, whose contribution to Cioran's central system of thought was the belief that life is arbitrary. Cioran's graduation thesis was on Henri Bergson, whom he later rejected, claiming Bergson did not comprehend the tragedy of life. From the age of 20, Cioran began to suffer from insomnia, a condition which he suffered from for the rest of his life, and permeated his writings. Cioran's decision to write about his experiences in his first book, "On the Heights of Despair", came from an episode of insomnia. Career. Berlin and Romania. In 1933, he received a scholarship to the University of Berlin, where he studied Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Immanuel Kant, Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. he came into contact with Klages and Nicolai Hartmann. While in Berlin, he became interested in the policies of the Nazi regime, contributed a column to "Vremea" dealing with the topic (in which Cioran confessed that "there is no present-day politician that I see as more sympathetic and admirable than Hitler", while expressing his approval for the Night of the Long Knives—"what has humanity lost if the lives of a few imbeciles were taken"), and, in a letter written to Petru Comarnescu, described himself as "a Hitlerist". He held similar views about Italian fascism, welcoming victories in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, arguing that: "Fascism is a shock, without which Italy is a compromise comparable to today's Romania". Cioran's first book, "On the Heights of Despair" (literally translated: "On the Summits of Despair"), was published in Romania in 1934. It was awarded the "Commission's Prize" and the "Young Writers Prize" for one of the best books written by an unpublished young writer. Regardless, Cioran later spoke negatively of it, saying "it is a very poorly written book, without any style." Successively, "The Book of Delusions" (1935), "The Transfiguration of Romania" (1936), and "Tears and Saints" (1937), were also published in Romania. "Tears and Saints" was "incredibly poorly received", and after it was published, Cioran's mother wrote him asking him to retract the book because it was causing her public embarrassment. Although Cioran was never a member of the group, it was during this time in Romania that he began taking an interest in the ideas put forth by the Iron Guard—a far right organization whose nationalist ideology he supported until the early years of World War II, despite allegedly disapproving of their violent methods. Cioran would later denounce fascism, describing it in 1970 as "the worst folly of my youth. If I am cured of one sickness, it is surely that one." Cioran revised "The Transfiguration of Romania" heavily in its second edition released in the 1990s, eliminating numerous passages he considered extremist or "pretentious and stupid". In its original form, the book expressed sympathy for totalitarianism, a view which was also present in various articles Cioran wrote at the time, and which aimed to establish "urbanization and industrialization" as "the two obsessions of a rising people". His early call for modernization was, however, hard to reconcile with the traditionalism of the Iron Guard. In 1934, he wrote, "I find that in Romania the sole fertile, creative, and invigorating nationalism can only be one which does not just dismiss tradition, but also denies and defeats it". Disapproval of what he viewed as specifically Romanian traits had been present in his works ("In any maxim, in any proverb, in any reflection, our people expresses the same shyness in front of life, the same hesitation and resignation... [...] Everyday Romanian [truisms] are dumbfounding."), which led to criticism from the far right "Gândirea" (its editor, Nichifor Crainic, had called "The Transfiguration of Romania" "a bloody, merciless, massacre of today's Romania, without even [the fear] of matricide and sacrilege"), as well as from various Iron Guard papers. France. After returning from Berlin in 1936, Cioran taught philosophy at the Andrei Șaguna High School in Brașov for a year. In 1937, he left for Paris with a scholarship from the French Institute branch in Bucharest, which was then prolonged until 1944. After a short stay in his home country (November 1940 – February 1941), Cioran never returned again. This last period in Romania was the one in which he exhibited a closer relationship with the Iron Guard, which by then had taken power ("see National Legionary State"). On 28 November, for the state-owned Romanian Radio, Cioran recorded a speech centered on the portrait of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, former leader of the movement, praising him and the Guard for, among other things, "having given Romanians a purpose". He later renounced not only his support for the Iron Guard, but also their nationalist ideas, and frequently expressed regret and repentance for his emotional implication in it. For example, in a 1972 interview, he condemned it as "a complex of movements; more than this, a demented sect and a party", saying, "I found out then [...] what it means to be carried by the wave without the faintest trace of conviction. [...] I am now immune to it". Cioran started writing "The Passionate Handbook" in 1940 and finished it by 1945. It was the last book he wrote in Romanian, though not the last to deal with pessimism and misanthropy through lyrical aphorisms. Cioran published books only in French thereafter. It was at this point that Cioran's apparent contempt for the Romanian people emerged. He told a friend that he "wanted to write a "Philosophy of Failure", with the subtitle "For the exclusive use of the Romanian People."" Furthermore, he described his move to Paris as "by far the most intelligent thing" he'd ever done, and in "The Trouble With Being Born", he says "In continual rebellion against my ancestry, I have spent my whole life wanting to be something else: Spanish, Russian, cannibal—anything, except what I was." In 1942, Cioran met Simone Boué, another insomniac, who he lived with for the rest of his life. Cioran kept their relationship entirely private, and never spoke of his relationship with Boué in his writings or interviews. In 1949, his first French book, "A Short History of Decay", was published by Gallimard and was awarded the "Prix Rivarol" in 1950 for the best book written by a non-French author. Cioran later refused every literary prize he was given. The Latin Quarter of Paris became Cioran's permanent residence. He lived most of his life in seclusion, avoiding the public, but still maintained contact with numerous friends, including Mircea Eliade, Eugène Ionesco, Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, Henri Michaux and Fernando Savater. In 1995, Cioran died of Alzheimer's disease and was buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery. Major themes and style. Professing a lack of interest in conventional philosophy in his early youth, Cioran dismissed abstract speculation in favor of personal reflection and passionate lyricism. "I invented nothing. I've been the one and only secretary of my own sensations", he later said. Aphorisms make up a large portion of Cioran's bibliography, and some of his books, such as "The Trouble with Being Born", are composed entirely of aphorisms. Speaking about this decision, Cioran said: Pessimism characterizes all of his works, which many critics trace back to events of his childhood (in 1935 his mother is reputed to have told him that if she had known he was going to be so unhappy she would have aborted him). However, Cioran's pessimism (in fact, his skepticism, even nihilism) remains both inexhaustible and, in its own particular manner, joyful; it is not the sort of pessimism which can be traced back to simple origins, single origins themselves being questionable. When Cioran's mother spoke to him of abortion, he confessed that it did not disturb him, but made an extraordinary impression which led to an insight about the nature of existence ("I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?" is what he later said in reference to the incident). His works often depict an atmosphere of torment, a state that Cioran himself experienced, and came to be dominated by lyricism and, often, the expression of intense and even violent feeling. The books he wrote in Romanian especially display this latter characteristic. Preoccupied with the problems of death and suffering, he was attracted to the idea of suicide, believing it to be an idea that could help one go on living, an idea which he fully explored in On the Heights of Despair. He revisits suicide in depth in "The New Gods", which contains a section of aphorisms devoted to the subject. The theme of human alienation, the most prominent existentialist theme, presented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, is thus formulated, in 1932, by young Cioran: "Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?" in "On the Heights of Despair." Cioran's works encompass many other themes as well: original sin, the tragic sense of history, the end of civilization, the refusal of consolation through faith, the obsession with the absolute, life as an expression of man's metaphysical exile, etc. He was a thinker passionate about history; widely reading the writers that were associated with the "Decadent movement". One of these writers was Oswald Spengler who influenced Cioran's political philosophy in that he offered Gnostic reflections on the destiny of man and civilization. According to Cioran, as long as man has kept in touch with his origins and hasn't cut himself off from himself, he has resisted decadence. Today, he is on his way to his own destruction through self-objectification, impeccable production and reproduction, excess of self-analysis and transparency, and artificial triumph. Regarding God, Cioran has noted that "without Bach, God would be a complete second rate figure" and that "Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure". Cioran went on to say "Bach, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche are the only arguments against monotheism." William H. Gass called Cioran's work "a philosophical romance on the modern themes of alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as agony, reason as disease". Cioran became most famous while writing not in Romanian but French, a language with which he had struggled since his youth. During Cioran's lifetime, Saint-John Perse called him "the greatest French writer to honor our language since the death of Paul Valéry." Cioran's tone and usage in his adopted language were seldom as harsh as in Romanian (though his use of Romanian is said to be more original). Legacy. After the death of Cioran's long-term companion, Simone Boué, a collection of Cioran's manuscripts (over 30 notebooks) were found in the couple's apartment by a manager who tried to auction them in 2005. A decision taken by the Court of Appeal of Paris stopped the commercial sale of the collection. However, in March 2011, the Court of Appeal ruled that the seller was the legitimate owner of the manuscripts. The manuscripts were purchased by Romanian businessman George Brăiloiu for €405,000. An aged Cioran is the main character in a play by Romanian dramatist-actor Matei Vișniec, "Mansardă la Paris cu vedere spre moarte" ("A Paris Loft with a View on Death"). The play, depicting an imaginary meeting between Vișniec and Emil Cioran, was first brought to the stage in 2007, under the direction of Radu Afrim and with a cast of Romanian and Luxembourgian actors; Cioran was played by Constantin Cojocaru. Stagings were organized in the Romanian city of Sibiu and in the Luxembourg, at Esch-sur-Alzette (both Sibiu and Luxembourg City were the year's European Capital of Culture). In 2009, the Romanian Academy granted posthumous membership to Cioran. Under the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Cioran's works were banned. In 1974, Francoist Spain banned "The Evil Demiurge" for being "atheist, blasphemous, and anti-Christian", which Cioran considered "one of the greatest jokes in his absurd existence." Major works. French. All of Cioran's major works in French have been translated into English by Richard Howard.

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Alan Code Alan Dodd Code (born 1951) is Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Classics (by courtesy) at Stanford University, and also Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. He is a leading scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, especially well known for his articles on Aristotle's metaphysics, science, and logic. Education and career. Code did his BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, writing his dissertation under Terry Penner. Before taking up a position at Stanford in 2011, he was Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Prior to that, he taught for many years at Berkeley, and also at the University of Michigan and Ohio State University. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013. Philosophical work. Some of Code's papers are considered centrally important to the understanding of Aristotle's metaphysics and philosophy of science. He has commented on, clarified and extended the work of such eminent scholars as G. E. L. Owen and Montgomery Furth.

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Roger Bacon Roger Bacon (; or "", also " Rogerus"; ), also known by the scholastic accolade "Doctor Mirabilis", was a medieval English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empiricism. In the early modern era, he was regarded as a wizard and particularly famed for the story of his mechanical or necromantic brazen head. He is sometimes credited (mainly since the 19th century) as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method. Bacon applied the empirical method of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) to observations in texts attributed to Aristotle. Bacon discovered the importance of empirical testing when the results he obtained were different from those that would have been predicted by Aristotle. His linguistic work has been heralded for its early exposition of a universal grammar. 21st century re-evaluations emphasise that Bacon was essentially a medieval thinker, with much of his "experimental" knowledge obtained from books in the scholastic tradition. He was, however, partially responsible for a revision of the medieval university curriculum, which saw the addition of optics to the traditional "". Bacon's major work, the "Opus Majus", was sent to Pope Clement IV in Rome in 1267 upon the pope's request. Although gunpowder was first invented and described in China, Bacon was the first in Europe to record its formula. Life. Roger Bacon was born in Ilchester in Somerset, England, in the early 13th century, although his date of birth is sometimes narrowed down to , "1213 or 1214", or "1215". However, modern scholars tend to argue for the date of , but there are disagreements on this. The only source for his birth date is a statement from his 1267 ' that "forty years have passed since I first learned the '". The latest dates assume this referred to the alphabet itself, but elsewhere in the " it is clear that Bacon uses the term to refer to rudimentary studies, the trivium or quadrivium that formed the medieval curriculum. His family appears to have been well off. Bacon studied at Oxford. While Robert Grosseteste had probably left shortly before Bacon's arrival, his work and legacy almost certainly influenced the young scholar and it is possible Bacon subsequently visited him and William of Sherwood in Lincoln. Bacon became a master at Oxford, lecturing on Aristotle. There is no evidence he was ever awarded a doctorate. (The title " was a posthumous scholastic accolade.) A caustic cleric named Roger Bacon is recorded speaking before the king at Oxford in 1233. In 1237 or at some point in the following decade, he accepted an invitation to teach at the University of Paris. While there, he lectured on Latin grammar, Aristotelian logic, arithmetic, geometry, and the mathematical aspects of astronomy and music. His faculty colleagues included Robert Kilwardby, Albertus Magnus, and Peter of Spain, the future Pope John XXI. The Cornishman Richard Rufus was a scholarly opponent. In 1247 or soon after, he left his position in Paris. As a private scholar, his whereabouts for the next decade are uncertain but he was likely in Oxford –1251, where he met Adam Marsh, and in Paris in 1251. He seems to have studied most of the known Greek and Arabic works on optics (then known as "perspective", '). A passage in the ' states that at some point he took a two-year break from his studies. By the late 1250s, resentment against the king's preferential treatment of his émigré Poitevin relatives led to a coup and the imposition of the Provisions of Oxford and Westminster, instituting a baronial council and more frequent parliaments. Pope Urban IV absolved the king of his oath in 1261 and, after initial abortive resistance, Simon de Montfort led a force, enlarged due to recent crop failures, that prosecuted the Second Barons' War. Bacon's own family were considered royal partisans: De Montfort's men seized their property and drove several members into exile. In 1256 or 1257, he became a friar in the Franciscan Order in either Paris or Oxford, following the example of scholarly English Franciscans such as Grosseteste and Marsh. After 1260, Bacon's activities were restricted by a statute prohibiting the friars of his order from publishing books or pamphlets without prior approval. He was likely kept at constant menial tasks to limit his time for contemplation and came to view his treatment as an enforced absence from scholarly life. By the mid-1260s, he was undertaking a search for patrons who could secure permission and funding for his return to Oxford. For a time, Bacon was finally able to get around his superiors' interference through his acquaintance with Guy de Foulques, bishop of Narbonne, cardinal of Sabina, and the papal legate who negotiated between England's royal and baronial factions. In 1263 or 1264, a message garbled by Bacon's messenger, Raymond of Laon, led Guy to believe that Bacon had already completed a summary of the sciences. In fact, he had no money to research, let alone copy, such a work and attempts to secure financing from his family were thwarted by the Second Barons' War. However, in 1265, Guy was summoned to a conclave at Perugia that elected him . William Benecor, who had previously been the courier between Henry III and the pope, now carried the correspondence between Bacon and Clement. Clement's reply of 22 June 1266 commissioned "writings and remedies for current conditions", instructing Bacon not to violate any standing "prohibitions" of his order but to carry out his task in utmost secrecy. While faculties of the time were largely limited to addressing disputes on the known texts of Aristotle, Clement's patronage permitted Bacon to engage in a wide-ranging consideration of the state of knowledge in his era. In 1267 or '68, Bacon sent the Pope his "", which presented his views on how to incorporate Aristotelian logic and science into a new theology, supporting Grosseteste's text-based approach against the "sentence method" then fashionable. Bacon also sent his ', ', "", an optical lens, and possibly other works on alchemy and astrology. The entire process has been called "one of the most remarkable single efforts of literary productivity", with Bacon composing referenced works of around a million words in about a year. Pope Clement died in 1268 and Bacon lost his protector. The Condemnations of 1277 banned the teaching of certain philosophical doctrines, including deterministic astrology. Some time within the next two years, Bacon was apparently imprisoned or placed under house arrest. This was traditionally ascribed to Franciscan Minister General Jerome of Ascoli, probably acting on behalf of the many clergy, monks, and educators attacked by Bacon's 1271 "". Modern scholarship, however, notes that the first reference to Bacon's "imprisonment" dates from eighty years after his death on the charge of unspecified "suspected novelties" and finds it less than credible. Contemporary scholars who do accept Bacon's imprisonment typically associate it with Bacon's "attraction to contemporary prophesies", his sympathies for "the radical 'poverty' wing of the Franciscans", interest in certain astrological doctrines, or generally combative personality rather than from "any scientific novelties which he may have proposed". Sometime after 1278, Bacon returned to the Franciscan House at Oxford, where he continued his studies and is presumed to have spent most of the remainder of his life. His last dateable writing—the ""—was completed in 1292. He seems to have died shortly afterwards and been buried at Oxford. Works. Medieval European philosophy often relied on appeals to the authority of Church Fathers such as St Augustine, and on works by Plato and Aristotle only known at second hand or through Latin translations. By the 13th century, new works and better versions – in Arabic or in new Latin translations from the Arabic – began to trickle north from Muslim Spain. In Roger Bacon's writings, he upholds Aristotle's calls for the collection of facts before deducing scientific truths, against the practices of his contemporaries, arguing that "thence cometh quiet to the mind". Bacon also called for reform with regard to theology. He argued that, rather than training to debate minor philosophical distinctions, theologians should focus their attention primarily on the Bible itself, learning the languages of its original sources thoroughly. He was fluent in several of these languages and was able to note and bemoan several corruptions of scripture, and of the works of the Greek philosophers that had been mistranslated or misinterpreted by scholars working in Latin. He also argued for the education of theologians in science ("natural philosophy") and its addition to the medieval curriculum. "Opus Majus". Bacon's 1267 "Greater Work", the ', contains treatments of mathematics, optics, alchemy, and astronomy, including theories on the positions and sizes of the celestial bodies. It is divided into seven sections: "The Four General Causes of Human Ignorance" ('), "The Affinity of Philosophy with Theology" ('), "On the Usefulness of Grammar" ('), "The Usefulness of Mathematics in Physics" ('), "On the Science of Perspective" ('), "On Experimental Knowledge" ('), and "A Philosophy of Morality" ('). It was not intended as a complete work but as a "persuasive preamble" ('), an enormous proposal for a reform of the medieval university curriculum and the establishment of a kind of library or encyclopedia, bringing in experts to compose a collection of definitive texts on these subjects. The new subjects were to be "perspective" (i.e., optics), "astronomy" (inclusive of astronomy proper, astrology, and the geography necessary in order to use them), "weights" (likely some treatment of mechanics but this section of the ' has been lost), alchemy, agriculture (inclusive of botany and zoology), medicine, and "experimental science", a philosophy of science that would guide the others. The section on geography was allegedly originally ornamented with a map based on ancient and Arabic computations of longitude and latitude, but has since been lost. His (mistaken) arguments supporting the idea that dry land formed the larger proportion of the globe were apparently similar to those which later guided Columbus. In this work Bacon criticises his contemporaries Alexander of Hales and Albertus Magnus, who were held in high repute despite having only acquired their knowledge of Aristotle at second hand during their preaching careers. Albert was received at Paris as an authority equal to Aristotle, Avicenna and Averroes, a situation Bacon decried: "never in the world [had] such monstrosity occurred before." In Part I of the "Opus Majus" Bacon recognises some philosophers as the "Sapientes", or gifted few, and saw their knowledge in philosophy and theology as superior to the "vulgus philosophantium", or common herd of philosophers. He held Islamic thinkers between 1210 and 1265 in especially high regard calling them "both philosophers and sacred writers" and defended the integration of Islamic philosophy into Christian learning. Calendrical reform. In Part IV of the "", Bacon proposed a calendrical reform similar to the later system introduced in 1582 under Pope Gregory XIII. Drawing on ancient Greek and medieval Islamic astronomy recently introduced to western Europe via Spain, Bacon continued the work of Robert Grosseteste and criticised the then-current Julian calendar as "intolerable, horrible, and laughable". It had become apparent that Eudoxus and Sosigenes's assumption of a year of 365¼ days was, over the course of centuries, too inexact. Bacon charged that this meant the computation of Easter had shifted forward by 9 days since the First Council of Nicaea in 325. His proposal to drop one day every 125 years and to cease the observance of fixed equinoxes and solstices was not acted upon following the death of Pope Clement IV in 1268. The eventual Gregorian calendar drops one day from the first three centuries in each set of 400 years. Optics. In Part V of the "", Bacon discusses physiology of eyesight and the anatomy of the eye and the brain, considering light, distance, position, and size, direct and reflected vision, refraction, mirrors, and lenses. His treatment was primarily oriented by the Latin translation of Alhazen's "Book of Optics". He also draws heavily on Eugene of Palermo's Latin translation of the Arabic translation of Ptolemy's "Optics"; on Robert Grosseteste's work based on Al-Kindi's "Optics"; and, through Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham), on Ibn Sahl's work on dioptrics. Gunpowder. A passage in the ' and another in the ' are usually taken as the first European descriptions of a mixture containing the essential ingredients of gunpowder. Partington and others have come to the conclusion that Bacon most likely witnessed at least one demonstration of Chinese firecrackers, possibly obtained by Franciscans—including Bacon's friend William of Rubruck—who visited the Mongol Empire during this period. The most telling passage reads: We have an example of these things (that act on the senses) in [the sound and fire of] that children's toy which is made in many [diverse] parts of the world; i.e. a device no bigger than one's thumb. From the violence of that salt called saltpetre [together with sulphur and willow charcoal, combined into a powder] so horrible a sound is made by the bursting of a thing so small, no more than a bit of parchment [containing it], that we find [the ear assaulted by a noise] exceeding the roar of strong thunder, and a flash brighter than the most brilliant lightning. At the beginning of the 20th century, Henry William Lovett Hime of the Royal Artillery published the theory that Bacon's "" contained a cryptogram giving a recipe for the gunpowder he witnessed. The theory was criticised by Thorndike in a 1915 letter to "Science" and several books, a position joined by Muir, Stillman, Steele, and Sarton. Needham et al. concurred with these earlier critics that the additional passage did not originate with Bacon and further showed that the proportions supposedly deciphered (a 7:5:5 ratio of saltpetre to charcoal to sulphur) as not even useful for firecrackers, burning slowly with a great deal of smoke and failing to ignite inside a gun barrel. The ~41% nitrate content is too low to have explosive properties. Secret of Secrets. Bacon attributed the "Secret of Secrets" (""), the Islamic "Mirror of Princes" (), to Aristotle, thinking that he had composed it for Alexander the Great. Bacon produced an edition of Philip of Tripoli's Latin translation, complete with his own introduction and notes; and his writings of the 1260s and 1270s cite it far more than his contemporaries did. This led Easton and others, including Robert Steele, to argue that the text spurred Bacon's own transformation into an experimentalist. (Bacon never described such a decisive impact himself.) The dating of Bacon's edition of the "Secret of Secrets" is a key piece of evidence in the debate, with those arguing for a greater impact giving it an earlier date; but it certainly influenced the elder Bacon's conception of the political aspects of his work in the sciences. Alchemy. Bacon has been credited with a number of alchemical texts. The "Letter on the Secret Workings of Art and Nature and on the Vanity of Magic" ('), also known as "On the Wonderful Powers of Art and Nature" ('), a likely-forged letter to an unknown "William of Paris," dismisses practices such as necromancy but contains most of the alchemical formulae attributed to Bacon, including one for a philosopher's stone and another possibly for gunpowder. It also includes several passages about hypothetical flying machines and submarines, attributing their first use to Alexander the Great. "On the Vanity of Magic" or "The Nullity of Magic" is a debunking of esoteric claims in Bacon's time, showing that they could be explained by natural phenomena. Linguistics. Bacon's early linguistic and logical works are the "Overview of Grammar" ("Summa Grammatica"), ', and the ' or "". These are mature but essentially conventional presentations of Oxford and Paris's terminist and pre-modist logic and grammar. His later work in linguistics is much more idiosyncratic, using terminology and addressing questions unique in his era. In his "Greek" and "Hebrew Grammars" (' and '), in his work "On the Usefulness of Grammar" (Book III of the ""), and in his "Compendium of the Study of Philosophy", Bacon stresses the need for scholars to know several languages. Europe's vernacular languages are not ignored—he considers them useful for practical purposes such as trade, proselytism, and administration—but Bacon is mostly interested in his era's languages of science and religion: Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin. Bacon is less interested in a full practical mastery of the other languages than on a theoretical understanding of their grammatical rules, ensuring that a Latin reader will not misunderstand passages' original meaning. For this reason, his treatments of Greek and Hebrew grammar are not isolated works on their topic but contrastive grammars treating the aspects which influenced Latin or which were required for properly understanding Latin texts. He pointedly states, "I want to describe Greek grammar for the benefit of Latin speakers". It is likely only this limited sense which was intended by Bacon's boast that he could teach an interested pupil a new language within three days. Passages in the "Overview" and the Greek grammar have been taken as an early exposition of a universal grammar underlying all human languages. The Greek grammar contains the tersest and most famous exposition: However, Bacon's lack of interest in studying a literal grammar underlying the languages known to him and his numerous works on linguistics and comparative linguistics has prompted Hovdhaugen to question the usual literal translation of Bacon's "" in such passages. She notes the ambiguity in the Latin term, which could refer variously to the structure of language, to its description, and to the science underlying such descriptions: i.e., linguistics. Other works. Bacon states that his "Lesser Work" (') and "Third Work" (') were originally intended as summaries of the ' in case it was lost in transit. Easton's review of the texts suggests that they became separate works over the course of the laborious process of creating a fair copy of the ', whose half-million words were copied by hand and apparently greatly revised at least once. Other works by Bacon include his "Tract on the Multiplication of Species" ('), "On Burning Lenses" ('), the ' and ', the "Compendium of the Study of Philosophy" and "of Theology" (' and '), and his "Computus". The "Compendium of the Study of Theology", presumably written in the last years of his life, was an anticlimax: adding nothing new, it is principally devoted to the concerns of the 1260s. Apocrypha. "The Mirror of Alchimy" (""), a short treatise on the origin and composition of metals, is traditionally credited to Bacon. It espouses the Arabian theory of mercury and sulphur forming the other metals, with vague allusions to transmutation. Stillman opined that "there is nothing in it that is characteristic of Roger Bacon's style or ideas, nor that distinguishes it from many unimportant alchemical lucubrations of anonymous writers of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries", and Muir and Lippmann also considered it a pseudepigraph. The cryptic Voynich manuscript has been attributed to Bacon by various sources, including by its first recorded owner, but historians of science Lynn Thorndike and George Sarton dismissed these claims as unsupported. and the vellum of the manuscript has since been dated to the 15th century. Legacy. Bacon was largely ignored by his contemporaries in favor of other scholars such as Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas, although his works were studied by Bonaventure, John Pecham, and Peter of Limoges, through whom he may have influenced Raymond Lull. He was also partially responsible for the addition of optics ("") to the medieval university curriculum. By the early modern period, the English considered him the epitome of a wise and subtle possessor of forbidden knowledge, a Faust-like magician who had tricked the devil and so was able to go to heaven. Of these legends, one of the most prominent was that he created a talking brazen head which could answer any question. The story appears in the anonymous 16th-century account of "The Famous Historie of Fryer Bacon", in which Bacon speaks with a demon but causes the head to speak by "the continuall fume of the six hottest Simples", testing his theory that speech is caused by "an effusion of vapors". Around 1589, Robert Greene adapted the story for the stage as "The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay", one of the most successful Elizabethan comedies. As late as the 1640s, Thomas Browne was still complaining that "Every ear is filled with the story of Frier Bacon, that made a brazen head to speak these words, "Time is"". Greene's Bacon spent seven years creating a brass head that would speak "strange and uncouth aphorisms" to enable him to encircle Britain with a wall of brass that would make it impossible to conquer. Unlike his source material, Greene does not cause his head to operate by natural forces but by "nigromantic charms" and "the enchanting forces of the devil": i.e., by entrapping a dead spirit or hobgoblin. Bacon collapses, exhausted, just before his device comes to life and announces "Time is", "Time was", and "Time is Past" before being destroyed in spectacular fashion: the stage direction instructs that "a lightening flasheth forth, and a hand appears that breaketh down the Head with a hammer". A necromantic head was ascribed to Pope Sylvester II as early as the 1120s, but Browne considered the legend to be a misunderstanding of a passage in Peter the Good's "Precious Pearl" where the negligent alchemist misses the birth of his creation and loses it forever. The story may also preserve the work by Bacon and his contemporaries to construct clockwork armillary spheres. Bacon had praised a "self-activated working model of the heavens" as "the greatest of all things which have been devised". As early as the 16th century, natural philosophers like Bruno, Dee, and Francis Bacon were attempting to rehabilitate Bacon's reputation and to portray him as a scientific pioneer who had avoided the petty bickering of his contemporaries to attempt a rational understanding of nature. By the 19th century, commenters following Whewell considered that "Bacon... was not appreciated in his age because he was so completely in advance of it; he is a 16th- or 17th-century philosopher, whose lot has been by some accident cast in the 13th century". His assertions in the "" that "theories supplied by reason should be verified by sensory data, aided by instruments, and corroborated by trustworthy witnesses" were (and still are) considered "one of the first important formulations of the scientific method on record". This idea that Bacon was a modern experimental scientist reflected two views of the period: that the principal form of scientific activity is experimentation and that 13th-century Europe still represented the "Dark Ages". This view, which is still reflected in some 21st-century popular science books, portrays Bacon as an advocate of modern experimental science who emerged as a solitary genius in an age hostile to his ideas. Based on Bacon's apocrypha, he is also portrayed as a visionary who predicted the invention of the submarine, aircraft, and automobile. However, in the course of the 20th century, Husserl, Heidegger and others emphasised the importance to modern science of Cartesian and Galilean projections of mathematics over sensory perceptions of nature; Heidegger in particular noted the lack of such an understanding in Bacon's works. Although Crombie, Kuhn and Schramm continued to argue for Bacon's importance to the development of "qualitative" areas of modern science, Duhem, Thorndike, Carton and Koyré emphasised the essentially medieval nature of Bacon's "". Research also established that Bacon was not as isolated—and probably not as persecuted—as was once thought. Many medieval sources of and influences on Bacon's scientific activity have been identified. In particular, Bacon often mentioned his debt to the work of Robert Grosseteste: his work on optics and the calendar followed Grosseteste's lead, as did his idea that inductively-derived conclusions should be submitted for verification through experimental testing. Bacon noted of William of Sherwood that "nobody was greater in philosophy than he"; praised Peter of Maricourt (the author of "A Letter on Magnetism") and John of London as "perfect" mathematicians; Campanus of Novara (the author of works on astronomy, astrology, and the calendar) and a Master Nicholas as "good"; and acknowledged the influence of Adam Marsh and lesser figures. He was clearly not an isolated genius. The medieval church was also not generally opposed to scientific investigation and medieval science was both varied and extensive. As a result, the picture of Bacon has changed. Bacon is now seen as part of his age: a leading figure in the beginnings of the medieval universities at Paris and Oxford but one joined in the development of the philosophy of science by Robert Grosseteste, William of Auvergne, Henry of Ghent, Albert Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. Lindberg summarised: Bacon was not a modern, out of step with his age, or a harbinger of things to come, but a brilliant, combative, and somewhat eccentric schoolman of the thirteenth century, endeavoring to take advantage of the new learning just becoming available while remaining true to traditional notions... of the importance to be attached to philosophical knowledge". A recent review of the many visions of Bacon across the ages says contemporary scholarship still neglects one of the most important aspects of his life and thought: his commitment to the Franciscan order. His was a plea for reform addressed to the supreme spiritual head of the Christian faith, written against a background of apocalyptic expectation and informed by the driving concerns of the friars. It was designed to improve training for missionaries and to provide new skills to be employed in the defence of the Christian world against the enmity of non-Christians and of the Antichrist. It cannot usefully be read solely in the context of the history of science and philosophy. With regard to religion's influence on Bacon's philosophy, Charles Sanders Peirce noted, "To Roger Bacon... the schoolmen's conception of reasoning appeared only an obstacle to truth... [but] Of all kinds of experience, the best, he thought, was interior illumination, which teaches many things about Nature which the external senses could never discover, such as the transubstantiation of bread." In Oxford lore, Bacon is credited as the namesake of Folly Bridge for having gotten himself placed under house arrest nearby. Although this is probably untrue, it had formerly been known as "Friar Bacon's Bridge". Bacon is also honoured at Oxford by a plaque affixed to the wall of the new Westgate shopping centre. In popular culture. To commemorate the 700th anniversary of Bacon's approximate year of birth, Prof. J. Erskine wrote the biographical play "A Pageant of the Thirteenth Century", which was performed and published by Columbia University in 1914. A fictionalised account of Bacon's life and times also appears in the second book of James Blish's "After Such Knowledge" trilogy, the 1964 "Doctor Mirabilis". Bacon serves as a mentor to the protagonists of Thomas Costain's 1945 "The Black Rose", and Umberto Eco's 1980 "The Name of the Rose". Greene's play prompted a less successful sequel "John of Bordeaux" and was recast as a children's story for James Baldwin's 1905 "Thirty More Famous Stories Retold". "The Brazen Head of Friar Bacon" also appears in Daniel Defoe's 1722 "Journal of the Plague Year", Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1843 "The Birth-Mark" and 1844 "The Artist of the Beautiful", William Douglas O'Connor's 1891 "The Brazen Android" (where Bacon devises it to terrify King Henry into accepting Simon de Montfort's demands for greater democracy), John Cowper Powys's 1956 "The Brazen Head", and Robertson Davies's 1970 "Fifth Business".

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H. G. Wells Herbert George Wells (21 September 186613 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography and autobiography. His work also included two books on recreational war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called the "father of science fiction", along with Jules Verne and the publisher Hugo Gernsback. During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the "Shakespeare of science fiction". Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption – dubbed “Wells's law” – leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 as "O Realist of the Fantastic!". His most notable science fiction works include "The Time Machine" (1895), "The Island of Doctor Moreau" (1896), "The Invisible Man" (1897), "The War of the Worlds" (1898) and the military science fiction "The War in the Air" (1907). Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. Wells's earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also an outspoken Socialist from a young age, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction, while he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of journalist. Novels such as "Kipps" and "The History of Mr Polly", which describe lower-middle-class life, led to the suggestion that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in "Tono-Bungay" (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole. Wells was a diabetic and co-founded the charity The Diabetic Association (known today as Diabetes UK) in 1934. Life. Early life. Herbert George Wells was born at Atlas House, 162 High Street in Bromley, Kent, on 21 September 1866. Called "Bertie" by his family, he was the fourth and last child of Sarah Neal, a former domestic servant, and Joseph Wells, a former domestic gardener, and at the time a shopkeeper and professional cricketer. An inheritance had allowed the family to acquire a shop in which they sold china and sporting goods, although it failed to prosper: the stock was old and worn out, and the location was poor. Joseph Wells managed to earn a meagre income, but little of it came from the shop and he received an unsteady amount of money from playing professional cricket for the Kent county team. Payment for skilled bowlers and batsmen came from voluntary donations afterwards, or from small payments from the clubs where matches were played. A defining incident of young Wells's life was an accident in 1874 that left him bedridden with a broken leg. To pass the time he began to read books from the local library, brought to him by his father. He soon became devoted to the other worlds and lives to which books gave him access; they also stimulated his desire to write. Later that year he entered Thomas Morley's Commercial Academy, a private school founded in 1849, following the bankruptcy of Morley's earlier school. The teaching was erratic, the curriculum mostly focused, Wells later said, on producing copperplate handwriting and doing the sort of sums useful to tradesmen. Wells continued at Morley's Academy until 1880. In 1877, his father, Joseph Wells, suffered a fractured thigh. The accident effectively put an end to Joseph's career as a cricketer, and his subsequent earnings as a shopkeeper were not enough to compensate for the loss of the primary source of family income. No longer able to support themselves financially, the family instead sought to place their sons as apprentices in various occupations. From 1880 to 1883, Wells had an unhappy apprenticeship as a draper at the Southsea Drapery Emporium, Hyde's. His experiences at Hyde's, where he worked a thirteen-hour day and slept in a dormitory with other apprentices, later inspired his novels "The Wheels of Chance", "The History of Mr Polly", and "Kipps", which portray the life of a draper's apprentice as well as providing a critique of society's distribution of wealth. Wells's parents had a turbulent marriage, owing primarily to his mother's being a Protestant and his father's being a freethinker. When his mother returned to work as a lady's maid (at Uppark, a country house in Sussex), one of the conditions of work was that she would not be permitted to have living space for her husband and children. Thereafter, she and Joseph lived separate lives, though they never divorced and remained faithful to each other. As a consequence, Herbert's personal troubles increased as he subsequently failed as a draper and also, later, as a chemist's assistant. However, Uppark had a magnificent library in which he immersed himself, reading many classic works, including Plato's "Republic", Thomas More's "Utopia", and the works of Daniel Defoe. This was the beginning of Wells's venture into literature. Teacher. In October 1879, Wells's mother arranged through a distant relative, Arthur Williams, for him to join the National School at Wookey in Somerset as a pupil–teacher, a senior pupil who acted as a teacher of younger children. In December that year, however, Williams was dismissed for irregularities in his qualifications and Wells was returned to Uppark. After a short apprenticeship at a chemist in nearby Midhurst and an even shorter stay as a boarder at Midhurst Grammar School, he signed his apprenticeship papers at Hyde's. In 1883, Wells persuaded his parents to release him from the apprenticeship, taking an opportunity offered by Midhurst Grammar School again to become a pupil–teacher; his proficiency in Latin and science during his earlier short stay had been remembered. The years he spent in Southsea had been the most miserable of his life to that point, but his good fortune at securing a position at Midhurst Grammar School meant that Wells could continue his self-education in earnest. The following year, Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (later the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, now part of Imperial College London) in London, studying biology under Thomas Henry Huxley. As an alumnus, he later helped to set up the Royal College of Science Association, of which he became the first president in 1909. Wells studied in his new school until 1887, with a weekly allowance of 21 shillings (a guinea) thanks to his scholarship. This ought to have been a comfortable sum of money (at the time many working class families had "round about a pound a week" as their entire household income) yet in his "Experiment in Autobiography", Wells speaks of constantly being hungry, and indeed photographs of him at the time show a youth who is very thin and malnourished. He soon entered the Debating Society of the school. These years mark the beginning of his interest in a possible reformation of society. At first approaching the subject through Plato's "Republic", he soon turned to contemporary ideas of socialism as expressed by the recently formed Fabian Society and free lectures delivered at Kelmscott House, the home of William Morris. He was also among the founders of "The Science School Journal", a school magazine that allowed him to express his views on literature and society, as well as trying his hand at fiction; a precursor to his novel "The Time Machine" was published in the journal under the title "The Chronic Argonauts". The school year 1886–87 was the last year of his studies. During 1888, Wells stayed in Stoke-on-Trent, living in Basford. The unique environment of The Potteries was certainly an inspiration. He wrote in a letter to a friend from the area that "the district made an immense impression on me." The inspiration for some of his descriptions in "The War of the Worlds" is thought to have come from his short time spent here, seeing the iron foundry furnaces burn over the city, shooting huge red light into the skies. His stay in The Potteries also resulted in the macabre short story "The Cone" (1895, contemporaneous with his famous "The Time Machine"), set in the north of the city. After teaching for some time, he was briefly on the staff of Holt Academy in Wales – Wells found it necessary to supplement his knowledge relating to educational principles and methodology and entered the College of Preceptors (College of Teachers). He later received his Licentiate and Fellowship FCP diplomas from the college. It was not until 1890 that Wells earned a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology from the University of London External Programme. In 1889–90, he managed to find a post as a teacher at Henley House School in London, where he taught A. A. Milne (whose father ran the school). His first published work was a "Text-Book of Biology" in two volumes (1893). Upon leaving the Normal School of Science, Wells was left without a source of income. His aunt Mary—his father's sister-in-law—invited him to stay with her for a while, which solved his immediate problem of accommodation. During his stay at his aunt's residence, he grew increasingly interested in her daughter, Isabel, whom he later courted. To earn money, he began writing short humorous articles for journals such as "The Pall Mall Gazette", later collecting these in volume form as "Select Conversations with an Uncle" (1895) and "Certain Personal Matters" (1897). So prolific did Wells become at this mode of journalism that many of his early pieces remain unidentified. According to David C. Smith, "Most of Wells's occasional pieces have not been collected, and many have not even been identified as his. Wells did not automatically receive the byline his reputation demanded until after 1896 or so ... As a result, many of his early pieces are unknown. It is obvious that many early Wells items have been lost." His success with these shorter pieces encouraged him to write book-length work, and he published his first novel, "The Time Machine", in 1895. Personal life. In 1891, Wells married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells (1865–1931; from 1902 Isabel Mary Smith). The couple agreed to separate in 1894, when he had fallen in love with one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins (1872–1927; later known as Jane), with whom he moved to Woking, Surrey, in May 1895. They lived in a rented house, 'Lynton', (now No.141) Maybury Road in the town centre for just under 18 months and married at St Pancras register office in October 1895. His short period in Woking was perhaps the most creative and productive of his whole writing career, for while there he planned and wrote "The War of the Worlds" and "The Time Machine", completed "The Island of Doctor Moreau", wrote and published "The Wonderful Visit" and "The Wheels of Chance", and began writing two other early books, "When the Sleeper Wakes" and "Love and Mr Lewisham". In late summer 1896, Wells and Jane moved to a larger house in Worcester Park, near Kingston upon Thames, for two years; this lasted until his poor health took them to Sandgate, near Folkestone, where he constructed a large family home, Spade House, in 1901. He had two sons with Jane: George Philip (known as "Gip"; 1901–1985) and Frank Richard (1903–1982) (grandfather of film director Simon Wells). Jane died on 6 October 1927, in Dunmow, at the age of 55. Wells had affairs with a significant number of women. In December 1909, he had a daughter, Anna-Jane, with the writer Amber Reeves, whose parents, William and Maud Pember Reeves, he had met through the Fabian Society. Amber had married the barrister G. R. Blanco White in July of that year, as co-arranged by Wells. After Beatrice Webb voiced disapproval of Wells' "sordid intrigue" with Amber, he responded by lampooning Beatrice Webb and her husband Sidney Webb in his 1911 novel "The New Machiavelli" as 'Altiora and Oscar Bailey', a pair of short-sighted, bourgeois manipulators. Between 1910 and 1913, novelist Elizabeth von Arnim was one of his mistresses. In 1914, he had a son, Anthony West (1914–1987), by the novelist and feminist Rebecca West, 26 years his junior. In 1920–21, and intermittently until his death, he had a love affair with the American birth control activist Margaret Sanger. Between 1924 and 1933 he partnered with the 22-year younger Dutch adventurer and writer Odette Keun, with whom he lived in "Lou Pidou", a house they built together in Grasse, France. Wells dedicated his longest book to her ("The World of William Clissold", 1926). When visiting Maxim Gorky in Russia 1920, he had slept with Gorky's mistress Moura Budberg, then still Countess Benckendorf and 27 years his junior. In 1933, when she left Gorky and emigrated to London, their relationship renewed and she cared for him through his final illness. Wells asked her to marry him repeatedly, but Budberg strongly rejected his proposals. In "Experiment in Autobiography" (1934), Wells wrote: "I was never a great amorist, though I have loved several people very deeply". David Lodge's novel "A Man of Parts" (2011)—a 'narrative based on factual sources' (author's note)—gives a convincing and generally sympathetic account of Wells's relations with the women mentioned above, and others. Director Simon Wells (born 1961), the author's great-grandson, was a consultant on the future scenes in "Back to the Future Part II" (1989). Artist. One of the ways that Wells expressed himself was through his drawings and sketches. One common location for these was the endpapers and title pages of his own diaries, and they covered a wide variety of topics, from political commentary to his feelings toward his literary contemporaries and his current romantic interests. During his marriage to Amy Catherine, whom he nicknamed Jane, he drew a considerable number of pictures, many of them being overt comments on their marriage. During this period, he called these pictures "picshuas". These picshuas have been the topic of study by Wells scholars for many years, and in 2006, a book was published on the subject. Writer. Some of his early novels, called "scientific romances", invented several themes now classic in science fiction in such works as "The Time Machine", "The Island of Doctor Moreau", "The Invisible Man", "The War of the Worlds", "When the Sleeper Wakes", and "The First Men in the Moon". He also wrote realistic novels that received critical acclaim, including "Kipps" and a critique of English culture during the Edwardian period, "Tono-Bungay". Wells also wrote dozens of short stories and novellas, including, "The Flowering of the Strange Orchid", which helped bring the full impact of Darwin's revolutionary botanical ideas to a wider public, and was followed by many later successes such as "The Country of the Blind" (1904). According to James Gunn, one of Wells's major contributions to the science fiction genre was his approach, which he referred to as his "new system of ideas". In his opinion, the author should always strive to make the story as credible as possible, even if both the writer and the reader knew certain elements are impossible, allowing the reader to accept the ideas as something that could really happen, today referred to as "the plausible impossible" and "suspension of disbelief". While neither invisibility nor time travel was new in speculative fiction, Wells added a sense of realism to the concepts which the readers were not familiar with. He conceived the idea of using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposely and selectively forwards or backwards in time. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle. He explained that while writing "The Time Machine", he realized that "the more impossible the story I had to tell, the more ordinary must be the setting, and the circumstances in which I now set the Time Traveller were all that I could imagine of solid upper-class comforts." In "Wells's Law", a science fiction story should contain only a single extraordinary assumption. Therefore, as justifications for the impossible, he employed scientific ideas and theories. Wells's best-known statement of the "law" appears in his introduction to a collection of his works published in 1934: As soon as the magic trick has been done the whole business of the fantasy writer is to keep everything else human and real. Touches of prosaic detail are imperative and a rigorous adherence to the hypothesis. Any extra fantasy outside the cardinal assumption immediately gives a touch of irresponsible silliness to the invention. Dr. Griffin / The Invisible Man is a brilliant research scientist who discovers a method of invisibility, but finds himself unable to reverse the process. An enthusiast of random and irresponsible violence, Griffin has become an iconic character in horror fiction. "The Island of Doctor Moreau" sees a shipwrecked man left on the island home of Doctor Moreau, a mad scientist who creates human-like hybrid beings from animals via vivisection. The earliest depiction of uplift, the novel deals with a number of philosophical themes, including pain and cruelty, moral responsibility, human identity, and human interference with nature. In "The First Men in the Moon" Wells used the idea of radio communication between astronomical objects, a plot point inspired by Nikola Tesla's claim that he had received radio signals from Mars. Though "Tono-Bungay" is not a science-fiction novel, radioactive decay plays a small but consequential role in it. Radioactive decay plays a much larger role in "The World Set Free" (1914). This book contains what is surely his biggest prophetic "hit", with the first description of a nuclear weapon. Scientists of the day were well aware that the natural decay of radium releases energy at a slow rate over thousands of years. The "rate" of release is too slow to have practical utility, but the "total amount" released is huge. Wells's novel revolves around an (unspecified) invention that accelerates the process of radioactive decay, producing bombs that explode with no more than the force of ordinary high explosives—but which "continue to explode" for days on end. "Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century", he wrote, "than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible ... [but] they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands". In 1932, the physicist and conceiver of nuclear chain reaction Leó Szilárd read "The World Set Free" (the same year Sir James Chadwick discovered the neutron), a book which he said made a great impression on him. In addition to writing early science fiction, he produced work dealing with mythological beings like an angel in the novel "The Wonderful Visit" (1895) and a mermaid in the novel "The Sea Lady" (1902). Wells also wrote non-fiction. His first non-fiction bestseller was "Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought" (1901). When originally serialised in a magazine it was subtitled "An Experiment in Prophecy", and is considered his most explicitly futuristic work. It offered the immediate political message of the privileged sections of society continuing to bar capable men from other classes from advancement until war would force a need to employ those most able, rather than the traditional upper classes, as leaders. Anticipating what the world would be like in the year 2000, the book is interesting both for its hits (trains and cars resulting in the dispersion of populations from cities to suburbs; moral restrictions declining as men and women seek greater sexual freedom; the defeat of German militarism, and the existence of a European Union) and its misses (he did not expect successful aircraft before 1950, and averred that "my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea"). His bestselling two-volume work, "The Outline of History" (1920), began a new era of popularised world history. It received a mixed critical response from professional historians. However, it was very popular amongst the general population and made Wells a rich man. Many other authors followed with "Outlines" of their own in other subjects. He reprised his "Outline" in 1922 with a much shorter popular work, "A Short History of the World", a history book praised by Albert Einstein, and two long efforts, "The Science of Life" (1930)—written with his son G. P. Wells and evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, and "The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind" (1931). The "Outlines" became sufficiently common for James Thurber to parody the trend in his humorous essay, "An Outline of Scientists"—indeed, Wells's "Outline of History" remains in print with a new 2005 edition, while "A Short History of the World" has been re-edited (2006). From quite early in Wells's career, he sought a better way to organise society and wrote a number of Utopian novels. The first of these was "A Modern Utopia" (1905), which shows a worldwide utopia with "no imports but meteorites, and no exports at all"; two travellers from our world fall into its alternate history. The others usually begin with the world rushing to catastrophe, until people realise a better way of living: whether by mysterious gases from a comet causing people to behave rationally and abandoning a European war ("In the Days of the Comet" (1906)), or a world council of scientists taking over, as in "The Shape of Things to Come" (1933, which he later adapted for the 1936 Alexander Korda film, "Things to Come"). This depicted, all too accurately, the impending World War, with cities being destroyed by aerial bombs. He also portrayed the rise of fascist dictators in "The Autocracy of Mr Parham" (1930) and "The Holy Terror" (1939). "Men Like Gods" (1923) is also a utopian novel. Wells in this period was regarded as an enormously influential figure; the critic Malcolm Cowley stated: "by the time he was forty, his influence was wider than any other living English writer". Wells contemplates the ideas of nature and nurture and questions humanity in books such as "The First Men in the Moon", where nature is completely suppressed by nurture, and "The Island of Doctor Moreau", where the strong presence of nature represents a threat to a civilized society. Not all his scientific romances ended in a Utopia, and Wells also wrote a dystopian novel, "When the Sleeper Wakes" (1899, rewritten as "The Sleeper Awakes", 1910), which pictures a future society where the classes have become more and more separated, leading to a revolt of the masses against the rulers. "The Island of Doctor Moreau" is even darker. The narrator, having been trapped on an island of animals vivisected (unsuccessfully) into human beings, eventually returns to England; like Gulliver on his return from the Houyhnhnms, he finds himself unable to shake off the perceptions of his fellow humans as barely civilised beasts, slowly reverting to their animal natures. Wells also wrote the preface for the first edition of W. N. P. Barbellion's diaries, "The Journal of a Disappointed Man", published in 1919. Since "Barbellion" was the real author's pen name, many reviewers believed Wells to have been the true author of the "Journal"; Wells always denied this, despite being full of praise for the diaries. In 1927, a Canadian teacher and writer Florence Deeks unsuccessfully sued Wells for infringement of copyright and breach of trust, claiming that much of "The Outline of History" had been plagiarised from her unpublished manuscript, "The Web of the World's Romance", which had spent nearly nine months in the hands of Wells's Canadian publisher, Macmillan Canada. However, it was sworn on oath at the trial that the manuscript remained in Toronto in the safekeeping of Macmillan, and that Wells did not even know it existed, let alone had seen it. The court found no proof of copying, and decided the similarities were due to the fact that the books had similar nature and both writers had access to the same sources. In 2000, A. B. McKillop, a professor of history at Carleton University, produced a book on the case, "The Spinster & The Prophet: Florence Deeks, H. G. Wells, and the Mystery of the Purloined Past". According to McKillop, the lawsuit was unsuccessful due to the prejudice against a woman suing a well-known and famous male author, and he paints a detailed story based on the circumstantial evidence of the case. In 2004, Denis N. Magnusson, Professor Emeritus of the Faculty of Law, Queen's University, Ontario, published an article on "Deeks v. Wells". This re-examines the case in relation to McKillop's book. While having some sympathy for Deeks, he argues that she had a weak case that was not well presented, and though she may have met with sexism from her lawyers, she received a fair trial, adding that the law applied is essentially the same law that would be applied to a similar case today (i.e., 2004). In 1933, Wells predicted in "The Shape of Things to Come" that the world war he feared would begin in January 1940, a prediction which ultimately came true four months early, in September 1939, with the outbreak of World War II. In 1936, before the Royal Institution, Wells called for the compilation of a constantly growing and changing World Encyclopaedia, to be reviewed by outstanding authorities and made accessible to every human being. In 1938, he published a collection of essays on the future organisation of knowledge and education, "World Brain", including the essay "The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia". Prior to 1933, Wells's books were widely read in Germany and Austria, and most of his science fiction works had been translated shortly after publication. By 1933, he had attracted the attention of German officials because of his criticism of the political situation in Germany, and on 10 May 1933, Wells's books were burned by the Nazi youth in Berlin's Opernplatz, and his works were banned from libraries and book stores. Wells, as president of PEN International (Poets, Essayists, Novelists), angered the Nazis by overseeing the expulsion of the German PEN club from the international body in 1934 following the German PEN's refusal to admit non-Aryan writers to its membership. At a PEN conference in Ragusa, Wells refused to yield to Nazi sympathisers who demanded that the exiled author Ernst Toller be prevented from speaking. Near the end of World War II, Allied forces discovered that the SS had compiled lists of people slated for immediate arrest during the invasion of Britain in the abandoned Operation Sea Lion, with Wells included in the alphabetical list of "The Black Book". Seeking a more structured way to play war games, Wells also wrote "Floor Games" (1911) followed by "Little Wars" (1913), which set out rules for fighting battles with toy soldiers (miniatures). "Little Wars" is recognised today as the first recreational war game and Wells is regarded by gamers and hobbyists as "the Father of Miniature War Gaming". A pacifist prior to the First World War, Wells stated "how much better is this amiable miniature [war] than the real thing". According to Wells, the idea of the game developed from a visit by his friend Jerome K. Jerome. After dinner, Jerome began shooting down toy soldiers with a toy cannon and Wells joined in to compete. During August 1914, immediately after the outbreak of the First World War, Wells published a number of articles in London newspapers that subsequently appeared as a book entitled "The War That Will End War". Wells blamed the Central Powers for the coming of the war and argued that only the defeat of German militarism could bring about an end to war. Wells used the shorter form of the phrase, "the war to end war", in "In the Fourth Year" (1918), in which he noted that the phrase "got into circulation" in the second half of 1914. In fact, it had become one of the most common catchphrases of the war. In 1918 Wells worked for the British War Propaganda Bureau, also called Wellington House. Wells was also one of fifty-three leading British authors — a number that included Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — who signed their names to the “Authors' Declaration.” This manifesto declared that the German invasion of Belgium had been a brutal crime, and that Britain “could not without dishonour have refused to take part in the present war.” Travels to Russia and the Soviet Union. Wells visited Russia three times: 1914, 1920 and 1934. During his second visit, he saw his old friend Maxim Gorky and with Gorky's help, met Vladimir Lenin. In his book "Russia in the Shadows", Wells portrayed Russia as recovering from a total social collapse, "the completest that has ever happened to any modern social organisation." On 23 July 1934, after visiting U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wells went to the Soviet Union and interviewed Joseph Stalin for three hours for the "New Statesman" magazine, which was extremely rare at that time. He told Stalin how he had seen 'the happy faces of healthy people' in contrast with his previous visit to Moscow in 1920. However, he also criticised the lawlessness, class discrimination, state violence, and absence of free expression. Stalin enjoyed the conversation and replied accordingly. As the chairman of the London-based PEN Club, which protected the rights of authors to write without being intimidated, Wells hoped by his trip to USSR, he could win Stalin over by force of argument. Before he left, he realised that no reform was to happen in the near future. Final years. Wells's literary reputation declined as he spent his later years promoting causes that were rejected by most of his contemporaries as well as by younger authors whom he had previously influenced. In this connection, George Orwell described Wells as "too sane to understand the modern world". G. K. Chesterton quipped: "Mr Wells is a born storyteller who has sold his birthright for a pot of message". Wells had diabetes, and was a co-founder in 1934 of The Diabetic Association (now Diabetes UK, the leading charity for people with diabetes in the UK). On 28 October 1940, on the radio station KTSA in San Antonio, Texas, Wells took part in a radio interview with Orson Welles, who two years previously had performed a famous radio adaptation of "The War of the Worlds". During the interview, by Charles C Shaw, a KTSA radio host, Wells admitted his surprise at the sensation that resulted from the broadcast but acknowledged his debt to Welles for increasing sales of one of his "more obscure" titles. Death. Wells died of unspecified causes on 13 August 1946, aged 79, at his home at 13 Hanover Terrace, overlooking Regent's Park, London. In his preface to the 1941 edition of "The War in the Air", Wells had stated that his epitaph should be: "I told you so. You "damned" fools". Wells' body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 16 August 1946; his ashes were subsequently scattered into the English Channel at Old Harry Rocks near Swanage in Dorset. A commemorative blue plaque in his honour was installed by the Greater London Council at his home in Regent's Park in 1966. Futurist. A futurist and “visionary”, Wells foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. Asserting that "Wells' visions of the future remain unsurpassed", John Higgs, author of "Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century", states that in the late 19th century Wells “saw the coming century clearer than anyone else. He anticipated wars in the air, the sexual revolution, motorised transport causing the growth of suburbs and a proto-Wikipedia he called the "world brain". In his novel "The World Set Free", he imagined an “atomic bomb” of terrifying power that would be dropped from aeroplanes. This was an extraordinary insight for an author writing in 1913, and it made a deep impression on Winston Churchill." In 2011, Wells was among a group of science fiction writers featured in the "Prophets of Science Fiction" series, a show produced and hosted by film director Sir Ridley Scott, which depicts how predictions influenced the development of scientific advancements by inspiring many readers to assist in transforming those futuristic visions into everyday reality. In a 2013 review of "The Time Machine" for the "New Yorker" magazine, Brad Leithauser writes, "At the base of Wells's great visionary exploit is this rational, ultimately scientific attempt to tease out the potential future consequences of present conditions—not as they might arise in a few years, or even decades, but millennia hence, epochs hence. He is world literature's Great Extrapolator. Like no other fiction writer before him, he embraced "deep time." Political views. Wells was a socialist and a member of the Fabian Society. Winston Churchill was an avid reader of Wells' books, and after they first met in 1902 they kept in touch until Wells died in 1946. As a junior minister Churchill borrowed lines from Wells for one of his most famous early landmark speeches in 1906, and as Prime Minister the phrase "the gathering storm" — used by Churchill to describe the rise of Nazi Germany — had been written by Wells in "The War of the Worlds", which depicts an attack on Britain by Martians. Wells's extensive writings on equality and human rights, most notably his most influential work, "The Rights of Man" (1940), laid the groundwork for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations shortly after his death. His efforts regarding the League of Nations, on which he collaborated on the project with Leonard Woolf with the booklets "The Idea of a League of Nations", "Prolegomena to the Study of World Organization", and "The Way of the League of Nations", became a disappointment as the organization turned out to be a weak one unable to prevent the Second World War, which itself occurred towards the very end of his life and only increased the pessimistic side of his nature. In his last book "Mind at the End of Its Tether" (1945), he considered the idea that humanity being replaced by another species might not be a bad idea. He referred to the era between the two World Wars as "The Age of Frustration". Religious views. Wells' views on God and religion changed over his lifetime. Early in his life he distanced himself from Christianity, and later from theism, and finally, late in life, he was essentially atheistic. Martin Gardner succinctly summarises this progression:[The younger Wells] ...did not object to using the word "God" provided it did not imply anything resembling human personality. In his middle years Wells went through a phase of defending the concept of a "finite God," similar to the god of such process theologians as Samuel Alexander, Edgar Brightman, and Charles Hartshorne. (He even wrote a book about it called "God the Invisible King".) Later Wells decided he was really an atheist. In "God the Invisible King" (1917), Wells wrote that his idea of God did not draw upon the traditional religions of the world: This book sets out as forcibly and exactly as possible the religious belief of the writer. [Which] is a profound belief in a personal and intimate God. ... Putting the leading idea of this book very roughly, these two antagonistic typical conceptions of God may be best contrasted by speaking of one of them as God-as-Nature or the Creator, and of the other as God-as-Christ or the Redeemer. One is the great Outward God; the other is the Inmost God. The first idea was perhaps developed most highly and completely in the God of Spinoza. It is a conception of God tending to pantheism, to an idea of a comprehensive God as ruling with justice rather than affection, to a conception of aloofness and awestriking worshipfulness. The second idea, which is contradictory to this idea of an absolute God, is the God of the human heart. The writer suggested that the great outline of the theological struggles of that phase of civilisation and world unity which produced Christianity, was a persistent but unsuccessful attempt to get these two different ideas of God into one focus. Later in the work, he aligns himself with a "renascent or modern religion ... neither atheist nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian ... [that] he has found growing up in himself". Of Christianity, he said: "it is not now true for me. ... Every believing Christian is, I am sure, my spiritual brother ... but if systemically I called myself a Christian I feel that to most men I should imply too much and so tell a lie". Of other world religions, he writes: "All these religions are true for me as Canterbury Cathedral is a true thing and as a Swiss chalet is a true thing. There they are, and they have served a purpose, they have worked. Only they are not true for me to live in them. ... They do not work for me". In "The Fate of Homo Sapiens" (1939), Wells criticised almost all world religions and philosophies, stating "there is no creed, no way of living left in the world at all, that really meets the needs of the time… When we come to look at them coolly and dispassionately, all the main religions, patriotic, moral and customary systems in which human beings are sheltering today, appear to be in a state of jostling and mutually destructive movement, like the houses and palaces and other buildings of some vast, sprawling city overtaken by a landslide. Wells' opposition to organised religion reached a fever pitch in 1943 with publication of his book "Crux Ansata", subtitled "An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church". Literary influence. The science fiction historian John Clute describes Wells as "the most important writer the genre has yet seen", and notes his work has been central to both British and American science fiction. Science fiction author and critic Algis Budrys said Wells "remains the outstanding expositor of both the hope, and the despair, which are embodied in the technology and which are the major facts of life in our world". He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921, 1932, 1935, and 1946. Wells so influenced real exploration of Mars that an impact crater on the planet was named after him. In the United Kingdom, Wells's work was a key model for the British "scientific romance", and other writers in that mode, such as Olaf Stapledon, J. D. Beresford, S. Fowler Wright, and Naomi Mitchison, all drew on Wells's example. Wells was also an important influence on British science fiction of the period after the Second World War, with Arthur C. Clarke and Brian Aldiss expressing strong admiration for Wells's work. Among contemporary British science fiction writers, Stephen Baxter, Christopher Priest and Adam Roberts have all acknowledged Wells's influence on their writing; all three are Vice-Presidents of the H. G. Wells Society. He also had a strong influence on British scientist J. B. S. Haldane, who wrote "Daedalus; or, Science and the Future" (1924), "The Last Judgement" and "On Being the Right Size" from the essay collection "Possible Worlds" (1927), and "Biological Possibilities for the Human Species in the Next Ten Thousand Years" (1963), which are speculations about the future of human evolution and life on other planets. Haldane gave several lectures about these topics which in turn influenced other science fiction writers. In the United States, Hugo Gernsback reprinted most of Wells's work in the pulp magazine "Amazing Stories", regarding Wells's work as "texts of central importance to the self-conscious new genre". Later American writers such as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert and Ursula K. Le Guin all recalled being influenced by Wells's work. Sinclair Lewis's early novels were strongly influenced by Wells's realistic social novels, such as "The History of Mr Polly"; Lewis also named his first son Wells after the author. In an interview with "The Paris Review", Vladimir Nabokov described Wells as his favourite writer when he was a boy and "a great artist." He went on to cite "The Passionate Friends", "Ann Veronica", "The Time Machine", and "The Country of the Blind" as superior to anything else written by Wells's British contemporaries. In an apparent allusion to Wells's socialism and political themes, Nabokov said: "His sociological cogitations can be safely ignored, of course, but his romances and fantasies are superb." Jorge Luis Borges wrote many short pieces on Wells in which he demonstrates a deep familiarity with much of Wells's work. While Borges wrote several critical reviews, including a mostly negative review of Wells's film "Things to Come", he regularly treated Wells as a canonical figure of fantastic literature. Late in his life, Borges included "The Invisible Man" and "The Time Machine" in his "Prologue to a Personal Library", a curated list of 100 great works of literature that he undertook at the behest of the Argentine publishing house Emecé. Canadian author Margaret Atwood read Wells' books, and he also inspired writers of European speculative fiction such as Karel Čapek and Yevgeny Zamyatin. Literary papers. In 1954, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign purchased the H. G. Wells literary papers and correspondence collection. The University's Rare Book & Manuscript Library holds the largest collection of Wells manuscripts, correspondence, first editions and publications in the United States. Among these is unpublished material and the manuscripts of such works as "The War of the Worlds" and "The Time Machine". The collection includes first editions, revisions, translations. The letters contain general family correspondence, communications from publishers, material regarding the Fabian Society, and letters from politicians and public figures, most notably George Bernard Shaw and Joseph Conrad.

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James A. Michener James Albert Michener ( or ; February 3, 1907 – October 16, 1997) was an American author. He wrote more than 40 books, most of which were lengthy, fictional family sagas covering the lives of many generations in particular geographic locales and incorporating detailed history. Michener had numerous bestsellers and works selected by the Book of the Month Club, and was known for his meticulous research behind the books. Michener's books include "Tales of the South Pacific" for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948, "Hawaii", "The Drifters", "Centennial", "The Source", "The Fires of Spring", "Chesapeake", "Caribbean", "Caravans", "Alaska", "Texas", "Space", and "Poland", as well as "The Bridges at Toko-ri". His non-fiction works include "Iberia", about his travels in Spain and Portugal; his memoir titled "The World Is My Home"; and "Sports in America". "Return to Paradise" combines fictional short stories with Michener's factual descriptions of the Pacific areas where they take place. His first book was adapted as the popular Broadway musical "South Pacific" by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and later as eponymous feature films in 1958 and 2001, adding to his financial success. A number of his other stories and novels were adapted for films or TV series. He also wrote a book entitled "Presidential Lottery: The Reckless Gamble in Our Electoral System", in which he condemns the United States' Electoral College system. It was published in 1969, and republished in 2014 and 2016. Biography. Michener wrote that he did not know who his biological parents were, or exactly when or where he was born. He was raised a Quaker by an adoptive mother, Mabel Michener, in Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Michener graduated from Doylestown High School in 1925. He attended Swarthmore College, in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where he played basketball and was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. After graduating summa cum laude in 1929, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and History, he traveled and studied in Scotland at the University of St Andrews in the medieval town of St. Andrews, Fife on the coast of the North Sea for two years. Michener took a job as a high school English teacher at The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. From 1933 to 1936, he taught English at George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania. He attended Colorado State Teachers College in Greeley, Colorado, (in 1970 renamed the University of Northern Colorado), where he earned a Master of Arts degree in Education. After graduation, he taught at the university and at College High School (the University Lab School) for several years. The library at the University of Northern Colorado was named after him in October 1972. In 1935, Michener married Patti Koon. He accepted a Guest Lecturer position at Harvard, from 1939 to 1940, but left to join Macmillan Publishers as their social studies education editor. Although as a Quaker, he could have qualified as a conscientious objector and not been drafted into the military, Michener enlisted in the United States Navy during World War II (1941–1945). He traveled throughout the South Pacific Ocean on various assignments which he gained because his base commanders mistakenly thought his father was Admiral Marc Mitscher. His experiences during these travels inspired the stories published in his breakout work "Tales of the South Pacific". In 1960, Michener was chairman of the Bucks County committee to elect Democrat John F. Kennedy as the 35th President. In 1962, he unsuccessfully ran as a Democratic Party candidate for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania, a decision he later considered a misstep. "My mistake was to run in 1962 as a Democratic candidate for Congress. [My wife] kept saying, 'Don't do it, don't do it.' I lost and went back to writing books." In 1968, Michener served as the campaign manager for the third-term run of the twice-elected U.S. Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania. Michener later served as Secretary for the 1967–1968 Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention. Also that year, Michener was a member of the Electoral College, serving as a Pennsylvania Democrat. He wrote about that experience in a political science text "Presidential Lottery: The Reckless Gamble in Our Electoral System", which was published the following year. In it, he suggested alternate systems, including using a direct popular vote by majority for the office of President of the United States and other more creative solutions. Writing career. Michener began his writing career during World War II, when as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy he was assigned to the South Pacific as a naval historian. He later turned his notes and impressions into "Tales of the South Pacific" (1947), his first book, published when he was age 40. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1948, and Rodgers and Hammerstein adapted it as the hit Broadway musical "South Pacific", which premiered on Broadway in New York City in 1949. The musical was also adapted as eponymous feature films in 1958 and 2001. In the late 1950s, Michener began working as a roving editor for the "Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature". He gave up that work in 1970. Michener tried television writing but was unsuccessful. American television producer Bob Mann wanted Michener to co-create a weekly anthology series from "Tales of the South Pacific" and serve as narrator. Rodgers and Hammerstein, however, had bought all dramatic rights to the novel and did not relinquish their ownership. Michener did lend his name to a different television series, "Adventures in Paradise", in 1959, starring Gardner McKay as Captain Adam Troy in the sailing ship "Tiki III". Michener was a popular writer during his lifetime; his novels sold an estimated 75 million copies worldwide. His novel "Hawaii" (1959), well-timed on its publication when Hawaii became the 50th state, was based on extensive research. He used this approach for nearly all of his subsequent novels, which were based on detailed historical, cultural, and even geological research. "Centennial" (1974), which documented several generations of families in the Rocky Mountains of the American West, was adapted as a popular 12-part television miniseries of the same name and aired on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC television network) from October 1978 through February 1979. In 1996, State House Press published "James A. Michener: A Bibliography", compiled by David A. Groseclose. Its more than 2,500 entries from 1923 to 1995 include magazine articles, forewords, and other works. Michener's prodigious output made for lengthy novels, several of which run more than 1,000 pages. The author states in "My Lost Mexico" (1992) that at times he would spend 12 to 15 hours per day at his typewriter for weeks on end, and that he used so much paper, his filing system had trouble keeping up. Marriages. Michener was married three times. In 1935, he married Patti Koon. In 1948, they divorced, and the same year Michener married his second wife, Vange Nord. Michener met his third wife, Mari Yoriko Sabusawa, at a luncheon in Chicago. An American, she and her Japanese parents were interned in western camps that the U.S. government set up during the early years of World War II to hold ethnic Japanese from West Coast / Pacific communities. Michener divorced Nord in 1955 and married Sabusawa the same year. Sabusawa died in 1994. Michener's novel "Sayonara" (1954) is quasi-autobiographical. Set during the early 1950s, it tells the story of Major Lloyd Gruver, a United States Air Force ace jet pilot in the Korean War (1950–1953), now stationed in Japan, who falls in love with Hana-Ogi, a Japanese woman. The novel follows their cross-cultural romance and illuminates the racism of the post-World War II time period. In 1957 it was adapted into the highly successful movie "Sayonara" which starred Marlon Brando, James Garner, Miiko Taka, and Red Buttons; Buttons won the 1958 Academy Award ("Oscar") for best supporting actor for his performance. Philanthropist. Michener became a major philanthropist, donating more than $100 million to educational, cultural, and writing institutions, including his "alma mater", Swarthmore College, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and the James A. Michener Art Museum, and more than $37 million to University of Texas at Austin. By 1992, his gifts made him UT Austin's largest single donor to that time. Over the years, Mari Michener played a major role in helping direct his donations. In 1989, Michener donated the royalty earnings from the Canadian edition of his novel "Journey" (1989), published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, to create the Journey Prize, an annual Canadian literary prize worth $10,000 (CDN) that is awarded for the year's best short story published by an emerging Canadian writer. Final years and death. In the Micheners' final years, he and his wife lived in Austin, Texas, and they endowed the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. The Center provides three-year Michener Fellowships in fiction, poetry, playwriting and screenwriting to a small number of students. Suffering from terminal kidney disease, in October 1997, Michener ended the daily dialysis treatment that had kept him alive for four years. He said he had accomplished what he wanted and did not want further physical complications. On October 16, 1997, he died of kidney failure, at age 90. Michener was cremated, and his ashes were placed next to those of his wife at Austin Memorial Park Cemetery in Austin, Texas. Michener is honored by a memorial headstone at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. Bequests. Michener left most of his estate and book copyrights to Swarthmore College, where he earned his bachelor's degree. He had donated his papers to the University of Northern Colorado, where he earned his master's degree. Honors. Many of the fondest memories of my travels stem back to my years of military service in the New Hebrides – (now Vanuatu) – during the Pacific War years of the early 1940s...While those beautiful islands have changed much with progress in the ensuing years, I know from subsequent visits that the friendliness of the peoples, their infectious smiles and their open-heartedness will remain forever one of life's treasures. James A. Michener Art Museum. Opened in 1988, in Michener's hometown of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, the James A. Michener Art Museum houses collections of local and well-known artists. Michener pledged $5.5 million to the museum in 1996. Constructed from the remains of an old state prison, the museum is a non-profit organization with both permanent and rotating collections. Two prominent permanent fixtures are the James A. Michener display room and the Nakashima Reading Room, constructed in honor of his third wife's Japanese heritage. The museum is known for its permanent collection of Pennsylvania Impressionist paintings. James A. Michener Society. The James A. Michener Society was formed in the fall of 1998. It comprises people who share a common interest and admirers of Michener's life and work. The society sponsors a variety of activities and publishes an electronic internet newsletter. Annual meetings of members are held at locations closely associated with Michener's life. The society's purpose is to: Works. In addition to writing novels, short stories, and non-fiction, Michener was very involved with movies, TV series, and radio. The following is only a selection of the listings in the Library of Congress files.

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Johann Gottfried Herder Johann Gottfried (after 1802, von) Herder (; ; 25 August 174418 December 1803) was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the Enlightenment, "Sturm und Drang", and Weimar Classicism. Biography. Born in Mohrungen (now Morąg, Poland) in the Kingdom of Prussia, Herder grew up in a poor household, educating himself from his father's Bible and songbook. In 1762, as a youth of 17, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, about 60 miles (100 km) north of Mohrungen, where he became a student of Immanuel Kant. At the same time, Herder became an intellectual protégé of Johann Georg Hamann, a Königsberg philosopher who disputed the claims of pure secular reason. Hamann's influence led Herder to confess to his wife later in life that "I have too little reason and too much idiosyncrasy", yet Herder can justly claim to have founded a new school of German political thought. Although himself an unsociable person, Herder influenced his contemporaries greatly. One friend wrote to him in 1785, hailing his works as "inspired by God." A varied field of theorists were later to find inspiration in Herder's tantalizingly incomplete ideas. In 1764, now a clergyman, Herder went to Riga to teach. It was during this period that he produced his first major works, which were literary criticism. In 1769 Herder traveled by ship to the French port of Nantes and continued on to Paris. This resulted in both an account of his travels as well as a shift of his own self-conception as an author. By 1770 Herder went to Strasbourg, where he met the young Goethe. This event proved to be a key juncture in the history of German literature, as Goethe was inspired by Herder's literary criticism to develop his own style. This can be seen as the beginning of the "Sturm und Drang" movement. In 1771 Herder took a position as head pastor and court preacher at Bückeburg under William, Count of Schaumburg-Lippe. By the mid-1770s, Goethe was a well-known author, and used his influence at the court of Weimar to secure Herder a position as General Superintendent. Herder moved there in 1776, where his outlook shifted again towards classicism. On May 2, 1773 Herder married Maria Karoline Flachsland (1750–1809) in Darmstadt. 1774 his son Gottfried (1774–1806) was born in Bückeburg. 1776 his second son August (1776–1838) was born in Bückeburg. His third son Wilhelm Ludwig Ernst was born 1778. His fourth son Karl Emil Adelbert (1779–1857) was born 1779 in Weimar. 1781 his daughter Luise (1781–1860) was born in Weimar. 1783 his fifth son Emil Ernst Gottfried (1783–1855) was born in Weimar. 1790 his sixth son Rinaldo Gottfried was born in Weimar. Towards the end of his career, Herder endorsed the French Revolution, which earned him the enmity of many of his colleagues. At the same time, he and Goethe experienced a personal split. Another reason for his isolation in later years was due to his unpopular attacks on Kantian philosophy. In 1802 Herder was ennobled by the Elector-Prince of Bavaria, which added the prefix "von" to his last name. He died in Weimar in 1803 at age 59. Works and ideas. In 1772 Herder published "Treatise on the Origin of Language" and went further in this promotion of language than his earlier injunction to "spew out the ugly slime of the Seine. Speak German, O You German". Herder now had established the foundations of comparative philology within the new currents of political outlook. Throughout this period, he continued to elaborate his own unique theory of aesthetics in works such as the above, while Goethe produced works like "The Sorrows of Young Werther"the Sturm und Drang movement was born. Herder wrote an important essay on Shakespeare and "Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker" (Extract from a correspondence about Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples) published in 1773 in a manifesto along with contributions by Goethe and Justus Möser. Herder wrote that "A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world." To him such poetry had its greatest purity and power in nations before they became civilised, as shown in the Old Testament, the Edda, and Homer, and he tried to find such virtues in ancient German folk songs and Norse poetry and mythology. Herder - most pronouncedly after Georg Forster's 1791 translation of the Sanskrit play "Shakuntala -" was influenced by the religious imagery of Hinduism and Indian literature, which he saw in a positive light, writing several essays on the topic and the preface to the 1803 edition of "Shakuntala". After becoming General Superintendent in 1776, Herder's philosophy shifted again towards classicism, and he produced works such as his unfinished "Outline of a Philosophical History of Humanity" which largely originated the school of historical thought. Herder's philosophy was of a deeply subjective turn, stressing influence by physical and historical circumstance upon human development, stressing that "one must go into the age, into the region, into the whole history, and feel one's way into everything". The historian should be the "regenerated contemporary" of the past, and history a science as "instrument of the most genuine patriotic spirit". Herder gave Germans new pride in their origins, modifying that dominance of regard allotted to Greek art ("Greek revival") extolled among others by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He remarked that he would have wished to be born in the Middle Ages and mused whether "the times of the Swabian emperors" did not "deserve to be set forth in their true light in accordance with the German mode of thought?". Herder equated the German with the Gothic and favoured Dürer and everything Gothic. As with the sphere of art, equally he proclaimed a national message within the sphere of language. He topped the line of German authors emanating from Martin Opitz, who had written his "Aristarchus, sive de contemptu linguae Teutonicae" in Latin in 1617, urging Germans to glory in their hitherto despised language. Herder's extensive collections of folk-poetry began a great craze in Germany for that neglected topic. Herder was one of the first to argue that language contributes to shaping the frameworks and the patterns with which each linguistic community thinks and feels. For Herder, language is "the organ of thought." This has often been misinterpreted, however. Neither Herder nor the great philosopher of language, Wilhelm von Humboldt, argue that language (written or oral) determines thought. Rather, language was the appropriation of the outer world within the human mind by means of distinguishing marks ("merkmale"). In positing his arguments, Herder reformulated an example from works by Moses Mendelssohn and Thomas Abbt. In his conjectural narrative of human origins, Herder argued that, although language did not determine thought, the first humans perceived sheep and their bleating, or subjects and corresponding "merkmale", as one and the same. That is, for these conjectured ancestors, the sheep were the bleating, and vice-versa. Hence, pre-linguistic cognition did not figure largely in Herderian conjectural narratives. Herder even moved beyond his narrative of human origins to contend that if active reflection ("besonnenheit") and language persisted in human consciousness, then human impulses to signify were immanent in the pasts, presents, and futures of humanity. Avi Lifschitz subsequently reframed Herder's "the organ of thought" quotation: "Herder's equation of word and idea, of language and cognition, prompted a further attack on any attribution of the first words to the imitation of natural sounds, to the physiology of the vocal organs, or to social convention...[Herder argued] for the linguistic character of our cognition but also for the cognitive nature of human language. One could not think without language, as various Enlightenment thinkers argued, but at the same time one could not properly speak without perceiving the world in a uniquely human way...man would not be himself without language and active reflection, while language deserved its name only as a cognitive aspect of the entire human being." In response to criticism of these contentions, Herder resisted descriptions of his findings as "conjectural" pasts, casting his arguments for a dearth of pre-linguistic cognition in humans and "the problem of the origin of language as a synchronic issue rather than a diachronic one." And in this sense, when Humboldt argues that all thinking is thinking in language, he is perpetuating the Herderian tradition. Herder additionally advanced select notions of myriad "authentic" conceptions of "Völk" and the unity of the individual and natural law, which became fodder for his self-proclaimed twentieth-century disciples. Herderian ideas continue to influence thinkers, linguists and anthropologists, and they have often been considered central to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and Franz Boas' coalescence of comparative linguistics and historical particularism with a neo-Kantian/Herderian four-field approach to the study of all cultures, as well as, more recently, anthropological studies by Dell Hymes. Herder's focus upon language and cultural traditions as the ties that create a "nation" extended to include folklore, dance, music and art, and inspired Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their collection of German folk tales. Arguably, the greatest inheritor of Herder's linguistic philosophy was Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt's great contribution lay in developing Herder's idea that language is "the organ of thought" into his own belief that languages were specific worldviews ("Weltansichten"), as Jürgen Trabant argues in the Wilhelm von Humboldt lectures on the Rouen Ethnolinguistics Project website. Herder attached exceptional importance to the concept of nationality and of patriotism"he that has lost his patriotic spirit has lost himself and the whole worlds about himself", whilst teaching that "in a certain sense every human perfection is national". Herder carried folk theory to an extreme by maintaining that "there is only one class in the state, the "Volk", (not the rabble), and the king belongs to this class as well as the peasant". Explanation that the "Volk" was not the rabble was a novel conception in this era, and with Herder can be seen the emergence of "the people" as the basis for the emergence of a classless but hierarchical national body. The nation, however, was individual and separate, distinguished, to Herder, by climate, education, foreign intercourse, tradition and heredity. Providence he praised for having "wonderfully separated nationalities not only by woods and mountains, seas and deserts, rivers and climates, but more particularly by languages, inclinations and characters". Herder praised the tribal outlook writing that "the savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species", isolated since "each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, as a bullet the centre of gravity". With no need for comparison since "every nation bears in itself the standard of its perfection, totally independent of all comparison with that of others" for "do not nationalities differ in everything, in poetry, in appearance, in tastes, in usages, customs and languages? Must not religion which partakes of these also differ among the nationalities?" Following a trip to Ukraine, Herder wrote a prediction in his diary ("Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1769") that Slavic nations would one day be the real power in Europe, as the western Europeans would reject Christianity and rot away, while the eastern European nations would stick to their religion and their idealism, and would this way become the power in Europe. More specifically, he praised Ukraine's "beautiful skies, blithe temperament, musical talent, bountiful soil, etc. [...] someday will awaken there a cultured nation whose influence will spread [...] throughout the world." One of his related predictions was that the Hungarian nation would disappear and become assimilated by surrounding Slavic peoples; this prophecy caused considerable uproar in Hungary and is widely cited to this day. Germany and the Enlightenment. This question was further developed by Herder's lament that Martin Luther did not establish a national church, and his doubt whether Germany did not buy Christianity at too high a price, that of true nationality. Herder's patriotism bordered at times upon national pantheism, demanding of territorial unity as "He is deserving of glory and gratitude who seeks to promote the unity of the territories of Germany through writings, manufacture, and institutions" and sounding an even deeper call: In his "Ideas upon Philosophy and the History of Mankind" he wrote: "Compare England with Germany: the English are Germans, and even in the latest times the Germans have led the way for the English in the greatest things." Herder, who hated absolutism and Prussian nationalism, but who was imbued with the spirit of the whole German "Volk", yet as a historical theorist turned away from the ideas of the eighteenth century. Seeking to reconcile his thought with this earlier age, Herder sought to harmonize his conception of sentiment with reasoning, whereby all knowledge is implicit in the soul; the most elementary stage is the sensuous and intuitive perception which by development can become self-conscious and rational. To Herder, this development is the harmonizing of primitive and derivative truth, of experience and intelligence, feeling and reasoning. Herder is the first in a long line of Germans preoccupied with this harmony. This search is itself the key to the understanding of many German theories of the time; however Herder understood and feared the extremes to which his folk-theory could tend, and so issued specific warnings. He argued that Jews in Germany should enjoy the full rights and obligations of Germans, and that the non-Jews of the world owed a debt to Jews for centuries of abuse, and that this debt could be discharged only by actively assisting those Jews who wished to do so to regain political sovereignty in their ancient homeland of Israel. Herder refused to adhere to a rigid racial theory, writing that "notwithstanding the varieties of the human form, there is but one and the same species of man throughout the whole earth". He also announced that "national glory is a deceiving seducer. When it reaches a certain height, it clasps the head with an iron band. The enclosed sees nothing in the mist but his own picture; he is susceptible to no foreign impressions." The passage of time was to demonstrate that while many Germans were to find influence in Herder's convictions and influence, fewer were to note his qualifying stipulations. Herder had emphasised that his conception of the nation encouraged democracy and the free self-expression of a people's identity. He proclaimed support for the French Revolution, a position which did not endear him to royalty. He also differed with Kant's philosophy for not placing reasoning within the context of language. Herder did not think that reason itself could be criticized, as it did not exist except as the process of reasoning. This process was dependent on language. He also turned away from the Sturm und Drang movement to go back to the poems of Shakespeare and Homer. To promote his concept of the "Volk", he published letters and collected folk songs. These latter were published in 1773 as "Voices of the Peoples in Their Songs" ("Stimmen der Völker in ihren Liedern"). The poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens von Brentano later used "Stimmen der Völker" as samples for "The Boy's Magic Horn" ("Des Knaben Wunderhorn"). Herder also fostered the ideal of a person's individuality. Although he had from an early period championed the individuality of cultures – for example, in his "This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity" (1774), he also championed the individuality of "persons" within a culture; for example, in his "On Thomas Abbt's Writings" (1768) and "On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul" (1778). In "On Thomas Abbt's Writings", Herder stated that "a human soul is an individual in the realm of minds: it senses in accordance with an individual formation, and thinks in accordance with the strength of its mental organs. ... My long allegory has succeeded if it achieves the representation of the mind of a human being as an individual phenomenon, as a rarity which deserves to occupy our eyes." Evolution. Herder has been described as a proto-evolutionary thinker by some science historians, although this has been disputed by others. Concerning the history of life on earth, Herder proposed naturalistic and metaphysical (religious) ideas that are difficult to distinguish and interpret. He was known for proposing a great chain of being. In his book "From the Greeks to Darwin", Henry Fairfield Osborn wrote that "in a general way he upholds the doctrine of the transformation of the lower and higher forms of life, of a continuous transformation from lower to higher types, and of the law of Perfectibility." However, biographer Wulf Köpke disagreed, noting that "biological evolution from animals to the human species was outside of his thinking, which was still influenced by the idea of divine creation."

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A. C. Grayling Anthony Clifford Grayling (; born 3 April 1949) is a British philosopher and author. He was born in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and spent most of his childhood there and in Nyasaland (now Malawi). In 2011 he founded and became the first Master of New College of the Humanities, an independent undergraduate college in London. Until June 2011, he was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, where he taught from 1991. He is also a supernumerary fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford where he formerly taught. Grayling is the author of about 30 books on philosophy, biography, history of ideas, human rights and ethics, including "The Refutation of Scepticism" (1985), "The Future of Moral Values" (1997), "Wittgenstein" (1992), "What Is Good?" (2000), "The Meaning of Things" (2001), "The Good Book" (2011), "The God Argument" (2013), "The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind" (2016) and "Democracy and its Crises" (2017). He was a trustee of the London Library and a fellow of the World Economic Forum, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts. For a number of years he was a columnist for "The Guardian" newspaper, and presented the BBC World Service series "Exchanges at the Frontier" on science and society. In 2013 he was awarded the Forkosch Literary Prize, and in 2015 he received the Bertrand Russell Award. Grayling was a director and contributor at "Prospect" magazine from its foundation until 2016. He is a vice-president of Humanists UK, honorary associate of the National Secular Society, and Patron of the Defence Humanists. His main academic interests lie in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophical logic and he has published works in these subjects. His political affiliations lie on the centre-left, and he has defended human rights and politically liberal values in print and by activism. He is associated in Britain with other new atheists. He frequently appears in British media discussing philosophy and public affairs. Early life and education. Son of Henry Clifford Grayling and Ursula Adelaide (née Burns), Grayling was born and raised in Luanshya, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), within the British expatriate enclave, and raised there and in Nyasaland (now Malawi) where his father worked as manager for the Standard Bank. He attended several boarding schools, including Falcon College in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), from which he ran away after being regularly caned. His first exposure to philosophical writing was at the age of twelve, when he found an English translation of the "Charmides", one of Plato's dialogues, in a local library. At age fourteen, he read G. H. Lewes's "Biographical History of Philosophy" (1846), which confirmed his ambition to study philosophy; he said it "superinduced order on the random reading that had preceded it, and settled my vocation". Grayling had an elder sister Jennifer and brother John. When he was 19 years old, his elder sister Jennifer was murdered in Johannesburg. She had been born with brain damage, and after brain surgery to alleviate it at the age of 20 had experienced personality problems that led to emotional difficulties and a premature marriage. She was found dead in a river shortly after the marriage; she had been stabbed. When her parents went to identify her, her mother—already ill—had a heart attack and died. Grayling said he dealt with his grief by becoming a workaholic. After moving to England in his teens, he spent three years at the University of Sussex, but said that although he applauded their intention to educate generalists, he wished to be a scholar, so in addition to his BA from Sussex, he also completed one in philosophy as a University of London external student. He went on to obtain an MA from Sussex, then attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was taught by P. F. Strawson and A. J. Ayer, obtaining his doctorate in 1981 for a thesis on "Epistemological Scepticism and Transcendental Arguments". A part of that thesis is published as "The Refutation of Scepticism" (1985) and its themes are further developed in "Scepticism and the Possibility of Knowledge" (2008). Career. Grayling lectured in philosophy at Bedford College, London and St Anne's College, Oxford, before taking up a post in 1991 at Birkbeck, University of London, where in 1998 he became reader in philosophy, and in 2005 professor. In addition to his work on Berkeley, philosophical logic, the theory of knowledge, and the history of ideas, the latter including (as chief editor) the four-volume "The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy", he wrote and edited several pedagogical works in philosophy, including "An Introduction to Philosophical Logic" (3rd ed., 1999) and the two volumes "Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject" (1995) and "Philosophy: Further Through the Subject" (1998). In his philosophical work, Grayling connected solutions to the problem of scepticism in epistemology with the questions about assertibility and the problem of meaning in the philosophy of language and logic. A principal theme in his work is that considerations of metaphysics, which relate to what exists, has to be kept separate from the two connected questions of the relation of thought to its objects in the variety of domains over which thought ranges, and the mastery of discourses about those domains, where a justificationist approach is required. Grayling resigned from Birkbeck in June 2011 to found and become the first master of New College of the Humanities, an independent undergraduate college in London. In February 2019, Northeastern University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, purchased the New College of the Humanities. He is a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He was a judge on the Man Booker prize 2003 and Chairman of the Judges for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. He has also been a judge on the Wellcome Trust Book Prize and the Art Fund prize. Grayling was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to philosophy. Public advocacy. For Grayling, work on technical problems is only one aspect of philosophy. Another aspect, one which has been at the centre of philosophy's place in history, has more immediate application to daily life: the questions of ethics, which revolve upon what Grayling calls the great Socratic question, 'How should one live?'. In pursuit of what he describes as 'contributing to the conversation society has with itself about possibilities for good lives in good societies', Grayling writes widely on contemporary issues, including war crimes, the legalisation of drugs, euthanasia, secularism, human rights and other topics in the tradition of Polemics. He has articulated positions on humanist ethics and on the history and nature of concepts of liberty as applied in civic life. In support of his belief that the philosopher should engage in public debate, he brings these philosophical perspectives to issues of the day in his work as a writer and as a commentator on radio and television. Among his contributions to the discussion about religion in contemporary society he argues that there are three separable, though naturally connected debates: On this last point, Grayling's view is that for historical reasons religions have an inflated place in the public domain out of all proportion to the numbers of their adherents or their intrinsic merits, so that their voice and influence is amplified disproportionately: with the result that they can distort such matters as public policy (e.g. on abortion) and science research and education (e.g. stem cells, teaching of evolution). He argues that winning the metaphysical and ethical debates is already abating the problems associated with (c) in more advanced Western societies, even the US. He sees his own major contribution as being the promotion of understanding of humanist ethics deriving from the philosophical tradition. Between 1999 and 2002 Grayling wrote a weekly column in "The Guardian" called "The Last Word", on a different topic every week. In these columns, which also formed the basis of a series of books for a general readership, commencing with "The Meaning of Things" in 2001, Grayling made the basics of philosophy available to the layperson. He is a regular contributor to "The Guardian's" "Comment is free" group blog, and writes columns for, among others, the "Prospect" and "New Scientist" magazines. Grayling is accredited with the United Nations Human Rights Council, and is a patron of Humanists UK, an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, patron of the Defence Humanists, was a Trustee of the London Library, and a board member of the Society of Authors and an Honorary Patron of The Philosophy Foundation, a charity whose aim is to bring philosophy to the wider community, and particularly to disadvantaged schools. In 2003 he was a Booker Prize judge and Chairman of the Judges for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. In 2005, Grayling debated with Christian philosopher William Lane Craig on whether God can exist in an evil world. Grayling is also a Patron of the right to die organisation, My Death My Decision. Grayling wrote a book on the , "Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan" (2006), as a contribution to the debate on the ethics of war. In September 2010, Grayling was one of 55 public figures who sent a letter to "The Guardian" expressing their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the UK. In August 2014, Grayling was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to "The Guardian" opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue. A. C. Grayling was one of the contributors to the book, "We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples", released in October 2009. The book explores the cultures of peoples around the world, portraying both their diversity and the threats they face. Other contributors included not only western writers, such as Laurens van der Post, Noam Chomsky, Claude Lévi-Strauss, but also indigenous people, such as Davi Kopenawa Yanomami and Roy Sesana. The royalties from the sale of this book go to the indigenous rights organisation, Survival International. In recent years Grayling has been campaigning against the UK Government's response to the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum result. In his book, "Democracy and Its Crisis", Grayling argues that voting systems must be reformed to prevent certain results, such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Grayling has tweeted that Brexit must be made to disappear like a "nasty, temporary, hiccup, soon forgotten". Personal life. Grayling lives in central London. His former wife, novelist Katie Hickman, and he have a daughter, Madeleine Catherine Jennifer Grayling, and he has two adult children from his first marriage, Anthony Jolyon Clifford Grayling and Georgina Eveline Ursula Grayling. Publications. Foreword to other books. Foreword to Shyam Wuppuluri, N. C. A. da Costa (eds.), ""Wittgensteinian" (adj.): Looking at the World from the Viewpoint of Wittgenstein's Philosophy" Springer — The Frontiers Collection, 2019.

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Richard Gaskin Richard Maxwell Gaskin (born 1960) is a British philosopher who serves as a professor at the University of Liverpool. He has published on metaphysics, philosophy of language and logic, and history of philosophy, as well as on philosophy of literature, literary theory, and the European literary tradition. Gaskin received his Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Philosophy, and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in classics and philosophy at University College, Oxford, and has held academic posts at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, as well as at the University of Sussex. Gaskin is the author of many published articles and nine books, including: "Language and World: A Defence of Linguistic Idealism" (2020), "Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: a Philosophical Perspective" (2018), "Language, Truth, and Literature: a Defence of Literary Humanism" (2013), "The Unity of the Proposition" (2008), "Experience and the World's Own Language: a Critique of John McDowell's Empiricism" (2006), and "The Sea Battle and the Master Argument: Aristotle and Diodorus Cronus on the metaphysics of the future" (1995). Early life, education, and career. Gaskin was born in 1960 in Milngavie, Glasgow, and attended Robert Gordon's College, Aberdeen, where his father, Maxwell Gaskin, held the Jaffrey Chair of Political Economy. He studied "literae humaniores" (classics and philosophy) at University College, Oxford, and obtained his BA (first class) in 1982. While an undergraduate at Oxford he was secretary of the Oxford University Dramatic Society from 1981 to 82, and directed a production of Marlowe’s "Dr Faustus" at the Oxford Playhouse in March 1981. He took the BPhil exam in 1986, supervised by John McDowell. In 1987 he won the Gaisford Dissertation Prize in classical literature for his essay "Tragedy and Subjectivity in Virgil’s 'Aeneid' ". He was awarded the DPhil in 1988 for a thesis supervised by Michael Dummett, David Wiggins, and Barry Stroud, entitled "Experience, Agency, and the Self". From 1988 to 1989 Gaskin spent a year as an Alexander von Humboldt visiting fellow at the University of Mainz, Germany, researching decision-making in classical literature under the Virgilian scholar Antonie Wlosok. From 1991 to 2001, he was a Lecturer (from 1997 Reader) in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. In 2001 he became Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. Philosophical work. A central part of Gaskin's work focuses on the doctrine of linguistic idealism, the idea that the world is produced by, and depends on, language. Gaskin argues that the dependence of the world on language is a logical and constitutive one, rather than a temporal one: objects (such as tables and chairs) exist in virtue of, and are constituted as objects by, the existence of sentences about them; language 'makes the world', but not in the sense that there was a time at which it pre-existed the world. Although human language is a purely contingent product of evolution, there is a transcendental sense in which the existence of the world depends on the existence of language—more precisely, on the capacity of language to talk about the world. In Gaskin’s view the world is constitutively composed of propositions, which are referents of sentences; these propositions contain the ordinary objects of our discourse. In "Language and World" (2020), Gaskin develops the theory of linguistic idealism and defends it against several objections. He addresses the problem that some mathematical entities, in particular uncomputable sets of real numbers, cannot be distinguished by language; he does this by developing a ‘split-level' version of linguistic idealism. In his approach all the basic entities of the world can be named in language, and all further entities, even if they cannot be named, can be derived from these basic entities by describable constructive operations. In "Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: A Philosophical Perspective" (2018), Gaskin argues that not even the tragic aspects of life (such as pain and suffering) are beyond language, an objection commonly raised against the idea that language is omnicompetent to talk about and describe reality. In his writings on literature, Gaskin has defended a version of literary humanism, according to which works of imaginative literature have an objective meaning which is fixed at the time of their production and is the same for all readers. In addition to his publications in philosophy of literature, he has written a study of the poets Horace and Housman, essays on Virgil (e.g. "On being pessimistic about the end of the 'Aeneid"'), Homer (e.g. "Do Homeric Heroes make real decisions?"), the classicist Richard Bentley, and the essayist Charles Lamb. Gaskin has translated selections from Apollonius of Rhodes's Greek poem "Argonautica" into English verse. Gaskin has written on ancient and on medieval philosophy, and on Wittgenstein. He maintains a website on which he mounts recordings of English, German, and Latin poetry. Publications. Selected Books. "Language and world: a Defence of Linguistic Idealism" (Routledge 2020). "Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: a Philosophical Perspective" (Routledge 2018). "Horace and Housman" (Palgrave Macmillan 2013). "Language, Truth, and Literature: a Defence of Literary Humanism" (OUP 2013). "The Unity of the Proposition" (OUP 2008). "Experience and the World’s Own Language: a Critique of John McDowell’s Empiricism" (Clarendon Press 2006). "The Sea Battle and the Master Argument: Aristotle and Diodorus Cronus on the Metaphysics of the Future" (Walter de Gruyter 1995). Selected articles. "On being pessimistic about the end of the Aeneid", forthcoming in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology. "A Defence of the Resemblance Meaning of “What it’s like”", Mind 128, 2019, 673–98. DOI 10.1093/mind/fzx023. "From the unity of the proposition to linguistic idealism", Synthese 196, 2019, 1325–42. DOI 10.1007/s11229-016-1081-5. "Identity and Reference in a Black Universe", in P. Stalmaszczyk ed., "Philosophical and Linguistic Analyses of Reference" (Frankfurt: Lang, 2016), 19–41. DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-05429-3. "The Identity Theory of Truth", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, published May 1, 2015. "Meaning, Normativity, and Naturalism", in B. Dainton and H. Robinson eds., "The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy" (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 230–54. . "When Logical Atomism met the Theaetetus: Ryle on Naming and Saying", in M. Beaney ed., "The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy" (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 851–69. DOI 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199238842.013.0037. "Reach’s Puzzle and Mention" (co-authored with Daniel J. Hill), Dialectica 67, 2013, 201–22. DOI 10.1111/1746-8361.12021. "On Neutral Relations" (co-authored with Daniel J. Hill), Dialectica 66, 2012, 167–86. DOI 10.1111/j.1746-8361.2012.01294.x. "Bentley’s classicism, Paradise Lost, and the Schema Horatianum", International Journal of the Classical Tradition 17, 2010, 354–65. DOI 10.2307/40931338. "Realism and the Picture Theory of Meaning", Philosophical Topics 37, 2009, 49–62. DOI 10.5840/philtopics200937115. "John Wyclif and the Theory of Complexly Signifiables", Vivarium 47, 2009, 74–96. DOI 10.1163/156853408X345927. "Complexe Significabilia and Aristotle’s Categories", in J. Biard und I. Rosier-Catach eds., "La Tradition Médiévale des Catégories" (Louvain: Peeters, 2003), 187–205. . "Nonsense and Necessity in Wittgenstein’s Mature Philosophy", in R. Gaskin ed., "Grammar in Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy" (London: Routledge, 2001), 199–217. . "Ockham’s Mental Language, Connotation, and the Inherence Regress", in D. Perler ed., "Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality" (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 227–63. . "Do Homeric Heroes make Real Decisions?" (revised version of 1990 CQ paper), in D. Cairns ed., "Oxford Readings on Homer’s Iliad" (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 147–65. . "Fatalism, Middle Knowledge, and Comparative Similarity of Worlds", Religious Studies 34, 1998, 189–203. DOI 10.1017/S0034412598004338. "Simplicius on the Meaning of Sentences: a Commentary on In Cat. 396,30–397,28", Phronesis 43, 1998, 42–62. DOI 10.1163/15685289860517793. "Peter Damian on Divine Power and the Contingency of the Past", British Journal of the History of Philosophy 5, 1997, 229–47. DOI 10.1080/09608789708570965. "Russell and Richard Brinkley on the Unity of the Proposition", History and Philosophy of Logic 18, 1997, 139–50. DOI 10.1080/01445349708837284. "Peter of Ailly and other Fourteenth-Century Thinkers on Divine Power and the Necessity of the Past", Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 79, 1997, 273–91. DOI 10.1515/agph.1997.79.3.273. "The Stoics on Cases, Predicates and the Unity of the Proposition", in Aristotle and After ed. R. Sorabji (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 1997), 91–108. DOI 10.1111/j.2041-5370.1997.tb02264.x. "Fregean Sense and Russellian Propositions", Philosophical Studies 86, 1997, 131–54. DOI 10.1023/A:1017929320501 "Conditionals of Freedom and Middle Knowledge" Philosophical Quarterly 43, 1993, 412–30. (Winner of 1992 PQ essay competition.) DOI 10.2307/2219983. Reprinted with corrections in E. Dekker et al. eds., "Middle Knowledge" (Peter Lang, 2000), 137–56, . "Turnus, Mezentius, and the Complexity of Virgil’s Aeneid", Latomus, "Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History" VI, 1992, 295–316, . "Do Homeric Heroes make Real Decisions?", Classical Quarterly 40, 1990, 1–15. DOI 10.1017/S0009838800026768. "Can Aesthetic Value Be Explained?", British Journal of Aesthetics 29, 1989, 329–40. DOI 10.1093/bjaesthetics/29.4.329.

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Averroes Ibn Rushd (; full name in ; 14 April 112611 December 1198), often Latinized as Averroes ( ), was a Muslim Andalusian polymath and jurist of Berber descent who wrote about many subjects, including philosophy, theology, medicine, astronomy, physics, psychology, mathematics, Islamic jurisprudence and law, and linguistics. The author of more than 100 books and treatises, his philosophical works include numerous commentaries on Aristotle, for which he was known in the western world as "The Commentator" and "Father of rationalism". Ibn Rushd also served as a chief judge and a court physician for the Almohad Caliphate. He was born in Córdoba in 1126 to a family of prominent judges—his grandfather was the chief judge of the city. In 1169 he was introduced to the caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf, who was impressed with his knowledge, became his patron and commissioned many of Averroes's commentaries. Averroes later served multiple terms as a judge in Seville and Córdoba. In 1182, he was appointed as court physician and the chief judge of Córdoba. After Abu Yusuf's death in 1184, he remained in royal favor until he fell into disgrace in 1195. He was targeted on various charges—likely for political reasons—and was exiled to nearby Lucena. He returned to royal favor shortly before his death on 11 December 1198. Averroes was a strong proponent of Aristotelianism; he attempted to restore what he considered the original teachings of Aristotle and opposed the Neoplatonist tendencies of earlier Muslim thinkers, such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna. He also defended the pursuit of philosophy against criticism by Ashari theologians such as Al-Ghazali. Averroes argued that philosophy was permissible in Islam and even compulsory among certain elites. He also argued scriptural text should be interpreted allegorically if it appeared to contradict conclusions reached by reason and philosophy. In Islamic jurisprudence, he wrote the "Bidāyat al-Mujtahid" on the differences between Islamic schools of law and the principles that caused their differences. In medicine, he proposed a new theory of stroke, described the signs and symptoms of Parkinson's disease for the first time, and might have been the first to identify the retina as the part of the eye responsible for sensing light. His medical book "Al-Kulliyat fi al-Tibb," translated into Latin and known as the "Colliget," became a textbook in Europe for centuries. His legacy in the Islamic world was modest for geographical and intellectual reasons. In the west, Averroes was known for his extensive commentaries on Aristotle, many of which were translated into Latin and Hebrew. The translations of his work reawakened western European interest in Aristotle and Greek thinkers, an area of study that had been widely abandoned after the fall of the Roman Empire. His thoughts generated controversies in Latin Christendom and triggered a philosophical movement called Averroism based on his writings. His unity of the intellect thesis, proposing that all humans share the same intellect, became one of the most well-known and controversial Averroist doctrines in the west. His works were condemned by the Catholic Church in 1270 and 1277. Although weakened by condemnations and sustained critique from Thomas Aquinas, Latin Averroism continued to attract followers up to the sixteenth century. Name. Ibn Rushd's full, transliterated Arabic name is "Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad ibn ʾAḥmad Ibn Rushd". Sometimes, the nickname "al-Hafid" ("The Grandson") is appended to his name, to distinguish him from his similarly named grandfather, a famous judge and jurist. "Averroes" is the Medieval Latin form of "Ibn Rushd"; it was derived from the Spanish pronunciation of the original Arabic name, wherein "Ibn" becomes "Aben" or "Aven". Other forms of the name in European languages include "Ibin-Ros-din", "Filius Rosadis", "Ibn-Rusid", "Ben-Raxid", "Ibn-Ruschod", "Den-Resched", "Aben-Rassad", "Aben-Rasd", "Aben-Rust", "Avenrosdy", "Avenryz", "Adveroys", "Benroist", "Avenroyth" and "Averroysta". Biography. Early life and education. Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd was born on 14 April 1126 (520 AH) in Córdoba. His family was well known in the city for their public service, especially in the legal and religious fields. His grandfather Abu al-Walid Muhammad (d. 1126) was the chief judge ("qadi") of Córdoba and the imam of the Great Mosque of Córdoba under the Almoravids. His father Abu al-Qasim Ahmad was not as celebrated as his grandfather, but was also chief judge until the Almoravids were replaced by the Almohads in 1146. According to his traditional biographers, Averroes's education was "excellent", beginning with studies in hadith (traditions of Prophet Muhammad), "fiqh" (jurisprudence), medicine and theology. He learned Maliki jurisprudence under al-Hafiz Abu Muhammad ibn Rizq and hadith with Ibn Bashkuwal, a student of his grandfather. His father also taught him about jurisprudence, including on Imam Malik's "magnum opus" the "Muwatta", which Averroes went on to memorize. He studied medicine under Abu Jafar Jarim al-Tajail, who probably taught him philosophy too. He also knew the works of the philosopher Ibn Bajjah (also known as Avempace), and might have known him personally or been tutored by him. He joined a regular meeting of philosophers, physicians and poets in Seville which was attended by philosophers Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Zuhr as well as the future caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub. He also studied the "kalam" theology of the Ashari school, which he criticized later in life. His 13th century biographer Ibn al-Abbar said he was more interested in the study of law and its principles ("usul") than that of hadith and he was especially competent in the field of "khilaf" (disputes and controversies in the Islamic jurisprudence). Ibn al-Abbar also mentioned his interests in "the sciences of the ancients", probably in reference to Greek philosophy and sciences. Career. By 1153 Averroes was in Marrakesh (Morocco), the capital of the Almohad Caliphate, to perform astronomical observations and to support the Almohad project of building new colleges. He was hoping to find physical laws of astronomical movements instead of only the mathematical laws known at the time but this research was unsuccessful. During his stay in Marrakesh he likely met Ibn Tufayl, a renowned philosopher and the author of "Hayy ibn Yaqdhan" who was also the court physician in Marrakesh. Averroes and ibn Tufayl became friends despite the differences in their philosophies. In 1169 Ibn Tufayl introduced Averroes to the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf. In a famous account reported by historian Abdelwahid al-Marrakushi the caliph asked Averroes whether the heavens had existed since eternity or had a beginning. Knowing this question was controversial and worried a wrong answer could put him in danger, Averroes did not answer. The caliph then elaborated the views of Plato, Aristotle and Muslim philosophers on the topic and discussed them with Ibn Tufayl. This display of knowledge put Averroes at ease; Averroes then explained his own views on the subject, which impressed the caliph. Averroes was similarly impressed by Abu Yaqub and later said the caliph had "a profuseness of learning I did not suspect". After their introduction, Averroes remained in Abu Yaqub's favor until the caliph's death in 1184. When the caliph complained to Ibn Tufayl about the difficulty of understanding Aristotle's work, Ibn Tufayl recommended to the caliph that Averroes work on explaining it. This was the beginning of Averroes's massive commentaries on Aristotle; his first works on the subject were written in 1169. In the same year, Averroes was appointed "qadi" (judge) in Seville. In 1171 he became "qadi" in his hometown of Córdoba. As "qadi" he would decide cases and give "fatwa"s (legal opinions) based on the Islamic law ("sharia"). The rate of his writing increased during this time despite other obligations and his travels within the Almohad empire. He also took the opportunity from his travels to conduct astronomical researches. Many of his works produced between 1169 and 1179 were dated in Seville rather than Córdoba. In 1179 he was again appointed "qadi" in Seville. In 1182 he succeeded his friend Ibn Tufayl as court physician and later the same year he was appointed the chief "qadi" of Córdoba, a prestigious office that had once been held by his grandfather. In 1184 Caliph Abu Yaqub died and was succeeded by Abu Yusuf Yaqub. Initially, Averroes remained in royal favor but in 1195 his fortune reversed. Various charges were made against him and he was tried by a tribunal in Córdoba. The tribunal condemned his teachings, ordered the burning of his works and banished Averroes to nearby Lucena. Early biographers's reasons for this fall from grace include a possible insult to the caliph in his writings but modern scholars attribute it to political reasons. The "Encyclopaedia of Islam" said the caliph distanced himself from Averroes to gain support from more orthodox "ulema", who opposed Averroes and whose support al-Mansur needed for his war against Christian kingdoms. Historian of Islamic philosophy Majid Fakhry also wrote that public pressure from traditional Maliki jurists who were opposed to Averroes played a role. After a few years, Averroes returned to court in Marrakesh and was again in the caliph's favor. He died shortly afterwards, on 11 December 1198 (9 Safar 595 in the Islamic calendar). He was initially buried in North Africa but his body was later moved to Córdoba for another funeral, at which future Sufi mystic and philosopher Ibn Arabi (1165–1240) was present. Works. Averroes was a prolific writer and his works, according to Fakhry, "covered a greater variety of subjects" than those of any of his predecessors in the East, including philosophy, medicine, jurisprudence or legal theory, and linguistics. Most of his writings were commentaries on or paraphrasings of the works of Aristotle that—especially the long ones—often contain his original thoughts. According to French author Ernest Renan, Averroes wrote at least 67 original works, including 28 works on philosophy, 20 on medicine, 8 on law, 5 on theology, and 4 on grammar, in addition to his commentaries on most of Aristotle's works and his commentary on Plato's "The Republic". Many of Averroes's works in Arabic did not survive, but their translations into Hebrew or Latin did. For example, of his long commentaries on Aristotle, only "a tiny handful of Arabic manuscript remains". Commentaries on Aristotle. Averroes wrote commentaries on nearly all of Aristotle's surviving works. The only exception is "Politics", which he did not have access to, so he wrote commentaries on Plato's "Republic". He classified his commentaries into three categories that modern scholars have named "short", "middle" and "long" commentaries. Most of the short commentaries ("jami") were written early in his career and contain summaries of Aristotlean doctrines. The middle commentaries ("talkhis") contain paraphrases that clarify and simplify Aristotle's original text. The middle commentaries were probably written in response to his patron caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf's complaints about the difficulty of understanding Aristotle's original texts and to help others in a similar position. The long commentaries ("tafsir" or "sharh"), or line-by-line commentaries, include the complete text of the original works with a detailed analysis of each line. The long commentaries are very detailed and contain a high degree of original thought, and were unlikely to be intended for a general audience. Only five of Aristotle's works had all three types of commentaries: "Physics", "Metaphysics", "On the Soul", "On the Heavens", and "Posterior Analytics". Stand alone philosophical works. Averroes also wrote stand alone philosophical treatises, including "On the Intellect", "On the Syllogism", "On Conjunction with the Active Intellect", "On Time", "On the Heavenly Sphere" and "On the Motion of the Sphere". He also wrote several polemics: "Essay on al-Farabi's Approach to Logic, as Compared to that of Aristotle", "Metaphysical Questions Dealt with in the Book of Healing by Ibn Sina", and "Rebuttal of Ibn Sina's Classification of Existing Entities". Islamic theology. Scholarly sources, including Fakhry and the "Encyclopedia of Islam", have named three works as Averroes's key writings in this area. "Fasl al-Maqal" ("The Decisive Treatise") is an 1178 treatise that argues for the compatibility of Islam and philosophy. "Al-Kashf 'an Manahij al-Adillah" ("Exposition of the Methods of Proof"), written in 1179, criticizes the theologies of the Asharites, and lays out Averroes's argument for proving the existence of God, as well as his thoughts on God's attributes and actions. The 1180 "Tahafut al-Tahafut" ("Incoherence of the Incoherence") is a rebuttal of al-Ghazali's (d. 1111) landmark criticism of philosophy "The Incoherence of the Philosophers". It combines ideas in his commentaries and stand alone works, and uses them to respond to al-Ghazali. The work also criticizes Avicenna and his neo-Platonist tendencies, sometimes agreeing with al-Ghazali's critique against him. Medicine. Averroes, who served as the royal physician at the Almohad court, wrote a number of medical treatises. The most famous was "al-Kulliyat fi al-Tibb" ("The General Principles of Medicine", Latinized in the west as the "Colliget"), written around 1162, before his appointment at court. The title of this book is the opposite of "al-Juz'iyyat fi al-Tibb" ("The Specificities of Medicine"), written by his friend Ibn Zuhr, and the two collaborated intending that their works complement each other. The Latin translation of the "Colliget" became a medical textbook in Europe for centuries. His other surviving titles include "On Treacle", "The Differences in Temperament", and "Medicinal Herbs". He also wrote summaries of the works of Greek physician Galen (died ) and a commentary on Avicenna's "Urjuzah fi al-Tibb" ("Poem on Medicine"). Jurisprudence and law. Averroes served multiple tenures as judge and produced multiple works in the fields of Islamic jurisprudence or legal theory. The only book that survives today is "Bidāyat al-Mujtahid wa Nihāyat al-Muqtaṣid" ("Primer of the Discretionary Scholar"). In this work he explains the differences of opinion ("ikhtilaf") between the Sunni "madhhabs" (schools of Islamic jurisprudence) both in practice and in their underlying juristic principles, as well as the reason why they are inevitable. Despite his status as a Maliki judge, the book also discusses the opinion of other schools, including liberal and conservative ones. Other than this surviving text, bibliographical information shows he wrote a summary of Al-Ghazali's "On Legal Theory of Muslim Jurisprudence" ("Al-Mustasfa") and tracts on sacrifices and land tax. Philosophical ideas. Aristotelianism in the Islamic philosophical tradition. In his philosophical writings, Averroes attempted to return to Aristotelianism, which according to him had been distorted by the Neoplatonist tendencies of Muslim philosophers such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna. He rejected al-Farabi's attempt to merge the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, pointing out the differences between the two, such as Aristotle's rejection of Plato's theory of ideas. He also criticized Al-Farabi's works on logic for misinterpreting its Aristotelian source. He wrote an extensive critique of Avicenna, who was the standard-bearer of Islamic Neoplatonism in the Middle Ages. He argued that Avicenna's theory of emanation had many fallacies and was not found in the works of Aristotle. Averroes disagreed with Avicenna's view that existence is merely an accident added to essence, arguing the reverse; something exists "per se" and essence can only be found by subsequent abstraction. He also rejected Avicenna's modality and Avicenna's argument to prove the existence of God as the Necessary Existent. Relation between religion and philosophy. During Averroes's lifetime, philosophy came under attack from the Sunni Islam tradition, especially from theological schools like the traditionalist (Hanbalite) and the Ashari schools. In particular, the Ashari scholar al-Ghazali (1058 – 1111) wrote "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" ("Tahafut al-falasifa"), a scathing and influential critique of the Neoplatonic philosophical tradition in the Islamic world and against the works of Avicenna in particular. Among others, Al-Ghazali charged philosophers with non-belief in Islam and sought to disprove the teaching of the philosophers using logical arguments. In "Decisive Treatise", Averroes argues that philosophy—which for him represented conclusions reached using reason and careful method—cannot contradict revelations in Islam because they are just two different methods of reaching the truth, and "truth cannot contradict truth". When conclusions reached by philosophy appear to contradict the text of the revelation, then according to Averroes, revelation must be subjected to interpretation or allegorical understanding to remove the contradiction. This interpretation must be done by those "rooted in knowledge"a phrase taken from the Quran, 3:7, which for Averroes refers to philosophers who during his lifetime had access to the "highest methods of knowledge". He also argues that the Quran calls for Muslims to study philosophy because the study and reflection of nature would increase a person's knowledge of "the Artisan" (God). He quotes Quranic passages calling on Muslims to reflect on nature and uses them to render a "fatwa" (legal opinion) that philosophy is allowed for Muslims and is probably an obligation, at least among those who have the talent for it. Averroes also distinguishes between three modes of discourse: the rhetorical (based on persuasion) accessible to the common masses; the dialectical (based on debate) and often employed by theologians and the "ulama" (scholars); and the demonstrative (based on logical deduction). According to Averroes, the Quran uses the rhetorical method of inviting people to the truth, which allows it to reach the common masses with its persuasiveness, whereas philosophy uses the demonstrative methods that were only available to the learned but provided the best possible understanding and knowledge. Averroes also tries to deflect Al-Ghazali's criticisms of philosophy by saying that many of them apply only to the philosophy of Avicenna and not to that of Aristotle, which Averroes argues to be the true philosophy from which Avicenna has deviated. Nature of God. Existence. Averroes lays out his views on the existence and nature of God in the treatise "The Exposition of the Methods of Proof". He examines and critiques the doctrines of four sects of Islam: the Asharites, the Mutazilites, the Sufis and those he calls the "literalists" ("al-hashwiyah"). Among other things, he examines their proofs of God's existence and critiques each one. Averroes argues that there are two arguments for God's existence that he deems logically sound and in accordance to the Quran; the arguments from "providence" and "from invention". The providence argument considers that the world and the universe seem finely tuned to support human life. Averroes cited the sun, the moon, the rivers, the seas and the location of humans on the earth. According to him, this suggests a creator who created them for the welfare of mankind. The argument from invention contends that worldly entities such as animals and plants appear to have been invented. Therefore, Averroes argues that a designer was behind the creation and that is God. Averroes's two arguments are teleological in nature and not cosmological like the arguments of Aristotle and most contemporaneous Muslim kalam theologians. God's attributes. Averroes upholds the doctrine of divine unity ("tawhid") and argues that God has seven divine attributes: knowledge, life, power, will, hearing, vision and speech. He devotes the most attention to the attribute of knowledge and argues that divine knowledge differs from human knowledge because God knows the universe because God is its cause while humans only know the universe through its effects. Averroes argues that the attribute of life can be inferred because it is the precondition of knowledge and also because God willed objects into being. Power can be inferred by God's ability to bring creations into existence. Averroes also argues that knowledge and power inevitably give rise to speech. Regarding vision and speech, he says that because God created the world, he necessarily knows every part of it in the same way an artist understands his or her work intimately. Because two elements of the world are the visual and the auditory, God must necessarily possess the vision and speech. The omnipotence paradox was first addressed by Averroës and only later by Thomas Aquinas. Pre-eternity of the world. In the centuries preceding Averroes, there had been a debate between Muslim thinkers questioning whether the world was created at a specific moment in time or whether it has always existed. Neo-Platonic philosophers such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna argued the world has always existed. This view was criticized by theologians and philosophers of the Ashari kalam tradition; in particular, al-Ghazali wrote an extensive refutation of the pre-eternity doctrine in his "Incoherence of the Philosophers" and accused the Neo-Platonic philosophers of unbelief ("kufr"). Averroes responded to Al-Ghazali in his "Incoherence of the Incoherence". First, he argued that the differences between the two positions were not vast enough to warrant the charge of unbelief. He also said the pre-eternity doctrine did not necessarily contradict the Quran and cited verses that mention pre-existing "throne" and "water" in passages related to creation. Averroes argued that a careful reading of the Quran implied only the "form" of the universe was created in time but that its existence has been eternal. Averroes further criticized the "kalam" theologians for using their own interpretations of scripture to answer questions that should have been left to philosophers. Politics. Averroes states his political philosophy in his commentary of Plato's "Republic". He combines his ideas with Plato's and with Islamic tradition; he considers the ideal state to be one based on the Islamic law ("shariah"). His interpretation of Plato's philosopher-king followed that of Al-Farabi, which equates the philosopher-king with the imam, caliph and lawgiver of the state. Averroes's description of the characteristics of a philosopher-king are similar to those given by Al-Farabi; they include love of knowledge, good memory, love of learning, love of truth, dislike for sensual pleasures, dislike for amassing wealth, magnanimity, courage, steadfastness, eloquence and the ability to "light quickly on the middle term". Averroes writes that if philosophers cannot rule—as was the case in the Almoravid and Almohad empires around his lifetime—philosophers must still try to influence the rulers towards implementing the ideal state. According to Averroes, there are two methods of teaching virtue to citizens; persuasion and coercion. Persuasion is the more natural method consisting of rhetorical, dialectical and demonstrative methods; sometimes, however, coercion is necessary for those not amenable to persuasion, e.g. enemies of the state. Therefore, he justifies war as a last resort, which he also supports using Quranic arguments. Consequently, he argues that a ruler should have both wisdom and courage, which are needed for governance and defense of the state. Like Plato, Averroes calls for women to share with men in the administration of the state, including participating as soldiers, philosophers and rulers. He regrets that contemporaneous Muslim societies limited the public role of women; he says this limitation is harmful to the state's well-being. Averroes also accepted Plato's ideas of the deterioration of the ideal state. He cites examples from Islamic history when the Rashidun caliphate—which in Sunni tradition represented the ideal state led by "rightly guided caliphs"—became a dynastic state under Muawiyah, founder of the Umayyad dynasty. He also says the Almoravid and the Almohad empires started as ideal, shariah-based states but then deteriorated into timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny. Diversity of Islamic law. In his tenure as judge and jurist, Averroes for the most part ruled and gave fatwas according to the Maliki school of Islamic law which was dominant in Al-Andalus and the western Islamic world during his time. However, he frequently acted as "his own man", including sometimes rejecting the "consensus of the people of Medina" argument that is one of the traditional Maliki position. In "Bidāyat al-Mujtahid", one of his major contributions to the field of Islamic law, he not only describes the differences between various school of Islamic laws but also tries to theoretically explain the reasons for the difference and why they are inevitable. Even though all the schools of Islamic law are ultimately rooted in the Quran and hadith, there are "causes which necessitate differences" ("al-asbab al-lati awjabat al-ikhtilaf"). They include differences in interpreting scripture in a general or specific sense, in interpreting scriptural commands as obligatory or merely recommended, or prohibitions as discouragement or total prohibition, as well as ambiguities in the meaning of words or expressions. Averroes also writes that the application of "qiyas" (reasoning by analogy) could give rise to different legal opinion because jurists might disagree on the applicability of certain analogies and different analogies might contradict each other. Natural philosophy. Astronomy. As did Avempace and Ibn Tufail, Averroes criticizes the Ptolemaic system using philosophical arguments and rejects the use of eccentrics and epicycles to explain the apparent motions of the moon, the sun and the planets. He argued that those objects move uniformly in a strictly circular motion around the earth, following Aristotelian principles. He postulates that there are three type of planetary motions; those that can be seen with the naked eye, those that requires instruments to observe and those that can only be known by philosophical reasoning. Averroes argues that the occasional opaque colors of the moon are caused by variations in its thickness; the thicker parts receive more light from the Sun—and therefore emit more light—than the thinner parts. This explanation was used up to the seventeenth century by the European Scholastics to account for Galileo's observations of spots on the moon's surface, until the Scholastics such as Antoine Goudin in 1668 conceded that the observation was more likely caused by mountains on the moon. He and Ibn Bajja observed sunspots, which they thought were transits of Venus and Mercury between the Sun and the Earth. In 1153 he conducted astronomical observations in Marrakesh, where he observed the star Canopus (Arabic: "Suhayl") which was invisible in the latitude of his native Spain. He used this observation to support Aristotle's argument for the spherical Earth. Averroes was aware that Arabic and Andalusian astronomers of his time focused on "mathematical" astronomy, which enabled accurate predictions through calculations but did not provide a detailed physical explanation of how the universe worked. According to him, "the astronomy of our time offers no truth, but only agrees with the calculations and not with what exists." He attempted to reform astronomy to be reconciled with physics, especially the physics of Aristotle. His long commentary of Aristotle's "Metaphysics" describes the principles of his attempted reform, but later in his life he declared that his attempts had failed. He confessed that he had not enough time or knowledge to reconcile the observed planetary motions with Aristotelian principles. In addition, he did not know the works of Eudoxus and Callippus, and so he missed the context of some of Aristotle's astronomical works. However, his works influenced astronomer Nur ad-Din al-Bitruji (d. 1204) who adopted most of his reform principles and did succeed in proposing an early astronomical system based on Aristotelian physics. Physics. In physics, Averroes did not adopt the inductive method that was being developed by Al-Biruni in the Islamic world and is closer to today's physics. Rather, he was—in the words of historian of science Ruth Glasner—a "exegetical" scientist who produced new theses about nature through discussions of previous texts, especially the writings of Aristotle. because of this approach, he was often depicted as an unimaginative follower of Aristotle, but Glasner argues that Averroes's work introduced highly original theories of physics, especially his elaboration of Aristotle's "minima naturalia" and on motion as "forma fluens", which were taken up in the west and are important to the overall development of physics. Averroes also proposed a definition of force as "the rate at which work is done in changing the kinetic condition of a material body"—a definition close to that of power in today's physics. Psychology. Averroes expounds his thoughts on psychology in his three commentaries on Aristotle's "On the Soul". Averroes is interested in explaining the human intellect using philosophical methods and by interpreting Aristotle's ideas. His position on the topic changed throughout his career as his thoughts developed. In his short commentary, the first of the three works, Averroes follows Ibn Bajja's theory that something called the "material intellect" stores specific images that a person encounters. These images serve as basis for the "unification" by the universal "agent intellect", which, once it happens, allow a person to gain universal knowledge about that concept. In his middle commentary, Averroes moves towards the ideas of Al-Farabi and Avicenna, saying the agent intellect gives humans the power of universal understanding, which is the material intellect. Once the person has sufficient empirical encounters with a certain concept, the power activates and gives the person universal knowledge (see also logical induction). In his last commentary—called the "Long Commentary"—he proposes another theory, which becomes known as the theory of "the unity of the intellect". In it, Averroes argues that there is only one material intellect, which is the same for all humans and is unmixed with human body. To explain how different individuals can have different thoughts, he uses a concept he calls "fikr"—known as "cogitatio" in Latin—a process that happens in human brains and contains not universal knowledge but "active consideration of particular things" the person has encountered. This theory attracted controversy when Averroes's works entered Christian Europe; in 1229 Thomas Aquinas wrote a detailed critique titled "On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists". Medicine. While his works in medicine indicate an in-depth theoretical knowledge in medicine of his time, he likely had limited expertise as a practitioner, and declared in one of his works that he had not "practiced much apart from myself, my relatives or my friends." He did serve as a royal physician, but his qualification and education was mostly theoretical. For the most part, Averroes's medical work "Al-Kulliyat fi al-Tibb" follows the medical doctrine of Galen, an influential Greek physician and author from the 2nd century, which was based on the four humors—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, whose balance is necessary for the health of the human body. Averroes's original contributions include his observations on the retina: he might have been the first to recognize that retina was the part of the eye responsible for sensing light, rather than the lens as was commonly thought. Modern scholars dispute whether this is what he meant it his "Kulliyat", but Averroes also stated a similar observation in his commentary to Aristotle's "Sense and Sensibilia": "the innermost of the coats of the eye [the retina] must necessarily receive the light from the humors of the eye [the lens], just like the humors receive the light from air." Another of his departure from Galen and the medical theories of the time is his description of stroke as produced by the brain and caused by an obstruction of the arteries from the heart to the brain. This explanation is closer to the modern understanding of the disease compared to that of Galen, which attributes it to the obstruction between heart and the periphery. He was also the first to describe the signs and symptoms of Parkinson's disease in his "Kulliyat", although he did not give the disease a name. Legacy. In Jewish tradition. Maimonides (d. 1204) was among early Jewish scholars who received Averroes's works enthusiastically, saying he "received lately everything Averroes had written on the works of Aristotle" and that Averroes "was extremely right". Thirteenth-century Jewish writers, including Samuel ibn Tibbon in his work "Opinion of the Philosophers", Judah ibn Solomon Cohen in his "Search for Wisdom" and Shem-Tov ibn Falaquera, relied heavily on Averroes's texts. In 1232, Joseph Ben Abba Mari translated Averroes's commentaries on the "Organon"; this was the first Jewish translation of a complete work. In 1260 Moses ibn Tibbon published the translation of almost all of Averroes's commentaries and some of his works on medicine. Jewish Averroism peaked in the fourteenth century; Jewish writers of this time who translated or were influenced by Averroes include Kalonymus ben Kalonymus of Arles, France, Todros Todrosi of Arles and Gersonides of Languedoc. In Latin tradition. Averroes's main influence on the Christian west was through his extensive commentaries on Aristotle. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, western Europe fell into a cultural decline that resulted in the loss of nearly all of the intellectual legacy of the Classical Greek scholars, including Aristotle. Averroes's commentaries, which were translated into Latin and entered western Europe in the thirteenth century, provided an expert account of Aristotle's legacy and made them available again. The influence of his commentaries led to Averroes being referred to simply as "The Commentator" rather than by name in Latin Christian writings. He has been sometimes described as the "father of free thought and unbelief" and "father of rationalism". Michael Scot (1175 – c. 1232) was the first Latin translator of Averroes who translated the long commentaries of "Physics", "Metaphysics", "On the Soul" and "On the Heavens", as well as multiple middle and short commentaries, starting in 1217 in Paris and Toledo. Following this, European authors such as Hermannus Alemannus, William de Luna and Armengaud of Montpellier translated Averroes's other works, sometimes with help from Jewish authors. Soon after, Averroes's works propagated among Christian scholars in the scholastic tradition. His writing attracted a strong circle of followers known as the Latin Averroists. Paris and Padua were major centers of Latin Averroism, and its prominent thirteenth-century leaders included Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia. Authorities of the Roman Catholic Church reacted against the spread of Averroism. In 1270, the Bishop of Paris Étienne Tempier issued a condemnation against 15 doctrines—many of which were Aristotelian or Averroist—that he said were in conflict with the doctrines of the church. In 1277, at the request of Pope John XXI, Tempier issued another condemnation, this time targeting 219 theses drawn from many sources, mainly the teachings of Aristotle and Averroes. Averroes received a mixed reception from other Catholic thinkers; Thomas Aquinas, a leading Catholic thinker of the thirteenth century, relied extensively on Averroes's interpretation of Aristotle but disagreed with him on many points. For example, he wrote a detailed attack on Averroes's theory that all humans share the same intellect. He also opposed Averroes on the eternity of the universe and divine providence. The Catholic Church's condemnations of 1270 and 1277, and the detailed critique by Aquinas weakened the spread of Averroism in Latin Christendom, though it maintained a following until the sixteenth century, when European thought began to diverge from Aristotelianism. Leading Averroists in the following centuries included John of Jandun and Marsilius of Padua (fourteenth century), Gaetano da Thiene and Pietro Pomponazzi (fifteenth century), and Agostino Nifo and Marcantonio Zimara (sixteenth century). In Islamic tradition. Averroes had no major influence on Islamic philosophic thought until modern times. Part of the reason was geography; Averroes lived in Spain, the extreme west of the Islamic civilization far from the centers of Islamic intellectual traditions. Also, his philosophy may not have appealed to Islamic scholars of his time. His focus on Aristotle's works was outdated in the twelfth-century Muslim world, which had already scrutinized Aristotle since the ninth century and by now was engaging deeply with newer schools of thought, especially that of Avicenna. In the nineteenth century, Muslim thinkers begin to engage with the works of Averroes again. By this time, there was a cultural renaissance called "Al-Nahda" ("reawakening") in the Arabic-speaking world and the works of Averroes were seen as inspiration to modernize the Muslim intellectual tradition. In popular culture. References to Averroes appear in the popular culture of both the western and Muslim world. The poem "The Divine Comedy" by the Italian writer Dante Alighieri, completed in 1320, depicts Averroes, "who made the Great Commentary", along with other non-Christian Greek and Muslim thinkers, in Limbo around Saladin. The prolog of "The Canterbury Tales" (1387) by Geoffrey Chaucer lists Averroes among other medical authorities known in Europe at the time. Averroes is depicted in Raphael's 1501 fresco "The School of Athens" that decorates the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican, which features seminal figures of philosophy. In the painting, Averroes wears a green robe and a turban, and peers out from behind Pythagoras, who is shown writing a book. A 1947 short story by Jorge Luis Borges, "Averroes's Search" (), features his attempts to understand Aristotle's "Poetics" within a culture that lacks a tradition of live theatrical performance. In the afterwords of the story, Borges comments, "I felt that [the story] mocked me, foiled me, thwarted me. I felt that Averroës, trying to imagine what a play is without ever having suspected what a theater is, was no more absurd than I, trying to imagine Averroës yet with no more material than a few snatches from Renan, Lane, and Asín Palacios." Averroes is also the hero of the 1997 Egyptian movie "Destiny" by Youssef Chahine, made partly in commemoration of the 800th anniversary of his death. The plant genus "Averrhoa" (whose members include the starfruit and the bilimbi), the lunar crater ibn Rushd, and the asteroid 8318 Averroes are named after him.

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Gilles Deleuze Gilles Deleuze (; ; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of "Capitalism and Schizophrenia": "Anti-Oedipus" (1972) and "A Thousand Plateaus" (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise "Difference and Repetition" (1968) is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus. An important part of Deleuze's oeuvre is devoted to the reading of other philosophers: the Stoics, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and Bergson, with particular influence derived from Spinoza. A. W. Moore, citing Bernard Williams's criteria for a great thinker, ranks Deleuze among the "greatest philosophers". Although he once characterized himself as a "pure metaphysician", his work has influenced a variety of disciplines across the humanities, including philosophy, art, and literary theory, as well as movements such as post-structuralism and postmodernism. Life. Early life. Deleuze was born into a middle-class family in Paris and lived there for most of his life. His initial schooling was undertaken during World War II, during which time he attended the Lycée Carnot. He also spent a year in khâgne at the Lycée Henri IV. During the Nazi occupation of France, Deleuze's older brother, Georges, was arrested for his participation in the French Resistance, and died while in transit to a concentration camp. In 1944, Deleuze went to study at the Sorbonne. His teachers there included several noted specialists in the history of philosophy, such as Georges Canguilhem, Jean Hyppolite, Ferdinand Alquié, and Maurice de Gandillac. Deleuze's lifelong interest in the canonical figures of modern philosophy owed much to these teachers. Career. Deleuze passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1948, and taught at various lycées (Amiens, Orléans, Louis le Grand) until 1957, when he took up a position at the University of Paris. In 1953, he published his first monograph, "Empiricism and Subjectivity", on David Hume. This monograph was based on his 1947 DES ("") thesis, roughly equivalent to an M.A. thesis, which was conducted under the direction of Jean Hyppolite and Georges Canguilhem. From 1960 to 1964, he held a position at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. During this time he published the seminal "Nietzsche and Philosophy" (1962) and befriended Michel Foucault. From 1964 to 1969, he was a professor at the University of Lyon. In 1968, Deleuze defended his dissertations amid the ongoing May 68 demonstrations, and later published his two dissertations, "Difference and Repetition" (supervised by Gandillac) and "Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza" (supervised by Alquié). In 1969, he was appointed to the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes/St. Denis, an experimental school organized to implement educational reform. This new university drew a number of well-known academics, including Foucault (who suggested Deleuze's hiring) and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Deleuze taught at Paris VIII until his retirement in 1987. Personal life. Deleuze was an atheist. He married Denise Paul "Fanny" Grandjouan in 1956. One of his children is French film director and screenwriter Émilie Deleuze. According to James Miller, Deleuze betrayed little visible interest in actually "doing" many of the risky things he so vividly conjured up in his lectures and writing. Married, with two children, he outwardly lived the life of a conventional French professor. His most conspicuous eccentricity was his fingernails: these he kept long and untrimmed because, as he once explained, he lacked "normal protective fingerprints", and therefore could not "touch an object, particularly a piece of cloth, with the pads of my fingers without sharp pain". Deleuze also claimed his fingernails were an homage to the Russian author Pushkin. When once asked to talk about his life, he replied: "Academics' lives are seldom interesting." Deleuze concludes his reply to this critic thus: Death. Deleuze, who had suffered from respiratory ailments from a young age, developed tuberculosis in 1968 and underwent lung removal. He suffered increasingly severe respiratory symptoms for the rest of his life. In the last years of his life, simple tasks such as writing required laborious effort. On 4 November 1995 he committed suicide, throwing himself from the window of his apartment. Before his death, Deleuze had announced his intention to write a book entitled "La Grandeur de Marx" ("The Greatness of Marx"), and left behind two chapters of an unfinished project entitled "Ensembles and Multiplicities" (these chapters have been published as the essays "Immanence: A Life" and "The Actual and the Virtual"). He is buried in the cemetery of the village of Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat. Philosophy. Deleuze's works fall into two groups: on one hand, monographs interpreting the work of other philosophers (Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Michel Foucault) and artists (Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Francis Bacon); on the other, eclectic philosophical tomes organized by concept (e.g., difference, sense, events, schizophrenia, economy, cinema, desire, philosophy). However, both of these aspects are seen by his critics and analysts as often overlapping, in particular due to his prose and the unique mapping of his books that allow for multifaceted readings. Metaphysics. Deleuze's main philosophical project in the works he wrote prior to his collaborations with Guattari can be summarized as an inversion of the traditional metaphysical relationship between identity and difference. Traditionally, difference is seen as derivative from identity: e.g., to say that "X is different from Y" assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable identities (as in Plato's forms). To the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference. Identities are neither logically nor metaphysically prior to difference, Deleuze argues, "given that there exist differences of nature between things of the same genus." That is, not only are no two things ever the same, the categories we use to identify individuals in the first place derive from differences. Apparent identities such as "X" are composed of endless series of differences, where "X" = "the difference between x and xformula_1", and "xformula_1" = "the difference between...", and so forth. Difference, in other words, goes all the way down. To confront reality honestly, Deleuze argues, we must grasp beings exactly as they are, and concepts of identity (forms, categories, resemblances, unities of apperception, predicates, etc.) fail to attain what he calls "difference in itself." "If philosophy has a positive and direct relation to things, it is only insofar as philosophy claims to grasp the thing itself, according to what it is, in its difference from everything it is not, in other words, in its "internal difference"." Like Kant, Deleuze considers traditional notions of space and time as unifying forms imposed by the subject. He therefore concludes that pure difference is non-spatio-temporal; it is an idea, what Deleuze calls "the virtual". (The coinage refers to Proust's definition of what is constant in both the past and the present: "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.") While Deleuze's virtual ideas superficially resemble Plato's forms and Kant's ideas of pure reason, they are not originals or models, nor do they transcend possible experience; instead they are the conditions of actual experience, the internal difference in itself. "The concept they [the conditions] form is identical to its object." A Deleuzean idea or concept of difference is therefore not a wraith-like abstraction of an experienced thing, it is a real system of differential relations that creates actual spaces, times, and sensations. Thus, Deleuze at times refers to his philosophy as a transcendental empiricism (), alluding to Kant. In Kant's transcendental idealism, experience only makes sense when organized by forms of sensibility (namely, space and time) and intellectual categories (such as causality). Assuming the content of these forms and categories to be qualities of the world as it exists independently of our perceptual access, according to Kant, spawns seductive but senseless metaphysical beliefs (for example, extending the concept of causality beyond possible experience results in unverifiable speculation about a first cause). Deleuze inverts the Kantian arrangement: experience exceeds our concepts by presenting novelty, and this raw experience of difference actualizes an idea, unfettered by our prior categories, forcing us to invent new ways of thinking (see "Epistemology"). Simultaneously, Deleuze claims that being is univocal, i.e., that all of its senses are affirmed in one voice. Deleuze borrows the doctrine of "ontological univocity" from the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus. In medieval disputes over the nature of God, many eminent theologians and philosophers (such as Thomas Aquinas) held that when one says that "God is good", God's goodness is only analogous to human goodness. Scotus argued to the contrary that when one says that "God is good", the goodness in question is exactly the same sort of goodness that is meant when one says "Jane is good". That is, God only differs from us in degree, and properties such as goodness, power, reason, and so forth are univocally applied, regardless of whether one is talking about God, a person, or a flea. Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, difference. "With univocity, however, it is not the differences which are and must be: it is being which is Difference, in the sense that it is said of difference. Moreover, it is not we who are univocal in a Being which is not; it is we and our individuality which remains equivocal in and for a univocal Being." Here Deleuze at once echoes and inverts Spinoza, who maintained that everything that exists is a modification of the one substance, God or Nature. For Deleuze, there is no one substance, only an always-differentiating process, an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding. Deleuze summarizes this ontology in the paradoxical formula "pluralism = monism". "Difference and Repetition" (1968) is Deleuze's most sustained and systematic attempt to work out the details of such a metaphysics, but his other works develop similar ideas. In "Nietzsche and Philosophy" (1962), for example, reality is a play of forces; in "Anti-Oedipus" (1972), a "body without organs"; in "What is Philosophy?" (1991), a "plane of immanence" or "chaosmos". Epistemology. Deleuze's unusual metaphysics entails an equally atypical epistemology, or what he calls a transformation of "the image of thought". According to Deleuze, the traditional image of thought, found in philosophers such as Aristotle, René Descartes, and Edmund Husserl, misconceives of thinking as a mostly unproblematic business. Truth may be hard to discover—it may require a life of pure theorizing, or rigorous computation, or systematic doubt—but thinking is able, at least in principle, to correctly grasp facts, forms, ideas, etc. It may be practically impossible to attain a God's-eye, neutral point of view, but that is the ideal to approximate: a disinterested pursuit that results in a determinate, fixed truth; an orderly extension of common sense. Deleuze rejects this view as papering over the metaphysical flux, instead claiming that genuine thinking is a violent confrontation with reality, an involuntary rupture of established categories. Truth changes what we think; it alters what we think is possible. By setting aside the assumption that thinking has a natural ability to recognize the truth, Deleuze says, we attain a "thought without image", a thought always determined by problems rather than solving them. "All this, however, presupposes codes or axioms which do not result by chance, but which do not have an intrinsic rationality either. It's just like theology: everything about it is quite rational if you accept sin, the immaculate conception, and the incarnation. Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational—not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift." "The Logic of Sense", published in 1969, is one of Deleuze's most peculiar works in the field of epistemology. Michel Foucault, in his essay "Theatrum Philosophicum" about the book, attributed this to how he begins with his metaphysics but approaches it through language and truth; the book is focused on "the simple condition that instead of denouncing metaphysics as the neglect of being, we force it to speak of extrabeing". In it, he refers to epistemological paradoxes: in the first series, as he analyzes Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland", he remarks that "the personal self requires God and the world in general. But when substantives and adjectives begin to dissolve, when the names of pause and rest are carried away by the verbs of pure becoming and slide into the language of events, all identity disappears from the self, the world, and God." Deleuze's peculiar readings of the history of philosophy stem from this unusual epistemological perspective. To read a philosopher is no longer to aim at finding a single, correct interpretation, but is instead to present a philosopher's attempt to grapple with the problematic nature of reality. "Philosophers introduce new concepts, they explain them, but they don't tell us, not completely anyway, the problems to which those concepts are a response. [...] The history of philosophy, rather than repeating what a philosopher says, has to say what he must have taken for granted, what he didn't say but is nonetheless present in what he did say." Likewise, rather than seeing philosophy as a timeless pursuit of truth, reason, or universals, Deleuze defines philosophy as the creation of concepts. For Deleuze, concepts are not identity conditions or propositions, but metaphysical constructions that define a range of thinking, such as Plato's ideas, Descartes's "cogito", or Kant's doctrine of the faculties. A philosophical concept "posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created." In Deleuze's view, then, philosophy more closely resembles practical or artistic production than it does an adjunct to a definitive scientific description of a pre-existing world (as in the tradition of John Locke or Willard Van Orman Quine). In his later work (from roughly 1981 onward), Deleuze sharply distinguishes art, philosophy, and science as three distinct disciplines, each analyzing reality in different ways. While philosophy creates concepts, the arts create novel qualitative combinations of sensation and feeling (what Deleuze calls "percepts" and "affects"), and the sciences create quantitative theories based on fixed points of reference such as the speed of light or absolute zero (which Deleuze calls "functives"). According to Deleuze, none of these disciplines enjoy primacy over the others: they are different ways of organizing the metaphysical flux, "separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another." For example, Deleuze does not treat cinema as an art representing an external reality, but as an ontological practice that creates different ways of organizing movement and time. Philosophy, science, and art are equally, and essentially, creative and practical. Hence, instead of asking traditional questions of identity such as "is it true?" or "what is it?", Deleuze proposes that inquiries should be functional or practical: "what does it do?" or "how does it work?" Values. In ethics and politics, Deleuze again echoes Spinoza, albeit in a sharply Nietzschean key. In a classical liberal model of society, morality begins from individuals, who bear abstract natural rights or duties set by themselves or a God. Following his rejection of any metaphysics based on identity, Deleuze criticizes the notion of an individual as an arresting or halting of differentiation (as the etymology of the word "individual" suggests). Guided by the naturalistic ethics of Spinoza and Nietzsche, Deleuze instead seeks to understand individuals and their moralities as products of the organization of pre-individual desires and powers. In the two volumes of "Capitalism and Schizophrenia", "Anti-Oedipus" (1972) and "A Thousand Plateaus" (1980), Deleuze and Guattari describe history as a congealing and regimentation of "desiring-production" (a concept combining features of Freudian drives and Marxist labor) into the modern individual (typically neurotic and repressed), the nation-state (a society of continuous control), and capitalism (an anarchy domesticated into infantilizing commodification). Deleuze, following Karl Marx, welcomes capitalism's destruction of traditional social hierarchies as liberating, but inveighs against its homogenization of all values to the aims of the market. The first part of "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" undertakes a universal history and posits the existence of a separate socius (the social body that takes credit for production) for each mode of production: the earth for the tribe, the body of the despot for the empire, and capital for capitalism." In his 1990 essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control" ("Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle"), Deleuze builds on Foucault's notion of the society of discipline to argue that society is undergoing a shift in structure and control. Where societies of discipline were characterized by discrete physical enclosures (such as schools, factories, prisons, office buildings, etc.), institutions and technologies introduced since World War II have dissolved the boundaries between these enclosures. As a result, social coercion and discipline have moved into the lives of individuals considered as "masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks'." The mechanisms of modern societies of control are described as continuous, following and tracking individuals throughout their existence via transaction records, mobile location tracking, and other personally identifiable information. But how does Deleuze square his pessimistic diagnoses with his ethical naturalism? Deleuze claims that standards of value are internal or immanent: to live well is to fully express one's power, to go to the limits of one's potential, rather than to judge what exists by non-empirical, transcendent standards. Modern society still suppresses difference and alienates persons from what they can do. To affirm reality, which is a flux of change and difference, we must overturn established identities and so become all that we can become—though we cannot know what that is in advance. The pinnacle of Deleuzean practice, then, is creativity. "Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?" Deleuze's interpretations. Deleuze's studies of individual philosophers and artists are purposely heterodox. In "Nietzsche and Philosophy", for example, Deleuze claims that Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morality" (1887) is an attempt to rewrite Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781), even though Nietzsche nowhere mentions the First Critique in the "Genealogy", and the "Genealogy"'s moral topics are far removed from the epistemological focus of Kant's book. Likewise, Deleuze claims that univocity is the organizing principle of Spinoza's philosophy, despite the total absence of the term from any of Spinoza's works. Deleuze once famously described his method of interpreting philosophers as "buggery ("enculage")", as sneaking behind an author and producing an offspring which is recognizably his, yet also monstrous and different. The various monographs thus are not attempts to present what Nietzsche or Spinoza strictly intended, but re-stagings of their ideas in different and unexpected ways. Deleuze's peculiar readings aim to enact the creativity he believes is the acme of philosophical practice. A parallel in painting Deleuze points to is Francis Bacon's "Study after Velázquez"—it is quite beside the point to say that Bacon "gets Velasquez wrong". Similar considerations apply, in Deleuze's view, to his own uses of mathematical and scientific terms, "pace" critics such as Alan Sokal: "I'm not saying that Resnais and Prigogine, or Godard and Thom, are doing the same thing. I'm pointing out, rather, that there are remarkable similarities between scientific creators of functions and cinematic creators of images. And the same goes for philosophical concepts, since there are distinct concepts of these spaces." Along with several French and Italian Marxist-inspired thinkers like Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Antonio Negri, he was one of the central figures in a great flowering of Spinoza studies in the late 20th and early 21st centuries continental philosophy (or the rise of French-inspired post-structuralist ) that was the second remarkable Spinoza revival in history, after highly significant Neo-Spinozism in German philosophy and literature of approximately the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A fervent Spinozist in many respects, Deleuze's preoccupation with and reverence for Spinoza are well known in contemporary philosophy. Reception. In the 1960s, Deleuze's portrayal of Nietzsche as a metaphysician of difference rather than a reactionary mystic contributed greatly to the plausibility and popularity of "left-wing Nietzscheanism" as an intellectual stance. His books "Difference and Repetition" (1968) and "The Logic of Sense" (1969) led Michel Foucault to declare that "one day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian." (Deleuze, for his part, said Foucault's comment was "a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid.") In the 1970s, the "Anti-Oedipus", written in a style by turns vulgar and esoteric, offering a sweeping analysis of the family, language, capitalism, and history via eclectic borrowings from Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, and dozens of other writers, was received as a theoretical embodiment of the anarchic spirit of May 1968. In 1994 and 1995, "L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze", an eight-hour series of interviews between Deleuze and Claire Parnet, aired on France's Arte Channel. In the 1980s and 1990s, almost all of Deleuze's books were translated into English. Deleuze's work is frequently cited in English-speaking academia (in 2007, e.g., he was the 11th most frequently cited author in English-speaking publications in the humanities, between Freud and Kant). Like his contemporaries Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, Deleuze's influence has been most strongly felt in North American humanities departments, particularly in literary theory, where "Anti-Oedipus" and "A Thousand Plateaus" are oft regarded as major statements of post-structuralism and postmodernism, though neither Deleuze nor Guattari described their work in those terms. Likewise in the English-speaking academy, Deleuze's work is typically classified as continental philosophy. Deleuze has attracted critics as well. The following list is not exhaustive, and gives only the briefest of summaries. Among French philosophers, Vincent Descombes argues that Deleuze's account of a difference that is not derived from identity (in "Nietzsche and Philosophy") is incoherent, and that his analysis of history in "Anti-Oedipus" is 'utter idealism', criticizing reality for falling short of a non-existent ideal of schizophrenic becoming. According to Pascal Engel, Deleuze's metaphilosophical approach makes it impossible to reasonably disagree with a philosophical system, and so destroys meaning, truth, and philosophy itself. Engel summarizes Deleuze's metaphilosophy thus: "When faced with a beautiful philosophical concept you should just sit back and admire it. You should not question it." Alain Badiou claims that Deleuze's metaphysics only apparently embraces plurality and diversity, remaining at bottom monist. Badiou further argues that, in practical matters, Deleuze's monism entails an ascetic, aristocratic fatalism akin to ancient Stoicism. Other European philosophers have criticized Deleuze's theory of subjectivity. For example, Manfred Frank claims that Deleuze's theory of individuation as a process of bottomless differentiation fails to explain the unity of consciousness. Slavoj Žižek claims that Deleuze's ontology oscillates between materialism and idealism, and that the Deleuze of "Anti-Oedipus" ("arguably Deleuze's worst book"), the "political" Deleuze under the "'bad' influence" of Guattari, ends up, despite protestations to the contrary, as "the ideologist of late capitalism". Žižek also calls Deleuze to task for allegedly reducing the subject to "just another" substance and thereby failing to grasp the nothingness that, according to Lacan and Žižek, defines subjectivity. What remains worthwhile in Deleuze's oeuvre, Žižek finds, are precisely Deleuze's engagements with virtuality as the product of negativity. English-speaking philosophers have also criticized aspects of Deleuze's work. Stanley Rosen objects to Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return. Todd May argues that Deleuze's claim that difference is ontologically primary ultimately contradicts his embrace of immanence, i.e., his monism. However, May believes that Deleuze can discard the primacy-of-difference thesis, and accept a Wittgensteinian holism without significantly altering his practical philosophy. Peter Hallward argues that Deleuze's insistence that being is necessarily creative and always-differentiating entails that his philosophy can offer no insight into, and is supremely indifferent to, the material, actual conditions of existence. Thus Hallward claims that Deleuze's thought is literally other-worldly, aiming only at a passive contemplation of the dissolution of all identity into the theophanic self-creation of nature. In "Fashionable Nonsense" (1997), physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Deleuze of abusing mathematical and scientific terms, particularly by sliding between accepted technical meanings and his own idiosyncratic use of those terms in his works. Sokal and Bricmont state that they don't object to metaphorical reasoning, including with mathematical concepts, but mathematical and scientific terms are useful only insofar as they are precise. They give examples of mathematical concepts being "abused" by taking them out of their intended meaning, rendering the idea into normal language reduces it to truism or nonsense. In their opinion, Deleuze used mathematical concepts about which the typical reader might be not knowledgeable, and thus served to display erudition rather than enlightening the reader. Sokal and Bricmont state that they only deal with the "abuse" of mathematical and scientific concepts and explicitly suspend judgment about Deleuze's wider contributions. Other scholars in continental philosophy, feminist studies and sexuality studies have taken Deleuze's analysis of the sexual dynamics of sadism and masochism with a level of uncritical celebration following the 1989 Zone Books translation of the 1967 booklet on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, "Le froid et le cruel" (Coldness and Cruelty). As sexuality historian Alison M. Moore notes, Deleuze's own value placed on difference is poorly reflected in this booklet which fails to differentiate between Masoch's own view of his desire and that imposed upon him by the pathologizing forms of psychiatric thought prevailing in the late nineteenth century which produced the concept of 'masochism' (a term Masoch himself emphatically rejected).

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Walter J. Ong Walter Jackson Ong (November 30, 1912 – August 12, 2003) was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian, and philosopher. His major interest was in exploring how the transition from orality to literacy influenced culture and changed human consciousness. In 1978 he served as elected president of the Modern Language Association. Biography. Ong was born in Kansas City, Missouri, to a Protestant father and a Roman Catholic mother; he was raised as a Roman Catholic. In 1929 he graduated from Rockhurst High School. In 1933 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rockhurst College, where he majored in Latin. During his time at Rockhurst College, he founded a chapter of the Catholic fraternity Alpha Delta Gamma. He worked in printing and publishing prior to entering the Society of Jesus in 1935, and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1946. In 1941 Ong earned a master's degree in English at Saint Louis University. His thesis on sprung rhythm in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins was supervised by the young Canadian Marshall McLuhan. Ong also received the degrees Licentiate of Philosophy and Licentiate of Sacred Theology from Saint Louis University. After completing his dissertation on the French logician and educational reformer Peter Ramus (1515–1572) and Ramism under the supervision of Perry Miller at Harvard University in 1954, Ong returned to Saint Louis University, where he would teach for the next 30 years. In 1955 he received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University. In 1963 the French government honored Ong for his work on Ramus by dubbing him a knight, "Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes académiques". In 1966–1967 he served on the 14-member White House Task Force on Education that reported to President Lyndon Johnson. In 1971 Ong was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In April and May 1974, he served as Lincoln Lecturer, presenting lectures in French in Cameroun, Zaire, and Senegal and in English in Nigeria. In 1967 he served as president of the Milton Society of America. In 1978 he served as elected president of the Modern Language Association of America. He was very active on the lecture circuit as well as in professional organizations. Ong died in 2003 in St. Louis, Missouri. Summary of Ong's works and interests. A major concern of Ong's works is the impact that the shift from orality to literacy has had on culture and education. Writing is a technology like other technologies (fire, the steam engine, etc.) that, when introduced to a "primary oral culture" (which has never known writing) has extremely wide-ranging impacts in all areas of life. These include culture, economics, politics, art, and more. Furthermore, even a small amount of education in writing transforms people's mentality from the holistic immersion of orality to interiorization and individuation. Many of the effects of the introduction of the technology of writing are related to the fact that oral cultures require strategies of preserving information in the absence of writing. These include, for example, a reliance on proverbs or condensed wisdom for making decisions, epic poetry, and stylized culture heroes (wise Nestor, crafty Odysseus). Writing makes these features no longer necessary, and introduces new strategies of remembering cultural material, which itself now changes. Because cultures at any given time vary along a continuum between full orality and full literacy, Ong distinguishes between primary oral cultures (which have never known writing), cultures with craft literacy (such as scribes), and cultures in a transition phase from orality to literacy, in which some people know of writing but are illiterate - these cultures have "residual orality". Some of Ong's interests: Major works. "Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue" (1958). According to Adrian Johns' foreword to the 2004 edition, Ong was urged to research Ramus after his graduate mentor, Marshall McLuhan had no particular interest in Ong's original subject, Gerard Manley Hopkins. McLuhan vigorously encouraged Ong's work, and eventually drew upon his former student's perspective on Ramism to write his own pivotal work, "The Gutenberg Galaxy". "Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason" (1958) elaborates the contrast between the visual and the oral that Ong found in Louis Lavelle's "La parole et l'ecriture" (1942). Ong details how the spatialization and quantification of thought in dialectic and logic during the Middle Ages enabled "a new state of mind" to emerge in print culture, which is associated with the emergence of modern science. The companion volume, "Ramus and Talon Inventory" (1958) is a notable work that contributes to the field known today as book history. Therein, Ong briefly describes more than 750 volumes (mostly in Latin) that he had tracked down in more than 100 libraries in Europe. Peter Ramus (1515–1572), was a French humanist, logician, and educational reformer whose textbook method of analyzing subjects was very widely adopted in many academic fields. In "Ramist Classroom Procedure and the Nature of Reality", Ong discusses Ramism as a transition phase between the Classical style of education and the modern one. He writes, "...Ramism might seem merely quaint, perhaps artistically lethal, but of no great importance. Yet its great spread will hardly allow us to regard it as educationally insignificant. As a matter of fact, it has educational significance of the headiest sort, for it implies no less than that it is the "arts" or curriculum subjects which hold the world together. Nothing is accessible for "use," that is, for active intussusception (the assimilation of new material and its dispersal among preexistent matter) by the human being, until it has first been put through the curriculum. The schoolroom is by implication the doorway to reality, and indeed the only doorway." "The Presence of the Word" (1967). "The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History" (1967) is an expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University. It is a pioneering work in cultural studies and media ecology. He writes, "[my] works do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explains everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, [my] thesis is relationist: major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness, are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state. But the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish". "Fighting for Life" (1981). Ong subsequently developed his observations regarding polemic in "The Presence of the Word" (192–286) in his book length study "Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness" (1981), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University. "Orality and Literacy" (1982). In Ong's most widely known work, "Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word" (1982), he attempts to identify the distinguishing characteristics of orality by examining thought and its verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy (especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population. Ong drew heavily on the work of Eric A. Havelock, who suggested a fundamental shift in the form of thought coinciding with the transition from orality to literacy in Ancient Greece. Ong describes writing as a technology that must be laboriously learned, and which effects the first transformation of human thought from the world of sound to the world of sight. This transition has implications for structuralism, deconstruction, speech-act and reader-response theory, the teaching of reading and writing skills to males and females, social studies, biblical studies, philosophy, and cultural history generally. "An Ong Reader" (2002). This 600-page selection of Ong's works is organized on the themes of orality and rhetoric. It includes his 1967 encyclopedia article on the "Written Transmission of Literature" (331–44); his most frequently cited article, his 1975 "PMLA" article "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction" (405–27); and his most frequently reprinted article, his 1978 "ADE Bulletin" article "Literacy and Orality in Our Times" (465–78). Taken together, these three essays make up a coherent approach to the study of written literature against the background of oral tradition.

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Kathleen Stock Kathleen Mary Linn Stock (born 1972) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex. She has published on aesthetics, fiction, imagination, sexual objectification, sex, gender, and sexual orientation. She is currently the vice-president of the British Society of Aesthetics. In her monograph "Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination" (2017), she examines the nature of fictional content. She has expressed critical views on the UK Gender Recognition Act and trans self-identification. Her 2021 book, "Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism", discusses modern gender theory; her thesis, according to a reviewer, is that there is "a new orthodoxy, one in which sex gives way to feeling, and feeling trumps facts". Stock has written one monograph as well as a number of articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, and has contributed several chapters to edited volumes. She edited "Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work" (first edition 2007), and together with Katherine Thomson-Jones, she edited "New Waves in Aesthetics" (2008). Stock has given lectures at the University of York, the Aristotelian Society, the London Aesthetics Forum, the University of Wolverhampton, the American Society for Aesthetics, and other places. Stock has called for trans women who still have male genitalia to be excluded from women's changing rooms, characterising them as "still males" who may be sexually attracted to women, but denies opposing trans rights, saying "I gladly and vocally assert the rights of trans people to live their lives free from fear, violence, harassment or any discrimination" and "I think that discussing female rights is compatible with defending these trans rights.". Stock was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to higher education.

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Marcel Proust Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (; ; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel "À la recherche du temps perdu" ("In Search of Lost Time"; earlier rendered as "Remembrance of Things Past"), published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. Background. Proust was born on 10 July 1871, shortly after the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian war and at the very beginning of the Third Republic. He was born in the Paris Borough of Auteuil (the south-western sector of the then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle on 10 July 1871, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. His birth took place during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponded with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of "In Search of Lost Time" concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes, that occurred in France during the Third Republic and the "fin de siècle." Proust's father, Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist, studying cholera in Europe and Asia. He wrote numerous articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust's mother, Jeanne Clémence (Weil), was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Alsace. Literate and well-read, she demonstrated a well-developed sense of humour in her letters, and her command of English was sufficient to help with her son's translations of John Ruskin. Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith. He was baptized (on 5 August 1871, at the church of ) and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never formally practised that faith. He later became an atheist and was something of a mystic. By the age of nine, Proust had had his first serious asthma attack, and thereafter he was considered a sickly child. Proust spent long holidays in the village of Illiers. This village, combined with recollections of his great-uncle's house in Auteuil, became the model for the fictional town of Combray, where some of the most important scenes of "In Search of Lost Time" take place. (Illiers was renamed Illiers-Combray in 1971 on the occasion of the Proust centenary celebrations.) In 1882, at the age of eleven, Proust became a pupil at the Lycée Condorcet; however, his education was disrupted by his illness. Despite this, he excelled in literature, receiving an award in his final year. Thanks to his classmates, he was able to gain access to some of the salons of the upper bourgeoisie, providing him with copious material for "In Search of Lost Time". In spite of his poor health, Proust served a year (1889–90) in the French army, stationed at Coligny Barracks in Orléans, an experience that provided a lengthy episode in "The Guermantes' Way", part three of his novel. As a young man, Proust was a dilettante and a social climber whose aspirations as a writer were hampered by his lack of self-discipline. His reputation from this period, as a snob and an amateur, contributed to his later troubles with getting "Swann's Way", the first part of his large-scale novel, published in 1913. At this time, he attended the "salons" of Mme Straus, widow of Georges Bizet and mother of Proust's childhood friend Jacques Bizet, of Madeleine Lemaire and of Mme Arman de Caillavet, one of the models for Madame Verdurin, and mother of his friend Gaston Arman de Caillavet, with whose fiancée (Jeanne Pouquet) he was in love. It is through Mme Arman de Caillavet, he made the acquaintance of Anatole France, her lover. Proust had a close relationship with his mother. To appease his father, who insisted that he pursue a career, Proust obtained a volunteer position at Bibliothèque Mazarine in the summer of 1896. After exerting considerable effort, he obtained a sick leave that extended for several years until he was considered to have resigned. He never worked at his job, and he did not move from his parents' apartment until after both were dead. His life and family circle changed markedly between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother, Robert Proust, married and left the family home. His father died in November of the same year. Finally, and most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in September 1905. She left him a considerable inheritance. His health throughout this period continued to deteriorate. Proust spent the last three years of his life mostly confined to his bedroom, sleeping during the day and working at night to complete his novel. He died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Early writing. Proust was involved in writing and publishing from an early age. In addition to the literary magazines with which he was associated, and in which he published while at school ("La Revue verte" and "La Revue lilas"), from 1890 to 1891 he published a regular society column in the journal "Le Mensuel". In 1892, he was involved in founding a literary review called "Le Banquet" (also the French title of Plato's "Symposium"), and throughout the next several years Proust published small pieces regularly in this journal and in the prestigious "La Revue Blanche". In 1896 "Les plaisirs et les jours", a compendium of many of these early pieces, was published. The book included a foreword by Anatole France, drawings by Mme Lemaire in whose "salon" Proust was a frequent guest, and who inspired Proust's Mme Verdurin. She invited him and Reynaldo Hahn to her château de Réveillon (the model for Mme Verdurin's La Raspelière) in summer 1894, and for three weeks in 1895. This book was so sumptuously produced that it cost twice the normal price of a book its size. That year Proust also began working on a novel, which was eventually published in 1952 and titled "Jean Santeuil" by his posthumous editors. Many of the themes later developed in "In Search of Lost Time" find their first articulation in this unfinished work, including the enigma of memory and the necessity of reflection; several sections of "In Search of Lost Time" can be read in the first draft in "Jean Santeuil". The portrait of the parents in "Jean Santeuil" is quite harsh, in marked contrast to the adoration with which the parents are painted in Proust's masterpiece. Following the poor reception of "Les Plaisirs et les Jours", and internal troubles with resolving the plot, Proust gradually abandoned "Jean Santeuil" in 1897 and stopped work on it entirely by 1899. Beginning in 1895 Proust spent several years reading Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Ruskin. Through this reading, he refined his theories of art and the role of the artist in society. Also, in "Time Regained" Proust's universal protagonist recalls having translated Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies". The artist's responsibility is to confront the appearance of nature, deduce its essence and retell or explain that essence in the work of art. Ruskin's view of artistic production was central to this conception, and Ruskin's work was so important to Proust that he claimed to know "by heart" several of Ruskin's books, including "The Seven Lamps of Architecture", "The Bible of Amiens", and "Praeterita". Proust set out to translate two of Ruskin's works into French, but was hampered by an imperfect command of English. To compensate for this he made his translations a group affair: sketched out by his mother, the drafts were first revised by Proust, then by Marie Nordlinger, the English cousin of his friend and sometime lover Reynaldo Hahn, then finally polished by Proust. Questioned about his method by an editor, Proust responded, "I don't claim to know English; I claim to know Ruskin". "The Bible of Amiens", with Proust's extended introduction, was published in French in 1904. Both the translation and the introduction were well-reviewed; Henri Bergson called Proust's introduction "an important contribution to the psychology of Ruskin", and had similar praise for the translation. At the time of this publication, Proust was already translating Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies", which he completed in June 1905, just before his mother's death, and published in 1906. Literary historians and critics have ascertained that, apart from Ruskin, Proust's chief literary influences included Saint-Simon, Montaigne, Stendhal, Flaubert, George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. 1908 was an important year for Proust's development as a writer. During the first part of the year he published in various journals pastiches of other writers. These exercises in imitation may have allowed Proust to solidify his own style. In addition, in the spring and summer of the year Proust began work on several different fragments of writing that would later coalesce under the working title of "Contre Sainte-Beuve". Proust described his efforts in a letter to a friend: "I have in progress: a study on the nobility, a Parisian novel, an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert, an essay on women, an essay on pederasty (not easy to publish), a study on stained-glass windows, a study on tombstones, a study on the novel". From these disparate fragments Proust began to shape a novel on which he worked continually during this period. The rough outline of the work centred on a first-person narrator, unable to sleep, who during the night remembers waiting as a child for his mother to come to him in the morning. The novel was to have ended with a critical examination of Sainte-Beuve and a refutation of his theory that biography was the most important tool for understanding an artist's work. Present in the unfinished manuscript notebooks are many elements that correspond to parts of the "Recherche", in particular, to the "Combray" and "Swann in Love" sections of Volume 1, and to the final section of Volume 7. Trouble with finding a publisher, as well as a gradually changing conception of his novel, led Proust to shift work to a substantially different project that still contained many of the same themes and elements. By 1910 he was at work on "À la recherche du temps perdu". "In Search of Lost Time". Begun in 1909, when Proust was 38 years old, "À la recherche du temps perdu" consists of seven volumes totaling around 3,200 pages (about 4,300 in The Modern Library's translation) and featuring more than 2,000 characters. Graham Greene called Proust the "greatest novelist of the 20th century", and W. Somerset Maugham called the novel the "greatest fiction to date". André Gide was initially not so taken with his work. The first volume was refused by the publisher Gallimard on Gide's advice. He later wrote to Proust apologizing for his part in the refusal and calling it one of the most serious mistakes of his life. Proust died before he was able to complete his revision of the drafts and proofs of the final volumes, the last three of which were published posthumously and edited by his brother Robert. The book was translated into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, appearing under the title "Remembrance of Things Past" between 1922 and 1931. Scott Moncrieff translated volumes one through six of the seven volumes, dying before completing the last. This last volume was rendered by other translators at different times. When Scott Moncrieff's translation was later revised (first by Terence Kilmartin, then by D. J. Enright) the title of the novel was changed to the more literal "In Search of Lost Time". In 1995 Penguin undertook a fresh translation of the book by editor Christopher Prendergast and seven translators in three countries, based on the latest, most complete and authoritative French text. Its six volumes, comprising Proust's seven, were published in Britain under the Allen Lane imprint in 2002. Personal life. Proust is known to have been homosexual, and his sexuality and relationships with men are often discussed by his biographers. Although his housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, denies this aspect of Proust's sexuality in her memoirs, her denial runs contrary to the statements of many of Proust's friends and contemporaries, including his fellow writer André Gide as well as his valet Ernest A. Forssgren. Proust never openly admitted to his homosexuality, though his family and close friends either knew or suspected it. In 1897, he even fought a duel with writer Jean Lorrain, who publicly questioned the nature of Proust's relationship with Lucien Daudet (both duelists survived). Despite Proust's own public denial, his romantic relationship with composer Reynaldo Hahn, and his infatuation with his chauffeur and secretary, Alfred Agostinelli, are well documented. On the night of 11 January 1918, Proust was one of the men identified by police in a raid on a male brothel run by Albert Le Cuziat. Proust's friend, the poet Paul Morand, openly teased Proust about his visits to male prostitutes. In his journal, Morand refers to Proust, as well as Gide, as "constantly hunting, never satiated by their adventures … eternal prowlers, tireless sexual adventurers." The exact influence of Proust's sexuality on his writing is a topic of debate. However, "In Search of Lost Time" discusses homosexuality at length and features several principal characters, both men and women, who are either homosexual or bisexual: the Baron de Charlus, Robert de Saint-Loup, Odette de Crécy, and Albertine Simonet. Homosexuality also appears as a theme in "Les plaisirs et les jours" and his unfinished novel, "Jean Santeuil". Proust inherited much of his mother's political outlook, which was supportive of the French Third Republic and near the liberal centre of French politics. In an 1892 article published in "Le Banquet" entitled "L'Irréligion d'État", Proust condemned extreme anti-clerical measures such as the expulsion of monks, observing that "one might just be surprised that the negation of religion should bring in its wake the same fanaticism, intolerance, and persecution as religion itself." He argued that socialism posed a greater threat to society than the Church. He was equally critical of the right, lambasting "the insanity of the conservatives," whom he deemed "as dumb and ungrateful as under Charles X," and referring to Pope Pius X's obstinacy as foolish. Proust always rejected the bigoted and illiberal views harbored by many priests at the time, but believed that the most enlightened clerics could be just as progressive as the most enlightened secularists, and that both could serve the cause of "the advanced liberal Republic". He approved of the more moderate stance taken in 1906 by Aristide Briand, whom he described as "admirable". Proust was among the earliest Dreyfusards, even attending Émile Zola's trial and proudly claiming to have been the one who asked Anatole France to sign the petition in support of Dreyfus's innocence. In 1919, when representatives of the right-wing Action Française published a manifesto upholding French colonialism and the Catholic Church as the embodiment of civilised values, Proust rejected their nationalism and chauvinism in favor of a liberal pluralist vision which acknowledged Christianity's cultural legacy in France. Julien Benda commended Proust in "La Trahison des clercs" as a writer who distinguished himself from his generation by avoiding the twin traps of nationalism and class sectarianism.

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Bertrand Russell Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British polymath. As an academic, he worked in philosophy, mathematics, and logic. His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science (see type theory and type system) and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. Russell was also a public intellectual, historian, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate. He was born in Monmouthshire into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in the United Kingdom. Russell was one of the early 20th century's most prominent logicians, and one of the founders of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore and his student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British "revolt against idealism". Together with his former teacher A. N. Whitehead, Russell wrote "Principia Mathematica", a milestone in the development of classical logic, and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic (see Logicism). Russell's article "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy". Russell was a pacifist who championed anti-imperialism and chaired the India League. He occasionally advocated preventive nuclear war, before the opportunity provided by the atomic monopoly had passed and he decided he would "welcome with enthusiasm" world government. He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I. Later, Russell concluded that the war against Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany was a necessary "lesser of two evils" and also criticized Stalinist totalitarianism, condemned the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War and was an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament. In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought". He was also the recipient of the De Morgan Medal (1932), Sylvester Medal (1934), Kalinga Prize (1957), and Jerusalem Prize (1963). Throughout his life, Russell considered himself a liberal, a socialist and a pacifist, although he later wrote he had "never been any of these things, in any profound sense". Biography. Early life and background. Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born on 18 May 1872 at Ravenscroft, Trellech, Monmouthshire, United Kingdom, into an influential and liberal family of the British aristocracy. His parents, Viscount and Viscountess Amberley, were radical for their times. Lord Amberley consented to his wife's affair with their children's tutor, the biologist Douglas Spalding. Both were early advocates of birth control at a time when this was considered scandalous. Lord Amberley was an atheist and his atheism was evident when he asked the philosopher John Stuart Mill to act as Russell's secular godfather. Mill died the year after Russell's birth, but his writings had a great effect on Russell's life. His paternal grandfather, the Earl Russell, had twice been Prime Minister in the 1840s and 1860s. The Russells had been prominent in England for several centuries before this, coming to power and the peerage with the rise of the Tudor dynasty (see: Duke of Bedford). They established themselves as one of the leading British Whig families and participated in every great political event from the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536–1540 to the Glorious Revolution in 1688–1689 and the Great Reform Act in 1832. Lady Amberley was the daughter of Lord and Lady Stanley of Alderley. Russell often feared the ridicule of his maternal grandmother, one of the campaigners for education of women. Childhood and adolescence. Russell had two siblings: brother Frank (nearly seven years older than Bertrand), and sister Rachel (four years older). In June 1874 Russell's mother died of diphtheria, followed shortly by Rachel's death. In January 1876, his father died of bronchitis following a long period of depression. Frank and Bertrand were placed in the care of their staunchly Victorian paternal grandparents, who lived at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park. His grandfather, former Prime Minister Earl Russell, died in 1878, and was remembered by Russell as a kindly old man in a wheelchair. His grandmother, the Countess Russell (née Lady Frances Elliot), was the dominant family figure for the rest of Russell's childhood and youth. The countess was from a Scottish Presbyterian family, and successfully petitioned the Court of Chancery to set aside a provision in Amberley's will requiring the children to be raised as agnostics. Despite her religious conservatism, she held progressive views in other areas (accepting Darwinism and supporting Irish Home Rule), and her influence on Bertrand Russell's outlook on social justice and standing up for principle remained with him throughout his life. Her favourite Bible verse, "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil", became his motto. The atmosphere at Pembroke Lodge was one of frequent prayer, emotional repression, and formality; Frank reacted to this with open rebellion, but the young Bertrand learned to hide his feelings. Russell's adolescence was very lonely, and he often contemplated suicide. He remarked in his autobiography that his keenest interests were in "nature and books and (later) mathematics saved me from complete despondency;" only his wish to know more mathematics kept him from suicide. He was educated at home by a series of tutors. When Russell was eleven years old, his brother Frank introduced him to the work of Euclid, which he described in his autobiography as "one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love." During these formative years he also discovered the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Russell wrote: "I spent all my spare time reading him, and learning him by heart, knowing no one to whom I could speak of what I thought or felt, I used to reflect how wonderful it would have been to know Shelley, and to wonder whether I should meet any live human being with whom I should feel so much sympathy." Russell claimed that beginning at age 15, he spent considerable time thinking about the validity of Christian religious dogma, which he found very unconvincing. At this age, he came to the conclusion that there is no free will and, two years later, that there is no life after death. Finally, at the age of 18, after reading Mill's "Autobiography", he abandoned the "First Cause" argument and became an atheist. He travelled to the continent in 1890 with an American friend, Edward FitzGerald, and with FitzGerald's family he visited the Paris Exhibition of 1889 and was able to climb the Eiffel Tower soon after it was completed. University and first marriage. Russell won a scholarship to read for the Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, and commenced his studies there in 1890, taking as coach Robert Rumsey Webb. He became acquainted with the younger George Edward Moore and came under the influence of Alfred North Whitehead, who recommended him to the Cambridge Apostles. He quickly distinguished himself in mathematics and philosophy, graduating as seventh Wrangler in the former in 1893 and becoming a Fellow in the latter in 1895. Russell was 17 years old in the summer of 1889 when he met the family of Alys Pearsall Smith, an American Quaker five years older, who was a graduate of Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia. He became a friend of the Pearsall Smith family—they knew him primarily as "Lord John's grandson" and enjoyed showing him off. He soon fell in love with the puritanical, high-minded Alys, and, contrary to his grandmother's wishes, married her on 13 December 1894. Their marriage began to fall apart in 1901 when it occurred to Russell, while he was cycling, that he no longer loved her. She asked him if he loved her and he replied that he did not. Russell also disliked Alys's mother, finding her controlling and cruel. It was to be a hollow shell of a marriage. A lengthy period of separation began in 1911 with Russell's affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell, and he and Alys finally divorced in 1921 to enable Russell to remarry. During his years of separation from Alys, Russell had passionate (and often simultaneous) affairs with a number of women, including Morrell and the actress Lady Constance Malleson. Some have suggested that at this point he had an affair with Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the English governess and writer, and first wife of T. S. Eliot. Early career. Russell began his published work in 1896 with "German Social Democracy", a study in politics that was an early indication of a lifelong interest in political and social theory. In 1896 he taught German social democracy at the London School of Economics. He was a member of the Coefficients dining club of social reformers set up in 1902 by the Fabian campaigners Sidney and Beatrice Webb. He now started an intensive study of the foundations of mathematics at Trinity. In 1897, he wrote "An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry" (submitted at the Fellowship Examination of Trinity College) which discussed the Cayley–Klein metrics used for non-Euclidean geometry. He attended the First International Congress of Philosophy in Paris in 1900 where he met Giuseppe Peano and Alessandro Padoa. The Italians had responded to Georg Cantor, making a science of set theory; they gave Russell their literature including the "Formulario mathematico". Russell was impressed by the precision of Peano's arguments at the Congress, read the literature upon returning to England, and came upon Russell's paradox. In 1903 he published "The Principles of Mathematics", a work on foundations of mathematics. It advanced a thesis of logicism, that mathematics and logic are one and the same. At the age of 29, in February 1901, Russell underwent what he called a "sort of mystic illumination", after witnessing Whitehead's wife's acute suffering in an angina attack. "I found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty ... and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable", Russell would later recall. "At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person." In 1905, he wrote the essay "On Denoting", which was published in the philosophical journal "Mind". Russell was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1908. The three-volume "Principia Mathematica", written with Whitehead, was published between 1910 and 1913. This, along with the earlier "The Principles of Mathematics", soon made Russell world-famous in his field. In 1910, he became a University of Cambridge lecturer at Trinity College, where he had studied. He was considered for a Fellowship, which would give him a vote in the college government and protect him from being fired for his opinions, but was passed over because he was "anti-clerical", essentially because he was agnostic. He was approached by the Austrian engineering student Ludwig Wittgenstein, who became his PhD student. Russell viewed Wittgenstein as a genius and a successor who would continue his work on logic. He spent hours dealing with Wittgenstein's various phobias and his frequent bouts of despair. This was often a drain on Russell's energy, but Russell continued to be fascinated by him and encouraged his academic development, including the publication of Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" in 1922. Russell delivered his lectures on logical atomism, his version of these ideas, in 1918, before the end of World War I. Wittgenstein was, at that time, serving in the Austrian Army and subsequently spent nine months in an Italian prisoner of war camp at the end of the conflict. First World War. During World War I, Russell was one of the few people to engage in active pacifist activities. In 1916, because of his lack of a Fellowship, he was dismissed from Trinity College following his conviction under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914. He later described this as an illegitimate means the state used to violate freedom of expression, in Free Thought and Official Propaganda. Russell championed the case of Eric Chappelow, a poet jailed and abused as a conscientious objector. Russell played a significant part in the "Leeds Convention" in June 1917, a historic event which saw well over a thousand "anti-war socialists" gather; many being delegates from the Independent Labour Party and the Socialist Party, united in their pacifist beliefs and advocating a peace settlement. The international press reported that Russell appeared with a number of Labour MPs, including Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden, as well as former Liberal MP and anti-conscription campaigner, Professor Arnold Lupton. After the event, Russell told Lady Ottoline Morrell that, "to my surprise, when I got up to speak, I was given the greatest ovation that was possible to give anybody". His conviction in 1916 resulted in Russell being fined £100 (), which he refused to pay in hope that he would be sent to prison, but his books were sold at auction to raise the money. The books were bought by friends; he later treasured his copy of the King James Bible that was stamped "Confiscated by Cambridge Police". A later conviction for publicly lecturing against inviting the United States to enter the war on the United Kingdom's side resulted in six months' imprisonment in Brixton Prison (see "Bertrand Russell's political views") in 1918. He later said of his imprisonment: While he was reading Strachey's "Eminent Victorians" chapter about Gordon he laughed out loud in his cell prompting the warden to intervene and reminding him that "prison was a place of punishment". Russell was reinstated to Trinity in 1919, resigned in 1920, was Tarner Lecturer in 1926 and became a Fellow again in 1944 until 1949. In 1924, Russell again gained press attention when attending a "banquet" in the House of Commons with well-known campaigners, including Arnold Lupton, who had been a Member of Parliament and had also endured imprisonment for "passive resistance to military or naval service". G. H. Hardy on the Trinity controversy. In 1941, G. H. Hardy wrote a 61-page pamphlet titled "Bertrand Russell and Trinity"—published later as a book by Cambridge University Press with a foreword by C. D. Broad—in which he gave an authoritative account about Russell's 1916 dismissal from Trinity College, explaining that a reconciliation between the college and Russell had later taken place and gave details about Russell's personal life. Hardy writes that Russell's dismissal had created a scandal since the vast majority of the Fellows of the College opposed the decision. The ensuing pressure from the Fellows induced the Council to reinstate Russell. In January 1920, it was announced that Russell had accepted the reinstatement offer from Trinity and would begin lecturing from October. In July 1920, Russell applied for a one year leave of absence; this was approved. He spent the year giving lectures in China and Japan. In January 1921, it was announced by Trinity that Russell had resigned and his resignation had been accepted. This resignation, Hardy explains, was completely voluntary and was not the result of another altercation. The reason for the resignation, according to Hardy, was that Russell was going through a tumultuous time in his personal life with a divorce and subsequent remarriage. Russell contemplated asking Trinity for another one-year leave of absence but decided against it, since this would have been an "unusual application" and the situation had the potential to snowball into another controversy. Although Russell did the right thing, in Hardy's opinion, the reputation of the College suffered due to Russell's resignation since the 'world of learning' knew about Russell's altercation with Trinity but not that the rift had healed. In 1925, Russell was asked by the Council of Trinity College to give the "Tarner Lectures" on the Philosophy of the Sciences; these would later be the basis for one of Russell's best-received books according to Hardy: "The Analysis of Matter", published in 1927. In the preface to the Trinity pamphlet, Hardy wrote: Between the wars. In August 1920, Russell travelled to Soviet Russia as part of an official delegation sent by the British government to investigate the effects of the Russian Revolution. He wrote a four-part series of articles, titled "Soviet Russia1920", for the US magazine "The Nation". He met Vladimir Lenin and had an hour-long conversation with him. In his autobiography, he mentions that he found Lenin disappointing, sensing an "impish cruelty" in him and comparing him to "an opinionated professor". He cruised down the Volga on a steamship. His experiences destroyed his previous tentative support for the revolution. He subsequently wrote a book, "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism", about his experiences on this trip, taken with a group of 24 others from the UK, all of whom came home thinking well of the Soviet regime, despite Russell's attempts to change their minds. For example, he told them that he had heard shots fired in the middle of the night and was sure that these were clandestine executions, but the others maintained that it was only cars backfiring. Russell's lover Dora Black, a British author, feminist and socialist campaigner, visited Soviet Russia independently at the same time; in contrast to his reaction, she was enthusiastic about the Bolshevik revolution. The following autumn, Russell, accompanied by Dora, visited Peking (as it was then known in the West) to lecture on philosophy for a year. He went with optimism and hope, seeing China as then being on a new path. Other scholars present in China at the time included John Dewey and Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nobel-laureate poet. Before leaving China, Russell became gravely ill with pneumonia, and incorrect reports of his death were published in the Japanese press. When the couple visited Japan on their return journey, Dora took on the role of spurning the local press by handing out notices reading "Mr. Bertrand Russell, having died according to the Japanese press, is unable to give interviews to Japanese journalists". Apparently they found this harsh and reacted resentfully. Dora was six months pregnant when the couple returned to England on 26 August 1921. Russell arranged a hasty divorce from Alys, marrying Dora six days after the divorce was finalised, on 27 September 1921. Russell's children with Dora were John Conrad Russell, 4th Earl Russell, born on 16 November 1921, and Katharine Jane Russell (now Lady Katharine Tait), born on 29 December 1923. Russell supported his family during this time by writing popular books explaining matters of physics, ethics, and education to the layman. From 1922 to 1927 the Russells divided their time between London and Cornwall, spending summers in Porthcurno. In the 1922 and 1923 general elections Russell stood as a Labour Party candidate in the Chelsea constituency, but only on the basis that he knew he was extremely unlikely to be elected in such a safe Conservative seat, and he was unsuccessful on both occasions. Owing to the birth of his two children, he became interested in education, especially early childhood education. He was not satisfied with the old traditional education and thought that progressive education also had some flaws, as a result, together with Dora, Russell founded the experimental Beacon Hill School in 1927. The school was run from a succession of different locations, including its original premises at the Russells' residence, Telegraph House, near Harting, West Sussex. During this time, he published On Education, Especially in Early Childhood. On 8 July 1930 Dora gave birth to her third child Harriet Ruth. After he left the school in 1932, Dora continued it until 1943. On a tour through the US in 1927, Russell met Barry Fox (later Barry Stevens), who became a well-known Gestalt therapist and writer in later years. Russell and Fox developed an intensive relationship. In Fox's words: "...for three years we were very close." Fox sent her daughter Judith to Beacon Hill School for some time. From 1927 to 1932 Russell wrote 34 letters to Fox. Upon the death of his elder brother Frank, in 1931, Russell became the 3rd Earl Russell. Russell's marriage to Dora grew increasingly tenuous, and it reached a breaking point over her having two children with an American journalist, Griffin Barry. They separated in 1932 and finally divorced. On 18 January 1936, Russell married his third wife, an Oxford undergraduate named Patricia ("Peter") Spence, who had been his children's governess since 1930. Russell and Peter had one son, Conrad Sebastian Robert Russell, 5th Earl Russell, who became a prominent historian and one of the leading figures in the Liberal Democrat party. Russell returned to the London School of Economics to lecture on the science of power in 1937. During the 1930s, Russell became a close friend and collaborator of V. K. Krishna Menon, then President of the India League, the foremost lobby in the United Kingdom for Indian self-rule. Russel was Chair of the India League from 1932-1939. Second World War. Russell's political views changed over time, mostly about war. He opposed rearmament against Nazi Germany. In 1937, he wrote in a personal letter: "If the Germans succeed in sending an invading army to England we should do best to treat them as visitors, give them quarters and invite the commander and chief to dine with the prime minister." In 1940, he changed his appeasement view that avoiding a full-scale world war was more important than defeating Hitler. He concluded that Adolf Hitler taking over all of Europe would be a permanent threat to democracy. In 1943, he adopted a stance toward large-scale warfare called "relative political pacifism": "War was always a great evil, but in some particularly extreme circumstances, it may be the lesser of two evils." Before World War II, Russell taught at the University of Chicago, later moving on to Los Angeles to lecture at the UCLA Department of Philosophy. He was appointed professor at the City College of New York (CCNY) in 1940, but after a public outcry the appointment was annulled by a court judgment that pronounced him "morally unfit" to teach at the college due to his opinions, especially those relating to sexual morality, detailed in "Marriage and Morals" (1929). The matter was however taken to the New York Supreme Court by Jean Kay who was afraid that her daughter would be harmed by the appointment, though her daughter was not a student at CCNY. Many intellectuals, led by John Dewey, protested at his treatment. Albert Einstein's oft-quoted aphorism that "great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds" originated in his open letter, dated 19 March 1940, to Morris Raphael Cohen, a professor emeritus at CCNY, supporting Russell's appointment. Dewey and Horace M. Kallen edited a collection of articles on the CCNY affair in "The Bertrand Russell Case". Russell soon joined the Barnes Foundation, lecturing to a varied audience on the history of philosophy; these lectures formed the basis of "A History of Western Philosophy". His relationship with the eccentric Albert C. Barnes soon soured, and he returned to the UK in 1944 to rejoin the faculty of Trinity College. Later life. Russell participated in many broadcasts over the BBC, particularly "The Brains Trust" and the Third Programme, on various topical and philosophical subjects. By this time Russell was world-famous outside academic circles, frequently the subject or author of magazine and newspaper articles, and was called upon to offer opinions on a wide variety of subjects, even mundane ones. En route to one of his lectures in Trondheim, Russell was one of 24 survivors (among a total of 43 passengers) of an aeroplane crash in Hommelvik in October 1948. He said he owed his life to smoking since the people who drowned were in the non-smoking part of the plane. "A History of Western Philosophy" (1945) became a best-seller and provided Russell with a steady income for the remainder of his life. In 1942, Russell argued in favour of a moderate socialism, capable of overcoming its metaphysical principles, in an inquiry on dialectical materialism, launched by the Austrian artist and philosopher Wolfgang Paalen in his journal "DYN", saying "I think the metaphysics of both Hegel and Marx plain nonsense—Marx's claim to be 'science' is no more justified than Mary Baker Eddy's. This does not mean that I am opposed to socialism." In 1943, Russell expressed support for Zionism: "I have come gradually to see that, in a dangerous and largely hostile world, it is essential to Jews to have some country which is theirs, some region where they are not suspected aliens, some state which embodies what is distinctive in their culture". In a speech in 1948, Russell said that if the USSR's aggression continued, it would be morally worse to go to war after the USSR possessed an atomic bomb than before it possessed one, because if the USSR had no bomb the West's victory would come more swiftly and with fewer casualties than if there were atom bombs on both sides. At that time, only the United States possessed an atomic bomb, and the USSR was pursuing an extremely aggressive policy towards the countries in Eastern Europe which were being absorbed into the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. Many understood Russell's comments to mean that Russell approved of a first strike in a war with the USSR, including Nigel Lawson, who was present when Russell spoke of such matters. Others, including Griffin, who obtained a transcript of the speech, have argued that he was merely explaining the usefulness of America's atomic arsenal in deterring the USSR from continuing its domination of Eastern Europe. However, just after the atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Russell wrote letters, and published articles in newspapers from 1945 to 1948, stating clearly that it was morally justified and better to go to war against the USSR using atomic bombs while the United States possessed them and before the USSR did. In September 1949, one week after the USSR tested its first A-bomb, but before this became known, Russell wrote that USSR would be unable to develop nuclear weapons because following Stalin's purges only science based on Marxist principles would be practised in the Soviet Union. After it became known that the USSR carried out its nuclear bomb tests, Russell declared his position advocating for the total abolition of atomic weapons. In 1948, Russell was invited by the BBC to deliver the inaugural Reith Lectures—what was to become an annual series of lectures, still broadcast by the BBC. His series of six broadcasts, titled "Authority and the Individual", explored themes such as the role of individual initiative in the development of a community and the role of state control in a progressive society. Russell continued to write about philosophy. He wrote a foreword to "Words and Things" by Ernest Gellner, which was highly critical of the later thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein and of ordinary language philosophy. Gilbert Ryle refused to have the book reviewed in the philosophical journal "Mind", which caused Russell to respond via "The Times". The result was a month-long correspondence in "The Times" between the supporters and detractors of ordinary language philosophy, which was only ended when the paper published an editorial critical of both sides but agreeing with the opponents of ordinary language philosophy. In the King's Birthday Honours of 9 June 1949, Russell was awarded the Order of Merit, and the following year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. When he was given the Order of Merit, George VI was affable but slightly embarrassed at decorating a former jailbird, saying, "You have sometimes behaved in a manner that would not do if generally adopted". Russell merely smiled, but afterwards claimed that the reply "That's right, just like your brother" immediately came to mind. In 1950, Russell attended the inaugural conference for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded anti-communist organisation committed to the deployment of culture as a weapon during the Cold War. Russell was one of the best-known patrons of the Congress, until he resigned in 1956. In 1952, Russell was divorced by Spence, with whom he had been very unhappy. Conrad, Russell's son by Spence, did not see his father between the time of the divorce and 1968 (at which time his decision to meet his father caused a permanent breach with his mother). Russell married his fourth wife, Edith Finch, soon after the divorce, on 15 December 1952. They had known each other since 1925, and Edith had taught English at Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia, sharing a house for 20 years with Russell's old friend Lucy Donnelly. Edith remained with him until his death, and, by all accounts, their marriage was a happy, close, and loving one. Russell's eldest son John suffered from serious mental illness, which was the source of ongoing disputes between Russell and his former wife Dora. In September 1961, at the age of 89, Russell was jailed for seven days in Brixton Prison for "breach of peace" after taking part in an anti-nuclear demonstration in London. The magistrate offered to exempt him from jail if he pledged himself to "good behaviour", to which Russell replied: "No, I won't." In 1962 Russell played a public role in the Cuban Missile Crisis: in an exchange of telegrams with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev assured him that the Soviet government would not be reckless. Russell sent this telegram to President Kennedy: YOUR ACTION DESPERATE. THREAT TO HUMAN SURVIVAL. NO CONCEIVABLE JUSTIFICATION. CIVILIZED MAN CONDEMNS IT. WE WILL NOT HAVE MASS MURDER. ULTIMATUM MEANS WAR... END THIS MADNESS. According to historian Peter Knight, after JFK's assassination, Russell, "prompted by the emerging work of the lawyer Mark Lane in the US ... rallied support from other noteworthy and left-leaning compatriots to form a Who Killed Kennedy Committee in June 1964, members of which included Michael Foot MP, Caroline Benn, the publisher Victor Gollancz, the writers John Arden and J. B. Priestley, and the Oxford history professor Hugh Trevor-Roper." Russell published a highly critical article weeks before the Warren Commission Report was published, setting forth "16 Questions on the Assassination" and equating the Oswald case with the Dreyfus affair of late 19th-century France, in which the state wrongly convicted an innocent man. Russell also criticised the American press for failing to heed any voices critical of the official version. Political causes. Bertrand Russell was opposed to war from early on, his opposition to World War I being used as grounds for his dismissal from Trinity College at Cambridge. This incident fused two of his most controversial causes, as he had failed to be granted Fellow status, which would have protected him from firing, because he was not willing to either pretend to be a devout Christian, or at least avoid admitting he was agnostic. He later described the resolution of these issues as essential to freedom of thought and expression, citing the incident in Free Thought and Official Propaganda, where he explained that the expression of any idea, even the most obviously "bad", must be protected not only from direct State intervention, but also economic leveraging and other means of being silenced: Russell spent the 1950s and 1960s engaged in political causes primarily related to nuclear disarmament and opposing the Vietnam War. The 1955 Russell–Einstein Manifesto was a document calling for nuclear disarmament and was signed by eleven of the most prominent nuclear physicists and intellectuals of the time. In 1966–1967, Russell worked with Jean-Paul Sartre and many other intellectual figures to form the Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal to investigate the conduct of the United States in Vietnam. He wrote a great many letters to world leaders during this period. Early in his life Russell supported eugenicist policies. He proposed in 1894 that the state issue certificates of health to prospective parents and withhold public benefits from those considered unfit. In 1929 he wrote that people deemed "mentally defective" and "feebleminded" should be sexually sterilized because they "are apt to have enormous numbers of illegitimate children, all, as a rule, wholly useless to the community." Russell was also an advocate of population control:The nations which at present increase rapidly should be encouraged to adopt the methods by which, in the West, the increase of population has been checked. Educational propaganda, with government help, could achieve this result in a generation. There are, however, two powerful forces opposed to such a policy: one is religion, the other is nationalism. I think it is the duty of all to proclaim that opposition to the spread of birth is appalling depth of misery and degradation, and that within another fifty years or so. I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing. There are others, which, one must suppose, opponents of birth control would prefer. War, as I remarked a moment ago, has hitherto been disappointing i this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective. If a Black Death could be spread throughout the whole world once in every generation survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full.In 1956, immediately before and during the Suez Crisis, Russell expressed his opposition to European imperialism in the Middle East. He viewed the crisis as another reminder of the pressing need for a more effective mechanism for international governance, and to restrict national sovereignty to places such as the Suez Canal area "where general interest is involved". At the same time the Suez Crisis was taking place, the world was also captivated by the Hungarian Revolution and the subsequent crushing of the revolt by intervening Soviet forces. Russell attracted criticism for speaking out fervently against the Suez war while ignoring Soviet repression in Hungary, to which he responded that he did not criticise the Soviets "because there was no need. Most of the so-called Western World was fulminating". Although he later feigned a lack of concern, at the time he was disgusted by the brutal Soviet response, and on 16 November 1956, he expressed approval for a declaration of support for Hungarian scholars which Michael Polanyi had cabled to the Soviet embassy in London twelve days previously, shortly after Soviet troops had already entered Budapest. In November 1957 Russell wrote an article addressing US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, urging a summit to consider "the conditions of co-existence". Khrushchev responded that peace could indeed be served by such a meeting. In January 1958 Russell elaborated his views in "The Observer", proposing a cessation of all nuclear-weapons production, with the UK taking the first step by unilaterally suspending its own nuclear-weapons program if necessary, and with Germany "freed from all alien armed forces and pledged to neutrality in any conflict between East and West". US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles replied for Eisenhower. The exchange of letters was published as "The Vital Letters of Russell, Khrushchev, and Dulles". Russell was asked by "The New Republic", a liberal American magazine, to elaborate his views on world peace. He urged that all nuclear-weapons testing and constant flights by planes armed with nuclear weapons be halted immediately, and negotiations be opened for the destruction of all hydrogen bombs, with the number of conventional nuclear devices limited to ensure a balance of power. He proposed that Germany be reunified and accept the Oder-Neisse line as its border, and that a neutral zone be established in Central Europe, consisting at the minimum of Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, with each of these countries being free of foreign troops and influence, and prohibited from forming alliances with countries outside the zone. In the Middle East, Russell suggested that the West avoid opposing Arab nationalism, and proposed the creation of a United Nations peacekeeping force to guard Israel's frontiers to ensure that Israel was prevented from committing aggression and protected from it. He also suggested Western recognition of the People's Republic of China, and that it be admitted to the UN with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. He was in contact with Lionel Rogosin while the latter was filming his anti-war film "Good Times, Wonderful Times" in the 1960s. He became a hero to many of the youthful members of the New Left. In early 1963, in particular, Russell became increasingly vocal in his disapproval of the Vietnam War, and felt that the US government's policies there were near-genocidal. In 1963 he became the inaugural recipient of the Jerusalem Prize, an award for writers concerned with the freedom of the individual in society. In 1964 he was one of eleven world figures who issued an appeal to Israel and the Arab countries to accept an arms embargo and international supervision of nuclear plants and rocket weaponry. In October 1965 he tore up his Labour Party card because he suspected Harold Wilson's Labour government was going to send troops to support the United States in Vietnam. Final years, death and legacy. In June 1955, Russell had leased Plas Penrhyn in Penrhyndeudraeth, Merionethshire, Wales and on 5 July of the following year it became his and Edith's principal residence. Russell published his three-volume autobiography in 1967, 1968, and 1969. Russell made a cameo appearance playing himself in the anti-war Hindi film "Aman", by Mohan Kumar, which was released in India in 1967. This was Russell's only appearance in a feature film. On 23 November 1969. he wrote to "The Times" newspaper saying that the preparation for show trials in Czechoslovakia was "highly alarming". The same month, he appealed to Secretary General U Thant of the United Nations to support an international war crimes commission to investigate alleged torture and genocide by the United States in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The following month, he protested to Alexei Kosygin over the expulsion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union of Writers. On 31 January 1970. Russell issued a statement condemning "Israel's aggression in the Middle East", and in particular, Israeli bombing raids being carried out deep in Egyptian territory as part of the War of Attrition. He called for an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-Six-Day War borders. This was Russell's final political statement or act. It was read out at the International Conference of Parliamentarians in Cairo on 3 February 1970, the day after his death. Russell died of influenza, just after 8 pm on 2 February 1970 at his home in Penrhyndeudraeth. His body was cremated in Colwyn Bay on 5 February 1970 with five people present. In accordance with his will, there was no religious ceremony but one minute's silence; his ashes were scattered over the Welsh mountains later that year. He left an estate valued at £69,423 (equivalent to £ million in ). In 1980, a memorial to Russell was commissioned by a committee including the philosopher A. J. Ayer. It consists of a bust of Russell in Red Lion Square in London sculpted by Marcelle Quinton. Lady Katharine Jane Tait, Russell's daughter, founded the Bertrand Russell Society in 1974 to preserve and understand his work. It publishes the "Bertrand Russell Society Bulletin", holds meetings and awards prizes for scholarship. She also authored several essays about her father; as well as a book, "My Father, Bertrand Russell", which was published in 1975. All members receive "Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies". Titles and honours from birth. Russell held throughout his life the following styles and honours: Views. Philosophy. Russell is generally credited with being one of the founders of analytic philosophy. He was deeply impressed by Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), and wrote on every major area of philosophy except aesthetics. He was particularly prolific in the fields of metaphysics, logic and the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, ethics and epistemology. When Brand Blanshard asked Russell why he did not write on aesthetics, Russell replied that he did not know anything about it, though he hastened to add "but that is not a very good excuse, for my friends tell me it has not deterred me from writing on other subjects". On ethics, Russell wrote that he was a utilitarian in his youth, yet he later distanced himself from this view. For the advancement of science and protection of the right to freedom of expression, Russell advocated The Will to Doubt, the recognition that all human knowledge is at most a best guess, that one should always remember: Religion. Russell described himself in 1947 as an agnostic, saying: "Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line." For most of his adult life, Russell maintained religion to be little more than superstition and, despite any positive effects, largely harmful to people. He believed that religion and the religious outlook serve to impede knowledge and foster fear and dependency, and to be responsible for much of our world's wars, oppression, and misery. He was a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association and President of Cardiff Humanists until his death. Society. Political and social activism occupied much of Russell's time for most of his life. Russell remained politically active almost to the end of his life, writing to and exhorting world leaders and lending his name to various causes. Russell argued for a "scientific society", where war would be abolished, population growth would be limited, and prosperity would be shared. He suggested the establishment of a "single supreme world government" able to enforce peace, claiming that "the only thing that will redeem mankind is co-operation". Russell also expressed support for guild socialism, and commented positively on several socialist thinkers and activists. Russell was an active supporter of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, being one of the signatories of A. E. Dyson's 1958 letter to "The Times" calling for a change in the law regarding male homosexual practices, which were partly legalised in 1967, when Russell was still alive. In "Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday" ("Postscript" in his "Autobiography"), Russell wrote: "I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken". William T. Ross, a literary scholar at the University of South Florida, has argued that Russell held a deeply "colonialist mindset", citing anti-black, white supremacist comments embedded in a number of his works. Freedom of opinion and expression. Like George Orwell, Russell was a champion of freedom of opinion and an opponent of both censorship and indoctrination. In 1928, he wrote: "The fundamental argument for freedom of opinion is the doubtfulness of all our belief... when the State intervenes to ensure the indoctrination of some doctrine, it does so because there is no conclusive evidence in favour of that doctrine .. It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions make it impossible to make a living. In 1957, he wrote: "'Free thought' means thinking freely ... to be worthy of the name freethinker he must be free of two things: the force of tradition and the tyranny of his own passions." Selected bibliography. Below is a selected bibliography of Russell's books in English, sorted by year of first publication: Russell was the author of more than sixty books and over two thousand articles. Additionally, he wrote many pamphlets, introductions, and letters to the editor. One pamphlet titled, "'I Appeal unto Caesar': The Case of the Conscientious Objectors", ghostwritten for Margaret Hobhouse, the mother of imprisoned peace activist Stephen Hobhouse, allegedly helped secure the release from prison of hundreds of conscientious objectors. His works can be found in anthologies and collections, including "The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell", which McMaster University began publishing in 1983. By March 2017 this collection of his shorter and previously unpublished works included 18 volumes, and several more are in progress. A bibliography in three additional volumes catalogues his publications. The Russell Archives held by McMaster's William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections possess over 40,000 of his letters. References. Sources. Primary sources Secondary sources

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Julian Jaynes Julian Jaynes (February 27, 1920 – November 21, 1997) was an American researcher in psychology at Yale and Princeton for nearly 25 years and best known for his 1976 book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". His career was dedicated to the problem of consciousness, "…the difference between what others see of us and our sense of our inner selves and the deep feelings that sustain it. … Men have been conscious of the problem of consciousness almost since consciousness began." Jaynes's solution touches on many disciplines, including neuroscience, linguistics, psychology, archeology, history, religion and analysis of ancient texts. Life. Jaynes was born and lived in West Newton, Massachusetts, son of Julian Clifford Jaynes (1854–1922), a Unitarian minister, and Clara Bullard Jaynes (1884–1980). He had an older sister, Helen, and a younger brother, Robert. The family had a summer home in Keppoch, Prince Edward Island, which was a place Jaynes loved, and which gave him a Canadian connection for his entire life. In the summer of 1939 he registered to attend Harvard University but took a scholarship from McGill University, where he graduated in 1941 with a bachelor's degree in psychology, and then began graduate studies at the University of Toronto to learn more about the brain. His studies were interrupted during the Second World War: because of his Unitarian principles, he applied for and received official recognition as a conscientious objector, but refused to comply with the U.S. government's law for pacifists; Jaynes spent three years in the penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, working in the prison hospital. On his release in 1946 he enrolled at Yale University hoping that in animal behavior he would find clues to the beginnings of consciousness. Jaynes received his master's degree in 1948, and then refused to accept his doctorate, again on a dispute of "principle" regarding educational credentials. After Yale, Jaynes spent several years in England working as an actor and playwright. He returned to Yale in 1954, working as an Instructor and Lecturer until 1960, making significant contributions in the fields of experimental psychology, learning, and ethology, and co-publishing some papers with Frank A. Beach. Jaynes had begun to turn his focus to comparative psychology and the history of psychology, and in 1964 he became a research associate at Princeton University. There he befriended Edwin G. Boring, and with plenty of time to pursue the problem of consciousness, Princeton became his academic home until 1995. After publishing , Jaynes was in high demand as a lecturer and was frequently invited to speak at conferences and as a guest lecturer at other universities. In 1984, he was invited to give the plenary lecture at the Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg, Austria. He gave six major lectures in 1985 and nine in 1986. He was awarded an honorary PhD by Rhode Island College in 1979 and another from Elizabethtown College in 1985. Jaynes died at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, on November 21, 1997. In 2006, his biographers Woodward and Tower reported that Jaynes “felt he had not truly succeeded” in his lifelong work because, in their words, “He was right” about his feeling that “there were people who disagreed with him [who] had not really read his book or understood it.” Research and motivations. Jaynes had dedicated years of research in psychology to the problem of consciousness and he had sought the roots of consciousness in the processes of learning and cognition that animals and humans shared in common, in accord with prevailing evolutionary assumptions that dominated mid-20th century thinking. He had established his reputation in the study of animal learning and natural animal behaviour, and in 1968 he lectured on the history of comparative psychology at the National Science Foundation Summer Institute. In September 1969 he gave his first public address on his “new theory of consciousness” at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. His “radical approach” explained the phenomena of introspection as dependent on culture and language, especially metaphors, more than on the physiology of the brain. This was a challenge to mainstream assumptions of 20th century research, especially to those that justified looking for origins of consciousness in evolution. It was also a challenge to the behaviorists, who, “under the tutelage of John Watson, solved the problem of consciousness by ignoring it.” What they had 'ignored' were the problems of introspection and the weaknesses of introspectionist methods of 19th century psychologists. Those 20th century thinkers who questioned the existence of introspection never doubted the existence of sense perception, however; they clearly distinguished between the two. On the other hand, in later years Jaynes's approach had become "radical" for emphasizing the distinction. Jaynes differed with those who ignored it, for example Stuart Sutherland, who simply defined consciousness as 'awareness'. Jaynes acknowledged that his whole argument was “contradictory to the usual and [...] superficial views of consciousness”, and he insisted that “the most common error” people make “is to confuse consciousness with perception.” But there can be no progress in the science of consciousness until careful distinctions have been made between what is introspectable and all the hosts of other neural abilities we have come to call cognition. Consciousness is not the same as cognition and should be sharply distinguished from it. In the years following, Jaynes talked more about how consciousness began, presenting "his talk [...] widely, as word of his slightly outrageous but tantalizing theory had spread.” In 1972 he had delivered a paper, “The Origin of Consciousness”, at Cornell University, writing: “For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that only humans are conscious, and that we became so at some historical epoch after language was evolved.” This took Jaynes, as he put it, directly into “. . . the earliest writings of mankind to see if we can find any hints as to when this important invention of consciousness might have occurred.” He went to ancient texts searching for early evidence of consciousness, and found what he believed to be evidence of remarkably recent . In the semi-historical Greek epic the "Iliad" Jaynes found “. . .the earliest writing of men in a language that we can really comprehend, [which] when looked at objectively, reveals a very different mentality from our own.” In a 1978 interview, Richard Rhodes reported that Jaynes “took up the study of Greek to trace Greek words for mind back to their origins. By the time he got to the "Iliad", the words had become concrete, but there is no word for mind in the "Iliad" at all.” Publications and theories. Jaynes's one and only book, published in 1976, is The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The topic of – "the human ability to introspect" - is introduced by reviewing prior efforts to explain its problematic nature: those efforts, as one of Jaynes's early critics has acknowledged, add up to a "spectacular history of failure". Abandoning the assumption that consciousness is innate, Jaynes explains it instead as a learned behavior that "arises ... from language, and specifically from metaphor." With this understanding, Jaynes then demonstrates that ancient texts and archeology can reveal a history of human mentality alongside the histories of other cultural products. His analysis of the evidence leads him not only to place the origin of consciousness during the 2nd millennium BCE but also to hypothesize the existence of an older non-conscious "mentality that he calls the bicameral mind, referring to the brain’s two hemispheres". Jaynes wrote an extensive afterword for the 1990 edition of his book, in which he addressed criticisms and clarified that his theory has four separate hypotheses: 1) consciousness is based on and accessed by language; 2) the non-conscious bicameral mind is based on verbal hallucinations; 3) the breakdown of bicameral mind precedes consciousness, but the dating is variable; 4) the 'double brain' of bicamerality is based on the two hemispheres of the cerebral cortex being organized differently from today's functional lateralization. He also expanded on the impact of consciousness on imagination and memory, notions of The Self, emotions, anxiety, guilt, and sexuality.

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Umberto Eco Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, cultural critic, political and social commentator, and novelist. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel "The Name of the Rose", a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory, and "Foucault's Pendulum," his 1988 novel which touches on similar themes. Eco wrote prolifically throughout his life, with his output including children's books, translations from French and English, and a twice-monthly newspaper column “La Bustina di Minerva” (Minerva’s Matchbook) in the magazine "L'Espresso" beginning in 1985, with his last column (a critical appraisal of the Romantic paintings of Francesco Hayez) appearing 27 January 2016. At the time of his death, he was an emeritus professor at the University of Bologna, where he taught for much of his life. Early life and education. Eco was born on 5 January 1932 in the city of Alessandria, in Piedmont in northern Italy, and he attended high school there. His father, Giulio, one of thirteen children, was an accountant before the government called him to serve in three wars. During World War II, Umberto and his mother, Giovanna (Bisio), moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside. Eco received a Salesian education and made references to the order and its founder in his works and interviews. Towards the end of his life, Eco came to believe that his family name was an acronym of "ex caelis oblatus" (from Latin: a gift from the heavens). As was the custom at the time, the name had been given to his grandfather (a foundling) by an official in city hall. In a 2011 interview, Eco explained that a friend happened to come across the acronym on a list of Jesuit acronyms in the Vatican Library, informing him of the likely origin of the name. Umberto's father urged him to become a lawyer, but he entered the University of Turin (UNITO), writing his thesis on the aesthetics of medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas under the supervision of Luigi Pareyson, for which he earned his Laurea degree in philosophy in 1954. Career. Medieval aesthetics and philosophy 1954–1964. After graduating, Eco worked for the state broadcasting station Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) in Milan, producing a variety of cultural programming. Following the publication of his first book in 1956, he became an assistant lecturer at his alma mater. In 1958, Eco left RAI and the University of Turin to complete 18 months of compulsory military service in the Italian Army. In 1959, following his return to university teaching, Eco was approached by Valentino Bompiani to edit a series on "Idee nuove" (New Ideas) for his eponymous publishing house in Milan. According to the publisher, he became aware of Eco through his short pamphlet of cartoons and verse "Filosofi in libertà" (Philosophers in Freedom, or Liberated Philosophers), which originally been published in a limited print run of 550 under the James Joyce-inspired pseudonym Daedalus. That same year, Eco published his second book, "Sviluppo dell'estetica medievale" ("The Development of Medieval Aesthetics"), a scholarly monograph building on his work on Aquinas. Earning his libera docenza in aesthetics in 1961, Eco was promoted to the position of Lecturer in the same subject in 1963, before leaving the University of Turin to take a position as Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Milan in 1964. Early writings on semiotics and popular culture 1961–1964. Among his work for a general audience, in 1961 Eco's short essay "Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno", a critical analysis of a popular but unrefined quiz show host, appeared as part of series of articles by Eco on mass media published in the magazine of the tyre manufacturer Pirelli. In it, Eco, observed that, "[Bongiorno] does not provoke inferiority complexes, despite presenting himself as an idol, and the public acknowledge him, by being grateful to him and loving him. He represents an ideal that nobody need strive to reach because everyone is already at his level.” Receiving notoriety among the general public thanks to widespread media coverage, the essay was later included in the collection "Diario minimo" (1963). Over this period, Eco began seriously developing his ideas on the "open" text and on semiotics, writing many essays on these subjects. In 1962 he published "Opera aperta" (translated into English as "The Open Work"). In it, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning; and that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. Literature which limits one's potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line, the "closed text", remains the least rewarding, while texts that are the most active between mind, society and life (open texts) are the liveliest and best—although valuation terminology was not his primary focus. Eco came to these positions through study of language and from semiotics, rather than from psychology or historical analysis (as did theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, on the one hand, and Hans Robert Jauss, on the other). In his 1964 book "Apocalittici e integrati," Eco continued his exploration of popular culture, analyzing the phenomenon of mass communication from a sociological perspective. Visual communication and semiological guerrilla warfare 1965–1975. From 1965 to 1969, he was Professor of Visual Communications at the University of Florence, where he gave the influential lecture "Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare", which coined the influential term "semiological guerrilla", and influenced the theorization of guerrilla tactics against mainstream mass media culture, such as guerrilla television and culture jamming. Among the expressions used in the essay are "communications guerrilla warfare" and "cultural guerrilla". The essay was later included in Eco's book "Faith in Fakes". Eco approach to semiotics is often referred to as "interpretative semiotics." His first book length elaboration his theory appears in "La struttura assente" (1968; literally: "The Absent Structure"). In 1969, he left to become Professor of Semiotics at Milan Polytechnic, spending his first year as a visiting professor at New York University. In 1971 he took up a position as Associate Professor at the University of Bologna, spending 1972 as a visiting professor at Northwestern University. Following the publication of "A Theory of Semiotics" in 1975"," he was promoted to Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna. That same year, Eco stepped down from his position as senior non-fiction editor at Bompiani. "Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum" 1975–1988. From 1977 to 1978 Eco was a visiting professor in the US, first at Yale University and then at Columbia University. He returned to Yale from 1980 to 1981, and Columbia in 1984. During this time he completed "The Role of the Reader" (1979) and "Semiotics and Philosophy of Language" (1984). Eco drew on his background as a medievalist in his first novel "The Name of the Rose" (1980), a historical mystery set in a 14th-century monastery. Franciscan friar William of Baskerville, aided by his assistant Adso, a Benedictine novice, investigates a series of murders at a monastery that is to host an important religious debate. The novel contains many direct or indirect metatextual references to other sources, requiring the detective work of the reader to 'solve'. The title is unexplained in the book. As a symbol, the rose is ubiquitous enough not to confer any single meaning. There is a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges, a major influence on Eco, in the blind monk and librarian Jorge of Burgos: Borges, like the character Jorge, lived a celibate life consecrated to his passion for books, and also went blind in later life. William of Baskerville is a logically-minded Englishman who is a friar and a detective, and his name evokes both William of Ockham and Sherlock Holmes (by way of "The Hound of the Baskervilles"); several passages describing him are strongly reminiscent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's descriptions of Holmes. The underlying mystery of the murder is borrowed from the "Arabian Nights". "The Name of the Rose" was later made into a motion picture starring Sean Connery, F. Murray Abraham, Christian Slater and Ron Perlman, which follows the plot, though not the philosophical and historical themes, of the novel and a made-for-television mini-series. In "Foucault's Pendulum" (1988), three under-employed editors who work for a minor publishing house decide to amuse themselves by inventing a conspiracy theory. Their conspiracy, which they call "The Plan", is about an immense and intricate plot to take over the world by a secret order descended from the Knights Templar. As the game goes on, the three slowly become obsessed with the details of this plan. The game turns dangerous when outsiders learn of The Plan, and believe that the men have really discovered the secret to regaining the lost treasure of the Templars. Anthropology of the West and "The Island of the Day Before" 1988–2000. In 1988, Eco founded the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Republic of San Marino, and in 1992 he founded the Institute of Communication Disciplines at University of Bologna, later founding the Higher School for the Study of the Humanities at the same institution. In 1988, at the University of Bologna, Eco created an unusual program called "Anthropology of the West" from the perspective of non-Westerners (African and Chinese scholars), as defined by their own criteria. Eco developed this transcultural international network based on the idea of Alain le Pichon in West Africa. The Bologna program resulted in the first conference in Guangzhou, China, in 1991 entitled "Frontiers of Knowledge". The first event was soon followed by an Itinerant Euro-Chinese seminar on "Misunderstandings in the Quest for the Universal" along the silk trade route from Guangzhou to Beijing. The latter culminated in a book entitled "The Unicorn and the Dragon", which discussed the question of the creation of knowledge in China and in Europe. Scholars contributing to this volume were from China, including Tang Yijie, Wang Bin and Yue Daiyun, as well as from Europe: Furio Colombo, Antoine Danchin, Jacques Le Goff, Paolo Fabbri and Alain Rey. Eco published "The Limits of Interpretation" in 1990. From 1992 to 1993, Eco was a visiting professor at Harvard University and from 2001 to 2002, at St Anne's College, Oxford. "The Island of the Day Before" (1994) was Eco's third novel. The book, set in the 17th century, is about a man stranded on a ship within sight of an island which he believes is on the other side of the international date-line. The main character is trapped by his inability to swim and instead spends the bulk of the book reminiscing on his life and the adventures that brought him to be stranded. He returned to semiotics in "Kant and the Platypus" in 1997, a book which Eco himself reputedly warned fans of his novels away from, saying, "This a hard-core book. It’s not a page turner. You have to stay on every page for two weeks with your pencil. In other words, don’t buy it if you are not Einstein." In 2000 a seminar in Timbuktu, Mali, was followed up with another gathering in Bologna to reflect on the conditions of reciprocal knowledge between East and West. This, in turn, gave rise to a series of conferences in Brussels, Paris and Goa, culminating in Beijing in 2007. The topics of the Beijing conference were "Order and Disorder", "New Concepts of War and Peace", "Human Rights" and "Social Justice and Harmony". Eco presented the opening lecture. Among those giving presentations were anthropologists Balveer Arora, Varun Sahni, and Rukmini Bhaya Nair from India, Moussa Sow from Africa, Roland Marti and Maurice Olender from Europe, Cha Insuk from Korea, and Huang Ping and Zhao Tinyang from China. Also on the program were scholars from the fields of law and science including Antoine Danchin, Ahmed Djebbar and Dieter Grimm. Eco's interest in east–west dialogue to facilitate international communication and understanding also correlates with his related interest in the international auxiliary language Esperanto. Later novels and writing 2000–2016. "Baudolino" was published in 2000. Baudolino is a much-travelled polyglot Piedmontese scholar who saves the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates during the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade. Claiming to be an accomplished liar, he confides his history, from his childhood as a peasant lad endowed with a vivid imagination, through his role as adopted son of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, to his mission to visit the mythical realm of Prester John. Throughout his retelling, Baudolino brags of his ability to swindle and tell tall tales, leaving the historian (and the reader) unsure of just how much of his story was a lie. "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" (2005) is about Giambattista Bodoni, an old bookseller specializing in antiques who emerges from a coma with only some memories to recover his past. Bodoni is pressed to make a very difficult choice, one between his past and his future. He must either abandon his past to live his future or regain his past and sacrifice his future. "The Prague Cemetery", Eco's sixth novel, was published in 2010. It is the story of a secret agent who "weaves plots, conspiracies, intrigues and attacks, and helps determine the historical and political fate of the European Continent". The book is a narrative of the rise of Modern-day antisemitism, by way of the Dreyfus affair, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and other important 19th-century events which gave rise to hatred and hostility toward the Jewish people. In 2012, Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière published a book of conversations on the future of information carriers. Eco criticized social networks, saying for example that "Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots." "From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation" (2014). "Numero Zero" was published in 2015. Set in 1992 and narrated by Colonna, a hack journalist working on a Milan newspaper, it offers a satire of Italy's kickback and bribery culture as well as, among many things, the legacy of Fascism. Influences and themes. A group of avant-garde artists, painters, musicians and writers, whom he had befriended at RAI, the Neoavanguardia or Gruppo '63, became an important and influential component in Eco's writing career. In 1971, Eco co-founded "Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici" (known as "VS "among Italian academics), a semiotic journal. "VS" is used by scholars whose work is related to signs and signification. The journal's foundation and activities have contributed to semiotics as an academic field in its own right, both in Italy and in the rest of Europe. Most of the well-known European semioticians, including Eco, A. J. Greimas, Jean-Marie Floch, and Jacques Fontanille, as well as philosophers and linguists like John Searle and George Lakoff, have published original articles in "VS". His work with Serbian and Russian scholars and writers included thought on Milorad Pavić and a meeting with Alexander Genis. Beginning in the early 1990s, Eco collaborated with artists and philosophers such as Enrico Baj, Jean Baudrillard, and Donald Kuspit to publish a number of tongue-in-cheek texts on the imaginary science of 'pataphysics. Eco's fiction has enjoyed a wide audience around the world, with many translations. His novels are full of subtle, often multilingual, references to literature and history. Eco's work illustrates the concept of intertextuality, or the inter-connectedness of all literary works. Eco cited James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges as the two modern authors who have influenced his work the most. Eco was also a translator: he translated into Italian Raymond Queneau's "Exercices de style" (1947). Eco's translation was published under the title "Esercizi di stile" in 1983. He was also the translator of "Sylvie," a novella by Gérard de Nerval. Critical reception and legacy. As an academic studying philosophy, semiotics, and culture, Eco divided critics as to whether his theorizing should be seen as brilliant or an unnecessary vanity project obsessing over minutiae, while his fiction writing stunned critics with its simultaneous complexity and popularity. In his 1980 review of "The Role of the Reader", philosopher Roger Scruton, attacking Eco’s esoteric tendencies, writes that, "[Eco seeks] the rhetoric of technicality, the means of generating so much smoke for so long that the reader will begin to blame his own lack of perception, rather than the author’s lack of illumination, for the fact that he has ceased to see." In his 1986 review of "Faith in Fakes" and "Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages", art historian Nicholas Penny, meanwhile, accuses Eco of pandering, writing "I suspect that Eco may have first been seduced from intellectual caution, if not modesty, by the righteous cause of ‘relevance’ (a word much in favour when the earlier of these essays appeared) – a cause which Medievalists may be driven to embrace with particularly desperate abandon." At the other end of the spectrum, Eco has been praised for his levity and encyclopedic knowledge, which allowed him to make abstruse academic subjects accessible and engaging. In a 1980 review of "The Name of the Rose", literary critic and scholar Frank Kermode refers to "Theory of Semiotics", as "a vigorous but difficult treatise", finding Eco's novel, "a wonderfully interesting book – a very odd thing to be born of a passion for the Middle Ages and for semiotics, and a very modern pleasure." Gilles Deleuze cites Eco's 1962 book "The Open Work" approvingly in his seminal 1968 text "Difference and Repetition", a book which poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida is said to have also taken inspiration from. In an obituary by the philosopher and literary critic Carlin Romano, meanwhile, Eco is described as having "[become], over time, the critical conscience at the center of Italian humanistic culture, uniting smaller worlds like no one before him." In 2017, a retrospective of Eco's work was published by Open Court as the 35th volume in the prestigious "Library of Living Philosophers," edited by Sara G. Beardsworth and Randall E. Auxier, featuring essays by 23 contemporary scholars. Honors. Following the publication of "In the Name of the Rose" in 1980"," in 1981 Eco was awarded the Strega prize, Italy's most prestigious literary award, receiving the Anghiari prize the same year. The following year, he received the Mendicis prize, and in 1985 the McLuhan Teleglobe prize. In 2005, Eco was honoured with the "Kenyon Review" Award for Literary Achievement, along with Roger Angell. In 2010, Eco was invited to join the Accademia dei Lincei. Eco was awarded honorary doctorate degrees by the University of Odense in 1986, Loyola University Chicago in 1987, the University of Glasgow in 1990, the University of Kent in 1992, Indiana University Bloomington in 1992, University of Tartu in 1996, Rutgers University in 2002, and the University of Belgrade in 2009. Additionally, Eco was an honorary fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. Religious views. During his university studies, Eco stopped believing in God and left the Catholic Church, later helping co-found the Italian skeptic organization "Comitato Italiano per il Controllo delle Affermazioni sulle Pseudoscienze" (Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Pseudosciences) CICAP. Personal life and death. In September 1962 he married Renate Ramge, a German graphic designer and art teacher with whom he had a son and a daughter. Eco divided his time between an apartment in Milan and a vacation house near Urbino. He had a 30,000 volume library in the former and a 20,000 volume library in the latter. Eco died at his Milanese home of pancreatic cancer, from which he had been suffering for two years, on the night of 19 February 2016. From 2008 to the time of his death at the age of 84, he was a professor emeritus at the University of Bologna, where he had taught since 1971. Selected bibliography. Anthologies. Ten essays on methods of abductive inference in Poe's Dupin, Doyle's Holmes, Peirce and many others, 236 pages.

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Philip K. Dick Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928March 2, 1982) was an American writer known for his work in science fiction. A master of dystopian fiction, he wrote 44 published novels and approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. His fiction explored varied philosophical and social themes, and featured recurrent elements such as alternate realities, simulacra, monopolistic corporations, drug abuse, authoritarian governments, and altered states of consciousness. His work was concerned with questions surrounding the nature of reality, perception, human nature, and identity. Born in Chicago, Dick moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with his family at a young age. He began publishing science fiction stories in 1952 (age 23). His stories initially found little commercial success, but his alternative history novel "The Man in the High Castle" (1962) earned Dick early acclaim, including a Hugo Award for Best Novel, when he was just 33 years old. Dick followed with science fiction novels such as "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968) and "Ubik" (1969). His 1974 novel "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Following a series of religious experiences in 1974, Dick's work engaged more explicitly with issues of theology, philosophy, and the nature of reality, as in novels "A Scanner Darkly" (1977) and "VALIS" (1981). A collection of his nonfiction writing on these themes was published posthumously as "The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick" (2011). He died in 1982 in Santa Ana, California, at the age of 53, due to complications from a stroke. Dick's posthumous influence has been widespread, extending beyond literary circles into Hollywood filmmaking. Popular films based on Dick's works include "Blade Runner" (1982), "Total Recall" (adapted twice: in 1990 and in 2012), "Minority Report" (2002), "A Scanner Darkly" (2006), and "The Adjustment Bureau" (2011). Beginning in 2015, Amazon produced the multi-season television adaptation "The Man in the High Castle" based on Dick's 1962 novel, and in 2017 Channel 4 began producing the ongoing anthology series "Electric Dreams" based on various Dick stories. In 2005, "Time" magazine named "Ubik" (1969) one of the hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer ever to be included in The Library of America series. Early life. Philip Kindred Dick and his twin sister, Jane Charlotte Dick, were born six weeks prematurely on December 16, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois, to Dorothy (née Kindred; 1900–1978) and Joseph Edgar Dick (1899–1985), who worked for the United States Department of Agriculture. His paternal grandparents were Irish. The death of Philip's twin, Jane, six weeks after their birth, on January 26, 1929, profoundly affected Philip's life, leading to the recurrent motif of the "phantom twin" in his books. Dick's family later moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. When Philip was five, his father was transferred to Reno, Nevada; when Dorothy refused to move, she and Joseph divorced. Both parents fought for custody of Philip, which was awarded to the mother. Dorothy, determined to raise Philip alone, took a job in Washington, D.C., and moved there with her son. Philip was enrolled at John Eaton Elementary School (1936–1938), completing the second through fourth grades. His lowest grade was a "C" in Written Composition, although a teacher remarked that he "shows interest and ability in story telling". He was educated in Quaker schools. In June 1938, Dorothy and Philip returned to California, and it was around this time that he became interested in science fiction. Dick stated that he read his first science fiction magazine, "Stirring Science Stories," in 1940. Dick attended Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California. He and fellow science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin were members of the class of 1947 but did not know each other at the time. After graduation, he attended the University of California, Berkeley from September 1949 to November 11, 1949, ultimately receiving an honorable dismissal dated January 1, 1950. Dick did not declare a major and took classes in history, psychology, philosophy, and zoology. Through his studies in philosophy, he believed that existence is based on internal human perception, which does not necessarily correspond to external reality; he described himself as "an acosmic panentheist," believing in the universe only as an extension of God. After reading the works of Plato and pondering the possibilities of metaphysical realms, Dick came to the conclusion that, in a certain sense, the world is not entirely real and there is no way to confirm whether it is truly there. This question from his early studies persisted as a theme in many of his novels. Dick dropped out because of ongoing anxiety problems, according to his third wife Anne's memoir. She also says he disliked the mandatory ROTC training. At Berkeley, Dick befriended poet Robert Duncan and poet and linguist Jack Spicer, who gave Dick ideas for a Martian language. Dick claimed to have hosted a classical music program on KSMO Radio in 1947. From 1948 to 1952, Dick worked at Art Music Company, a record store on Telegraph Avenue. Career. Early writing. Dick sold his first story, "Roog", in 1951, when he was 22 years old, about "a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container", and from then on wrote full-time. During 1952, his first speculative fiction publications appeared in July and September numbers of "Planet Stories", edited by Jack O'Sullivan, and in "If" and "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" that year. His debut novel was "Solar Lottery", published in 1955 as half of Ace Double #D-103 alongside "The Big Jump" by Leigh Brackett. The 1950s were a difficult and impoverished time for Dick, who once lamented, "We couldn't even pay the late fees on a library book." He published almost exclusively within the science fiction genre, but dreamed of a career in mainstream fiction. During the 1950s, he produced a series of non-genre, relatively conventional novels. In 1960, Dick wrote that he was willing to "take twenty to thirty years to succeed as a literary writer". The dream of mainstream success formally died in January 1963 when the Scott Meredith Literary Agency returned all of his unsold mainstream novels. Only one of these works, "Confessions of a Crap Artist", was published during Dick's lifetime. In 1963, Dick won the Hugo Award for "The Man in the High Castle". Although he was hailed as a genius in the science fiction world, the mainstream literary world was unappreciative, and he could publish books only through low-paying science fiction publishers such as Ace. Even in his later years, he continued to have financial troubles. In the introduction to the 1980 short story collection "The Golden Man", Dick wrote: Flight to Canada and suicide attempt. In 1971, Dick's marriage to Nancy Hackett broke down, and she moved out of their house in Santa Venetia, California. Having abused amphetamine for much of the past decade (stemming in part from his need to maintain a prolific writing regimen due to the financial exigencies of the science fiction field), he allowed other drug users to move into the house. Following the release of 21 novels between 1960 and 1970, these developments were exacerbated by unprecedented periods of writer's block, with Dick ultimately failing to publish new fiction until 1974. One day, in November 1971, Dick returned to his home to discover that it had been burglarized, with his safe blown open and personal papers missing. The police were unable to determine the culprit, and even suspected Dick of having done it himself. Shortly thereafter, he was invited to be guest of honor at the Vancouver Science Fiction Convention in February 1972. Within a day of arriving at the conference and giving his speech "The Android and the Human", he informed people that he had fallen in love with a woman named Janis whom he had met there and announced that he would be remaining in Vancouver. An attendee of the conference, Michael Walsh, movie critic for local newspaper "The Province", invited Dick to stay in his home, but asked him to leave two weeks later due to his erratic behavior. This was followed by Janis ending their relationship and moving away. On March 23, 1972, Dick attempted suicide by taking an overdose of the sedative potassium bromide. Subsequently, after deciding to seek help, Dick became a participant in X-Kalay (a Canadian Synanon-type recovery program), and was well enough by April to return to California. Upon relocating to Orange County, California at the behest of California State University, Fullerton professor Willis McNelly (who initiated a correspondence with Dick during his X-Kalay stint), he donated manuscripts, papers and other materials to the University's Special Collections Library, where they are archived in the Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Collection in the Pollak Library. During this period, Dick befriended a circle of Fullerton State students that encompassed several aspiring science fiction writers, including K. W. Jeter, James Blaylock and Tim Powers. Jeter would later go on to continue Dick's Bladerunner series with three sequels. Dick returned to the events of these months while writing his novel "A Scanner Darkly" (1977), which contains fictionalized depictions of the burglary of his home, his time using amphetamines and living with addicts, and his experiences of X-Kalay (portrayed in the novel as "New-Path"). A factual account of Dick's recovery program participation was portrayed in his posthumously released book "The Dark Haired Girl", a collection of letters and journals from the period. Paranormal experiences. On February 20, 1974, while recovering from the effects of sodium pentothal administered for the extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth, Dick received a home delivery of Darvon from a young woman. When he opened the door, he was struck by the beauty of the dark-haired girl and was especially drawn to her golden necklace. He asked her about its curious fish-shaped design. As she was leaving, she replied: "This is a sign used by the early Christians." Dick called the symbol the "vesicle pisces". This name seems to have been based on his conflation of two related symbols, the Christian ichthys symbol (two intersecting arcs delineating a fish in profile), which the woman was wearing, and the vesica piscis. Dick recounted that as the sun glinted off the gold pendant, the reflection caused the generation of a "pink beam" of light that mesmerized him. He came to believe the beam imparted wisdom and clairvoyance, and also believed it to be intelligent. On one occasion, Dick was startled by a separate recurrence of the pink beam. It imparted the information to him that his infant son was ill. The Dicks rushed the child to the hospital, where his suspicion was confirmed by professional diagnosis. After the woman's departure, Dick began experiencing strange hallucinations. Although initially attributing them to side effects from medication, he considered this explanation implausible after weeks of continued hallucinations. Dick told Charles Platt: "I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane." Throughout February and March 1974, Dick experienced a series of hallucinations, which he referred to as "2-3-74", shorthand for February–March 1974. Aside from the "pink beam", Dick described the initial hallucinations as geometric patterns, and, occasionally, brief pictures of Jesus and ancient Rome. As the hallucinations increased in duration and frequency, Dick claimed he began to live two parallel lives, one as himself, "Philip K. Dick", and one as "Thomas", a Christian persecuted by Romans in the first century AD. He referred to the "transcendentally rational mind" as "Zebra", "God" and "VALIS" (an acronym for "Vast Active Living Intelligence System"). Dick wrote about the experiences, first in the semi-autobiographical novel "Radio Free Albemuth" and then in "VALIS", "The Divine Invasion", "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer" and the unfinished "The Owl in Daylight" (the VALIS trilogy). In 1974, Dick wrote a letter to the FBI, accusing various people, including University of California, San Diego professor Fredric Jameson, of being foreign agents of Warsaw Pact powers. He also wrote that Stanisław Lem was probably a false name used by a composite committee operating on orders of the Communist party to gain control over public opinion. At one point, Dick felt that he had been taken over by the spirit of the prophet Elijah. He believed that an episode in his novel "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" was a detailed retelling of a biblical story from the Book of Acts, which he had never read. Dick documented and discussed his experiences and faith in a private journal he called his "exegesis", portions of which were later published as "The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick". The last novel Dick wrote was "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer"; it was published shortly after his death in 1982. Personal life. Dick was married five times: Dick had three children, Laura Archer Dick (born February 25, 1960 to Dick and his third wife, Anne Williams Rubenstein), Isolde Freya Dick (now Isa Dick Hackett) (born March 15, 1967, to Dick and his fourth wife, Nancy Hackett), and Christopher Kenneth Dick (born July 25, 1973, to Dick and his fifth wife, Leslie "Tessa" Busby). In 1955, Dick and his second wife, Kleo Apostolides, received a visit from the FBI, which they believed to be the result of Kleo's socialist views and left-wing activities. The couple briefly befriended one of the FBI agents. He was physically abusive with his third wife, Anne Williams Rubinstein; after one argument in 1963, he attempted to push her off a cliff in a car, then later claimed she was trying to kill him, and convinced a psychiatrist to commit her involuntarily. After filing for divorce in 1964, he moved to Oakland to live with a fan, author and editor Grania Davis. Shortly after, he attempted suicide by driving off the road while she was a passenger. Dick tried to stay out of the political scene because of high societal turmoil from the Vietnam War. Still, he did show some anti-Vietnam War and anti-governmental sentiments. In 1968, he joined the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest", an anti-war pledge to pay no U.S. federal income tax, which resulted in the confiscation of his car by the IRS. Death. On February 17, 1982, after completing an interview, Dick contacted his therapist, complaining of failing eyesight, and was advised to go to a hospital immediately, but did not. The following day, he was found unconscious on the floor of his Santa Ana, California home, having suffered a stroke. On February 25, 1982, Dick suffered another stroke in the hospital, which led to brain death. Five days later, on March 2, 1982, he was disconnected from life support and died. After his death, Dick's father, Joseph, took his son's ashes to Riverside Cemetery in Fort Morgan, Colorado, (section K, block 1, lot 56), where they were buried next to his twin sister Jane, who died in infancy. Her tombstone had been inscribed with both of their names at the time of her death, 53 years earlier. He died four months before the release of "Blade Runner", the film based on his novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". Style and works. Themes. Dick's stories typically focus on the fragile nature of what is real and the construction of personal identity. His stories often become surreal fantasies, as the main characters slowly discover that their everyday world is actually an illusion assembled by powerful external entities, such as the suspended animation in "Ubik", vast political conspiracies or the vicissitudes of an unreliable narrator. "All of his work starts with the basic assumption that there cannot be one, single, objective reality", writes science fiction author Charles Platt. "Everything is a matter of perception. The ground is liable to shift under your feet. A protagonist may find himself living out another person's dream, or he may enter a drug-induced state that actually makes better sense than the real world, or he may cross into a different universe completely." Alternate universes and simulacra are common plot devices, with fictional worlds inhabited by common, working people, rather than galactic elites. "There are no heroes in Dick's books", Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, "but there are heroics. One is reminded of Dickens: what counts is the honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people." Dick made no secret that much of his thinking and work was heavily influenced by the writings of Carl Jung. The Jungian constructs and models that most concerned Dick seem to be the archetypes of the collective unconscious, group projection/hallucination, synchronicities, and personality theory. Many of Dick's protagonists overtly analyze reality and their perceptions in Jungian terms (see "Lies, Inc."). Dick identified one major theme of his work as the question, "What constitutes the authentic human being?" In works such as "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", beings can appear totally human in every respect while lacking soul or compassion, while completely alien beings such as Glimmung in "Galactic Pot-Healer" may be more humane and complex than their human peers. Mental illness was a constant interest of Dick's, and themes of mental illness permeate his work. The character Jack Bohlen in the 1964 novel "Martian Time-Slip" is an "ex-schizophrenic". The novel "Clans of the Alphane Moon" centers on an entire society made up of descendants of lunatic asylum inmates. In 1965, he wrote the essay titled "Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes". Drug use (including religious, recreational, and abuse) was also a theme in many of Dick's works, such as "A Scanner Darkly" and "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch". Dick himself was a drug user for much of his life. According to a 1975 interview in "Rolling Stone", Dick wrote all of his books published before 1970 while on amphetamines. ""A Scanner Darkly" (1977) was the first complete novel I had written without speed", said Dick in the interview. He also experimented briefly with psychedelics, but wrote "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" (1965), which "Rolling Stone" dubs "the classic LSD novel of all time", before he had ever tried them. Despite his heavy amphetamine use, however, Dick later said that doctors told him the amphetamines never actually affected him, that his liver had processed them before they reached his brain. Summing up all these themes in "Understanding Philip K. Dick", Eric Carl Link discussed eight themes or 'ideas and motifs': Epistemology and the Nature of Reality, Know Thyself, The Android and the Human, Entropy and Pot Healing, The Theodicy Problem, Warfare and Power Politics, The Evolved Human, and 'Technology, Media, Drugs and Madness'. Pen names. Dick had two professional stories published under the pen names Richard Phillipps and Jack Dowland. "Some Kinds of Life" was published in October 1953 in "Fantastic Universe" under byline Richard Phillipps, apparently because the magazine had a policy against publishing multiple stories by the same author in the same issue; "Planet for Transients" was published in the same issue under his own name. The short story "Orpheus with Clay Feet" was published under the pen name Jack Dowland. The protagonist desires to be the muse for fictional author Jack Dowland, considered the greatest science fiction author of the 20th century. In the story, Dowland publishes a short story titled "Orpheus with Clay Feet" under the pen name Philip K. Dick. The surname Dowland refers to Renaissance composer John Dowland, who is featured in several works. The title "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" directly refers to Dowland's best-known composition, "Flow, my tears". In the novel "The Divine Invasion", the character Linda Fox, created specifically with Linda Ronstadt in mind, is an intergalactically famous singer whose entire body of work consists of recordings of John Dowland compositions. Selected works. "The Man in the High Castle" (1962) is set in an alternate history in which the United States is ruled by the victorious Axis powers. It is the only Dick novel to win a Hugo Award. In 2015 this was adapted into a television series by Amazon Studios. "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" (1965) utilizes an array of science fiction concepts and features several layers of reality and unreality. It is also one of Dick's first works to explore religious themes. The novel takes place in the 21st century, when, under UN authority, mankind has colonized the Solar System's every habitable planet and moon. Life is physically daunting and psychologically monotonous for most colonists, so the UN must draft people to go to the colonies. Most entertain themselves using "Perky Pat" dolls and accessories manufactured by Earth-based "P.P. Layouts". The company also secretly creates "Can-D", an illegal but widely available hallucinogenic drug allowing the user to "translate" into Perky Pat (if the drug user is a woman) or Pat's boyfriend, Walt (if the drug user is a man). This recreational use of Can-D allows colonists to experience a few minutes of an idealized life on Earth by participating in a collective hallucination. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968) is the story of a bounty hunter policing the local android population. It occurs on a dying, poisoned Earth de-populated of almost all animals and all "successful" humans; the only remaining inhabitants of the planet are people with no prospects off-world. The 1968 novel is the literary source of the film "Blade Runner" (1982). It is both a conflation and an intensification of the pivotally Dickian question: "What is real, what is fake? What crucial factor defines humanity as distinctly 'alive', versus those merely alive only in their outward appearance?" "Ubik" (1969) employs extensive psychic telepathy and a suspended state after death in creating a state of eroding reality. A group of psychics is sent to investigate a rival organisation, but several of them are apparently killed by a saboteur's bomb. Much of the following novel flicks between different equally plausible realities and the "real" reality, a state of half-life and psychically manipulated realities. In 2005, "Time" magazine listed it among the "All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels" published since 1923. "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" (1974) concerns Jason Taverner, a television star living in a dystopian near-future police state. After being attacked by an angry ex-girlfriend, Taverner awakens in a dingy Los Angeles hotel room. He still has his money in his wallet, but his identification cards are missing. This is no minor inconvenience, as security checkpoints (manned by "pols" and "nats", the police and National Guard) are set up throughout the city to stop and arrest anyone without valid ID. Jason at first thinks that he was robbed, but soon discovers that his entire identity has been erased. There is no record of him in any official database, and even his closest associates do not recognize or remember him. For the first time in many years, Jason has no fame or reputation to rely on. He has only his innate charm and social graces to help him as he tries to find out what happened to his past while avoiding the attention of the pols. The novel was Dick's first published novel after years of silence, during which time his critical reputation had grown, and this novel was awarded the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. It is the only Philip K. Dick novel nominated for both a Hugo and a Nebula Award. In an essay written two years before his death, Dick described how he learned from his Episcopal priest that an important scene in "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" – involving its other main character, the eponymous Police General Felix Buckman, was very similar to a scene in "Acts of the Apostles", a book of the New Testament. Film director Richard Linklater discusses this novel in his film "Waking Life", which begins with a scene reminiscent of another Dick novel, "Time Out of Joint". "A Scanner Darkly" (1977) is a bleak mixture of science fiction and police procedural novels; in its story, an undercover narcotics police detective begins to lose touch with reality after falling victim to Substance D, the same permanently mind-altering drug he was enlisted to help fight. Substance D is instantly addictive, beginning with a pleasant euphoria which is quickly replaced with increasing confusion, hallucinations and eventually total psychosis. In this novel, as with all Dick novels, there is an underlying thread of paranoia and dissociation with multiple realities perceived simultaneously. It was adapted to film by Richard Linklater. "The Philip K. Dick Reader" is an introduction to the variety of Dick's short fiction. "VALIS" (1980) is perhaps Dick's most postmodern and autobiographical novel, examining his own unexplained experiences. It may also be his most academically studied work, and was adapted as an opera by Tod Machover. Later works like the VALIS trilogy were heavily autobiographical, many with "two-three-seventy-four" (2-3-74) references and influences. The word VALIS is the acronym for "Vast Active Living Intelligence System". Later, Dick theorized that VALIS was both a "reality generator" and a means of extraterrestrial communication. A fourth VALIS manuscript, "Radio Free Albemuth", although composed in 1976, was posthumously published in 1985. This work is described by the publisher (Arbor House) as "an introduction and key to his magnificent VALIS trilogy". Regardless of the feeling that he was somehow experiencing a divine communication, Dick was never fully able to rationalize the events. For the rest of his life, he struggled to comprehend what was occurring, questioning his own sanity and perception of reality. He transcribed what thoughts he could into an eight-thousand-page, one-million-word journal dubbed the "Exegesis". From 1974 until his death in 1982, Dick spent many nights writing in this journal. A recurring theme in "Exegesis" is Dick's hypothesis that history had been stopped in the first century AD, and that "the Empire never ended". He saw Rome as the pinnacle of materialism and despotism, which, after forcing the Gnostics underground, had kept the population of Earth enslaved to worldly possessions. Dick believed that VALIS had communicated with him, and anonymously others, to induce the impeachment of U.S. President Richard Nixon, whom Dick believed to be the current Emperor of Rome incarnate. In a 1968 essay titled "Self Portrait", collected in the 1995 book "The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick", Dick reflects on his work and lists which books he feels "might escape World War Three": "Eye in the Sky", "The Man in the High Castle", "Martian Time-Slip", "Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb", "The Zap Gun", "The Penultimate Truth", "The Simulacra", "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" (which he refers to as "the most vital of them all"), "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", and "Ubik". In a 1976 interview, Dick cited "A Scanner Darkly" as his best work, feeling that he "had finally written a true masterpiece, after 25 years of writing". Adaptations. Films. Several of Dick's stories have been made into films. Dick himself wrote a screenplay for an intended film adaptation of "Ubik" in 1974, but the film was never made. Many film adaptations have not used Dick's original titles. When asked why this was, Dick's ex-wife Tessa said, "Actually, the books rarely carry Phil's original titles, as the editors usually wrote new titles after reading his manuscripts. Phil often commented that he couldn't write good titles. If he could, he would have been an advertising writer instead of a novelist." Films based on Dick's writing had accumulated a total revenue of over US$1 billion by 2009. Future films based on Dick's writing include an animated adaptation of "The King of the Elves" from Walt Disney Animation Studios, which was set to be released in the spring of 2016 but is currently still in preproduction; and a film adaptation of "Ubik" which, according to Dick's daughter, Isa Dick Hackett, is in advanced negotiation. Ubik was set to be made into a film by Michel Gondry. In 2014, however, Gondry told French outlet Telerama (via Jeux Actu), that he was no longer working on the project. The "Terminator" series prominently features the theme of humanoid assassination machines first portrayed in "Second Variety". The Halcyon Company, known for developing the "Terminator" franchise, acquired right of first refusal to film adaptations of the works of Philip K. Dick in 2007. In May 2009, they announced plans for an adaptation of "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said". Television. It was reported in 2010 that Ridley Scott would produce an adaptation of "The Man in the High Castle" for the BBC, in the form of a mini-series. A pilot episode was released on Amazon Prime in January 2015 and Season 1 was fully released in ten episodes of about 60 minutes each on November 20, 2015. Premiering in January 2015, the pilot was Amazon's "most-watched since the original series development program began." The next month Amazon ordered episodes to fill out a ten-episode season, which was released in November, to positive reviews. A second season of ten episodes premiered in December 2016, with a third season announced a few weeks later to be released in 2018. In July 2018, it was announced that the series had been renewed for a fourth season. In late 2015, Fox aired "Minority Report", a television series sequel adaptation to the 2002 film of the same name based on Dick's short story "The Minority Report" (1956). The show was cancelled after one 10-episode season. In May 2016, it was announced that a 10-part anthology series was in the works. Titled "Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams", the series was distributed by Sony Pictures Television and premiered on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom and Amazon Video in the United States. It was written by executive producers Ronald D. Moore and Michael Dinner, with executive input from Dick's daughter Isa Dick Hackett, and stars Bryan Cranston, also an executive producer. Stage and radio. Four of Dick's works have been adapted for the stage. One was the opera "VALIS", composed and with libretto by Tod Machover, which premiered at the Pompidou Center in Paris on December 1, 1987, with a French libretto. It was subsequently revised and readapted into English, and was recorded and released on CD (Bridge Records BCD9007) in 1988. Another was "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said", adapted by Linda Hartinian and produced by the New York-based avant-garde company Mabou Mines. It premiered in Boston at the Boston Shakespeare Theatre (June 18–30, 1985) and was subsequently staged in New York and Chicago. Productions of "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" were also staged by the Evidence Room in Los Angeles in 1999 and by the Fifth Column Theatre Company at the Oval House Theatre in London in the same year. A play based on "Radio Free Albemuth" also had a brief run in the 1980s. In November 2010, a production of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", adapted by Edward Einhorn, premiered at the 3LD Art and Technology Center in Manhattan. A radio drama adaptation of Dick's short story "Mr. Spaceship" was aired by the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yleisradio) in 1996 under the name "Menolippu Paratiisiin". Radio dramatizations of Dick's short stories "Colony" and "The Defenders" were aired by NBC in 1956 as part of the series "X Minus One". In January 2006, a "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" (English for "Trzy stygmaty Palmera Eldritcha") theatre adaptation premiered in Stary Teatr in Cracov, with an extensive use of lights and laser choreography. In June 2014 the BBC broadcast a two part adaptation of 'Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?' on Radio 4, starring James Purefoy as Rick Deckard. Comics. Marvel Comics adapted Dick's short story "The Electric Ant" as a limited series which was released in 2009. The comic was produced by writer David Mack ("Daredevil") and artist Pascal Alixe ("Ultimate X-Men"), with covers provided by artist Paul Pope. "The Electric Ant" had earlier been loosely adapted by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow in their 3-issue mini-series "Hard Boiled" published by Dark Horse Comics in 1990–1992. In 2009, BOOM! Studios started publishing a 24-issue miniseries comic book adaptation of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" "Blade Runner", the 1982 film adapted from "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", had previously been adapted to comics as "". In 2011, Dynamite Entertainment published a 4-issue miniseries "Total Recall," a sequel to the 1990 film "Total Recall", inspired by Philip K. Dick's short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale". In 1990, DC Comics published the official adaptation of the original film as a "DC Movie Special: Total Recall". Alternative formats. In response to a 1975 request from the National Library for the Blind for permission to make use of "The Man in the High Castle", Dick responded, "I also grant you a general permission to transcribe any of my former, present or future work, so indeed you can add my name to your 'general permission' list." Some of his books and stories are available in braille and other specialized formats through the NLS. As of December 2012, thirteen of Philip K. Dick's early works in the public domain in the United States are available in ebook form from Project Gutenberg. As of December 2019, Wikisource has three of Philip K. Dick's early works in the public domain in the United States available in ebook form which is not from Project Gutenberg. Influence and legacy. Lawrence Sutin's 1989 biography of Dick, "Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick", is considered the standard biographical treatment of Dick's life. In 1993, French writer Emmanuel Carrère published "Je suis vivant et vous êtes morts" which was first translated and published in English in 2004 as "I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick", which the author describes in his preface in this way:The book you hold in your hands is a very peculiar book. I have tried to depict the life of Philip K. Dick from the inside, in other words, with the same freedom and empathy – indeed with the same truth – with which he depicted his own characters. Critics of the book have complained about the lack of fact checking, sourcing, notes and index, "the usual evidence of deep research that gives a biography the solid stamp of authority." It can be considered a non-fiction novel about his life. Dick has influenced many writers, including Jonathan Lethem and Ursula K. Le Guin. The prominent literary critic Fredric Jameson proclaimed Dick the "Shakespeare of Science Fiction", and praised his work as "one of the most powerful expressions of the society of spectacle and pseudo-event". The author Roberto Bolaño also praised Dick, describing him as "Thoreau plus the death of the American dream". Dick has also influenced filmmakers, his work being compared to films such as the Wachowskis' "The Matrix", David Cronenberg's "Videodrome", "eXistenZ", and "Spider", Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich", "Adaptation", Michel Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", Alex Proyas's "Dark City", Peter Weir's "The Truman Show", Andrew Niccol's "Gattaca", "In Time", Terry Gilliam's "12 Monkeys", Alejandro Amenábar's "Open Your Eyes", David Fincher's "Fight Club", Cameron Crowe's "Vanilla Sky", Darren Aronofsky's "Pi", Richard Kelly's "Donnie Darko" and "Southland Tales", Rian Johnson's "Looper", Duncan Jones' "Source Code", and Christopher Nolan's "Memento" and "Inception". The Philip K. Dick Society was an organization dedicated to promoting the literary works of Dick and was led by Dick's longtime friend and music journalist Paul Williams. Williams also served as Dick's literary executor for several years after Dick's death and wrote one of the first biographies of Dick, entitled "". The Philip K. Dick estate owns and operates the production company Electric Shepherd Productions, which has produced the films "Adjustment Bureau" (2011), the TV series "The Man in the High Castle" and also a Marvel Comics 5-issue adaptation of "Electric Ant". Dick was recreated by his fans in the form of a simulacrum or remote-controlled android designed in his likeness. Such simulacra had been themes of many of Dick's works. The Philip K. Dick simulacrum was included on a discussion panel in a San Diego Comic Con presentation about the film adaptation of the novel, "A Scanner Darkly". In February 2006, an America West Airlines employee misplaced the android's head, and it has not yet been found. In January 2011, it was announced that Hanson Robotics had built a replacement. Contemporary philosophy. Postmodernists such as Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Laurence Rickels and Slavoj Žižek have commented on Dick's writing's foreshadowing of postmodernity. Jean Baudrillard offers this interpretation: "It is hyperreal. It is a universe of simulation, which is something altogether different. And this is so not because Dick speaks specifically of simulacra. SF has always done so, but it has always played upon the double, on artificial replication or imaginary duplication, whereas here the double has disappeared. There is no more double; one is always already in the other world, an other world which is not another, without mirrors or projection or utopias as means for reflection. The simulation is impassable, unsurpassable, checkmated, without exteriority. We can no longer move 'through the mirror' to the other side, as we could during the golden age of transcendence." For his anti-government skepticism, Philip K. Dick was afforded minor mention in "Mythmakers and Lawbreakers", a collection of interviews about fiction by anarchist authors. Noting his early authorship of "The Last of the Masters", an anarchist-themed novelette, author Margaret Killjoy expressed that while Dick never fully sided with anarchism, his opposition to government centralization and organized religion has influenced anarchist interpretations of gnosticism. Awards and honors. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted Dick in 2005. During his lifetime he received numerous annual literary awards and nominations for particular works. Philip K. Dick Award. The Philip K. Dick Award is a science fiction award that annually recognizes the previous year's best SF paperback original published in the U.S. It is conferred at Norwescon, sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, and since 2005 supported by the Philip K. Dick Trust. Winning works are identified on their covers as "Best Original SF Paperback". It is currently administered by Pat LoBrutto, John Silbersack, and Gordon Van Gelder. The award was inaugurated in 1983, the year after Dick's death. It was founded by Thomas Disch with assistance from David G. Hartwell, Paul S. Williams, and Charles N. Brown. Past administrators include Algis J. Budrys and David Alexander Smith. Bibliography. Primary bibliography Secondary bibliography

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Seneca the Younger Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (; AD65), usually known as Seneca, was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work, satirist, from the post-Augustan age of Latin literature. Seneca was born in Cordoba in Hispania, and raised in Rome, where he was trained in rhetoric and philosophy. His father was Seneca the Elder, his elder brother was Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeanus, and his nephew was the poet Lucan. In AD 41, Seneca was exiled to the island of Corsica under emperor Claudius, but was allowed to return in 49 to become a tutor to Nero. When Nero became emperor in 54, Seneca became his advisor and, together with the praetorian prefect Sextus Afranius Burrus, provided competent government for the first five years of Nero's reign. Seneca's influence over Nero declined with time, and in 65 Seneca was forced to take his own life for alleged complicity in the Pisonian conspiracy to assassinate Nero, in which he was likely to have been innocent. His stoic and calm suicide has become the subject of numerous paintings. As a writer Seneca is known for his philosophical works, and for his plays, which are all tragedies. His prose works include a dozen essays and one hundred twenty-four letters dealing with moral issues. These writings constitute one of the most important bodies of primary material for ancient Stoicism. As a tragedian, he is best known for plays such as his "Medea", "Thyestes", and "Phaedra". Seneca's influence on later generations is immense—during the Renaissance he was "a sage admired and venerated as an oracle of moral, even of Christian edification; a master of literary style and a model [for] dramatic art." Life. Early life, family and adulthood. Seneca was born in Corduba in the Roman province of Baetica in Hispania. His father was Lucius Annaeus Seneca the elder, a Spanish-born Roman knight who had gained fame as a writer and teacher of rhetoric in Rome. Seneca's mother, Helvia, was from a prominent Baetician family. Seneca was the second of three brothers; the others were Lucius Annaeus Novatus (later known as Junius Gallio), and Annaeus Mela, the father of the poet Lucan. Miriam Griffin says in her biography of Seneca that "the evidence for Seneca's life before his exile in 41 is so slight, and the potential interest of these years, for social history as well as for biography, is so great that few writers on Seneca have resisted the temptation to eke out knowledge with imagination." Griffin also infers from the ancient sources that Seneca was born in either 8, 4, or 1 BC. She thinks he was born between 4 and 1 BC and was resident in Rome by AD 5. Seneca tells us that he was taken to Rome in the "arms" of his aunt (his mother's stepsister) at a young age, probably when he was about five years old. His father resided for much of his life in the city. Seneca was taught the usual subjects of literature, grammar, and rhetoric, as part of the standard education of high-born Romans. While still young he received philosophical training from Attalus the Stoic, and from Sotion and Papirius Fabianus, both of whom belonged to the short-lived School of the Sextii, which combined Stoicism with Pythagoreanism. Sotion persuaded Seneca when he was a young man (in his early twenties) to become a vegetarian, which he practised for around a year before his father urged him to desist because the practice was associated with "some foreign rites". Seneca often had breathing difficulties throughout his life, probably asthma, and at some point in his mid-twenties (c. 20 AD) he appears to have been struck down with tuberculosis. He was sent to Egypt to live with his aunt (the same aunt who had brought him to Rome), whose husband Gaius Galerius had become Prefect of Egypt. She nursed him through a period of ill-health that lasted up to ten years. In 31 AD he returned to Rome with his aunt, his uncle dying en route in a shipwreck. His aunt's influence helped Seneca be elected quaestor (probably after 37 AD), which also earned him the right to sit in the Roman Senate. Politics and exile. Seneca's early career as a senator seems to have been successful and he was praised for his oratory. Cassius Dio relates a story that Caligula was so offended by Seneca's oratorical success in the Senate that he ordered him to commit suicide. Seneca only survived because he was seriously ill and Caligula was told that he would soon die anyway. In his writings Seneca has nothing good to say about Caligula and frequently depicts him as a monster. Seneca explains his own survival as down to his patience and his devotion to his friends: "I wanted to avoid the impression that all I could do for loyalty was die." In 41 AD, Claudius became emperor, and Seneca was accused by the new empress Messalina of adultery with Julia Livilla, sister to Caligula and Agrippina. The affair has been doubted by some historians, since Messalina had clear political motives for getting rid of Julia Livilla and her supporters. The Senate pronounced a death sentence on Seneca, which Claudius commuted to exile, and Seneca spent the next eight years on the island of Corsica. Two of Seneca's earliest surviving works date from the period of his exile—both consolations. In his "Consolation to Helvia", his mother, Seneca comforts her as a bereaved mother for losing her son to exile. Seneca incidentally mentions the death of his only son, a few weeks before his exile. Later in life Seneca was married to a woman younger than himself, Pompeia Paulina. It has been thought that the infant son may have been from an earlier marriage, but the evidence is "tenuous". Seneca's other work of this period, his "Consolation to Polybius", one of Claudius' freedmen, focused on consoling Polybius on the death of his brother. It is noted for its flattery of Claudius, and Seneca expresses his hope that the emperor will recall him from exile. In 49 AD Agrippina married her uncle Claudius, and through her influence Seneca was recalled to Rome. Agrippina gained the praetorship for Seneca and appointed him tutor to her son, the future emperor Nero. Imperial advisor. From AD 54 to 62, Seneca acted as Nero's advisor, together with the praetorian prefect Sextus Afranius Burrus. One by-product of his new position was that Seneca was appointed suffect consul in 56. Seneca's influence was said to have been especially strong in the first year. Seneca composed Nero's accession speeches in which he promised to restore proper legal procedure and authority to the Senate. He also composed the eulogy for Claudius that Nero delivered at the funeral. Seneca's satirical skit "Apocolocyntosis", which lampoons the deification of Claudius and praises Nero dates from the earliest period of Nero's reign. In 55 AD, Seneca wrote "On Clemency" following Nero's murder of Britannicus, perhaps to assure the citizenry that the murder was the end, not the beginning of bloodshed. "On Clemency" is a work which, although it flatters Nero, was intended to show the correct (Stoic) path of virtue for a ruler. Tacitus and Dio suggest that Nero's early rule, during which he listened to Seneca and Burrus, was quite competent. However, the ancient sources suggest that, over time, Seneca and Burrus lost their influence over the emperor. In 59 they had reluctantly agreed to Agrippina's murder, and afterward Tacitus reports that Seneca had to write a letter justifying the murder to the Senate. In 58 AD the senator Publius Suillius Rufus made a series of public attacks on Seneca. These attacks, reported by Tacitus and Cassius Dio, included charges that, in a mere four years of service to Nero, Seneca had acquired a vast personal fortune of three hundred million sestertii by charging high interest on loans throughout Italy and the provinces. Suillius' attacks included claims of sexual corruption, with a suggestion that Seneca had slept with Agrippina. Tacitus, though, reports that Suillius was highly prejudiced: he had been a favourite of Claudius, and had been an embezzler and informant. In response, Seneca brought a series of prosecutions for corruption against Suillius: half of his estate was confiscated and he was sent into exile. However, the attacks reflect a criticism of Seneca that was made at the time and continued through later ages. Seneca was undoubtedly extremely rich: he had properties at Baiae and Nomentum, an Alban villa, and Egyptian estates. Cassius Dio even reports that the Boudica uprising in Britannia was caused by Seneca forcing large loans on the indigenous British aristocracy in the aftermath of Claudius's conquest of Britain, and then calling them in suddenly and aggressively. Seneca was sensitive to such accusations: his "De Vita Beata" ("On the Happy Life") dates from around this time and includes a defence of wealth along Stoic lines, arguing that properly gaining and spending wealth is appropriate behaviour for a philosopher. Retirement. After Burrus' death in 62, Seneca's influence declined rapidly; as Tacitus puts it (Ann. 14.52.1), "mors Burri infregit Senecae potentiam" ("the death of Burrus broke Seneca's power"). Tacitus reports that Seneca tried to retire twice, in 62 and 64 AD, but Nero refused him on both occasions. Nevertheless, Seneca was increasingly absent from the court. He adopted a quiet lifestyle on his country estates, concentrating on his studies and seldom visiting Rome. It was during these final few years that he composed two of his greatest works: "Naturales quaestiones"—an encyclopedia of the natural world; and his "Letters to Lucilius"—which document his philosophical thoughts. Death. In AD 65, Seneca was caught up in the aftermath of the Pisonian conspiracy, a plot to kill Nero. Although it is unlikely that Seneca was part of the conspiracy, Nero ordered him to kill himself. Seneca followed tradition by severing several veins in order to bleed to death, and his wife Pompeia Paulina attempted to share his fate. Cassius Dio, who wished to emphasize the relentlessness of Nero, focused on how Seneca had attended to his last-minute letters, and how his death was hastened by soldiers. A generation after the Julio-Claudian emperors, Tacitus wrote an account of the suicide, which, in view of his Republican sympathies, is perhaps somewhat romanticized. According to this account, Nero ordered Seneca's wife saved. Her wounds were bound up and she made no further attempt to kill herself. As for Seneca himself, his age and diet were blamed for slow loss of blood and extended pain rather than a quick death. He also took poison, which was, however, not fatal. After dictating his last words to a scribe, and with a circle of friends attending him in his home, he immersed himself in a warm bath, which he expected would speed blood flow and ease his pain. Tacitus wrote, "He was then carried into a bath, with the steam of which he was suffocated, and he was burnt without any of the usual funeral rites. So he had directed in a codicil of his will, even when in the height of his wealth and power he was thinking of life's close." This may give the impression of a favourable portrait of Seneca, but Tacitus' treatment of him is at best ambivalent. Alongside Seneca's apparent fortitude in the face of death, for example, one can also view his actions as rather histrionic and performative; and when Tacitus tells us that he left his family an "imago suae vitae" ("Annales" 15.62), "an image of his life", he is possibly being ambiguous: in Roman culture, the "imago" was a kind of mask that commemorated the great ancestors of noble families, but at the same time, it may also suggest duplicity, superficiality, and pretence. Philosophy. As "a major philosophical figure of the Roman Imperial Period", Seneca’s lasting contribution to philosophy has been to the school of Stoicism.  His writing is highly accessible and was the subject of attention from the Renaissance onwards by writers such as Michel de Montaigne. He has been described as “a towering and controversial figure of antiquity” and “the world’s most interesting Stoic”. Seneca wrote a number of books on Stoicism, mostly on ethics, with one work ("Naturales Quaestiones") on the physical world. Seneca built on the writings of many of the earlier Stoics: he often mentions Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus; and frequently cites Posidonius, with whom Seneca shared an interest in natural phenomena. He frequently quotes Epicurus, especially in his "Letters". His interest in Epicurus is mainly limited to using him as a source of ethical maxims. Likewise Seneca shows some interest in Platonist metaphysics, but never with any clear commitment. His moral essays are based on Stoic doctrines. Stoicism was a popular philosophy in this period, and many upper-class Romans found in it a guiding ethical framework for political involvement. It was once popular to regard Seneca as being very eclectic in his Stoicism, but modern scholarship views him as a fairly orthodox Stoic, albeit a free-minded one. His works discuss both ethical theory and practical advice, and Seneca stresses that both parts are distinct but interdependent. His "Letters to Lucilius" showcase Seneca's search for ethical perfection and “represent a sort of philosophical testament for posterity”. Seneca regards philosophy as a balm for the wounds of life. The destructive passions, especially anger and grief, must be uprooted, or moderated according to reason. He discusses the relative merits of the contemplative life and the active life, and he considers it important to confront one's own mortality and be able to face death. One must be willing to practice poverty and use wealth properly, and he writes about favours, clemency, the importance of friendship, and the need to benefit others. The universe is governed for the best by a rational providence, and this must be reconciled with acceptance of adversity. Drama. Ten plays are attributed to Seneca, of which most likely eight were written by him. The plays stand in stark contrast to his philosophical works. With their intense emotions, and grim overall tone, the plays seem to represent the antithesis of Seneca's Stoic beliefs. Up to the 16th century it was normal to distinguish between Seneca the moral philosopher and Seneca the dramatist as two separate people. Scholars have tried to spot certain Stoic themes: it is the uncontrolled passions that generate madness, ruination, and self-destruction. This has a cosmic as well as an ethical aspect, and fate is a powerful, albeit rather oppressive, force. Many scholars have thought, following the ideas of the 19th-century German scholar Friedrich Leo, that Seneca's tragedies were written for recitation only. Other scholars think that they were written for performance and that it is possible that actual performance took place in Seneca's lifetime. Ultimately, this issue cannot be resolved on the basis of our existing knowledge. The tragedies of Seneca have been successfully staged in modern times. The dating of the tragedies is highly problematic in the absence of any ancient references. A parody of a lament from "Hercules Furens" appears in the "Apocolocyntosis", which implies a date before 54 AD for that play. A relative chronology has been proposed on metrical grounds. The plays are not all based on the Greek pattern; they have a five-act form and differ in many respects from extant Attic drama, and while the influence of Euripides on some of these works is considerable, so is the influence of Virgil and Ovid. Seneca's plays were widely read in medieval and Renaissance European universities and strongly influenced tragic drama in that time, such as Elizabethan England (William Shakespeare and other playwrights), France (Corneille and Racine), and the Netherlands (Joost van den Vondel). English translations of Seneca's tragedies appeared in print in the mid-16th century, with all ten published collectively in 1581. He is regarded as the source and inspiration for what is known as "Revenge Tragedy", starting with Thomas Kyd's "The Spanish Tragedy" and continuing well into the Jacobean era. "Thyestes" is considered Seneca's masterpiece, and has been described by scholar Dana Gioia as "one of the most influential plays ever written". "Medea" is also highly regarded, and was praised along with "Phaedra" by T. S. Eliot. Works. Works attributed to Seneca include a dozen philosophical essays, one hundred and twenty-four letters dealing with moral issues, nine tragedies, and a satire, the attribution of which is disputed. His authorship of "Hercules on Oeta" has also been questioned. Seneca's tragedies. "Fabulae crepidatae" (tragedies with Greek subjects): "Fabula praetexta" (tragedy in Roman setting): Essays and letters. Essays. "Traditionally given in the following order:" "Pseudo-Seneca". Various antique and medieval texts purport to be by Seneca, "e.g.", "De remediis fortuitorum". Their unknown authors are collectively called "Pseudo-Seneca." At least some of these seem to preserve and adapt genuine Senecan content, for example, Saint Martin of Braga's (d. c. 580) "Formula vitae honestae", or "De differentiis quatuor virtutumvitae honestae" ("Rules for an Honest Life", or "On the Four Cardinal Virtues"). Early manuscripts preserve Martin's preface, where he makes it clear that this was his adaptation, but in later copies this was omitted, and the work was later thought fully Seneca's work. Legacy. As a proto-Christian saint. Seneca's writings were well known in the later Roman period, and Quintilian, writing thirty years after Seneca's death, remarked on the popularity of his works amongst the youth. While he found much to admire, Quintillian criticised Seneca for what he regarded as a degenerate literary style—a criticism echoed by Aulus Gellius in the middle of the 2nd century. The early Christian Church was very favourably disposed towards Seneca and his writings, and the church leader Tertullian possessively referred to him as "our Seneca". By the 4th century an apocryphal correspondence with Paul the Apostle had been created linking Seneca into the Christian tradition. The letters are mentioned by Jerome who also included Seneca among a list of Christian writers, and Seneca is similarly mentioned by Augustine. In the 6th century Martin of Braga synthesised Seneca's thought into a couple of treatises that became popular in their own right. Otherwise, Seneca was mainly known through a large number of quotes and extracts in the "florilegia", which were popular throughout the medieval period. When his writings were read in the later Middle Ages, it was mostly his "Letters to Lucilius"—the longer essays and plays being relatively unknown. Medieval writers and works continued to link him to Christianity because of his alleged association with Paul. The "Golden Legend", a 13th-century hagiographical account of famous saints that was widely read, included an account of Seneca's death scene, and erroneously presented Nero as a witness to Seneca's suicide. Dante placed Seneca (alongside Cicero) among the "great spirits" in the First Circle of Hell, or Limbo. Boccaccio, who in 1370 came across the works of Tacitus whilst browsing the library at Montecassino, wrote an account of Seneca's suicide hinting that it was a kind of disguised baptism, or a "de facto" baptism in spirit. Some, such as Albertino Mussato and Giovanni Colonna, went even further and concluded that Seneca must have been a Christian convert. An improving reputation. Seneca remains one of the few popular Roman philosophers from the period. He appears not only in Dante, but also in Chaucer and to a large degree in Petrarch, who adopted his style in his own essays and who quotes him more than any other authority except Virgil. In the Renaissance, printed editions and translations of his works became common, including an edition by Erasmus and a commentary by John Calvin. John of Salisbury, Erasmus and others celebrated his works. French essayist Montaigne, who gave a spirited defense of Seneca and Plutarch in his "Essays", was himself considered by Pasquier a "French Seneca". Similarly, Thomas Fuller praised Joseph Hall as "our English Seneca". Many who considered his ideas not particularly original, still argued that he was important in making the Greek philosophers presentable and intelligible. His suicide has also been a popular subject in art, from Jacques-Louis David's 1773 painting "The Death of Seneca" to the 1951 film "Quo Vadis". Even with the admiration of an earlier group of intellectual stalwarts, Seneca has never been without his detractors. In his own time, he was accused of hypocrisy or, at least, a less than "Stoic" lifestyle. While banished to Corsica, he wrote a plea for restoration rather incompatible with his advocacy of a simple life and the acceptance of fate. In his "Apocolocyntosis" he ridiculed the behaviours and policies of Claudius, and flattered Nero—such as proclaiming that Nero would live longer and be wiser than the legendary Nestor. The claims of Publius Suillius Rufus that Seneca acquired some "three hundred million "sesterces"" through Nero's favour, are highly partisan, but they reflect the reality that Seneca was both powerful and wealthy. Robin Campbell, a translator of Seneca's letters, writes that the "stock criticism of Seneca right down the centuries [has been]...the apparent contrast between his philosophical teachings and his practice." In 1562 Gerolamo Cardano wrote an "apology" praising Nero in his "Encomium Neronis", printed in Basel. This was likely intended as a mock "encomium", inverting the portrayal of Nero and Seneca that appears in Tacitus. In this work Cardano portrayed Seneca as a crook of the worst kind, an empty rhetorician who was only thinking to grab money and power, after having poisoned the mind of the young emperor. Cardano stated that Seneca well deserved death. Among the historians who have sought to reappraise Seneca is the scholar Anna Lydia Motto who in 1966 argued that the negative image has been based almost entirely on Suillius' account, while many others who might have lauded him have been lost. "We are therefore left with no contemporary record of Seneca's life, save for the desperate opinion of Publius Suillius. Think of the barren image we should have of Socrates, had the works of Plato and Xenophon not come down to us and were we wholly dependent upon Aristophanes' description of this Athenian philosopher. To be sure, we should have a highly distorted, misconstrued view. Such is the view left to us of Seneca, if we were to rely upon Suillius alone." More recent work is changing the dominant perception of Seneca as a mere conduit for pre-existing ideas showing originality in Seneca's contribution to the history of ideas. Examination of Seneca's life and thought in relation to contemporary education and to the psychology of emotions is revealing the relevance of his thought. For example, Martha Nussbaum in her discussion of desire and emotion includes Seneca among the Stoics who offered important insights and perspectives on emotions and their role in our lives. Specifically devoting a chapter to his treatment of anger and its management, she shows Seneca's appreciation of the damaging role of uncontrolled anger, and its pathological connections. Nussbaum later extended her examination to Seneca's contribution to political philosophy showing considerable subtlety and richness in his thoughts about politics, education, and notions of global citizenship—and finding a basis for reform-minded education in Seneca's ideas she used to propose a mode of modern education that avoids both narrow traditionalism and total rejection of tradition. Elsewhere Seneca has been noted as the first great Western thinker on the complex nature and role of gratitude in human relationships. Notable fictional portrayals. Seneca is a character in Monteverdi's 1642 opera "L'incoronazione di Poppea" ("The Coronation of Poppea"), which is based on the pseudo-Senecan play, "Octavia". In Nathaniel Lee's 1675 play "Nero, Emperor of Rome", Seneca attempts to dissuade Nero from his egomaniacal plans, but is dragged off to prison, dying off-stage. He appears in Robert Bridges' verse drama "Nero", the second part of which (published 1894) culminates in Seneca's death. Seneca appears in a fairly minor role in Henryk Sienkiewicz's 1896 novel "Quo Vadis" and was played by Nicholas Hannen in the 1951 film. In Robert Graves' 1934 book "Claudius the God", the sequel novel to "I, Claudius", Seneca is portrayed as an unbearable sycophant. He is shown as a flatterer who converts to Stoicism solely to appease Claudius' own ideology. The "Pumpkinification" ("Apocolocyntosis") to Graves thus becomes an unbearable work of flattery to the loathsome Nero mocking a man that Seneca grovelled to for years. The historical novel "Chariot of the Soul" by Linda Proud features Seneca as tutor of the young Togidubnus, son of King Verica of the Atrebates, during his ten-year stay in Rome.

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Miguel de Unamuno Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (29 September 1864 – 31 December 1936) was a Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, philosopher, professor of Greek and Classics, and later rector at the University of Salamanca. His major philosophical essay was "The Tragic Sense of Life" (1912), and his most famous novel was "" (1917), a modern exploration of the Cain and Abel story. Biography. Miguel de Unamuno was born in Bilbao, a port city of the Basque Country, Spain, the son of Félix de Unamuno and Salomé Jugo. As a young man, he was interested in the Basque language, which he could speak, and competed for a teaching position in the "Instituto de Bilbao" against Sabino Arana. The contest was finally won by the Basque scholar Resurrección María de Azkue. Unamuno worked in all major genres: the essay, the novel, poetry, and theater, and, as a modernist, contributed greatly to dissolving the boundaries between genres. There is some debate as to whether Unamuno was in fact a member of the Generation of '98, an "ex post facto" literary group of Spanish intellectuals and philosophers that was the creation of José Martínez Ruiz (Azorín)—a group that includes, besides Azorín, Antonio Machado, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Pío Baroja, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Ramiro de Maeztu, and Ángel Ganivet, among others. Unamuno would have preferred to be a philosophy professor, but was unable to get an academic appointment; philosophy in Spain was somewhat politicized. Instead he became a Greek professor. In 1901 Unamuno gave his well-known conference on the scientific and literary inviability of the Basque. According to Azurmendi, Unamuno went against the Basque language once his political views changed as a result of his reflection on Spain. In addition to his writing, Unamuno played an important role in the intellectual life of Spain. He served as rector of the University of Salamanca for two periods: from 1900 to 1924 and 1930 to 1936, during a time of great social and political upheaval. During the 1910s and 1920s, he became one of the most passionate advocates of Spanish liberalism. Unamuno linked his liberalism with his hometown of Bilbao, which, through its commerce and connection with the civilized world, Unamuno believed had developed an individualism and independent outlook in stark contrast to the narrow-mindedness of Carlist traditionalism. When in 1912 José Canalejas was assassinated by an anarchist, he blamed it on the fact that Spain lacked a "true liberal democratic party" and in 1914 denounced the large property owners for their negligence and ignorance. Along with many other Spanish writers and intellectuals, such as Benito Pérez Galdós, he was an outspoken supporter of the Allied cause during the First World War despite Spain's official neutrality. Unamuno viewed the war as a crusade not just against the bellicose authoritarianism of the Germans, but against their sympathizers in Spain, and intensified his attacks on Alfonso XIII and the Spanish monarchy. Unamuno was removed from his two university chairs by the dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1924, over the protests of other Spanish intellectuals. As a result of his vociferous criticisms of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, he lived in exile until 1930, first banished to Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands; his house there is now a museum, as is his house in Salamanca. From Fuerteventura he escaped to France, as related in his book "De Fuerteventura a Paris". After a year in Paris, Unamuno established himself in Hendaye, a border town in the French Basque Country, as close to Spain as he could get while remaining in France. Unamuno returned to Spain after the fall of General Primo de Rivera's dictatorship in 1930 and took up his rectorship again. It is said in Salamanca that the day he returned to the University, Unamuno began his lecture by saying "As we were saying yesterday..." (Decíamos ayer...) as Fray Luis de León had done in the same place in 1576, after four years of imprisonment by the Inquisition. It was as though he had not been absent at all. After the fall of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, Spain embarked on its Second Republic. He was a candidate on the Republican/Socialist ticket and was elected, after which he led a large demonstration in the Plaza Mayor in which he raised the Republic's flag and declared its victory. He always was a moderate and refused all political and anticlerical extremisms. In a speech delivered on 28 November 1932, at the Madrid Ateneo, he protested against Azaña's extremist anti-clerical ruling: `Even the Inquisition was limited by certain legal guarantees. But now we have something worse: a police force which is grounded only on a general sense of panic and on the invention of non-existent dangers to cover up this over-stepping of the law. Unamuno's dislike for Manuel Azaña's ruling went so far as to tell a reporter who published his statement in El Adelanto in June of 1936 that President Manuel Azaña should commit suicide as a patriotic act". The Republican government had a serious problem with Unamuno's statements, and on 22 August 1936, they decreed that Unamuno should once again be removed from his position as rector of the university. Moreover, the government removed his name from streets and replaced it with the name of Simón Bolívar. Having begun his literary career as an internationalist, Unamuno gradually became convinced of the universal values of Spanish culture, feeling that Spain's essential qualities would be destroyed if influenced too much by outside forces. Thus he initially welcomed Franco's revolt as necessary to rescue Spain from the excesses of the Second Republic. When a journalist questioned how he could side with the military and "abandon a Republic that [he] helped create," Unamuno responded, it "is not a fight against the liberal Republic, but a fight for civilization. What Madrid represents now is not socialism or democracy, or even communism" However, the harsh tactics employed by the Francoists in the struggle against their republican opponents caused him to oppose both the Republic and Franco. Unamuno said of the military revolt that it would be the victory of "a brand of Catholicism that is not Christian and of a paranoid militarism bred in the colonial campaigns," referring in the latter case to the 1921 war with Abd el-Krim in what was then Spanish Morocco, (Franco's 1936 revolt also started from Spanish Morocco). In 1936 Unamuno had a public quarrel with the Nationalist general Millán Astray at the university in which he denounced both Astray—with whom he had had verbal battles in the 1920s—and elements of the rebel movement. Shortly afterwards, Unamuno was effectively removed for a second time from the rectorship of the University of Salamanca. A few days later he confided to Nikos Kazantzakis: On 21 November, he wrote to the Italian philosopher Lorenzo Giusso that "The barbarism is unanimous. It is a regime of terror on both sides." In one of his final letters, dated 13 December, he condemned the atrocities being committed by Franco's forces in terms that would become famous: Broken-hearted, he was placed under house arrest by Franco, until his death. Confrontation with Millán Astray. On 12 October 1936, the Spanish Civil War had been underway for just under three months; the celebration of Columbus Day had brought together a politically diverse crowd at the University of Salamanca, including Enrique Pla y Deniel, the Archbishop of Salamanca, and Carmen Polo Martínez-Valdés, the wife of Franco, Africanist General José Millán Astray and Unamuno himself. Unamuno had supported Franco's uprising because he believed it necessary to bring order to the anarchy created by the Popular Front, and that day he was representing General Franco in the event. By then the Republican Government had removed Unamuno from his perpetual rectory at the Salamanca University and the rebel government had restored him. There are different versions of the account The Portillo/Thomas version. According to the British historian Hugh Thomas in his "magnum opus" "The Spanish Civil War" (1961), the evening began with an impassioned speech by the Falangist writer José María Pemán. After this, Professor Francisco Maldonado decried Catalonia and the Basque Country as "cancers on the body of the nation," adding that "Fascism, the healer of Spain, will know how to exterminate them, cutting into the live flesh, like a determined surgeon free from false sentimentalism." From somewhere in the auditorium, someone cried out the Spanish Legion´s motto ""¡Viva la Muerte!" [Long live death!]. As was his habit, Millán Astray, the founder and first commander of the Spanish Legion, responded with "¡España!" [Spain!]; the crowd replied with "¡Una!" [One!]. He repeated "¡España!"; the crowd then replied "¡Grande!" [Great!]. A third time, Millán Astray shouted "¡España!"; the crowd responded "Libre!"" [Free!] This—Spain, one, great and free—was a common Falangist cheer and would become a francoist motto thereafter. Later, a group of uniformed Falangists entered, saluting the portrait of Franco that hung on the wall. Unamuno, who was presiding over the meeting, rose up slowly and addressed the crowd: Unamuno gestured to the Archbishop of Salamanca, Millán Astray responded: "Death to intelligence! Long live death!" provoking applause from the Falangists. Pemán, in an effort to calm the crowd, exclaimed "No! Long live intelligence! Death to the bad intellectuals!" Unamuno continued: "This is the temple of intelligence, and I am its high priest. You are profaning its sacred domain. You will win "[venceréis]", because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince "[pero no convenceréis]". In order to convince it is necessary to persuade, and to persuade you will need something that you lack: reason and right in the struggle. I see it is useless to ask you to think of Spain. I have spoken." Millán Astray, controlling himself, shouted "Take the lady's arm!" Unamuno took Carmen Polo by the arm and left under her protection. The Severiano Delgado version. In 2018, the details of Unamuno's speech were disputed by the historian Severiano Delgado, who argued that the account in a 1941 article by Luis Gabriel Portillo (who was not present at Salamanca) in the British magazine "Horizon" may not have been an accurate representation of events. Severiano Delgado, a historian and librarian at the University of Salamanca, asserts that Unamuno's words were put in his mouth by Luis Portillo, in 1941, possibly with some help from George Orwell, in a piece in the literary magazine Horizon, entitled Unamuno's Last Lecture. Portillo had not witnessed the event. Severiano Delgado's book, titled "Archeology of a Myth: The act of October 12, 1936 in the auditorium of the University of Salamanca," shows how the propaganda myth arose regarding the confrontation that took place that day between Miguel de Unamuno and the general Millán Astray. Delgado agrees that a "very fierce and violent verbal confrontation" between Unamuno and Millán Astray definitely occurred, which led to Unamuno being removed from his rectorship, but he thinks that the famous speech attributed to Unamuno was invented and written by Luis Portillo." Delgado says that: Unamuno took the floor, not to confront Millán Astray, but to answer a previous speech by Professor of Literature Francisco Maldonado who had identified Catalonia and the Basque Country with the "antiespaña" (Antispain}. Unamuno himself was Basque and was revolted with Francisco Maldonado's speech, but when addressing the audience, Unamuno used the example of what had happened with José Rizal (a Filipino nationalist and polymath during the tail end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines, executed by the Spanish colonial government for the crime of rebellion after the Philippine Revolution). Millán Astray had fought in the Philippines and it was the reference to José Rizal that annoyed Millán Astray, who shouted "The traitoring intellectuals die". As proof that the incident was nothing more than a crossroads of hard words, the photograph reproduced on the cover of his book shows Millán Astray and Miguel de Unamuno calmly saying goodbye in the presence of Bishop Plà, with no tension between them. The photo was discovered in 2018 in the National Library and was part of the chronicle of the act that the newspaper "The Advancement of Salamanca" published the following day, 13 October 1936. According to Delgado, Portillo's account of the speech became famous when a then very young British historian Hugh Thomas, aged 30, came across it in a Horizon anthology while researching his seminal book, "The Spanish Civil War", and mistakenly took it as a primary source. Death. Unamuno died on 31 December 1936. The official version accounted that he died as a result of the inhalation of gases from a brazier. However, research by and , released in 2020, suggests that he may have been murdered by Bartolomé Aragón, the last person to have visited him, based on the fact that he falsely claimed to be a former student of his, was a fascist militant (and requete) with opposed political ideas to Unamuno and had collaborated with Nationals propaganda before. Additional telltale findings were: the lack of autopsy (despite having been mandatory, as the cause of death was determined to be a sudden death due to a intracranial bleeding), two screams from Unamuno heard by his maid during the Aragón visit and discrepancies in the time of death registered by the coroner and the authorities. Literary career and works. Philosophy. Unamuno's philosophy was not systematic but rather a negation of all systems and an affirmation of faith "in itself." He developed intellectually under the influence of rationalism and positivism, but during his youth he wrote articles that clearly show his sympathy for socialism and his great concern for the situation in which he found Spain at the time. An important concept for Unamuno was "intrahistoria". He thought that history could best be understood by looking at the small histories of anonymous people, rather than by focusing on major events such as wars and political pacts. Some authors relativize the importance of "intrahistoria" in his thinking. Those authors say that more than a clear concept is an ambiguous metaphor. The term first appears in the essay "En torno al casticismo" (1895), but Unamuno leaves it soon. In the late nineteenth century Unamuno suffered a religious crisis and left the positivist philosophy. Then, in the early twentieth century, he developed his own thinking influenced by existentialism. Life was tragic, according to Unamuno, because of the knowledge that we are to die. He explains much of human activity as an attempt to survive, in some form, after our death. Unamuno summarized his personal creed thus: "My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live." He said, "Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those who possess this tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, "René", "Obermann", Thomson, Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard—men burdened with wisdom rather than with knowledge." He provides a stimulating discussion of the differences between faith and reason in his most famous work: "Del sentimiento trágico de la vida" ("The Tragic Sense of Life", 1912). A historically influential paperfolder from childhood to his last, difficult days, in several works Unamuno ironically expressed philosophical views of Platonism, scholasticism, positivism, and the "science vs religion" issue in terms of "origami" figures, notably the traditional Spanish "". Since he was also a linguist (professor of Greek), he coined the word "cocotología" ("cocotology") to describe the art of paper folding. After the conclusion of "Amor y pedagogía" ("Love and Pedagogy", 1902), he included in the volume, attributing it to one of the characters, "Notes for a Treatise on Cocotology" ("Apuntes para un tratado de cocotología"). Along with "The Tragic Sense of Life", Unamuno's long-form essay "La agonía del cristianismo" ("The Agony of Christianity", 1931) and his novella "San Manuel Bueno, mártir" ("Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr", 1930) were all included on the "Index Librorum Prohibitorum". After his youthful sympathy for socialism ended, Unamuno gravitated towards liberalism. Unamuno's conception of liberalism, elaborated in essays such as "La esencia del liberalismo" in 1909, was one that sought to reconcile a great respect for individual freedom with a more interventionist state, bringing him to a position closer to social liberalism. In writing about the Church in 1932 during the second Spanish Republic, Unamuno urged the clergy to end their attacks on liberalism and instead embrace it as a way of rejuvenating the faith. Unamuno was probably the best Spanish connoisseur of Portuguese culture, literature, and history of his time. He believed it was as important for a Spaniard to become familiar with the great names of Portuguese literature as with those of Catalan literature. He believed that Iberian countries should come together through the exchange of manifestations of the spirit but he was openly against any type of Iberian Federalism. In the final analysis Unamuno's significance is that he was one of a number of notable interwar intellectuals, along with Julien Benda, Karl Jaspers, Johan Huizinga, and José Ortega y Gasset, who resisted the intrusion of ideology into Western intellectual life. Poetry. For Unamuno, the art of poetry was a way of expressing spiritual problems. His themes were the same in his poetry as in his other fiction: spiritual anguish, the pain provoked by the silence of God, time and death. Unamuno was always attracted to traditional meters and, though his early poems did not rhyme, he subsequently turned to rhyme in his later works. Among his outstanding works of poetry are: Drama. Unamuno's dramatic production presents a philosophical progression. Questions such as individual spirituality, faith as a "vital lie", and the problem of a double personality were at the center of "La esfinge" ("The Sphinx") (1898), and "La verdad" ("Truth"), (1899). In 1934, he wrote "El hermano Juan o El mundo es teatro" ("Brother Juan or The World is a Theatre"). Unamuno's theatre is schematic; he did away with artifice and focused only on the conflicts and passions that affect the characters. This austerity was influenced by classical Greek theatre. What mattered to him was the presentation of the drama going on inside of the characters, because he understood the novel as a way of gaining knowledge about life. By symbolizing passion and creating a theatre austere both in word and presentation, Unamuno's theatre opened the way for the renaissance of Spanish theatre undertaken by Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Azorín, and Federico García Lorca.

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Hubert Dreyfus Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (; October 15, 1929 – April 22, 2017) was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests included phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. He was widely known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger, which critics labeled "Dreydegger". Dreyfus was featured in Tao Ruspoli's film "Being in the World" (2010)"," and was amongst the philosophers interviewed by Bryan Magee for the BBC Television series "The Great Philosophers" (1987)"." The "Futurama" character Professor "Hubert" Farnsworth is partly named after him, writer Eric Kaplan having been a former student. Life and career. Dreyfus was born on 15 October 1929, in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Stanley S. and Irene (Lederer) Dreyfus. He attended Harvard University from 1947. With a senior honors thesis on "Causality and Quantum Theory" (for which W. V. O. Quine was the main examiner) he was awarded a BA "summa cum laude" in 1951 and joined Phi Beta Kappa. He was awarded an MA in 1952. He was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard in 1952-1953 (as he was again in 1954 and 1956). Then, on a Harvard Sheldon traveling fellowship, Dreyfus studied at the University of Freiburg over 1953–1954. During this time he had an interview with Martin Heidegger. Sean D. Kelly records that Dreyfus found the meeting 'disappointing.' Brief mention of it was made by Dreyfus during his 1987 BBC interview with Bryan Magee in remarks that are revealing of both his and Heidegger's opinion of the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. Between 1956 and 1957, Dreyfus undertook research at the Husserl Archives at the University of Louvain on a Fulbright Fellowship. Towards the end of his stay, his first (jointly authored) paper "Curds and Lions in Don Quijote" would appear in print. After acting as an instructor in philosophy at Brandeis University (1957–1959), he attended the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, on a French government grant (1959–1960). From 1960, first as an instructor, then as an assistant and then associate professor, Dreyfus taught philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1964, with his dissertation "Husserl’s Phenomenology of Perception", he obtained his PhD from Harvard. (Due to his knowledge of Husserl, Dagfinn Føllesdal sat on the thesis committee but he has asserted that Dreyfus "was not really my student.") That same year, his co-translation (with his first wife) of "Sense and Non-Sense" by Maurice Merleau-Ponty was published. Also in 1964, and whilst still at MIT, he was employed as a consultant by the RAND Corporation to review the work of Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). This resulted in the publication, in 1965, of the "famously combative" "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence", which proved to be the first of a series of papers and books attacking the AI field's claims and assumptions. The first edition of "What Computers Can't Do" would follow in 1972, and this critique of AI (which has been translated into at least ten languages) would establish Dreyfus's public reputation. However, as the editors of his "Festschrift" noted: "the study and interpretation of 'continental' philosophers... came first in the order of his philosophical interests and influences." In 1968, although he had been granted tenure, Dreyfus left MIT and became an associate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley (winning, that same year, the Harbison Prize for Outstanding Teaching). In 1972 he was promoted to full professor. Though Dreyfus retired from his chair in 1994, he continued as professor of philosophy in the Graduate School (and held, from 1999, a joint appointment in the rhetoric department). And he continued to teach philosophy at UC Berkeley until his last class in December 2016. Dreyfus was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate for "his brilliant and highly influential work in the field of artificial intelligence" and his interpretation of twentieth century continental philosophy by Erasmus University. Dreyfus died on April 22, 2017. His younger brother and sometimes collaborator, Stuart Dreyfus, is a professor emeritus of industrial engineering and operations research at the University of California, Berkeley. Dreyfus' criticism of AI. Dreyfus' critique of artificial intelligence (AI) concerns what he considers to be the four primary assumptions of AI research. The first two assumptions are what he calls the "biological" and "psychological" assumptions. The biological assumption is that the brain is analogous to computer hardware and the mind is analogous to computer software. The psychological assumption is that the mind works by performing discrete computations (in the form of algorithmic rules) on discrete representations or symbols. Dreyfus claims that the plausibility of the psychological assumption rests on two others: the epistemological and ontological assumptions. The epistemological assumption is that all activity (either by animate or inanimate objects) can be formalized (mathematically) in the form of predictive rules or laws. The ontological assumption is that reality consists entirely of a set of mutually independent, atomic (indivisible) facts. It's because of the epistemological assumption that workers in the field argue that intelligence is the same as formal rule-following, and it's because of the ontological one that they argue that human knowledge consists entirely of internal representations of reality. On the basis of these two assumptions, workers in the field claim that cognition is the manipulation of internal symbols by internal rules, and that, therefore, human behaviour is, to a large extent, context free (see contextualism). Therefore, a truly scientific psychology is possible, which will detail the 'internal' rules of the human mind, in the same way the laws of physics detail the 'external' laws of the physical world. However, it is this key assumption that Dreyfus denies. In other words, he argues that we cannot now (and never will be able to) understand our own behavior "in the same way" as we understand objects in, for example, physics or chemistry: that is, by considering ourselves as things whose behaviour can be predicted via 'objective', context free scientific laws. According to Dreyfus, a context-free psychology is a contradiction in terms. Dreyfus's arguments against this position are taken from the phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition (especially the work of Martin Heidegger). Heidegger argued that, contrary to the cognitivist views (on which AI has been based), our being is in fact highly context-bound, which is why the two context-free assumptions are false. Dreyfus doesn't deny that we can "choose to see" human (or any) activity as being 'law-governed', in the same way that we can "choose to see" reality as consisting of indivisible atomic facts... if we wish. But it is a huge leap from that to state that because we want to or can see things in this way that "it is therefore an objective fact that they are the case". In fact, Dreyfus argues that they are "not" (necessarily) the case, and that, therefore, any research program that assumes they "are" will quickly run into profound theoretical and practical problems. Therefore, the current efforts of workers in the field are doomed to failure. Dreyfus argues that to get a device or devices with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being-in-the-world and to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours. (This view is shared by psychologists in the embodied psychology (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) and distributed cognition traditions. His opinions are similar to those of robotics researchers such as Rodney Brooks as well as researchers in the field of artificial life.) Daniel Crevier writes: "time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of some of Dreyfus's comments. Had he formulated them less aggressively, constructive actions they suggested might have been taken much earlier." Webcasting philosophy. When UC Berkeley and Apple began making a selected number of lecture classes freely available to the public as podcasts beginning around 2006, a recording of Dreyfus teaching a course called "Man, God, and Society in Western Literature – From Gods to God and Back" rose to the 58th most popular webcast on iTunes. These webcasts have attracted the attention of many, including non-academics, to Dreyfus and his subject area.

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Michel de Montaigne Michel Eyquem de Montaigne ( ; ; 28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592), also known as Lord of Montaigne, was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. His work is noted for its merging of casual anecdotes and autobiography with intellectual insight. His massive volume "Essais" contains some of the most influential essays ever written. Montaigne had a direct influence on Western writers including Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, Virginia Woolf, Albert Hirschman, William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Henry Newman, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Alexander Pushkin, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan Zweig, Eric Hoffer, Isaac Asimov, Fulton Sheen and possibly, on the later works of William Shakespeare. During his lifetime, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that, "I am myself the matter of my book", was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne came to be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt that began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, ""Que sçay-je"?" ("What do I know?", in Middle French; now rendered as "Que sais-je?" in modern French). Life. Montaigne was born in the Aquitaine region of France, on the family estate Château de Montaigne, in a town now called Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, close to Bordeaux. The family was very wealthy; his great-grandfather, Ramon Felipe Eyquem, had made a fortune as a herring merchant and had bought the estate in 1477, thus becoming the Lord of Montaigne. His father, Pierre Eyquem, Seigneur of Montaigne, was a French Catholic soldier in Italy for a time and he also had been the mayor of Bordeaux. Although there were several families bearing the patronym "Eyquem" in Guyenne, his father's family is thought to have had some degree of Marrano (Spanish and Portuguese Jewish) origins, while his mother, Antoinette López de Villanueva, was a convert to Protestantism. His maternal grandfather, Pedro Lopez, from Zaragoza, was from a wealthy Marrano (Sephardic Jewish) family that had converted to Catholicism. His maternal grandmother, Honorette Dupuy, was from a Catholic family in Gascony, France. During a great part of Montaigne's life his mother lived near him and even survived him, but is mentioned only twice in his essays. Montaigne's relationship with his father, however, is frequently reflected upon and discussed in his essays. Montaigne's education began in early childhood and followed a pedagogical plan that his father had developed, refined by the advice of the latter's humanist friends. Soon after his birth, Montaigne was brought to a small cottage, where he lived the first three years of life in the sole company of a peasant family, in order to, according to the elder Montaigne, "draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help". After these first spartan years, Montaigne was brought back to the château. Another objective was for Latin to become his first language. The intellectual education of Montaigne was assigned to a German tutor (a doctor named Horstanus, who could not speak French). His father hired only servants who could speak Latin, and they also were given strict orders always to speak to the boy in Latin. The same rule applied to his mother, father, and servants, who were obliged to use only Latin words he employed, and thus they acquired a knowledge of the very language his tutor taught him. Montaigne's Latin education was accompanied by constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation. He was familiarized with Greek by a pedagogical method that employed games, conversation, and exercises of solitary meditation, rather than the more traditional books. The atmosphere of the boy's upbringing, although designed by highly refined rules taken under advisement by his father, created in the boy's life the spirit of "liberty and delight" that he later would describe as making him "relish... duty by an unforced will, and of my own voluntary motion...without any severity or constraint"; yet he would have everything to take advantage of his freedom. And so a musician woke him every morning, playing one instrument or another, and an "épinettier" (with a zither) was the constant companion to Montaigne and his tutor, playing tunes to alleviate boredom and tiredness. Around the year 1539, Montaigne was sent to study at a highly regarded boarding school in Bordeaux, the College of Guienne, then under the direction of the greatest Latin scholar of the era, George Buchanan, where he mastered the whole curriculum by his thirteenth year. He finished the first phase of his educational studies at the College of Guienne in 1546. He then began his study of law (his alma mater remains unknown since there are no certainties about his activity from 1546 to 1557) and entered a career in the local legal system. He was a counselor of the Court des Aides of Périgueux and, in 1557, he was appointed counselor of the Parlement in Bordeaux, a high court. From 1561 to 1563 he was courtier at the court of Charles IX and he was present with the king at the siege of Rouen (1562). He was awarded the highest honour of the French nobility, the collar of the Order of Saint Michael, something to which he aspired from his youth. While serving at the Bordeaux Parlement, he became a very close friend of the humanist poet Étienne de La Boétie, whose death in 1563 deeply affected Montaigne. It has been suggested by Donald M. Frame, in his introduction to "The Complete Essays of Montaigne" that because of Montaigne's "imperious need to communicate", after losing Étienne he began the "Essais" as a new "means of communication" and that "the reader takes the place of the dead friend". Montaigne married Françoise de la Cassaigne in 1565, probably in an arranged marriage. She was the daughter and niece of wealthy merchants of Toulouse and Bordeaux. They had six daughters, but only the second-born, Léonor, survived infancy. Little is known about their marriage, he wrote very little about their relationship, however, he did write about of his daughter Léonor, "All my children die at nurse; but Léonore, our only daughter, who has escaped this misfortune, has reached the age of six and more without having been punished, the indulgence of her mother aiding, except in words, and those very gentle ones." His daughter married François de la Tour and later, Charles de Gamaches. She had a daughter by each. Following the petition of his father, Montaigne started to work on the first translation of the Catalan monk Raymond Sebond's "Theologia naturalis", which he published a year after his father's death in 1568 (in 1595, Sebond's Prologue was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum because of its declaration that the Bible is not the only source of revealed truth). After this, he inherited the family's estate, the Château de Montaigne, to which he moved back in 1570, thus becoming the Lord of Montaigne. Another literary accomplishment was Montaigne's posthumous edition of the works of his friend, Boétie. In 1571, he retired from public life to the Tower of the château, his so-called "citadel", in the Dordogne, where he almost totally isolated himself from every social and family affair. Locked up in his library, which contained a collection of some 1,500 works, he began work on his "Essais" ("Essays"), first published in 1580. On the day of his 38th birthday, as he entered this almost ten-year period of self-imposed reclusion, he had the following inscription placed on the crown of the bookshelves of his working chamber: In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure. During this time of the Wars of Religion in France, Montaigne, a Roman Catholic, acted as a moderating force, respected both by the Catholic King Henry III and the Protestant Henry of Navarre. In 1578, Montaigne, whose health had always been excellent, started suffering from painful kidney stones, a tendency he inherited from his father's family. Throughout this illness, he would have nothing to do with doctors or drugs. From 1580 to 1581, Montaigne traveled in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, partly in search of a cure, establishing himself at Bagni di Lucca, where he took the waters. His journey was also a pilgrimage to the Holy House of Loreto, to which he presented a silver relief depicting him, his wife, and their daughter kneeling before the Madonna, considering himself fortunate that it should be hung on a wall within the shrine. He kept a journal recording regional differences and customs and a variety of personal episodes, including the dimensions of the stones he succeeded in expelling. This was published much later, in 1774, after its discovery in a trunk that is displayed in his tower. During a visit to the Vatican that Montaigne described in his travel journal, the "Essais" were examined by Sisto Fabri, who served as Master of the Sacred Palace under Pope Gregory XIII. After Fabri examined Montaigne's "Essais" the text was returned to him on 20 March 1581. Montaigne had apologized for references to the pagan notion of "fortuna" as well as for writing favorably of Julian the Apostate and of heretical poets, and was released to follow his own conscience in making emendations to the text. While in the city of Lucca in 1581, he learned that, like his father before him, he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux. He returned and served as mayor. He was re-elected in 1583 and served until 1585, again moderating between Catholics and Protestants. The plague broke out in Bordeaux toward the end of his second term in office, in 1585. In 1586, the plague and the French Wars of Religion prompted him to leave his château for two years. Montaigne continued to extend, revise, and oversee the publication of the "Essais". In 1588 he wrote its third book and also met Marie de Gournay, an author who admired his work and later edited and published it. Montaigne later referred to her as his adopted daughter. King Henry III was assassinated in 1589, and Montaigne then helped to keep Bordeaux loyal to Henry of Navarre, who would go on to become King Henry IV. Montaigne died of quinsy at the age of 59, in 1592 at the Château de Montaigne. In his case, the disease "brought about paralysis of the tongue", especially difficult for one who once said, "the most fruitful and natural play of the mind is conversation. I find it sweeter than any other action in life; and if I were forced to choose, I think I would rather lose my sight than my hearing and voice." Remaining in possession of all his other faculties, he requested Mass, and died during the celebration of that Mass. He was buried nearby. Later his remains were moved to the church of Saint Antoine at Bordeaux. The church no longer exists: it became the Convent des Feuillants, which also has disappeared. The Bordeaux Tourist Office says that Montaigne is buried at the Musée Aquitaine, Faculté des Lettres, Université Bordeaux 3 Michel de Montaigne, Pessac. His heart is preserved in the parish church of Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne. The humanities branch of the University of Bordeaux is named after him: . "Essais". His humanism finds expression in his "Essais", a collection of a large number of short subjective essays on various topics published in 1580 that were inspired by his studies in the classics, especially by the works of Plutarch and Lucretius. Montaigne's stated goal was to describe humans, and especially himself, with utter frankness. Montaigne's writings are studied as literature and philosophy around the world. Inspired by his consideration of the lives and ideals of the leading figures of his age, he finds the great variety and volatility of human nature to be its most basic features. He describes his own poor memory, his ability to solve problems and mediate conflicts without truly getting emotionally involved, his disdain for the human pursuit of lasting fame, and his attempts to detach himself from worldly things to prepare for his timely death. He writes about his disgust with the religious conflicts of his time. He believed that humans are not able to attain true certainty. The longest of his essays, "Apology for Raymond Sebond", marking his adoption of Pyrrhonism, contains his famous motto, "What do I know?" Montaigne considered marriage necessary for the raising of children, but disliked strong feelings of passionate love because he saw them as detrimental to freedom. In education, he favored concrete examples and experience over the teaching of abstract knowledge intended to be accepted uncritically. His essay "On the Education of Children" is dedicated to Diana of Foix. The "Essais" exercised an important influence on both French and English literature, in thought and style. Francis Bacon's "Essays", published over a decade later, in 1596, usually are presumed to be directly influenced by Montaigne's collection, and Montaigne is cited by Bacon alongside other classical sources in later essays. Montaigne's influence on psychology. Although not a scientist, Montaigne made observations on topics in psychology. In his essays, he developed and explained his observations of these topics. His thoughts and ideas covered topics such as thought, motivation, fear, happiness, child education, experience, and human action. Montaigne's ideas have influenced psychology and are a part of its rich history. Child education. Child education was among the psychological topics that he wrote about. His essays "On the Education of Children", "On Pedantry", and "On Experience" explain the views he had on child education. Some of his views on child education are still relevant today. Montaigne's views on the education of children were opposed to the common educational practices of his day. He found fault both with what was taught and how it was taught. Much of the education during Montaigne's time was focused on the reading of the classics and learning through books.Montaigne disagreed with learning strictly through books. He believed it was necessary to educate children in a variety of ways. He also disagreed with the way information was being presented to students. It was being presented in a way that encouraged students to take the information that was taught to them as absolute truth. Students were denied the chance to question the information. Therefore, students could not truly learn. Montaigne believed that, to learn truly, a student had to take the information and make it their own. At the foundation Montaigne believed that the selection of a good tutor was important for the student to become well educated. Education by a tutor was to be conducted at the pace of the student.He believed that a tutor should be in dialogue with the student, letting the student speak first. The tutor also should allow for discussions and debates to be had. Such a dialogue was intended to create an environment in which students would teach themselves. They would be able to realize their mistakes and make corrections to them as necessary. Individualized learning was integral to his theory of child education. He argued that the student combines information already known with what is learned and forms a unique perspective on the newly learned information. Montaigne also thought that tutors should encourage the natural curiosity of students and allow them to question things.He postulated that successful students were those who were encouraged to question new information and study it for themselves, rather than simply accepting what they had heard from the authorities on any given topic. Montaigne believed that a child's curiosity could serve as an important teaching tool when the child is allowed to explore the things that the child is curious about. Experience also was a key element to learning for Montaigne. Tutors needed to teach students through experience rather than through the mere memorization of information often practised in book learning.He argued that students would become passive adults, blindly obeying and lacking the ability to think on their own. Nothing of importance would be retained and no abilities would be learned. He believed that learning through experience was superior to learning through the use of books. For this reason he encouraged tutors to educate their students through practice, travel, and human interaction. In doing so, he argued that students would become active learners, who could claim knowledge for themselves. Montaigne's views on child education continue to have an influence in the present. Variations of Montaigne's ideas on education are incorporated into modern learning in some ways. He argued against the popular way of teaching in his day, encouraging individualized learning. He believed in the importance of experience, over book learning and memorization. Ultimately, Montaigne postulated that the point of education was to teach a student how to have a successful life by practising an active and socially interactive lifestyle. Related writers and influence. Thinkers exploring ideas similar to Montaigne include Erasmus, Thomas More, John Fisher, and Guillaume Budé, who all worked about fifty years before Montaigne. Many of Montaigne's Latin quotations are from Erasmus' "Adagia", and most critically, all of his quotations from Socrates. Plutarch remains perhaps Montaigne's strongest influence, in terms of substance and style. Montaigne's quotations from Plutarch in the "Essays" number more than 500. Ever since Edward Capell first made the suggestion in 1780, scholars have suggested Montaigne to be an influence on Shakespeare. The latter would have had access to John Florio's translation of Montaigne's "Essais", published in English in 1603, and a scene in "The Tempest" "follows the wording of Florio [translating "Of Cannibals"] so closely that his indebtedness is unmistakable". Most parallels between the two may be explained, however, as : as similarities with writers in other nations to the works of Cervantes and Shakespeare could be due simply to their own study of Latin moral and philosophical writers such as Seneca the Younger, Horace, Ovid, and Virgil. Much of Blaise Pascal's skepticism in his "Pensées" has been attributed traditionally to his reading Montaigne. The English essayist William Hazlitt expressed boundless admiration for Montaigne, exclaiming that "he was the first who had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man. ... He was neither a pedant nor a bigot. ... In treating of men and manners, he spoke of them as he found them, not according to preconceived notions and abstract dogmas". Beginning most overtly with the essays in the "familiar" style in his own "Table-Talk", Hazlitt tried to follow Montaigne's example. Ralph Waldo Emerson chose "Montaigne; or, the Skeptic" as a subject of one of his series of lectures entitled, "Representative Men", alongside other subjects such as Shakespeare and Plato. In "The Skeptic" Emerson writes of his experience reading Montaigne, "It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience." Friedrich Nietzsche judged of Montaigne: "That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this Earth". Sainte-Beuve advises us that "to restore lucidity and proportion to our judgments, let us read every evening a page of Montaigne." The American philosopher Eric Hoffer employed Montaigne both stylistically and in thought. In Hoffer's memoir, "Truth Imagined", he said of Montaigne, "He was writing about me. He knew my innermost thoughts." The British novelist John Cowper Powys expressed his admiration for Montaigne's philosophy in his books, "Suspended Judgements" (1916) and "The Pleasures of Literature" (1938). Judith N. Shklar introduces her book "Ordinary Vices" (1984), "It is only if we step outside the divinely ruled moral universe that we can really put our minds to the common ills we inflict upon one another each day. That is what Montaigne did and that is why he is the hero of this book. In spirit he is on every one of its pages..." Twentieth-century literary critic Erich Auerbach called Montaigne the first modern man. "Among all his contemporaries", writes Auerbach ("Mimesis", Chapter 12), "he had the clearest conception of the problem of man's self-orientation; that is, the task of making oneself at home in existence without fixed points of support". Discovery of remains. The Musée d'Aquitaine announced on 20 November 2019 that the human remains, which had been found in the basement of the museum a year earlier, might belong to Montaigne. Investigation of the remains, postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, resumed in September 2020. Commemoration. The birthdate of Montaigne served as the basis to establish National Essay Day in the USA.

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Iris Murdoch Dame Jean Iris Murdoch ( ; 15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, "Under the Net", was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Her 1978 novel "The Sea, the Sea" won the Booker Prize. In 1987, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. In 2008, "The Times" ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Her other books include "The Bell" (1958), "A Severed Head" (1961), "The Red and the Green" (1965), "The Nice and the Good" (1968), "The Black Prince" (1973), "Henry and Cato" (1976), "The Philosopher's Pupil" (1983), "The Good Apprentice" (1985), "The Book and the Brotherhood" (1987), "The Message to the Planet" (1989), and "The Green Knight" (1993). Life. Murdoch was born in Phibsborough, Dublin, Ireland, the daughter of Irene Alice (née Richardson, 1899–1985) and Wills John Hughes Murdoch. Her father, a civil servant, came from a mainly Presbyterian sheep farming family from Hillhall, County Down. In 1915, he enlisted as a soldier in King Edward's Horse and served in France during the First World War before being commissioned as a Second lieutenant. Her mother had trained as a singer before Iris was born, and was from a middle-class Church of Ireland family in Dublin. Iris Murdoch's parents first met in Dublin when her father was on leave and were married in 1918. Iris was the couple's only child. When she was a few weeks old the family moved to London, where her father had joined the Ministry of Health as a second-class clerk. She is a second cousin of the Irish mathematician Brian Murdoch. Murdoch was educated in progressive independent schools, entering the Froebel Demonstration School in 1925 and attending Badminton School in Bristol as a boarder from 1932 to 1938. In 1938 she went up to Somerville College, Oxford, with the intention of studying English, but switched to "Greats", a course of study combining classics, ancient history, and philosophy. At Oxford she studied philosophy with Donald M. MacKinnon and attended Eduard Fraenkel's seminars on "Agamemnon". She was awarded a first-class honours degree in 1942. After leaving Oxford she went to work in London for HM Treasury. In June 1944 she left the Treasury and went to work for the UNRRA. At first she was stationed in London at the agency's European Regional Office. In 1945 she was transferred first to Brussels, then to Innsbruck, and finally to Graz, Austria, where she worked in a refugee camp. She left the UNRRA in 1946. From 1947 to 1948 Iris Murdoch studied philosophy as a postgraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge. She met Wittgenstein at Cambridge but did not hear him lecture, as he had left his Trinity College professorship before she arrived. In 1948 she became a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, where she taught philosophy until 1963. From 1963 to 1967 she taught one day a week in the General Studies department at the Royal College of Art. In 1956 Murdoch married John Bayley, a literary critic, novelist, and from 1974 to 1992 Warton Professor of English at Oxford University, whom she had met in Oxford in 1954. The unusual romantic partnership lasted more than forty years until Murdoch's death. Bayley thought that sex was "inescapably ridiculous." Murdoch in contrast had "multiple affairs with both men and women which, on discomposing occasions, [Bayley] witnessed for himself". Iris Murdoch's first novel, "Under the Net", was published in 1954. She had previously published essays on philosophy, and the first monograph about Jean-Paul Sartre published in English. She went on to produce 25 more novels and additional works of philosophy, as well as poetry and drama. In 1976 she was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and in 1987 was made a Dame Commander of Order of the British Empire. She was awarded honorary degrees by the University of Bath (DLitt, 1983), University of Cambridge (1993) and Kingston University (1994), among others. She was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982. Her last novel, "Jackson's Dilemma", was published in 1995. Iris Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1997 and died in 1999 in Oxford. There is a bench dedicated to her in the grounds of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she used to enjoy walking. Work. Philosophy. For some time, Murdoch's influence and achievements as a philosopher were eclipsed by her success as a novelist, but recent appraisals have increasingly accorded her a substantial role in postwar Anglo-American philosophy, particularly for her unfashionably prescient work in moral philosophy and her reinterpretation of Aristotle and Plato. Martha Nussbaum has argued for Murdoch's "transformative impact on the discipline" of moral philosophy because she directed her analysis not at the once-dominant matters of will and choice, but at those of attention (how people learn to see and conceive of one another) and phenomenal experience (how the sensory "thinginess" of life shapes moral sensibility). In a recent survey of Murdoch's philosophical work, Justin Broackes points to several distinctive features of Murdoch's moral philosophy, including a "moral realism or 'naturalism', allowing into the world cases of such properties as humility or generosity; an anti‐scientism; a rejection of Humean moral psychology; a sort of 'particularism'; special attention to the virtues; and emphasis on the metaphor of moral perception or 'seeing' moral facts." Broackes also notes that Murdoch's influence on the discipline of philosophy was sometimes indirect, since it impacted both her contemporaries and the following generation of philosophers, particularly Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, John McDowell, and Bernard Williams. She sent copies of her earlier novels to Anscombe, but there is nothing in Anscombe's writing which reflects any of these. Her philosophical work was influenced by Simone Weil (from whom she borrows the concept of 'attention'), and by Plato, under whose banner she claimed to fight. In re-animating Plato, she gives force to the reality of the Good, and to a sense of the moral life as a pilgrimage from illusion to reality. From this perspective, Murdoch's work offers perceptive criticism of Kant, Sartre and Wittgenstein ('early' and 'late'). Her most central parable, which appears in "The Sovereignty of Good", asks us (in Nussbaum's succinct account), "to imagine a mother-in-law, M, who has contempt for D, her daughter-in-law. M sees D as common, cheap, low. Since M is a self-controlled Englishwoman, she behaves (so Murdoch stipulates) with perfect graciousness all the while, and no hint of her real view surfaces in her acts. But she realizes, too, that her feelings and thoughts are unworthy, and likely to be generated by jealousy and an excessively keen desire to hang on to her son. So she sets herself a moral task: she will change her view of D, making it more accurate, less marred by selfishness. She gives herself exercises in vision: where she is inclined to say 'coarse,' she will say, and see, 'spontaneous.' Where she is inclined to say 'common,' she will say, and see, 'fresh and naive.' As time goes on, the new images supplant the old. Eventually M does not have to make such an effort to control her actions: they flow naturally from the way she has come to see D." This is how M cultivates a pattern of behavior that leads her to view D "justly or lovingly". The parable is partly meant to show (against Oxford contemporaries including R. M. Hare and Stuart Hampshire) the importance of the 'inner' life to moral action. Seeing another correctly can depend on overcoming jealousy, and discoveries about the world involve inner work. Fiction. Her novels, in their attention and generosity to the inner lives of individuals, follow the tradition of novelists like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, George Eliot, and Proust, besides showing an abiding love of Shakespeare. There is however great variety in her achievement, and the richly layered structure and compelling realistic comic imagination of "The Black Prince" (1973) is very different from the early comic work "Under the Net" (1954) or "The Unicorn" (1963). "The Unicorn" can be read as a sophisticated Gothic romance, or as a novel with Gothic trappings, or perhaps as a parody of the Gothic mode of writing. "The Black Prince", for which Murdoch won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, is a study of erotic obsession, and the text becomes more complicated, suggesting multiple interpretations, when subordinate characters contradict the narrator and the mysterious "editor" of the book in a series of afterwords. Though her novels differ markedly, and her style developed, themes recur. Her novels often include upper-middle-class male intellectuals caught in moral dilemmas, gay characters, refugees, Anglo-Catholics with crises of faith, empathetic pets, curiously "knowing" children and sometimes a powerful and almost demonic male "enchanter" who imposes his will on the other characters—a type of man Murdoch is said to have modelled on her lover, the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti. Murdoch was awarded the Booker Prize in 1978 for "The Sea, the Sea", a finely detailed novel about the power of love and loss, featuring a retired stage director who is overwhelmed by jealousy when he meets his erstwhile lover after several decades apart. An authorised collection of her poetic writings, "Poems by Iris Murdoch", appeared in 1997, edited by Paul Hullah and Yozo Muroya. Several of her works have been adapted for the screen, including the British television series of her novels "An Unofficial Rose" and "The Bell". J. B. Priestley's dramatisation of her 1961 novel "A Severed Head" starred Ian Holm and Richard Attenborough. In 1997, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature". Literary critics and theorists have given her mixed reviews. Harold Bloom wrote in his 1986 review of "The Good Apprentice" that 'no other contemporary British novelist' seemed of her 'eminence'. A. S. Byatt called her 'a great philosophical novelist'. James Wood wrote in "How Fiction Works": 'In her literary and philosophical criticism, she again and again stresses that the creation of free and independent characters is the mark of a great novelist; yet her own characters never have this freedom.' He stressed that some authors, 'like Tolstoy, Trollope, Balzac and Dickens', wrote about people different from themselves by choice, whereas others, such as 'James, Flaubert, Lawrence, Woolf', have more interest in the self. Wood called Murdoch 'poignant', because she spent her whole life in writing in the latter category, whilst she struggled to fit herself into the former. In an assessment of her Booker Prize winning novel "The Sea, the Sea", Sam Jordison, creator of the poll "Crap Towns", declared that the book contained 'scenes of absurd melodrama' and 'mystical bollocks'. He did, however, praise Murdoch's comic set-pieces, and her portrayal of self-deceit. Political views. Murdoch won a scholarship to study at Vassar College in 1946, but was refused a visa to enter the United States because she had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1938, while a student at Oxford. She left the party in 1942, when she went to work at the Treasury, but remained sympathetic to communism for several years. In later years she was allowed to visit the United States, but always had to obtain a waiver from the provisions of the McCarran Act, which barred Communist Party members and former members from entering the country. In a 1990 Paris Review interview she said that her membership of the Communist Party had made her see "how strong and how awful it [Marxism] is, certainly in its organized form". Aside from her Communist Party membership, her Irish heritage is the other sensitive aspect of Murdoch's political life that seems to attract interest. Part of the interest revolves around the fact that, although Irish by both birth and traced descent on both sides, Murdoch did not display the full set of political opinions that are sometimes assumed to go with this origin: "No one ever agrees about who is entitled to lay claim to Irishness. Iris's Belfast cousins today call themselves British, not Irish... [but] with both parents brought up in Ireland, and an ancestry within Ireland both North and South going back three centuries, Iris has as valid a claim to call herself Irish as most North Americans have to call themselves American". Conradi notes A.N. Wilson's record that Murdoch regretted the sympathetic portrayal of the Irish nationalist cause she had given earlier in "The Red and the Green", and a competing defence of the book at Caen in 1978. The novel, while broad of sympathy, is hardly an unambiguous celebration of the 1916 rising, dwelling upon bloodshed, unintended consequences and the evils of romanticism, besides celebrating selfless individuals on both sides. Later, of Ian Paisley, Iris Murdoch stated "[he] sincerely condemns violence and did not intend to incite the Protestant terrorists. That he is emotional and angry is not surprising, after 12–15 years of murderous IRA activity. All this business is deep in my soul, I'm afraid." In private correspondence with her close friend and fellow philosopher Philippa Foot, she remarked in 1978 that she felt "unsentimental about Ireland to the point of hatred" and, of a Franco-Irish conference she had attended in Caen in 1982, said that "the sounds of all those Irish voices made me feel privately sick". Biographies and memoirs. Peter J. Conradi's 2001 biography was the fruit of long research and authorised access to journals and other papers. It is also a labour of love, and of a friendship with Murdoch that extended from a meeting at her Gifford Lectures to her death. The book was well received. John Updike commented: "There would be no need to complain of literary biographies [...] if they were all as good". The text addresses many popular questions about Murdoch, such as how Irish she was, what her politics were, etc. Though not a trained philosopher, Conradi's interest in Murdoch's achievement as a thinker is evident in the biography, and yet more so in his earlier work of literary criticism "The Saint and the Artist: A Study of Iris Murdoch's Works" (Macmillan 1986, HarperCollins 2001). He also recalled his personal encounters with Murdoch in "Going Buddhist: Panic and Emptiness, the Buddha and Me". (Short Books, 2005). Conradi's archive of material on Murdoch, together with Iris Murdoch's Oxford library, is held at Kingston University. An account of Murdoch's life with a different ambition is given by A. N. Wilson in his 2003 book "Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her". The work was described by Galen Strawson in "The Guardian" as "mischievously revelatory" and labelled by Wilson himself as an "anti-biography". Wilson eschews objectivity, but is careful to stress his affection for his subject. Wilson remarks that Murdoch "had clearly been one of those delightful young women... who was prepared to go to bed with almost anyone". While Murdoch's thought is an inspiration for Conradi, Wilson treats Murdoch's philosophical work as at best a distraction. David Morgan met Iris Murdoch in 1964, when he was a student at the Royal College of Art. His 2010 memoir "With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch", describes their lifelong friendship. John Bayley wrote two memoirs of his life with Iris Murdoch. "Iris: A Memoir" was published in the United Kingdom in 1998, shortly before her death. The American edition, which was published in 1999, was called "Elegy for Iris". A sequel entitled "Iris and the Friends" was published in 1999, after her death. Murdoch was portrayed by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench in Richard Eyre's film "Iris" (2001), based on Bayley's memories of his wife as she developed Alzheimer's disease. In her centenary year, 2019, a collection of unpublished memories was published by Sabrestorm Press entitled 'Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration', edited by Miles Leeson who directs the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester, UK. Adaptations. BBC Radio 4 broadcast in 2015 an "Iris Murdoch season" with several memoirs by people who knew her, and dramatisations of her novels.: In March 2019, it was announced that the London-based award-winning production company Rebel Republic Films, led by director Garo Berberian, has optioned the book and is currently developing a screenplay based on "The Italian Girl". Bibliography. Novels Short Stories Philosophy Plays Poetry collections Source: Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Kingston University

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Lucretius Titus Lucretius Carus ( , ; 99 – c. 55 BC) was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the philosophical poem "De rerum natura", a didactic work about the tenets and philosophy of Epicureanism, and which usually is translated into English as "On the Nature of Things". Lucretius has been credited with originating the concept of the three-age system that was formalised in 1836 by C. J. Thomsen. Very little is known about Lucretius's life; the only certainty is that he was either a friend or client of Gaius Memmius, to whom the poem was addressed and dedicated. "De rerum natura" was a considerable influence on the Augustan poets, particularly Virgil (in his "Aeneid" and "Georgics", and to a lesser extent on the "Eclogues") and Horace. The work was almost lost during the Middle Ages, but was rediscovered in 1417 in a monastery in Germany by Poggio Bracciolini and it played an important role both in the development of atomism (Lucretius was an important influence on Pierre Gassendi) and the efforts of various figures of the Enlightenment era to construct a new Christian humanism. Lucretius's scientific poem "On the Nature of Things" has a remarkable description of Brownian motion of dust particles in verses 113–140 from Book II. He uses this as a proof of the existence of atoms. Life. Virtually nothing is known about the life of Lucretius, and there is insufficient basis for a confident assertion of the dates of Lucretius's birth or death in other sources. Another, yet briefer, note is found in the "Chronicon" of Donatus's pupil, Jerome. Writing four centuries after Lucretius's death, he enters under the 171st Olympiad: "Titus Lucretius the poet is born." If Jerome is accurate about Lucretius's age (43) when Lucretius died (discussed below), then it may be concluded he was born in 99 or 98 BC. Less specific estimates place the birth of Lucretius in the 90s BC and his death in the 50s BC, in agreement with the poem's many allusions to the tumultuous state of political affairs in Rome and its civil strife. Lucretius probably was a member of the aristocratic "gens Lucretia", and his work shows an intimate knowledge of the luxurious lifestyle in Rome. Lucretius's love of the countryside invites speculation that he inhabited family-owned rural estates, as did many wealthy Roman families, and he certainly was expensively educated with a mastery of Latin, Greek, literature, and philosophy. A brief biographical note is found in Aelius Donatus's "Life of Virgil", which seems to be derived from an earlier work by Suetonius. The note reads: "The first years of his life Virgil spent in Cremona until the assumption of his "toga virilis" on his 17th birthday (when the same two men held the consulate as when he was born), and it so happened that on the very same day Lucretius the poet passed away." However, although Lucretius certainly lived and died around the time that Virgil and Cicero flourished, the information in this particular testimony is internally inconsistent: if Virgil was born in 70 BC, his 17th birthday would be in 53. The two consuls of 70 BC, Pompey and Crassus, stood together as consuls again in 55, not 53. Another yet briefer note is found in the "Chronicon" of Donatus's pupil, Jerome. Writing four centuries after Lucretius's death, Jerome contends in the aforementioned "Chronicon" that Lucretius "was driven mad by a love potion, and when, during the intervals of his insanity, he had written a number of books, which were later emended by Cicero, he killed himself by his own hand in the 44th year of his life." The claim that he was driven mad by a love potion, although defended by such scholars as Reale and Catan, is often dismissed as the result of historical confusion, or anti-Epicurean bias. In some accounts the administration of the toxic aphrodisiac is attributed to his wife Lucilia. Regardless, Jerome's image of Lucretius as a lovesick, mad poet continued to have significant influence on modern scholarship until quite recently, although it now is accepted that such a report is inaccurate. "De rerum natura". His poem "De rerum natura" (usually translated as "On the Nature of Things" or "On the Nature of the Universe") transmits the ideas of Epicureanism, which includes atomism and cosmology. Lucretius was the first writer known to introduce Roman readers to Epicurean philosophy. The poem, written in some 7,400 dactylic hexameters, is divided into six untitled books, and explores Epicurean physics through richly poetic language and metaphors. Lucretius presents the principles of atomism, the nature of the mind and soul, explanations of sensation and thought, the development of the world and its phenomena, and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The universe described in the poem operates according to these physical principles, guided by "fortuna", "chance", and not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities and the religious explanations of the natural world. Within this work, Lucretius makes reference to the cultural and technological development of humans in his use of available materials, tools, and weapons through prehistory to Lucretius's own time. He specifies the earliest weapons as hands, nails, and teeth. These were followed by stones, branches, and, once humans could kindle and control it, fire. He then refers to "tough iron" and copper in that order, but goes on to say that copper was the primary means of tilling the soil and the basis of weaponry until, "by slow degrees", the iron sword became predominant (it still was in his day) and "the bronze sickle fell into disrepute" as iron ploughs were introduced. He had earlier envisaged a pre-technological, pre-literary kind of human whose life was lived "in the fashion of wild beasts roaming at large". From this beginning, he theorised, there followed the development in turn of crude huts, use and kindling of fire, clothing, language, family, and city-states. He believed that smelting of metal, and perhaps too, the firing of pottery, was discovered by accident: for example, the result of a forest fire. He does specify, however, that the use of copper followed the use of stones and branches and preceded the use of iron. Lucretius seems to equate copper with bronze, an alloy of copper and tin that has much greater resilience than copper; both copper and bronze were superseded by iron during his millennium (1000 BC to 1 BC). He may have considered bronze to be a stronger variety of copper and not necessarily a wholly individual material. Lucretius is believed to be the first to put forward a theory of the successive uses of first wood and stone, then copper and bronze, and finally iron. Although his theory lay dormant for many centuries, it was revived in the nineteenth century and he has been credited with originating the concept of the three-age system that was formalised from 1834 by C. J. Thomsen. Reception. In a letter by Cicero to his brother Quintus in February 54 BC, Cicero said: "The poems of Lucretius are as you write: they exhibit many flashes of genius, and yet show great mastership." In the work of another author in late Republican Rome, Virgil writes in the second book of his "Georgics", apparently referring to Lucretius, "Happy is he who has discovered the causes of things and has cast beneath his feet all fears, unavoidable fate, and the din of the devouring Underworld." Natural philosophy. An early thinker in what grew to become the study of evolution, Lucretius believed nature experiments endlessly across the aeons, and the organisms that adapt best to their environment have the best chance of surviving. Living organisms survived because of their strength, speed, or intellect. In contrast to modern thought on the subject, he did not believe that new species evolved from previously existing ones and denied that modern animals, which dwell on land, derived from marine ancestors. Lucretius challenged the assumption that humans are necessarily superior to animals, noting that mammalian mothers in the wild recognize and nurture their offspring as do human mothers. Despite his advocacy of empiricism and his many correct conjectures about atomism and the nature of the physical world, Lucretius concludes his first book stressing the absurdity of the (by then well-established) spherical Earth theory. While Epicurus left open the possibility for free will by arguing for the uncertainty of the paths of atoms, Lucretius viewed the soul or mind as emerging from arrangements of distinct particles. Bibliography. Editions Commentary

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Charles Renouvier Charles Bernard Renouvier (; January 1, 1815 – September 1, 1903) was a French philosopher. He considered himself a "Swedenborg of history" who sought to update the philosophy of Kantian liberalism and individualism for the socio-economic realities of the late nineteenth century, and influenced the sociological method of Émile Durkheim. Biography. Renouvier was born in Montpellier and educated in Paris at the École Polytechnique. He took an early interest in politics, but never held public office, spending his time writing, away from public scrutiny. Philosophy. Renouvier was the first French philosopher after Nicolas Malebranche to formulate a complete idealistic system, and had a vast influence on the development of French thought. His system is based on Immanuel Kant's, as his chosen term "néo-criticisme" indicates; but it is a transformation rather than a continuation of Kantianism. The two leading ideas are the dislike of the "unknowable" in all its forms, and a reliance on the validity of personal experience. The former accounts for Renouvier's acceptance of Kant's phenomenalism, combined with rejection of the "thing-in-itself". It accounts, too, for his polemic on the one hand against a Substantial Soul, a Buddhistic Absolute, an Infinite Spiritual Substance; on the other hand against the no less mysterious material or dynamic substratum by which naturalistic Monism explains the world. He maintains that nothing exists except presentations, which are not merely sensational, and have an objective aspect no less than a subjective. To explain the formal organization of our experience, Renouvier adopts a modified version of the Kantian categories. The insistence on the validity of personal experience leads Renouvier to a yet more important divergence from Kant in his treatment of volition. Liberty, he says, in a much wider sense than Kant, is man's fundamental characteristic. Human freedom acts in the phenomenal, not in an imaginary noumenal sphere. Belief is not merely intellectual, but is determined by an act of will affirming what we hold to be morally good. In his religious views, Renouvier makes a considerable approximation to Gottfried Leibniz. He holds that we are rationally justified in affirming human immortality and the existence of a finite God who is to be a constitutional ruler, but not a despot, over the souls of people. He nevertheless regards atheism as preferable to a belief in an infinite Deity. Renouvier's dislike of the unknowable also led him to take up arms against the notion of an actual infinite. He believed that an infinite sum must be a name for something incomplete. If one begins to count, "one, two, three ..." there never comes a time when one is entitled to shout "infinity"! Infinity is a project, never a fact, in the neocritical view. Renouvier became an important influence upon the thought of American psychologist and philosopher William James. James wrote that "but for the decisive impression made on me in the 1870s by his masterly advocacy of pluralism, I might never have got free from the monistic superstition under which I had grown up."

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John Kenneth Muir John Kenneth Muir (born December 3, 1969) is an American literary critic. As of 2010, he has written twenty-one reference books in the fields of film and television, with a particular focus on the horror and science fiction genres. Biography. Born December 3, 1969, Muir began his full-time writing career in 1996, penning several books for the North Carolina-based publisher of scholarly reference books, McFarland & Company. Muir also has written monographs about SF-TV, including "Exploring ("1997), "An Analytical Guide to Battlestar Galactica" (1998), "A Critical History of Dr. Who on TV" (1999), "A History and Critical Analysis of Blake's 7" (1999) and "An Analytical Guide to TV's " (2001). Muir was educated at the University of Richmond in Virginia from 1988 to 1992, where he studied for two years under renowned "Hudson Review" film critic, Bert Cardullo (a student of The New Republic's film critic Stanley Kauffmann). Muir also counts Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert as important career influences. Muir's first book, "Exploring Space: 1999" was published five years after his graduation from University, in April 1997. The book was the first English language attempt to analyse the television series "Space: 1999" in a wider cultural context, and is sometimes compared and contrasted with a similar French book written by Pierre Fageolle. In 2009, Muir became a member of the artist collective, Tecamachalco Underground. The following year he was a judge at the ACEFEST NYC2010 Film Festival, occurring August 20–28, 2010. Selected works of literary criticism. Muir has written a book about Kevin Smith, titled "An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith", a study of Sam Raimi titled "The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi", A book on terror television called "Terror Television American Series-1970-1999", and another on the works of comedian Christopher Guest and his repertory company, titled "Best in Show: The Films of Christ opher Guest and Company". As of 2010, Muir's most recent film director study was "Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair". Media appearances. Muir has appeared on TV on "The E! True Hollywood Story: "Curse of The Exorcist"", TV Ontario's "Saturday Night at the Movies", and on the premiere episode of the Sci-Fi Channel series "Sciography". On radio, Muir has been a guest on "Destinies: The Voice of Science Fiction", "NiteShift" "Good Morning Charlotte", "The Allan Handelman Show", and "The Mitch Albom Show". In 2007, Muir appeared as a commentator in "Decade of Darkness", a special feature on the Collector's Edition DVD release of the 1985 film "Return of the Living Dead". He also appeared with others in the 2009 documentary film "Nightmares in Red, White and Blue". On October 25, 2010, he was featured on the Biography Channel's "The Inside Story: Halloween" documentary about director John Carpenter's 1978 film, "Halloween". Fiction. Muir's first novel was published by Powys Media in 2003, an officially licensed continuation of the "" saga, titled "The Forsaken". This is the second in the Powys line of "Space: 1999" books, following William Latham's "Resurrection". Muir's other fiction includes two short stories for "The Official Farscape Magazine". In issue #6, for May 2002, his story "That Old Voodoo" was featured. In issue #8, for August 2002, his story "Make a Wish" was published. Two of his "Space: 1999" licensed short stories, "Futility" and "The Touch of Venus", appear in the anthology "Space: 1999 Shepherd Moon" (2010). Muir's second novel was published by Powys Media in 2014, another officially licensed novel in the "" saga, entitled "The Whispering Sea". "The House Between". In 2006, Muir wrote and directed an original science fiction series titled "The House Between", to be broadcast online. "The House Between's" first-season episode, "Arrived", premiered at Fantasci V in Chesapeake, Virginia, on July 29, 2006. The second season of the series premiered January 25, 2008 and ran through March 2008. A third season began airing online in January 2009. "The House Betweens" second-season premiere ("Returned") was nominated for a Sy Fy Genre Award in 2008 under the category "Best Web Production." Sy Fy Radio on August 13, 2008 announced that "The House" Between placed second out of five productions, behind the bigger-budgeted "" by a margin of less than 100 votes. The third season of the series was nominated for "Best Web Production" at Airlock Alpha, but did not win. Altogether twenty-one episodes of "The House Between" were produced over three seasons.

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George Santayana Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known in English as George Santayana (; December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952), was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. Originally from Spain, Santayana was raised and educated in the US from the age of eight and identified himself as an American, although he always retained a valid Spanish passport. At the age of 48, Santayana left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe permanently. Santayana is popularly known for aphorisms, such as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", "Only the dead have seen the end of war", and the definition of beauty as "pleasure objectified". Although an atheist, he treasured the Spanish Catholic values, practices, and worldview in which he was raised. Santayana was a broad-ranging cultural critic spanning many disciplines. He was profoundly influenced by Spinoza's life and thought; and, in many respects, was a devoted Spinozist. Early life. Santayana was born on December 16, 1863, in Madrid and spent his early childhood in Ávila, Spain. His mother Josefina Borrás was the daughter of a Spanish official in the Philippines and he was the only child of her second marriage. Josefina Borrás' first husband was George Sturgis, a Bostonian merchant with the Manila firm Russell & Sturgis, with whom she had five children, two of whom died in infancy. She lived in Boston for a few years following her husband's death in 1857; in 1861 moved with her three surviving children to Madrid. There she encountered Agustín Ruiz de Santayana, an old friend from her years in the Philippines. They married in 1862. A colonial civil servant, Ruiz de Santayana was a painter and minor intellectual. The family lived in Madrid and Ávila. In 1869, Josefina Borrás de Santayana returned to Boston with her three Sturgis children, because she had promised her first husband to raise the children in the US. She left the six-year-old Jorge with his father in Spain. Jorge and his father followed her to Boston in 1872. His father, finding neither Boston nor his wife's attitude to his liking, soon returned alone to Ávila, and remained there the rest of his life. Jorge did not see him again until he entered Harvard College and began to take his summer vacations in Spain. Sometime during this period, Jorge's first name was anglicized as George, the English equivalent. Education. Santayana attended Boston Latin School and Harvard College, where he studied under the philosophers William James and Josiah Royce and was involved in eleven clubs as an alternative to athletics. He was founder and president of the Philosophical Club, a member of the literary society known as the O.K., an editor and cartoonist for "The Harvard Lampoon", and co-founder of the literary journal "The Harvard Monthly". In December, 1885, he played the role of Lady Elfrida in the Hasty Pudding theatrical "Robin Hood", followed by the production "Papillonetta" in the spring of his senior year. After graduating from Harvard in 1886, Santayana studied for two years in Berlin. He then returned to Harvard to write his dissertation on Hermann Lotze (1889). He was a professor at Harvard from 1889–1912, becoming part of the Golden Age of the Harvard philosophy department. Some of his Harvard students became famous in their own right, including T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Horace Kallen, Walter Lippmann, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Wallace Stevens was not among his students but became a friend. From 1896 to 1897, Santayana studied at King's College, Cambridge. Later life. Santayana never married. His romantic life, if any, is not well understood. Some evidence, including a comment Santayana made late in life comparing himself to A. E. Housman, and his friendships with people who were openly homosexual and bisexual, has led scholars to speculate that Santayana was perhaps homosexual or bisexual, but it remains unclear whether he had any actual heterosexual or homosexual relationships. In 1912, Santayana resigned his position at Harvard to spend the rest of his life in Europe. He had saved money and been aided by a legacy from his mother. After some years in Ávila, Paris and Oxford, after 1920, he began to winter in Rome, eventually living there year-round until his death. During his 40 years in Europe, he wrote 19 books and declined several prestigious academic positions. Many of his visitors and correspondents were Americans, including his assistant and eventual literary executor, Daniel Cory. In later life, Santayana was financially comfortable, in part because his 1935 novel, "The Last Puritan", had become an unexpected best-seller. In turn, he financially assisted a number of writers, including Bertrand Russell, with whom he was in fundamental disagreement, philosophically and politically. Santayana's one novel, "The Last Puritan", is a "bildungsroman", centering on the personal growth of its protagonist, Oliver Alden. His "Persons and Places" is an autobiography. These works also contain many of his sharper opinions and "bons mots". He wrote books and essays on a wide range of subjects, including philosophy of a less technical sort, literary criticism, the history of ideas, politics, human nature, morals, the influence of religion on culture and social psychology, all with considerable wit and humor. While his writings on technical philosophy can be difficult, his other writings are more accessible and pithy. He wrote poems and a few plays, and left ample correspondence, much of it published only since 2000. Like Alexis de Tocqueville, Santayana observed American culture and character from a foreigner's point of view. Like William James, his friend and mentor, he wrote philosophy in a literary way. Ezra Pound includes Santayana among his many cultural references in "The Cantos", notably in "Canto LXXXI" and "Canto XCV". Santayana is usually considered an American writer, although he declined to become an American citizen, resided in Fascist Italy for decades, and said that he was most comfortable, intellectually and aesthetically, at Oxford University. Following 1935 and the writing of his only novel "The Last Puritan", he continued to winter in Rome, eventually living there year-round until his death. Although an atheist, Santayana considered himself an "aesthetic Catholic" and spent the last decade of his life in a Roman residence under the care of Catholic nuns. In 1941, he entered a retirement home run by Blue Nuns of the Little Company of Mary on the Celian Hill at 6 Via Santo Stefano Rotondo in Roma, where he was cared for by the Irish sisters until his death in September 1952. Upon his death, he did not want to be buried in consecrated land, which made his burial problematic in Italy. Finally, the Spanish consulate in Rome agreed that he be buried in the Pantheon of the Obra Pía Española, in the Campo Verano cemetery in Rome. Philosophical work and publications. Santayana's main philosophical work consists of "The Sense of Beauty" (1896), his first book-length monograph and perhaps the first major work on aesthetics written in the United States; "The Life of Reason" (5 vols., 1905–06), the high point of his Harvard career; "Skepticism and Animal Faith" (1923); and "The Realms of Being" (4 vols., 1927–40). Although Santayana was not a pragmatist in the mold of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, or John Dewey, "The Life of Reason" arguably is the first extended treatment of pragmatism written. Like many of the classical pragmatists, and because he was well-versed in evolutionary theory, Santayana was committed to metaphysical naturalism. He believed that human cognition, cultural practices, and social institutions have evolved so as to harmonize with the conditions present in their environment. Their value may then be adjudged by the extent to which they facilitate human happiness. The alternate title to "The Life of Reason", "the Phases of Human Progress," is indicative of this metaphysical stance. Santayana was an early adherent of epiphenomenalism, but also admired the classical materialism of Democritus and Lucretius. (Of the three authors on whom he wrote in "Three Philosophical Poets", Santayana speaks most favorably of Lucretius). He held Spinoza's writings in high regard, calling him his "master and model." Although an atheist, he held a fairly benign view of religion and described himself as an "aesthetic Catholic". Santayana's views on religion are outlined in his books "Reason in Religion", "The Idea of Christ in the Gospels", and "Interpretations of Poetry and Religion". He held racial superiority and eugenic views. He believed superior races should be discouraged from "intermarriage with inferior stock". Legacy. Santayana is remembered in large part for his aphorisms, many of which have been so frequently used as to have become clichéd. His philosophy has not fared quite as well. He is regarded by most as an excellent prose stylist, and Professor John Lachs (who is sympathetic with much of Santayana's philosophy) writes, in "On Santayana", that his eloquence may ironically be the very cause of this neglect. Santayana influenced those around him, including Bertrand Russell, whom Santayana single-handedly steered away from the ethics of G. E. Moore. He also influenced many prominent people such as Harvard students T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Horace Kallen, Walter Lippmann, W. E. B. Du Bois, Conrad Aiken, Van Wyck Brooks, and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, as well as Max Eastman and the poet Wallace Stevens. Stevens was especially influenced by Santayana's aesthetics and became a friend even though Stevens did not take courses taught by Santayana. Santayana is quoted by the Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman as a central influence in the thesis of his famous book "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" (1959). Religious historian Jerome A. Stone credits Santayana with contributing to the early thinking in the development of religious naturalism. English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead quotes Santayana extensively in his magnum opus "Process and Reality" (1929). Chuck Jones used Santayana's description of fanaticism as "redoubling your effort after you've forgotten your aim" to describe his cartoons starring Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner. In popular culture. Santayana's passing is referenced in the lyrics to singer-songwriter Billy Joel's 1989 music single, "We Didn't Start the Fire". The quote "Only the dead have seen the end of war." is frequently attributed or misattributed to Plato; an early example of this misattribution (if it is indeed misattributed) is found in General Douglas MacArthur's Farewell Speech given to the Corps of Cadets at West Point in 1962. Bibliography. "The Works of George Santayana". Unmodernized, critical editions of George Santayana's published and unpublished writing. "The Works" is edited by the Santayana Edition and published by The MIT Press.

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Robert Rowland Smith Robert Rowland Smith is a British author and philosopher. His books include "Derrida and Autobiography" (Cambridge University Press, 1995), "Breakfast with Socrates: The Philosophy of Everyday Life" (Profile Books, 2009), and "AutoBioPhilosophy: An Intimate Story of What It Means to Be Human" (4th Estate, 2018). He is a regular speaker at public and private events, addressing a wide range of topics that includes philosophy, psychology, politics, and art. Alongside his literary career, Smith works as a business adviser and practitioner of Systemic Family Constellations. Biography. Smith was born on 21 January 1965. From 1975 to 1983 he attended Dulwich College in south London. He read English Language and Literature at Mansfield College, Oxford, where he was a Scholar, graduating in 1988 with a top First. From 1988-1990 Smith was a doctoral student at Wolfson College, Oxford, specialising in the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In 1990 he was elected to a Fellowship by Examination ('Prize Fellowship') at All Souls College, Oxford. He was awarded a D.Phil. in 1991. While a Fellow of All Souls, Smith also held lectureships at both Mansfield College, Oxford and Hertford College, Oxford, and was a member of the English Faculty, lecturing on literary theory, modern poetry, and Shakespeare. Smith left Oxford in 1998 to pursue a career in management consultancy, becoming a partner in a London-based firm in 2004. In 2009, Smith set up a company of his own in order to operate independently. He continues to be a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Smith sits on the board of the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology and of the Institute of Art and Ideas. He is a founding faculty member of The School of Life, and from 2013-2015 was a faculty member of the London Graduate School based at Kingston University. In 2017 he stepped down from the editorial board of "", an academic publication that he helped to found in 1993. Literary career. Books. Robert Rowland Smith is the author of seven books. Three of these are academic. "Derrida and Autobiography" (Cambridge University Press, 1995) was based on Smith's doctoral thesis, and won a Choice award for 'Outstanding Academic Title'. "Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art" (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) is an examination of Freud's metapsychological works in relation to other theorists of death including Heidegger, Durkheim and Pascal. "On Modern Poetry: From Theory to Total Criticism" (Continuum, 2012) also won a Choice award for 'Outstanding Academic Title'. The first part of the book examines theories of poetry; the second part is made up of close textual analysis of certain nineteenth and twentieth century poems. Smith has written two works of popular philosophy: "Breakfast with Socrates: The Philosophy of Everyday Life" (Profile Books, 2009) and "Driving with Plato: The Meaning of Life's Milestones" (Profile Books, 2011). The former has been translated into twenty languages. "The Reality Test: Still Relying on Strategy?" (Profile Books, 2014) draws on Smith's experience as a business adviser. It poses and seeks to answer forty-eight questions relating to business vision, market strategy, organisational performance, and leadership. Smith's most recent book is "AutoBioPhilosophy: An Intimate Story of What It Means to Be Human" (4th Estate, 2018). The book combines the genres of autobiography and philosophy in order to explore themes such as fate, love, spirituality, death, friendship, and creativity. In addition, Smith wrote the text for an art book by Israeli photographer Ori Gersht, entitled "Gersht's Ghosts" (Photoworks, 2012). He also contributed a foreword to the 2015 design publication, "Patternity: A New Way of Seeing: The Inspirational Power of Pattern" (Octopus, 2015). Journalism. From 2009 to 2012, Robert wrote the "To Be Or Not To Be" column in the Sunday Times Magazine, that examined moral dilemmas. He recorded a weekly video blog for the online version of the same publication, looking at current affairs through the lens of philosophy. He has written articles for numerous other publications including Intelligent Life, The Independent on Sunday, The Guardian, The Observer, New Scientist, Psychologies and Photoworks. He contributed articles to the first three editions of The Alpine Review, published in Toronto by Louis-Jacques Darveau. He has also been profiled in The Sunday Telegraph and Time Out. Radio, Television and Film. Smith has broadcast talks across several platforms. These include a verbal essay entitled Beyond the Age of Ideas for Four Thought for BBC Radio 4, a podcast on Derrida and forgiveness for the Philosophy Bites series; several videos for the Institute of Art and Ideas, filmed at the HowTheLightGetsIn Festival; several videos for The School of Life, including 'in conversation' events with Steven Pinker and Jared Diamond; a series of interviews with entrepreneurs in different fields, entitled Innovators on Innovation; and videos for the Royal Society of Arts (Beyond Ideas and Carl Jung - Legacy and Influence). Other BBC Radio and TV programmes on which Smith has appeared include Night Waves, The Human Zoo, The Review Show and Today. Smith has appeared in two films by the independent production company, Heraclitus Pictures. These are Do Not Read This (directed by Joanna Callaghan, HDV, 29 minutes, 2012), in which he plays the part of a publisher; and Love in the Post (directed by Joanna Callaghan, HDV, 75 minutes, 2014), in which he plays a university professor. Public speaking. Smith has spoken to audiences in the UK, France, Norway, the United States, Japan, Lithuania, Poland, Switzerland and El Salvador on subjects including love, enlightenment, and innovation. In 1992 he was invited by the British Council to undertake a lecture tour in Romania, and in the 1990s was closely involved with the Oxford Amnesty Lectures that brought leading thinkers to Oxford. Other fora to which Smith has contributed include: Institute of Contemporary Arts (on Derrida), Hayward Gallery (on concepts of light), the London School of Economics (on the meaning of life), the British Library (on theories of knowledge), the Petrie Museum (on concepts of time), Off Grid (on not knowing) and the Aye Write Festival (on the philosophy of everyday life). With the philosopher Mark Vernon, Smith performs a 'Philosophy Slam', an improvised ideas format. The pair appear regularly at the Wilderness Festival and other venues, and have featured twice at the Camden Comedy Club at the Camden Head in London in support of comedian Pippa Evans. Appearance in works by others. Robert Rowland Smith is the subject of an abstract sculpture by Dutch-Monegasque artist, Adeline de Monseignat, entitled Robert. Smith is one of the walking companions featured in "A London Safari" by Rose Rouse. He appears in Monique Roffey's memoir, With the Kisses of His Mouth and in the novel by Nicholas Royle entitled "An English Guide to Birdwatching". Critical acclaim. Breakfast with Socrates. 'Philosophy made accessible and applied to the quotidian...manages to be funny without underestimating the reader.' - Review by Emmanuelle Smith for The Financial Times, 26 October 2009'I am often asked to recommend a good introduction to philosophy - now I've discovered one. There are plenty of books but mostly they're either the 'wrong kind' of philosophy or they are terribly written. Smith's work is witty, inventive and intelligent - Carl Schmitt on arguing with your partner, Jacques Derrida on booking a holiday - and brilliantly shows how grounded High Theory really is.' - Times Higher Education Supplement'...a very thoughtful and continuously entertaining picture of human behavior. Smith adequately and expertly matches the right classical mind or system of thought with each chapter subject without making it seem like a stretch. Rooted deeply in philosophy and psychology, the book is never too complex or confusing that anyone with a normal level of reading comprehension would have a problem with.' - Review by Curtis Silver for wired.com, 3 December 2010 Driving with Plato. 'A friendly guide to "the meaning of life's milestones" from birth, to learning to walk, starting school and on to passing your driving test, marrying and having a mid-life crisis, retiring and dying.' - Review by Lindesay Irvine for The Guardian, 19 February 2011 On Modern Poetry. 'On Modern Poetry dazzles and illuminates, as does poetry itself. The book is an exciting intervention in poetic criticism, and the zest with which the book apprehends as well as comprehends its material will ensure that all kinds of readers interested in poetry will be enthused to think more carefully about its idioms, strange logics, and its genres. In bringing together intuitive and intellectual attention without simply pre-empting the distinction or its affects, the book achieves what it sets out to do.' - Dr Anthony Mellors, Reader in Poetry and Poetics, Birmingham City University, UK'Smith's writing moves with an ease and elegance that can belie the, sometimes breath-taking, flair, reach and focus of his readings…it has much to recommend it to a wide audience, from general readers, to students, to specialists.' - Dr Clare Connors, University of East Anglia, UK Death-Drive. 'This is a rich and fascinating work. Smith provides a lucid, probing and astute overview of the death drive in Freud, but also leads the reader into strange and compelling new terrain, exploring the notion that works of art have 'an unconscious of their own'. This is an important new contribution to a topic that remains controversial in psychoanalysis and culture more generally.' - Nicholas Royle, University of Sussex 'The death-drive has haunted psychoanalytic theory since its first appearance in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Rowland Smith brings new life to this grim hypothesis, tracing the rhetorical adventures of the death-drive through Freud's works and those of his defenders and adversaries. Sinuously argued and vividly expressed, Death-Drive will appeal both to beginners and to seasoned readers of psychoanalysis and literature. Rarely has death been discussed with such vitality.' - Maud Ellmann, Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame The Reality Test. 'By approaching the perennial problems of business through a highly original set of emotionally-charged questions, Smith brings an extraordinary array of insights to the challenges of management and leadership. Brilliant - a tour de force.' - Jules Goddard, author of Uncommon Sense, Common Nonsense'Practical, wise and very much based in reality, this book will make anyone running a business a more shrewd, and probably a more successful, leader.' - Andrew Cahn, former CEO of UK Trade and Investment'I regard Robert Rowland Smith as simply the most intelligent person I know. After reading this book you will understand why.' - Guy Fraser-Sampson, Senior Fellow, Cass Business School'The Reality Test' cuts through turgid corporate "leadership speak" to get the heart of the matter - it should be required reading for any aspiring leader. If 'Fred the Shred' of HBOS had taken the Reality Test, perhaps we wouldn't be living through the biggest recession since the 1930s.' - Lord Victor O. Adebowale CBE, CEO of Turning Point'Robert Rowland Smith asks the practical questions that really matter to business leaders - this book will do more than make you think, it will make you do something.' - Matt Kingdon, co-founder of ?What If! and author of The Science of Serendipity'Intriguing…thought-provoking.' - Review by Frank Dillon for Irish Times, 12 August 2013

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Marshall McLuhan Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher, whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, McLuhan studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the US and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" and the term "global village", and predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspective. Life and career. McLuhan was born on 21 July 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta, and was named "Marshall" after his maternal grandmother's surname. His brother, Maurice, was born two years later. His parents were both also born in Canada: his mother, Elsie Naomi (née Hall), was a Baptist school teacher who later became an actress; and his father, Herbert Ernest McLuhan, was a Methodist with a real-estate business in Edmonton. When the business failed at the break out of World War I, McLuhan's father enlisted in the Canadian Army. After a year of service, he contracted influenza and remained in Canada, away from the front lines. After Herbert's discharge from the army in 1915, the McLuhan family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, where Marshall grew up and went to school, attending Kelvin Technical School before enrolling in the University of Manitoba in 1928. Undergraduate education. After studying for one year as an engineering student, he changed majors and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree (1933), winning a University Gold Medal in Arts and Sciences. He went on to receive a Master of Arts degree (1934) in English from the University as well. He had long desired to pursue graduate studies in England and was accepted to the University of Cambridge, having failed to secure a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. Though having already earned his B.A. and M.A. in Manitoba, Cambridge required him to enrol as an undergraduate "affiliated" student, with one year's credit towards a three-year bachelor's degree, before entering any doctoral studies. He entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in the autumn of 1934, where he studied under I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, and was influenced by New Criticism. Years afterward, upon reflection, he credited the faculty there with influencing the direction of his later work because of their emphasis on the "training of perception", as well as such concepts as Richards' notion of "feedforward". These studies formed an important precursor to his later ideas on technological forms. He received the required bachelor's degree from Cambridge in 1936 and entered their graduate program. Conversion to Catholicism. At the University of Manitoba, McLuhan explored his conflicted relationship with religion and turned to literature to "gratify his soul's hunger for truth and beauty," later referring to this stage as agnosticism. While studying the trivium at Cambridge, he took the first steps toward his eventual conversion to Catholicism in 1937, founded on his reading of G. K. Chesterton. In 1935, he wrote to his mother:Had I not encountered Chesterton I would have remained agnostic for many years at least. Chesterton did not convince me of religious faith, but he prevented my despair from becoming a habit or hardening into misanthropy. He opened my eyes to European culture and encouraged me to know it more closely. He taught me the reasons for all that in me was simply blind anger and misery.At the end of March 1937, McLuhan completed what was a slow but total conversion process, when he was formally received into the Catholic Church. After consulting a minister, his father accepted the decision to convert. His mother, however, felt that his conversion would hurt his career and was inconsolable. McLuhan was devout throughout his life, but his religion remained a private matter. He had a lifelong interest in the number three (e.g., the trivium, the Trinity) and sometimes said that the Virgin Mary provided intellectual guidance for him. For the rest of his career, he taught in Catholic institutions of higher education. Early career, marriage, and doctorate. Unable to find a suitable job in Canada, he returned from England to take a job as a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for the 1936–37 academic year. From 1937 to 1944, he taught English at Saint Louis University (with an interruption from 1939 to 1940 when he returned to Cambridge). There he taught courses on Shakespeare, eventually tutoring and befriending Walter J. Ong, who would write his doctoral dissertation on a topic that McLuhan had called to his attention, as well as become a well-known authority on communication and technology. McLuhan met Corinne Lewis in St. Louis, a teacher and aspiring actress from Fort Worth, Texas, whom he married on 4 August 1939. They spent 1939–40 in Cambridge, where he completed his master's degree (awarded in January 1940) and began to work on his doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the verbal arts. While the McLuhans were in England, World War II had broken out in Europe. For this reason, he obtained permission to complete and submit his dissertation from the United States, without having to return to Cambridge for an oral defence. In 1940, the McLuhans returned to Saint Louis University, where they started a family as he continued teaching. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in December 1943. He next taught at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario, from 1944 to 1946, then moved to Toronto in 1946 where he joined the faculty of St. Michael's College, a Catholic college of the University of Toronto, where Hugh Kenner would be one of his students. Canadian economist and communications scholar Harold Innis was a university colleague who had a strong influence on his work. McLuhan wrote in 1964: "I am pleased to think of my own book "The Gutenberg Galaxy" as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing." Later career and reputation. In the early 1950s, McLuhan began the Communication and Culture seminars at the University of Toronto, funded by the Ford Foundation. As his reputation grew, he received a growing number of offers from other universities. During this period, he published his first major work, "" (1951), in which he examines the effect of advertising on society and culture. Throughout the 1950s, he and Edmund Carpenter also produced an important academic journal called "Explorations". McLuhan and Carpenter have been characterized as the Toronto School of communication theory, together with Harold Innis, Eric A. Havelock, and Northrop Frye. During this time, McLuhan supervised the doctoral thesis of modernist writer Sheila Watson on the subject of Wyndham Lewis. Hoping to keep him from moving to another institute, the University of Toronto created the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCT) in 1963. From 1967 to 1968, McLuhan was named the Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities at Fordham University in the Bronx. While at Fordham, he was diagnosed with a benign brain tumour, which was treated successfully. He returned to Toronto where he taught at the University of Toronto for the rest of his life and lived in Wychwood Park, a bucolic enclave on a hill overlooking the downtown where Anatol Rapoport was his neighbour. In 1970, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 1975, the University of Dallas hosted him from April to May, appointing him to the McDermott Chair. Marshall and Corinne McLuhan had six children: Eric, twins Mary and Teresa, Stephanie, Elizabeth, and Michael. The associated costs of a large family eventually drove him to advertising work and accepting frequent consulting and speaking engagements for large corporations, including IBM and AT&T. Woody Allen's Oscar-winning "Annie Hall" (1977) featured McLuhan in a cameo as himself. In the film, a pompous academic is arguing with Allen in a cinema queue when McLuhan suddenly appears and silences him, saying, "You know nothing of my work." This was one of McLuhan's most frequent statements to and about those who disagreed with him. Death. In September 1979, McLuhan suffered a stroke which affected his ability to speak. The University of Toronto's School of Graduate Studies tried to close his research centre shortly thereafter, but was deterred by substantial protests, most notably by Woody Allen. McLuhan never fully recovered from the stroke and died in his sleep on 31 December 1980. He is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Thornhill, Ontario, Canada. Major works. During his years at Saint Louis University (1937–1944), McLuhan worked concurrently on two projects: his doctoral dissertation and the manuscript that was eventually published in 1951 as a book, titled "The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man", which included only a representative selection of the materials that McLuhan had prepared for it. McLuhan's 1942 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation surveys the history of the verbal arts (grammar, logic, and rhetoric—collectively known as the trivium) from the time of Cicero down to the time of Thomas Nashe. In his later publications, McLuhan at times uses the Latin concept of the "trivium" to outline an orderly and systematic picture of certain periods in the history of Western culture. McLuhan suggests that the Late Middle Ages, for instance, were characterized by the heavy emphasis on the formal study of logic. The key development that led to the Renaissance was not the rediscovery of ancient texts, but a shift in emphasis from the formal study of logic to rhetoric and grammar. Modern life is characterized by the re-emergence of grammar as its most salient feature—a trend McLuhan felt was exemplified by the New Criticism of Richards and Leavis. McLuhan also began the academic journal "Explorations" with anthropologist Edmund "Ted" Carpenter. In a letter to Walter Ong, dated 31 May 1953, McLuhan reports that he had received a two-year grant of $43,000 from the Ford Foundation to carry out a communication project at the University of Toronto involving faculty from different disciplines, which led to the creation of the journal. At a Fordham lecture in 1999, Tom Wolfe suggested that a major under-acknowledged influence on McLuhan's work is the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose ideas anticipated those of McLuhan, especially the evolution of the human mind into the "noosphere." In fact, McLuhan warns against outright dismissing or whole-heartedly accepting de Chardin's observations early on in his second published book "The Gutenberg Galaxy": In his private life, McLuhan wrote to friends saying: "I am not a fan of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The idea that anything is better because it comes later is surely borrowed from pre-electronic technologies." Further, McLuhan noted to a Catholic collaborator: "The idea of a Cosmic thrust in one direction ... is surely one of the lamest semantic fallacies ever bred by the word 'evolution'.… That development should have any direction at all is inconceivable except to the highly literate community." Some of McLuhan's main ideas were influenced or prefigured by anthropologist like Edward Sapir and Claude Lévi-Strauss, arguably with a more complex historical and psychological analysis. The idea of the retribalization of Western society by the far-reaching techniques of communication, the view on the function of the artist in society, and the characterization of means of transportation, like the railroad and the airplane, as means of communication, are prefigured in Sapir's 1933 article on "Communication" in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, while the distinction between "hot" and "cool" media draws from Lévi-Strauss' distinction between hot and cold societies. "The Mechanical Bride" (1951). McLuhan's first book, ' (1951), is a pioneering study in the field now known as popular culture. In the book, McLuhan turns his attention to analysing and commenting on numerous examples of persuasion in contemporary popular culture. This followed naturally from his earlier work as both dialectic and rhetoric in the classical trivium aimed at persuasion. At this point, his focus shifted dramatically, turning inward to study the influence of communication media independent of their content. His famous aphorism "the medium is the message" (elaborated in his ', 1964) calls attention to this intrinsic effect of communications media. His interest in the critical study of popular culture was influenced by the 1933 book "Culture and Environment" by F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, and the title "The Mechanical Bride" is derived from a piece by the Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp. Like his later "The Gutenberg Galaxy" (1962), "The Mechanical Bride" is composed of a number of short essays that may be read in any order—what he styled the "mosaic approach" to writing a book. Each essay begins with a newspaper or magazine article, or an advertisement, followed by McLuhan's analysis thereof. The analyses bear on aesthetic considerations as well as on the implications behind the imagery and text. McLuhan chose these ads and articles not only to draw attention to their symbolism, as well as their implications for the corporate entities who created and disseminated them, but also to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed. Roland Barthes's essays 1957 "Mythologies", echoes McLuhan's "Mechanical Bride", as a series of exhibits of popular mass culture (like advertisements, newspaper articles and photographs) that are analyzed in a semiological way. "The Gutenberg Galaxy" (1962). Written in 1961 and first published by University of Toronto Press, "" (1962) is a pioneering study in the fields of oral culture, print culture, cultural studies, and media ecology. Throughout the book, McLuhan efforts to reveal how communication technology (i.e., alphabetic writing, the printing press, and the electronic media) affects cognitive organization, which in turn has profound ramifications for social organization: [I]f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent. Movable type. McLuhan's episodic history takes the reader from pre-alphabetic, tribal humankind to the electronic age. According to McLuhan, the invention of movable type greatly accelerated, intensified, and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes that had already been taking place since the invention and implementation of the alphabet, by which McLuhan means phonemic orthography. (McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet from logographic or logogramic writing systems, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs or ideograms.) Print culture, ushered in by the advance in printing during the middle of the 15th century when the Gutenberg press was invented, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral. Quoting (with approval) an observation on the nature of the printed word from William Ivins' "Prints and Visual Communication", McLuhan remarks: In this passage [Ivins] not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out the visual homogenizing of experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background.…The technology and social effects of typography incline us to abstain from noting interplay and, as it were, "formal" causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook. The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in "The Medium Is the Massage") is that new technologies (such as alphabets, printing presses, and even speech) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn, affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits—"visual homogenizing of experience"—which in turn affects social interactions—"fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a…specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, this advance of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism, and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification." Global village. In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence:" when electronic media replaces visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the "global village". The term is sometimes described as having negative connotations in "The Gutenberg Galaxy", but McLuhan was interested in exploring effects, not making value judgments: Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture. Key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has no "per se" moral bent—it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's self-conception and realization: Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds?…Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But", someone says, "we didn't know it would happen." Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality. The moral valence of technology's effects on cognition is, for McLuhan, a matter of perspective. For instance, McLuhan contrasts the considerable alarm and revulsion that the growing quantity of books aroused in the latter 17th century with the modern concern for the "end of the book." If there can be no universal moral sentence passed on technology, McLuhan believes that "there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies". Though the World Wide Web was invented almost 30 years after "The Gutenberg Galaxy", and 10 years after his death, McLuhan prophesied the web technology seen today as early as 1962: The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind. Furthermore, McLuhan coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term "surfing" to refer to rapid, irregular, and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements such as "Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave." Paul Levinson's 1999 book "Digital McLuhan" explores the ways that McLuhan's work may be understood better through using the lens of the digital revolution. McLuhan frequently quoted Walter Ong's "Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue" (1958), which evidently had prompted McLuhan to write "The Gutenberg Galaxy". Ong wrote a highly favorable review of this new book in "America". However, Ong later tempered his praise, by describing McLuhan's "The Gutenberg Galaxy" as "a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond." McLuhan himself said of the book, "I'm not concerned to get any kudos out of ["The Gutenberg Galaxy"]. It seems to me a book that somebody should have written a century ago. I wish somebody else had written it. It will be a useful prelude to the rewrite of "Understanding Media" [the 1960 NAEB report] that I'm doing now." McLuhan's "The Gutenberg Galaxy" won Canada's highest literary award, the Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction, in 1962. The chairman of the selection committee was McLuhan's colleague at the University of Toronto and oftentime intellectual sparring partner, Northrop Frye. "Understanding Media" (1964). McLuhan's most widely-known work, "" (1964), is a seminal study in media theory. Dismayed by the way in which people approach and use new media such as television, McLuhan famously argues that in the modern world "we live mythically and integrally…but continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age." McLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study—popularly quoted as "the medium is the message." McLuhan's insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society—in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example—the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it. "Hot" and "cool" media. In the first part of "Understanding Media", McLuhan states that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Using a terminology derived from French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss' distinction between hot and cold societies, McLuhan argues that a cool medium requires increased involvement due to decreased description, while a hot medium is the opposite, decreasing involvement and increasing description. In other words, a society that appears to be actively participating in the streaming of content but not considering the effects of the tool is not allowing an "extension of ourselves." A movie is thus said to be "high definition," demanding a viewer's attention, while a comic book to be "low definition," requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value: "Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue." Some media, such as movies, are "hot"—that is, they enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort to perceive a detailed moving image. Hot media usually, but not always, provide complete involvement with considerable stimulus. In contrast, "cool" print may also occupy visual space, using visual senses, but requires focus and comprehension to immerse its reader. Hot media creation favour analytical precision, quantitative analysis and sequential ordering, as they are usually sequential, linear, and logical. They emphasize one sense (for example, of sight or sound) over the others. For this reason hot media also include film (especially silent films), radio, the lecture, and photography. McLuhan contrasts "hot" media with "cool"—specifically, television [of the 1960s i.e. small black-and-white screens], which he claims requires more effort on the part of the viewer to determine meaning; and comics, which, due to their minimal presentation of visual detail, require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. Cool media are usually, but not always, those that provide little involvement with substantial stimulus. They require more active participation on the part of the user, including the perception of abstract patterning and simultaneous comprehension of all parts. Therefore, in addition to television, cool media include the seminar and cartoons. McLuhan describes the term "cool media" as emerging from jazz and popular music used, in this context, to mean "detached." This concept appears to force media into binary categories. However, McLuhan's hot and cool exist on a continuum: they are more correctly measured on a scale than as dichotomous terms. Critiques of "Understanding Media". Some theorists have attacked McLuhan's definition and treatment of the word "medium" for being too simplistic. Umberto Eco, for instance, contends that McLuhan's medium conflates channels, codes, and messages under the overarching term of the medium, confusing the vehicle, internal code, and content of a given message in his framework. In "Media Manifestos", Régis Debray also takes issue with McLuhan's envisioning of the medium. Like Eco, he is ill at ease with this reductionist approach, summarizing its ramifications as follows: The list of objections could be and has been lengthened indefinitely: confusing technology itself with its use of the media makes of the media an abstract, undifferentiated force and produces its image in an imaginary "public" for mass consumption; the magical naivete of supposed causalities turns the media into a catch-all and contagious "mana"; apocalyptic millenarianism invents the figure of a "homo mass-mediaticus" without ties to historical and social context, and so on. Furthermore, when "Wired" magazine interviewed him in 1995, Debray stated that he views McLuhan "more as a poet than a historian, a master of intellectual collage rather than a systematic analyst.… McLuhan overemphasizes the technology behind cultural change at the expense of the usage that the messages and codes make of that technology." Dwight Macdonald, in turn, reproached McLuhan for his focus on television and for his "aphoristic" style of prose, which he believes leaves "Understanding Media" filled with "contradictions, non-sequiturs, facts that are distorted and facts that are not facts, exaggerations, and chronic rhetorical vagueness." Additionally, Brian Winston's "Misunderstanding Media", published in 1986, chides McLuhan for what he sees as his technologically deterministic stances. Raymond Williams furthers this point of contention, claiming: The work of McLuhan was a particular culmination of an aesthetic theory which became, negatively, a social theory ... It is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism.… For if the medium – whether print or television – is the cause, all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history, are at once reduced to effects. David Carr states that there has been a long line of "academics who have made a career out of deconstructing McLuhan’s effort to define the modern media ecosystem", whether it be due to what they see as McLuhan's ignorance toward sociohistorical context or the style of his argument. While some critics have taken issue with McLuhan's writing style and mode of argument, McLuhan himself urged readers to think of his work as "probes" or "mosaics" offering a toolkit approach to thinking about the media. His eclectic writing style has also been praised for its postmodern sensibilities and suitability for virtual space. "The Medium Is the Massage" (1967). "", published in 1967, was McLuhan's best seller, "eventually selling nearly a million copies worldwide." Initiated by Quentin Fiore, McLuhan adopted the term "massage" to denote the effect each medium has on the human sensorium, taking inventory of the "effects" of numerous media in terms of how they "massage" the sensorium. Fiore, at the time a prominent graphic designer and communications consultant, set about composing the visual illustration of these effects which were compiled by Jerome Agel. Near the beginning of the book, Fiore adopted a pattern in which an image demonstrating a media effect was presented with a textual synopsis on the facing page. The reader experiences a repeated shifting of analytic registers—from "reading" typographic print to "scanning" photographic facsimiles—reinforcing McLuhan's overarching argument in this book: namely, that each medium produces a different "massage" or "effect" on the human sensorium. In "The Medium Is the Massage", McLuhan also rehashed the argument—which first appeared in the Prologue to 1962's "The Gutenberg Galaxy"—that all media are "extensions" of our human senses, bodies and minds. Finally, McLuhan described key points of change in how man has viewed the world and how these views were changed by the adoption of new media. "The technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth [century]", brought on by the adoption of fixed points of view and perspective by typography, while "[t]he technique of the suspended judgment is the discovery of the twentieth century," brought on by the bard abilities of radio, movies and television.The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backward into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land.An audio recording version of McLuhan's famous work was made by Columbia Records. The recording consists of a pastiche of statements made by McLuhan "interrupted" by other speakers, including people speaking in various phonations and falsettos, discordant sounds and 1960s incidental music in what could be considered a deliberate attempt to translate the disconnected images seen on TV into an audio format, resulting in the prevention of a connected stream of conscious thought. Various audio recording techniques and statements are used to illustrate the relationship between spoken, literary speech and the characteristics of electronic audio media. McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand called the recording "the 1967 equivalent of a McLuhan video.""I wouldn't be seen dead with a living work of art."—'Old man' speaking "Drop this jiggery-pokery and talk straight turkey."—'Middle aged man' speaking "War and Peace in the Global Village" (1968). In "War and Peace in the Global Village", McLuhan used James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake", an inspiration for this study of war throughout history, as an indicator as to how war may be conducted in the future. Joyce's "Wake" is claimed to be a gigantic cryptogram which reveals a cyclic pattern for the whole history of man through its Ten Thunders. Each "thunder" below is a 100-character portmanteau of other words to create a statement he likens to an effect that each technology has on the society into which it is introduced. In order to glean the most understanding out of each, the reader must break the portmanteau into separate words (and many of these are themselves portmanteaus of words taken from multiple languages other than English) and speak them aloud for the spoken effect of each word. There is much dispute over what each portmanteau truly denotes. McLuhan claims that the ten thunders in "Wake" represent different stages in the history of man: "From Cliché to Archetype" (1970). Collaborating with Canadian poet Wilfred Watson in "From Cliché to Archetype" (1970), McLuhan approaches the various implications of the verbal cliché and of the archetype. One major facet in McLuhan's overall framework introduced in this book that is seldom noticed is the provision of a new term that actually succeeds the global village: the "global theater". In McLuhan's terms, a "cliché" is a "normal" action, phrase, etc. which becomes so often used that we are "anesthetized" to its effects. McLuhan provides the example of Eugène Ionesco's play "The Bald Soprano", whose dialogue consists entirely of phrases Ionesco pulled from an Assimil language book: "Ionesco originally put all these idiomatic English clichés into literary French which presented the English in the most absurd aspect possible." McLuhan's "archetype" "is a quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment." "Environment" would also include the kinds of "awareness" and cognitive shifts brought upon people by it, not totally unlike the psychological context Carl Jung described. McLuhan also posits that there is a factor of interplay between the "cliché" and the "archetype", or a "doubleness:" Another theme of the Wake ["Finnegans Wake"] that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is 'past time are pastimes.' The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the 20th century, the number of 'past times' that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist's role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of 'doubleness' or 'interplay' because this type of hendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy. McLuhan relates the cliché-to-archetype process to the Theater of the Absurd: Pascal, in the seventeenth century, tells us that the heart has many reasons of which the head knows nothing. The Theater of the Absurd is essentially a communicating to the head of some of the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred years it has tried to forget all about. In the seventeenth century world the languages of the heart were pushed down into the unconscious by the dominant print cliché. The "languages of the heart," or what McLuhan would otherwise define as oral culture, were thus made archetype by means of the printing press, and turned into cliché. The satellite medium, McLuhan states, encloses the Earth in a man-made environment, which "ends 'Nature' and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed." All previous environments (book, newspaper, radio, etc.) and their artifacts are retrieved under these conditions ("past times are pastimes"). McLuhan thereby meshes this into the term "global theater". It serves as an update to his older concept of the global village, which, in its own definitions, can be said to be subsumed into the overall condition described by that of the global theater. "The Global Village" (1989). In his posthumous book, "" (1989), McLuhan, collaborating with Bruce R. Powers, provides a strong conceptual framework for understanding the cultural implications of the technological advances associated with the rise of a worldwide electronic network. This is a major work of McLuhan's as it contains the most extensive elaboration of his concept of "acoustic space", and provides a critique of standard 20th-century communication models such as the Shannon–Weaver model. McLuhan distinguishes between the existing worldview of "visual space"—a linear, quantitative, classically geometric model—and that of "acoustic space"—a holistic, qualitative order with an intricate, paradoxical topology: "Acoustic Space has the basic character of a sphere whose focus or center is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is nowhere." The transition from "visual" to "acoustic" "space" was not automatic with the advent of the global network, but would have to be a conscious project. The "universal environment of simultaneous electronic flow" inherently favors right-brain Acoustic Space, yet we are held back by habits of adhering to a fixed point of view. There are no boundaries to sound. We hear from all directions at once. Yet Acoustic and Visual Space are, in fact, inseparable. The resonant interval is the invisible borderline between Visual and Acoustic Space. This is like the television camera that the Apollo 8 astronauts focused on the Earth after they had orbited the moon. McLuhan illustrates how it feels to exist within acoustic space by quoting from the autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, "And There Was Light." Lusseyran lost his eyesight in a violent accident as a child, and the autobiography describes how a reordering of his sensory life and perception followed:When I came upon the myth of objectivity in certain modern thinkers, it made me angry. So there was only one world for these people, the same for everyone. And all the other worlds were to be counted as illusions left over from the past. Or why not call them by their name - hallucinations? I had learned to my cost how wrong they were. From my own experience I knew very well that it was enough to take from a man a memory here, an association there, to deprive him of hearing or sight, for the world to undergo immediate transformation, and for another world, entirely different, but entirely coherent, to be born. Another world? Not really. The same world, rather, but seen from a different angle, and counted in entirely new measures. When this happened all the hierarchies they called objective were turned upside down, scattered to the four winds, not even theories but like whims.Reading, writing, and hierarchical ordering are associated with the left brain and visual space, as are the linear concept of time and phonetic literacy. The left brain is the locus of analysis, classification, and rationality. The right brain and acoustic space are the locus of the spatial, tactile, and musical. "Comprehensive awareness" results when the two sides of the brain are in true balance. Visual Space is associated with the simplified worldview of Euclidean geometry, the intuitive three dimensions useful for the architecture of buildings and the surveying of land. It is linearly rational and has no grasp of the acoustic. Acoustic Space is multisensory. McLuhan writes about robotism in the context of Japanese Zen Buddhism and how it can offer us new ways of thinking about technology. The Western way of thinking about technology is too much related to the left hemisphere of our brain, which has a rational and linear focus. What he called robotism might better be called androidism in the wake of "Blade Runner" and the novels of Philip K. Dick. Robotism-androidism emerges from the further development of the right hemisphere of the brain, creativity and a new relationship to spacetime (most humans are still living in 17th-century classical Newtonian physics spacetime). Robots-androids will have much greater flexibility than humans have had until now, in both mind and body. Robots-androids will teach humanity this new flexibility. And this flexibility of androids (what McLuhan calls robotism) has a strong affinity with Japanese culture and life. McLuhan quotes from Ruth Benedict, "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword", an anthropological study of Japanese culture published in 1946:Occidentals cannot easily credit the ability of the Japanese to swing from one behavior to another without psychic cost. Such extreme possibilities are not included in our experience. Yet in Japanese life the contradictions, as they seem to us, are as deeply based in their view of life as our uniformities are in ours.The ability to live in the present and instantly readjust. Beyond existing communication models. "All Western scientific models of communication are—like the Shannon–Weaver model—linear, sequential, and logical as a reflection of the late medieval emphasis on the Greek notion of efficient causality." McLuhan and Powers criticize the Shannon-Weaver model of communication as emblematic of left-hemisphere bias and linearity, descended from a print-era perversion of Aristotle's notion of efficient causality. A third term of "The Global Village" that McLuhan and Powers develop at length is The Tetrad. McLuhan had begun development on the Tetrad as early as 1974. The tetrad an analogical, simultaneous, four-fold pattern of transformation. "At full maturity the tetrad reveals the metaphoric structure of the artifact as having two figures and two grounds in dynamic and analogical relationship to each other." Like the camera focused on the Earth by the Apollo 8 astronauts, the tetrad reveals figure (Moon) and ground (Earth) simultaneously. The right-brain hemisphere thinking is the capability of being in many places at the same time. Electricity is acoustic. It is simultaneously everywhere. The Tetrad, with its fourfold Möbius topological structure of enhancement, reversal, retrieval and obsolescence, is mobilized by McLuhan and Powers to illuminate the media or technological inventions of cash money, the compass, the computer, the database, the satellite, and the global media network. Key concepts. Tetrad of media effects. In "Laws of Media" (1988), published posthumously by his son Eric, McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a concise tetrad of media effects. The tetrad is a means of examining the effects on society of any technology (i.e., any medium) by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously. McLuhan designed the tetrad as a pedagogical tool, phrasing his laws as questions with which to consider any medium: The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the "grammar and syntax" of the "language" of media. McLuhan departs from his mentor Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium "overheats," or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme. Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as four diamonds forming an X, with the name of a medium in the centre. The two diamonds on the left of a tetrad are the "Enhancement" and "Retrieval" qualities of the medium, both "Figure" qualities. The two diamonds on the right of a tetrad are the "Obsolescence" and "Reversal" qualities, both "Ground" qualities. Using the example of radio: Figure and ground. McLuhan adapted the Gestalt psychology idea of a "figure and a ground", which underpins the meaning of "the medium is the message." He used this concept to explain how a form of communications technology, the medium, or "figure", necessarily operates through its context, or "ground". McLuhan believed that in order to grasp fully the effect of a new technology, one must examine figure (medium) and ground (context) together, since neither is completely intelligible without the other. McLuhan argued that we must study media in their historical context, particularly in relation to the technologies that preceded them. The present environment, itself made up of the effects of previous technologies, gives rise to new technologies, which, in their turn, further affect society and individuals. All technologies have embedded within them their own assumptions about time and space. The message which the medium conveys can only be understood if the medium and the environment in which the medium is used—and which, simultaneously, it effectively creates—are analysed together. He believed that an examination of the figure-ground relationship can offer a critical commentary on culture and society. Opposition between optic and haptic perception. In McLuhan's (and Harley Parker's) work, electric media has an affinity with haptic and hearing perception, while mechanical media have an affinity with visual perception. This opposition between optic and haptic, had been previously formulated by art historians Alois Riegl, in his 1901 "Late Roman art industry", and then Erwin Panofsky (in his "Perspective as Symbolic Form"). However, McLuhan's comments are more aware of the contingent cultural context in which for instance linear perspective arose, while Panofsky's ones are more teleological. Also Walter Benjamin, in his "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), observed how in the scenario of perceptions of modern Western culture, from about the 19th century, has begun a shift from the optic towards the haptic. This shift is one of the main recurring topics in McLuhan work, which McLuhan attributes to the advent of the electronic era. Legacy. After the publication of "Understanding Media", McLuhan received an astonishing amount of publicity, making him perhaps the most publicized English teacher in the twentieth century and arguably the most controversial. This publicity began with the work of two California advertising executives, Howard Gossage and Gerald Feigen who used personal funds to fund their practice of "genius scouting". Much enamoured with McLuhan's work, Feigen and Gossage arranged for McLuhan to meet with editors of several major New York magazines in May 1965 at the Lombardy Hotel in New York. Philip Marchand reports that, as a direct consequence of these meetings, McLuhan was offered the use of an office in the headquarters of both "Time" and "Newsweek", any time he needed it. In August 1965, Feigen and Gossage held what they called a "McLuhan festival" in the offices of Gossage's advertising agency in San Francisco. During this "festival", McLuhan met with advertising executives, members of the mayor's office, and editors from the "San Francisco Chronicle" and "Ramparts" magazine. More significant was the presence at the festival of Tom Wolfe, who wrote about McLuhan in a subsequent article, "What If He Is Right?", published in "New York" magazine and Wolfe's own "The Pump House Gang". According to Feigen and Gossage, their work had only a moderate effect on McLuhan's eventual celebrity: they claimed that their work only "probably speeded up the recognition of [McLuhan's] genius by about six months." In any case, McLuhan soon became a fixture of media discourse. "Newsweek" magazine did a cover story on him; articles appeared in "Life", "Harper's", "Fortune", "Esquire", and others. Cartoons about him appeared in "The New Yorker". In 1969, "Playboy" magazine published a lengthy interview with him. In a running gag on the popular sketch comedy "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In", the "poet" Henry Gibson would randomly say, "Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?" McLuhan was credited with coining the phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out" by its popularizer, Timothy Leary, in the 1960s. In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, Leary stated that the slogan was "given to him" by McLuhan during a lunch in New York City. Leary said McLuhan "was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, 'Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, that’s a lot,' to the tune of a Pepsi commercial. Then he started going, 'Tune in, turn on, and drop out.'" During his lifetime and afterward, McLuhan heavily influenced cultural critics, thinkers, and media theorists such as Neil Postman, Jean Baudrillard, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, William Irwin Thompson, Paul Levinson, Douglas Rushkoff, Jaron Lanier, Hugh Kenner, and John David Ebert, as well as political leaders such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Jerry Brown. Andy Warhol was paraphrasing McLuhan with his now famous "15 minutes of fame" quote. When asked in the 1970s for a way to sedate violences in Angola, he suggested a massive spread of TV devices. Douglas Coupland, argued that McLuhan "was conservative, socially, but he never let politics enter his writing or his teaching". The character "Brian O'Blivion" in David Cronenberg's 1983 film "Videodrome" is a "media oracle" based on McLuhan. In 1991, McLuhan was named as the "patron saint" of "Wired" magazine and a quote of his appeared on the masthead for the first ten years of its publication. He is mentioned by name in a Peter Gabriel–penned lyric in the song "Broadway Melody of 1974". This song appears on the concept album "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway", from progressive rock band Genesis. The lyric is: "Marshall McLuhan, casual viewin' head buried in the sand." McLuhan is also jokingly referred to during an episode of "The Sopranos" entitled "House Arrest". Despite his death in 1980, someone claiming to be McLuhan was posting on a "Wired" mailing list in 1996. The information this individual provided convinced one writer for "Wired" that "if the poster was not McLuhan himself, it was a bot programmed with an eerie command of McLuhan's life and inimitable perspective." A new centre known as the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, formed soon after his death in 1980, was the successor to McLuhan's Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. Since 1994, it has been part of the University of Toronto Faculty of Information and in 2008 the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology incorporated in the Coach House Institute. The first director was literacy scholar and OISE Professor David R. Olsen. From 1983 until 2008, the McLuhan Program was under the direction of Derrick de Kerckhove who was McLuhan's student and translator. From 2008 through 2015 Professor Dominique Scheffel-Dunand of York University served Director of the Program. In 2011 at the time of his centenary the Coach House Institute established a Marshall McLuhan Centenary Fellowship program in his honor, and each year appoints up to four fellows for a maximum of two years. In May 2016 the Coach House Institute was renamed the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology; its Interim Director was Seamus Ross (2015–16). Sarah Sharma, an Associate Professor of Media Theory from the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology (ICCIT) and the Faculty of Information (St. George), began a five-year term as director of the Coach House (2017- ). Professor Sharma's research and teaching focuses on feminist approaches to technology, including issues related to temporality and media. Professor Sharma's thematic for the 2017-2018 Monday Night Seminars at the McLuhan Centre is MsUnderstanding Media which extends and introduces feminist approaches to technology to McLuhan's formulations of technology and culture. In Toronto, Marshall McLuhan Catholic Secondary School is named after him. Bibliography of major works. This is a partial list of works cited in this article.

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Bell hooks Gloria Jean Watkins (born September 25, 1952), better known by her pen name bell hooks, is an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. The name "bell hooks" is borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. The focus of hooks' writing has been the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she describes as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She has published more than 30 books and numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. She has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. In 2014, she founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. Biography. Early life. Gloria Jean Watkins (bell hooks) was born in 1952 in Hopkinsville, a small, segregated town in Kentucky, to a working-class African-American family. Watkins was one of six children born to Rosa Bell Watkins ("née" Oldham) and Veodis Watkins. Her father worked as a janitor and her mother worked as a maid in the homes of white families. An avid reader, Watkins was educated in racially segregated public schools, later writing that this is where she had experienced education as the practice of freedom. She describes the great adversities she faced when making the transition to an integrated school, where teachers and students were predominantly white. She graduated from Hopkinsville High School before obtaining her BA in English from Stanford University in 1973, and her MA in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976. In 1983, after several years of teaching and writing, she completed her doctorate in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a dissertation on author Toni Morrison. Career. Her teaching career began in 1976 as an English professor and senior lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California. During her three years there, Golemics, a Los Angeles publisher, released her first published work, a chapbook of poems titled "And There We Wept" (1978), written under the name "bell hooks". She adopted her maternal great-grandmother's name as a pen name because her great-grandmother "was known for her snappy and bold tongue, which [she] greatly admired". She put the name in lowercase letters "to distinguish [herself from] her great-grandmother." She said that her unconventional lowercasing of her name signifies what is most important is her works: the "substance of books, not who I am." She taught at several post-secondary institutions in the early 1980s and 1990s, including the University of California, Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, Yale, Oberlin College and City College of New York. In 1981 South End Press published her first major work, "Ain't I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism", though it was written years earlier while she was an undergraduate student. In the decades since its publication, "Ain't I a Woman?" has gained widespread recognition as an influential contribution to feminist thought. "Ain't I a Woman?" examines several recurring themes in her later work: the historical impact of sexism and racism on black women, devaluation of black womanhood, media roles and portrayal, the education system, the idea of a white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy, the marginalization of black women, and the disregard for issues of race and class within feminism. Since the publication of "Ain't I a Woman?", she has become eminent as a leftist and postmodern political thinker and cultural critic. She targets and appeals to a broad audience by presenting her work in a variety of media using various writing and speaking styles. As well as having written books, she has published in numerous scholarly and mainstream magazines, lectures at widely accessible venues, and appears in various documentaries.She is frequently cited by feminists as having provided the best solution to the difficulty of defining something as diverse as "feminism", addressing the problem that if feminism can mean everything, it means nothing. She asserts an answer to the question "what is feminism?" that she says is "rooted in neither fear nor fantasy... 'Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression. She has published more than 30 books, ranging in topics from black men, patriarchy, and masculinity to self-help, engaged pedagogy to personal memoirs, and sexuality (in regards to feminism and politics of aesthetic/visual culture). A prevalent theme in her most recent writing is the community and communion, the ability of loving communities to overcome race, class, and gender inequalities. In three conventional books and four children's books, she suggests that communication and literacy (the ability to read, write, and think critically) are crucial to developing healthy communities and relationships that are not marred by race, class, or gender inequalities. She has held positions as Professor of African-American Studies and English at Yale University, Associate Professor of Women's Studies and American Literature at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and as Distinguished Lecturer of English Literature at the City College of New York. In 2002, hooks gave a commencement speech at Southwestern University. Eschewing the congratulatory mode of traditional commencement speeches, she spoke against what she saw as government-sanctioned violence and oppression, and admonished students who she believed went along with such practices. This was followed by a controversy described in the "Austin Chronicle" after an "irate Arizonian" had criticized the speech in a letter to the editor. The newspaper reported that many in the audience booed the speech, though "several graduates passed over the provost to shake her hand or give her a hug". In 2004, she joined Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, as Distinguished Professor in Residence, where she participated in a weekly feminist discussion group, "Monday Night Feminism"; a luncheon lecture series, "Peanut Butter and Gender"; and a seminar, "Building Beloved Community: The Practice of Impartial Love". Her 2008 book, "belonging: a culture of place", includes a candid interview with author Wendell Berry as well as a discussion of her move back to Kentucky. She has undertaken three scholar-in-residences at The New School. Mostly recently she did one for a week in October 2014. She engaged in public dialogues with Gloria Steinem, Laverne Cox, and Cornel West. Influences. Those who have influenced hooks include African-American abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth (whose speech "Ain't I a Woman?" inspired her first major work), Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (whose perspectives on education she embraces in her theory of engaged pedagogy), Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, psychologist Erich Fromm, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, African-American writer James Baldwin, Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, African-American black nationalist leader Malcolm X, and African-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (who addresses how the strength of love unites communities). Hooks says of Martin Luther King Jr.'s notion of a beloved community, "He had a profound awareness that the people involved in oppressive institutions will not change from the logics and practices of domination without engagement with those who are striving for a better way." "Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom". In her 1994 book "Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom," hooks writes about a transgressive approach in education where educators can teach students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom. To educate as the practice of freedom, bell hooks describes it as "a way of teaching that anyone can learn." Hooks combines her practical knowledge and personal experiences of the classroom with feminist thinking and critical pedagogy. Hooks investigates the classroom as a source of constraint but also a potential source of liberation. She argues that teachers' use of control and power over students dulls the students' enthusiasm and teaches obedience to authority, "confin[ing] each pupil to a rote, assembly-line approach to learning." She advocates that universities should encourage students and teachers to transgress, and seeks ways to use collaboration to make learning more relaxing and exciting. She describes teaching as a performative act and teachers as catalysts that invite everyone to become more engaged and activated. Performative aspect of learning "offers the space for change, invention, spontaneous shifts, that can serve as a catalyst drawing out the unique elements in each classroom." Hooks also dedicated a chapter of the book to Paulo Freire, written in a form of a playful dialogue between herself, Gloria Watkins and her writing voice, bell hooks. In the last chapter of the book, hooks raised the critical question of eros or the erotic in classroom environments. According to hooks, eros and the erotics do not need to be denied for learning to take place. She argues that one of the central tenets of feminist pedagogy has been to subvert the mind-body dualism and allow oneself as a teacher to be whole in the classroom, and as a consequence wholehearted. "Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope". In 2004, 10 years after the success of "Teaching to Transgress", bell hooks published "Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope". In this book, hooks offers advice about how to continue to make the classroom a place that is life-sustaining and mind expanding, a place of liberating mutuality where teacher and student together work in partnership. She writes that education as a practice of freedom enable us to confront feelings of loss and restore our sense of connections and consequently teaches us how to create community. She locates hope in places of struggle where she witnessed individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. For hooks, educating is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness. "Feminist Theory". Noting a lack of diverse voices in popular feminist theory, hooks published "" in 1984. In this book, she argues that those voices have been marginalized, and states: "To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body." She argues that if feminism seeks to make women equal to men, then it is impossible because in Western society, not all men are equal. She claims, "Women in lower class and poor groups, particularly those who are non-white, would not have defined women's liberation as women gaining social equality with men since they are continually reminded in their everyday lives that all women do not share a common social status." She used the work as a platform to offer a new, more inclusive feminist theory. Her theory encouraged the long-standing idea of sisterhood but advocated for women to acknowledge their differences while still accepting each other. She challenged feminists to consider gender's relation to race, class, and sex, a concept which came to be known as intersectionality. She also argues for the importance of male involvement in the equality movement, stating that for change to occur, men must do their part. She also calls for a restructuring of the cultural framework of power, one that does not find oppression of others necessary. Part of this restructuring involves allowing men into the feminist movement, so that there is not a separationist ideology, so much as an incorporating camaraderie. Additionally, she shows great appreciation for the movement away from feminist thought as led by bourgeois white women, and towards a multidimensional gathering of both genders to fight for the raising up of women. This shifts the original focus of feminism away from victimization, towards harboring understanding, appreciation, and tolerance for all genders and sexes so that all are in control of their own destinies, uncontrolled by patriarchal, capitalist tyrants. Another part of restructuring the movement comes from education: hooks points out that there is an anti-intellectual stigma among the masses. Poor people do not want to hear from intellectuals because they are different and have different ideas. As she points out, this stigma against intellectuals leads to the shunning of poor people who have risen up to graduation from post-secondary education, because they are no longer like the rest of the masses. In order for us to achieve equality, people must be able to learn from those who have been able to smash these stereotypes. This separation leads to further inequality and in order for the feminist movement to succeed, they must be able to bridge the education gap and relate to those in the lower end of the economic sphere. If they are able to do this, then there will be more success and less inequality. In "Rethinking The Nature of Work", hooks goes beyond discussing work and raises a pertinent question that feminists may need to ask themselves. "Many Women active in feminist movement do not have radical political perspectives and are unwilling to face these realities, especially when they, as individuals, gain economic self-sufficiency within the existing structure." In "All About Love", hooks discusses how a culture of lovelessness feeds the patriarchal system. Media theory. In her book "Reel to Real", hooks discusses the effect that movies have on any given individual, with specific emphasis on the black female spectator. She argues that, although we know that movies are not real life, "no matter how sophisticated our strategies of critique and intervention, [we] are usually seduced, at least for a time, by the images we see on the screen. They have power over us, and we have no power over them." She focuses on problematic racial representations. She has written a number of essays and articles, and in "Reel to Real" she describes her experiences growing up watching mainstream movies as well as engaging in the media. Her belief is that to engage in film is to engage in the negation of black female representation in the media. She states, "Representation is the 'hot' issue right now because it's a major realm of power for any system of domination. We keep coming back to the question of representation because identity is always about representation". "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators". In her book "Black Looks: Race and Representation", in the chapter "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators", hooks discusses what she calls an "oppositional gaze". She discusses it as a position and strategy for black people, especially black women, to develop a critical spectatorship in relation to mass media. Describing how for her, the "gaze" had always been political, hooks explains how she began to grow curious of the results of black slaves being punished for looking at their white owners. She wondered how much had been absorbed and carried on through the generations to affect not only black parenting, but black spectatorship as well. hooks writes that because she remembered how she had dared to look at adults as a child, even though she was forbidden, she knew that slaves had looked too. Drawing on Foucault's thoughts about power always coexisting with the possibility of resistance, hooks discusses this looking as a form of resistance, as a way of finding agency, and declaring: "Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality." She writes that when black people started watching films and television in the United States, they knew that mass media was part of the system that was maintaining white supremacy. Because of this, watching television became a space for black people to develop a critical spectatorship; an oppositional gaze. Prior to racial integration, black viewers "... experienced visual pleasure in a context where looking was also about contestation and confrontation." She further discusses how this spectatorship looked different for black women compared to black men. Black men could renounce the racism of the images, while simultaneously engaging in the phallocentric nature of Hollywood films as a way of contesting white supremacy and experiencing imaginative phallocentric power. Participating in the phallocentric gaze, and objectifying the white female who was cast as the desired object, black men could rebel against the racist reality where black men was constantly interpreted as looking at white womanhood and punished for it. For black women, however, the spectatorship looked different. Since bodies of black females were mostly absent in early films, the development of black women's spectatorship was complicated. If black females were present, their bodies were there to: "... enhance and maintain white womanhood as object of the phallocentric gaze." According to hooks, the conventional representations of black females have been an assault to black womanhood. In response to this, many black women rejected looking at the images altogether. Another response of some black women, were to turn off their criticism and identify with the white woman on the screen, through this victimization being able to experience cinematic pleasure. A third option, is to look through the lens of the oppositional gaze. This is a critical gaze that, according to hooks, goes beyond Laura Mulvey's analysis of how the Hollywood film constructs the man as the subject, and the woman as the object. This "woman" is in fact, a white woman. She criticizes mainstream feminist film theory for ignoring the subject of race, and by that also ignoring the role of black female spectatorship. She asserts that there is a pleasure to be found in the oppositional gaze, in looking against the grain. However, some black females are unable to resist dominant ways of looking, because their perception of reality is still colonized. She discusses that the amount of feelings of dehumanization and objectification that a black woman experiences in this society is determinant for her looking relations. The more she is able to construct herself as a subject in daily life, the more inclined she is to develop an oppositional gaze. And this is in turn affected by the realm of representation in mass media. This is one of the reasons why hooks stresses the importance of black female film makers, mentioning Julie Dash, Camille Billops, Kathleen Collins, Ayoka Chenzira and Zeinabu Davis. This sector of filmmaking and spectatorship is creating new ways of recognition, identification and subjectification. External links.

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Jacques Lacan Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (; ; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan’s work has marked the French and international intellectual landscape, having made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory as well as on psychoanalysis itself. Lacan took up and discussed the whole range of Freudian concepts emphasising the philosophical dimension of Freud’s thought and applying concepts derived from structuralism in linguistics and anthropology to its development in his own work which he would further augment by employing formulae from mathematical logic and topology. Taking this new direction, and introducing controversial innovations in clinical practice, led to expulsion for Lacan and his followers from the International Psychoanalytic Association. In consequence Lacan went on to establish new psychoanalytic institutions to promote and develop his work which he declared to be a “return to Freud” in opposition to prevalent trends in psychoanalysis collusive of adaptation to social norms. Biography. Early life. Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Émilie and Alfred Lacan's three children. His father was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic – his younger brother entered a monastery in 1929. Lacan attended the Collège Stanislas between 1907 and 1918. An interest in philosophy led him to a preoccupation with the work of Spinoza, one outcome of which was his abandonment of religious faith for atheism. There were tensions in the family around this issue, and he regretted not persuading his brother to take a different path, but by 1924 his parents had moved to Boulogne and he was living in rooms in Montmartre. During the early 1920s, Lacan actively engaged with the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde. Having met James Joyce, he was present at the Parisian bookshop where the first readings of passages from "Ulysses" in French and English took place, shortly before it was published in 1922. He also had meetings with Charles Maurras, whom he admired as a literary stylist, and he occasionally attended meetings of Action Française (of which Maurras was a leading ideologue), of which he would later be highly critical. In 1920, after being rejected for military service on the grounds that he was too thin, Lacan entered medical school. Between 1927 and 1931, after completing his studies at the faculty of medicine of the University of Paris, he specialised in psychiatry under the direction of Henri Claude at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, the major psychiatric hospital serving central Paris, at the Infirmary for the Insane of the Police Prefecture under Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault and also at the Hospital Henri-Rousselle. 1930s. Lacan was involved with the Parisian surrealist movement of the 1930s, associating with André Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso. For a time, he served as Picasso's personal therapist. He attended the "mouvement Psyché" that Maryse Choisy founded and published in the Surrealist journal "Minotaure". "[Lacan's] interest in surrealism predated his interest in psychoanalysis," former Lacanian analyst and biographer Dylan Evans explains, speculating that "perhaps Lacan never really abandoned his early surrealist sympathies, its neo-Romantic view of madness as 'convulsive beauty', its celebration of irrationality." Translator and historian David Macey writes that "the importance of surrealism can hardly be over-stated... to the young Lacan... [who] also shared the surrealists' taste for scandal and provocation, and viewed provocation as an important element in psycho-analysis itself". In 1931, after a second year at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, Lacan was awarded his "Diplôme de médecin légiste" (a medical examiner's qualification) and became a licensed forensic psychiatrist. The following year he was awarded his (roughly equivalent to an M.D. degree) for his thesis "On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality" ("De la Psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité". Its publication had little immediate impact on French psychoanalysis but it did meet with acclaim amongst Lacan's circle of surrealist writers and artists. In their only recorded instance of direct communication, Lacan sent a copy of his thesis to Sigmund Freud who acknowledged its receipt with a postcard. Lacan's thesis was based on observations of several patients with a primary focus on one female patient whom he called Aimée. Its exhaustive reconstruction of her family history and social relations, on which he based his analysis of her paranoid state of mind, demonstrated his dissatisfaction with traditional psychiatry and the growing influence of Freud on his ideas. Also in 1932, Lacan published a translation of Freud's 1922 text, "Über einige neurotische Mechanismen bei Eifersucht, Paranoia und Homosexualität" ("Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality") as "De quelques mécanismes névrotiques dans la jalousie, la paranoïa et l'homosexualité" in the "". In Autumn 1932, Lacan began his training analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, which was to last until 1938. In 1934 Lacan became a candidate member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). He began his private psychoanalytic practice in 1936 whilst still seeing patients at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, and the same year presented his first analytic report at the Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in Marienbad on the "Mirror Phase". The congress chairman, Ernest Jones, terminated the lecture before its conclusion, since he was unwilling to extend Lacan's stated presentation time. Insulted, Lacan left the congress to witness the Berlin Olympic Games. No copy of the original lecture remains, Lacan having decided not to hand in his text for publication in the conference proceedings. Lacan's attendance at Kojève's lectures on Hegel, given between 1933 and 1939, and which focused on the "Phenomenology" and the master-slave dialectic in particular, was formative for his subsequent work, initially in his formulation of his theory of the mirror phase, for which he was also indebted to the experimental work on child development of Henri Wallon. It was Wallon who commissioned from Lacan the last major text of his pre-war period, a contribution to the 1938 "Encyclopédie française" entitled "La Famille" (reprinted in 1984 as "Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l'individu", Paris: Navarin). 1938 was also the year of Lacan's accession to full membership ("membre titulaire") of the SPP, notwithstanding considerable opposition from many of its senior members who were unimpressed by his recasting of Freudian theory in philosophical terms. Lacan married Marie-Louise Blondin in January 1934 and in January 1937 they had the first of their three children, a daughter named Caroline. A son, Thibaut, was born in August 1939 and a daughter, Sybille, in November 1940. 1940s. The SPP was disbanded due to Nazi Germany's occupation of France in 1940. Lacan was called up for military service which he undertook in periods of duty at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, whilst at the same time continuing his private psychoanalytic practice. In 1942 he moved into apartments at 5 rue de Lille, which he would occupy until his death. During the war he did not publish any work, turning instead to a study of Chinese for which he obtained a degree from the École spéciale des langues orientales. In a relationship they formed before the war, Sylvia Bataille (née Maklès), the estranged wife of his friend Georges Bataille, became Lacan's mistress and, in 1953, his second wife. During the war their relationship was complicated by the threat of deportation for Sylvia, who was Jewish, since this required her to live in the unoccupied territories. Lacan intervened personally with the authorities to obtain papers detailing her family origins, which he destroyed. In 1941 they had a child, Judith. She kept the name Bataille because Lacan wished to delay the announcement of his planned separation and divorce until after the war. After the war, the SPP recommenced their meetings. In 1945 Lacan visited England for a five-week study trip, where he met the British analysts Ernest Jones, Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. Bion's analytic work with groups influenced Lacan, contributing to his own subsequent emphasis on study groups as a structure within which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis. He published a report of his visit as 'La Psychiatrique anglaise et la guerre' ("Evolution psychiatrique" 1, 1947, pp.  293–318). In 1949, Lacan presented a new paper on the mirror stage, 'The Mirror-Stage, as Formative of the I, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience', to the sixteenth IPA congress in Zurich. The same year he set out in the "Doctrine de la Commission de l’Enseignement," produced for the Training Commission of the SPP, the protocols for the training of candidates. 1950s. With the purchase in 1951 of a country mansion at Guitrancourt, Lacan established a base for weekend retreats for work, leisure—including extravagant social occasions—and for the accommodation of his vast library. His art collection included Courbet’s L'Origine du monde, which he had concealed in his study by a removable wooden screen on which an abstract representation of the Courbet by the artist André Masson was portrayed. In 1951, Lacan started to hold a private weekly seminar in Paris in which he inaugurated what he described as "a return to Freud," whose doctrines were to be re-articulated through a reading of Saussure’s linguistics and Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology. Becoming public in 1953, Lacan's 27-year-long seminar was highly influential in Parisian cultural life, as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. In January 1953 Lacan was elected president of the SPP. When, at a meeting the following June, a formal motion was passed against him criticising his abandonment of the standard analytic training session for the variable-length session, he immediately resigned his presidency. He and a number of colleagues then resigned from the SPP to form the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). One consequence of this was to eventually deprive the new group of membership of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Encouraged by the reception of "the return to Freud" and of his report "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan began to re-read Freud's works in relation to contemporary philosophy, linguistics, ethnology, biology, and topology. From 1953 to 1964 at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, he held his Seminars and presented case histories of patients. During this period he wrote the texts that are found in the collection "Écrits", which was first published in 1966. In his seventh seminar "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" (1959–60), which according to Lewis A. Kirshner “arguably represents the most far-reaching attempt to derive a comprehensive ethical position from psychoanalysis,” Lacan defined the ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and presented his "ethics for our time"—one that would, in the words of Freud, prove to be equal to the tragedy of modern man and to the "discontent of civilization." At the roots of the ethics is desire: the only promise of analysis is austere, it is the entrance-into-the-I (in French a play on words between "l'entrée en je" and "l'entrée en jeu"). "I must come to the place where the id was," where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness, the truth of his desire. The end of psychoanalysis entails "the purification of desire." He defended three assertions: that psychoanalysis must have a scientific status; that Freudian ideas have radically changed the concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; and that the analytic field is the only place from which it is possible to question the insufficiencies of science and philosophy. 1960s. Starting in 1962, a complex negotiation took place to determine the status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan's practice (with its controversial indeterminate-length sessions) and his critical stance towards psychoanalytic orthodoxy led, in August 1963, to the IPA setting the condition that registration of the SFP was dependent upon the removal of Lacan from the list of SFP analysts. With the SFP's decision to honour this request in November 1963, Lacan had effectively been stripped of the right to conduct training analyses and thus was constrained to form his own institution in order to accommodate the many candidates who desired to continue their analyses with him. This he did, on 21 June 1964, in the "Founding Act" of what became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), taking "many representatives of the third generation with him: among them were Maud and Octave Mannoni, Serge Leclaire ... and Jean Clavreul". With the support of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser, Lacan was appointed lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He started with a seminar on "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis" in January 1964 in the Dussane room at the École Normale Supérieure. Lacan began to set forth his own approach to psychoanalysis to an audience of colleagues that had joined him from the SFP. His lectures also attracted many of the École Normale's students. He divided the École Freudienne de Paris into three sections: the section of pure psychoanalysis (training and elaboration of the theory, where members who have been analyzed but have not become analysts can participate); the section for applied psychoanalysis (therapeutic and clinical, physicians who either have not started or have not yet completed analysis are welcome); and the section for taking inventory of the Freudian field (concerning the critique of psychoanalytic literature and the analysis of the theoretical relations with related or affiliated sciences). In 1967 he invented the procedure of the Pass, which was added to the statutes after being voted in by the members of the EFP the following year. 1966 saw the publication of Lacan's collected writings, the "Écrits", compiled with an index of concepts by Jacques-Alain Miller. Printed by the prestigious publishing house Éditions du Seuil, the "Écrits" did much to establish Lacan's reputation to a wider public. The success of the publication led to a subsequent two-volume edition in 1969. By the 1960s, Lacan was associated, at least in the public mind, with the far left in France. In May 1968, Lacan voiced his sympathy for the student protests and as a corollary his followers set up a Department of Psychology at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII). However, Lacan's unequivocal comments in 1971 on revolutionary ideals in politics draw a sharp line between the actions of some of his followers and his own style of "revolt.” In 1969, Lacan moved his public seminars to the Faculté de Droit (Panthéon), where he continued to deliver his expositions of analytic theory and practice until the dissolution of his school in 1980. 1970s. Throughout the final decade of his life, Lacan continued his widely followed seminars. During this period, he developed his concepts of masculine and feminine jouissance and placed an increased emphasis on the concept of "the Real" as a point of impossible contradiction in the "symbolic order". Lacan continued to draw widely on various disciplines, working closely on classical Chinese literature with François Cheng and on the life and work of James Joyce with Jacques Aubert. The growing success of the "Écrits", which was translated (in abridged form) into German and English, led to invitations to lecture in Italy, Japan and the United States. He gave lectures in 1975 at Yale, Columbia and MIT. Last years. Lacan's failing health made it difficult for him to meet the demands of the year-long Seminars he had been delivering since the fifties, but his teaching continued into the first year of the eighties. After dissolving his School, the EFP, in January 1980, Lacan travelled to Caracas to found the Freudian Field Institute on 12 July. The Overture to the Caracas Encounter was to be Lacan's final public address. His last texts from the spring of 1981 are brief institutional documents pertaining to the newly formed Freudian Field Institute. Lacan died on 9 September 1981. Major concepts. Return to Freud. Lacan's "return to Freud" emphasizes a renewed attention to the original texts of Freud, and included a radical critique of ego psychology, whereas "Lacan's quarrel with Object Relations psychoanalysis" was a more muted affair. Here he attempted "to restore to the notion of the Object Relation... the capital of experience that legitimately belongs to it", building upon what he termed "the hesitant, but controlled work of Melanie Klein... Through her we know the function of the imaginary primordial enclosure formed by the "imago" of the mother's body", as well as upon "the notion of the transitional object, introduced by D. W. Winnicott... a key-point for the explanation of the genesis of fetishism". Nevertheless, "Lacan systematically questioned those psychoanalytic developments from the 1930s to the 1970s, which were increasingly and almost exclusively focused on the child's early relations with the mother... the pre-Oedipal or Kleinian mother"; and Lacan's rereading of Freud—"characteristically, Lacan insists that his return to Freud supplies the only valid model"—formed a basic conceptual starting-point in that oppositional strategy. Lacan thought that Freud's ideas of "slips of the tongue", jokes, and the interpretation of dreams all emphasized the agency of language in subjective constitution. In "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud," he proposes that "the unconscious is structured like a language." The unconscious is not a primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, he explained, but rather a formation as complex and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself. One consequence of his idea that the unconscious is structured like a language is that the self is denied any point of reference to which to be "restored" following trauma or a crisis of identity. André Green objected that "when you read Freud, it is obvious that this proposition doesn't work for a minute. Freud very clearly opposes the unconscious (which he says is constituted by thing-presentations and nothing else) to the pre-conscious. What is related to language can only belong to the pre-conscious". Freud certainly contrasted "the presentation of the "word" and the presentation of the "thing"... the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone" in his metapsychology. Dylan Evans, however, in his "Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis," "... takes issue with those who, like André Green, question the linguistic aspect of the unconscious, emphasizing Lacan's distinction between "das Ding" and "die Sache" in Freud's account of thing-presentation". Green's criticism of Lacan also included accusations of intellectual dishonesty, he said, "[He] cheated everybody... the return to Freud was an excuse, it just meant going to Lacan." Mirror stage. Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage, which he described as "formative of the function of the 'I' as revealed in psychoanalytic experience." By the early 1950s, he came to regard the mirror stage as more than a moment in the life of the infant; instead, it formed part of the permanent structure of subjectivity. In the "imaginary order", the subject's own image permanently catches and captivates the subject. Lacan explains that "the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image". As this concept developed further, the stress fell less on its historical value and more on its structural value. In his fourth seminar, "La relation d'objet", Lacan states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship. " The mirror stage describes the formation of the ego via the process of objectification, the ego being the result of a conflict between one's perceived visual appearance and one's emotional experience. This identification is what Lacan called "alienation". At six months, the baby still lacks physical co-ordination. The child is able to recognize themselves in a mirror prior to the attainment of control over their bodily movements. The child sees their image as a whole and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the lack of co-ordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. The child experiences this contrast initially as a rivalry with their image, because the wholeness of the image threatens the child with fragmentation—thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the child identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart forms the ego. Lacan understood this moment of identification as a moment of jubilation, since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery; yet when the child compares their own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother, a depressive reaction may accompany the jubilation. Lacan calls the specular image "orthopaedic", since it leads the child to anticipate the overcoming of its "real specific prematurity of birth". The vision of the body as integrated and contained, in opposition to the child's actual experience of motor incapacity and the sense of his or her body as fragmented, induces a movement from "insufficiency to anticipation". In other words, the mirror image initiates and then aids, like a crutch, the process of the formation of an integrated sense of self. In the mirror stage a "misunderstanding" ("méconnaissance") constitutes the ego—the "me" ("moi") becomes alienated from itself through the introduction of an imaginary dimension to the subject. The mirror stage also has a significant symbolic dimension, due to the presence of the figure of the adult who carries the infant. Having jubilantly assumed the image as their own, the child turns their head towards this adult, who represents the big other, as if to call on the adult to ratify this image. Other. While Freud uses the term "other", referring to "der Andere" (the other person) and "das Andere" (otherness), Lacan (influenced by the seminar of Alexandre Kojève) theorizes alterity in a manner more closely resembling Hegel's philosophy. Lacan often used an algebraic symbology for his concepts: the big other ("l'Autre") is designated "A", and the little other ("l'autre") is designated "a". He asserts that an awareness of this distinction is fundamental to analytic practice: "the analyst must be imbued with the difference between A and "a", so he can situate himself in the place of Other, and not the other." Dylan Evans explains that: For Lacan "the Other must first of all be considered a locus in which speech is constituted," so that the other as another subject is secondary to the other as symbolic order. We can speak of the other "as a subject" in a secondary sense only when a subject occupies this position and thereby embodies the other for another subject. In arguing that speech originates in neither the ego nor in the subject but rather in the other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond the subject's conscious control. They come from another place, outside of consciousness—"the unconscious is the discourse of the Other." When conceiving the other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud's concept of psychical locality, in which the unconscious is described as "the other scene". "It is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child," Dylan Evans explains, "it is she who receives the child's primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message". The castration complex is formed when the child discovers that this other is not complete because there is a "lack (manque)" in the other. This means that there is always a signifier missing from the trove of signifiers constituted by the other. Lacan illustrates this incomplete other graphically by striking a bar through the symbol "A"; hence another name for the castrated, incomplete other is the "barred other". Phallus. Feminist thinkers have both utilised and criticised Lacan's concepts of castration and the phallus. Feminists such as Avital Ronell, Jane Gallop, and Elizabeth Grosz, have interpreted Lacan's work as opening up new possibilities for feminist theory. Some feminists have argued that Lacan's phallocentric analysis provides a useful means of understanding gender biases and imposed roles, while others, most notably Luce Irigaray, accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. For Irigaray, the phallus does not define a single axis of gender by its presence or absence; instead, gender has two positive poles. Like Irigaray, French philosopher Jacques Derrida, in criticizing Lacan's concept of castration, discusses the phallus in a chiasmus with the hymen, as both one and other. Three orders (plus one). The imaginary. The imaginary is the field of images and imagination. The main illusions of this order are synthesis, autonomy, duality, and resemblance. Lacan thought that the relationship created within the mirror stage between the ego and the reflected image means that the ego and the imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: "alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order." This relationship is also narcissistic. In "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis", Lacan argues that the Symbolic order structures the visual field of the imaginary, which means that it involves a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is the foundation of the symbolic, the signified and signification are part of the imaginary order. Language has symbolic and imaginary connotations—in its imaginary aspect, language is the "wall of language" that inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. The imaginary, however, is rooted in the subject's relationship with his or her own body (the image of the body). In "Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real", Lacan argues that in the sexual plane the imaginary appears as sexual display and courtship love. Insofar as identification with the analyst is the objective of analysis, Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the imaginary order. Instead, Lacan proposes the use of the symbolic to dislodge the disabling fixations of the imaginary—the analyst transforms the images into words. "The use of the Symbolic," he argued, "is the only way for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification." The Symbolic. In his Seminar IV, "La relation d'objet", Lacan argues that the concepts of "Law" and "Structure" are unthinkable without language—thus the Symbolic is a linguistic dimension. This order is not equivalent to language, however, since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. The dimension proper to language in the Symbolic is that of the signifier—that is, a dimension in which elements have no positive existence, but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences. The Symbolic is also the field of radical alterity—that is, the Other; the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. It is the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. The Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts of death and lack (manque) connive to make of the pleasure principle the regulator of the distance from the Thing ("das Ding an sich") and the death drive that goes "beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition"—"the death drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order." By working in the Symbolic order, the analyst is able to produce changes in the subjective position of the analysand. These changes will produce imaginary effects because the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic. The Real. Lacan's concept of the Real dates back to 1936 and his doctoral thesis on psychosis. It was a term that was popular at the time, particularly with Émile Meyerson, who referred to it as "an ontological absolute, a true being-in-itself". Lacan returned to the theme of the Real in 1953 and continued to develop it until his death. The Real, for Lacan, is not synonymous with reality. Not only opposed to the Imaginary, the Real is also exterior to the Symbolic. Unlike the latter, which is constituted in terms of oppositions (i.e. presence/absence), "there is no absence in the Real." Whereas the Symbolic opposition "presence/absence" implies the possibility that something may be missing from the Symbolic, "the Real is always in its place." If the Symbolic is a set of differentiated elements (signifiers), the Real in itself is undifferentiated—it bears no fissure. The Symbolic introduces "a cut in the real" in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things—things originally confused in the "here and now" of the all in the process of coming into being." The Real is that which is outside language and that resists symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan defines the Real as "the impossible" because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, and impossible to attain. It is this resistance to symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality. Finally, the Real is the object of anxiety, insofar as it lacks any possible mediation and is "the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence." The Sinthome. The term "sinthome" () was introduced by Jacques Lacan in his seminar "Le sinthome" (1975–76). According to Lacan, "sinthome" is the Latin way (1495 Rabelais, IV,63) of spelling the Greek origin of the French word "symptôme", meaning symptom. The seminar is a continuing elaboration of his topology, extending the previous seminar's focus ("RSI") on the Borromean Knot and an exploration of the writings of James Joyce. Lacan redefines the psychoanalytic symptom in terms of his topology of the subject. In "Psychoanalysis and its Teachings" ("Écrits") Lacan views the symptom as inscribed in a writing process, not as ciphered message which was the traditional notion. In his seminar "L'angoisse" (1962–63) he states that the symptom does not call for interpretation: in itself it is not a call to the Other but a pure jouissance addressed to no one. This is a shift from the linguistic definition of the symptom — as a signifier — to his assertion that "the symptom can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys ("jouit") the unconscious in so far as the unconscious determines the subject." He goes from conceiving the symptom as a message which can be deciphered by reference to the unconscious structured like a language to seeing it as the trace of the particular modality of the subject's "jouissance". Desire. Lacan's concept of desire is related to Hegel's "Begierde", a term that implies a continuous force, and therefore somehow differs from Freud's concept of "Wunsch". Lacan's desire refers always to unconscious desire because it is unconscious desire that forms the central concern of psychoanalysis. The aim of psychoanalysis is to lead the analysand to recognize his/her desire and by doing so to uncover the truth about his/her desire. However this is possible only if desire is articulated in speech: "It is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term." And again in "The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis": "...what is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence. The subject should come to recognize and to name her/his desire. But it isn't a question of recognizing something that could be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world." The truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, although discourse is never able to articulate the entire truth about desire, whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover or surplus. Lacan distinguishes desire from need and from demand. Need is a biological instinct where the subject depends on the Other to satisfy its own needs: in order to get the Other's help "need" must be articulated in "demand." But the presence of the Other not only ensures the satisfaction of the "need", it also represents the Other's love. Consequently, "demand" acquires a double function: on the one hand, it articulates "need", and on the other, acts as a "demand for love." Even after the "need" articulated in demand is satisfied, the "demand for love" remains unsatisfied since the Other cannot provide the unconditional love that the subject seeks. "Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second." Desire is a surplus, a leftover, produced by the articulation of need in demand: "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need." Unlike need, which can be satisfied, desire can never be satisfied: it is constant in its pressure and eternal. The attainment of desire does not consist in being fulfilled but in its reproduction as such. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, "desire's "raison d'être" is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire." Lacan also distinguishes between desire and the drives: desire is one and drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire. Lacan's concept of "objet petit a" is the object of desire, although this object is not that towards which desire tends, but rather the cause of desire. Desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack (manque). In "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis" Lacan argues that "man's desire is the desire of the Other." This entails the following: Last but not least for Lacan the first person who occupies the place of the Other is the mother and at first the child is at her mercy. Only when the father articulates desire with the law by castrating the mother, the subject is liberated from the mother's desire. Drive. Lacan maintains Freud's distinction between drive ("Trieb") and instinct ("Instinkt"). Drives differ from biological needs because they can never be satisfied and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually around it. He argues that the purpose of the drive ("Triebziel") is not to reach a goal but to follow its aim, meaning "the way itself" instead of "the final destination", that is to circle around the object. The purpose of the drive is to return to its circular path and the true source of jouissance is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit. Lacan posits the drives as both cultural and symbolic constructs—to him, "the drive is not a given, something archaic, primordial." He incorporates the four elements of the drives as defined by Freud (the pressure, the end, the object and the source) to his theory of the drive's circuit: the drive originates in the erogenous zone, circles round the object, and returns to the erogenous zone. Three grammatical voices structure this circuit: The active and reflexive voices are autoerotic—they lack a subject. It is only when the drive completes its circuit with the passive voice that a new subject appears, implying that prior to that instance, there was not subject. Despite being the "passive" voice, the drive is essentially active: "to make oneself be seen" rather than "to be seen." The circuit of the drive is the only way for the subject to transgress the pleasure principle. To Freud sexuality is composed of partial drives (i.e. the oral or the anal drives) each specified by a different erotogenic zone. At first these partial drives function independently (i.e. the polymorphous perversity of children), it is only in puberty that they become organized under the aegis of the genital organs. Lacan accepts the partial nature of drives, but 1) rejects the notion that partial drives can ever attain any complete organization: the primacy of the genital zone, if achieved, is always precarious; and 2) he argues that drives are partial in that they only represent sexuality partially not in the sense that they are a part of the whole. Drives do not represent the reproductive function of sexuality but only the dimension of jouissance. Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive (the erogenous zones are the lips, the partial object the breast, the verb is "to suck"), the anal drive (the anus and the faeces, "to shit"), the scopic drive (the eyes and the gaze, "to see") and the invocatory drive (the ears and the voice, "to hear"). The first two drives relate to demand and the last two to desire. The notion of dualism is maintained throughout Freud's various reformulations of the drive-theory. From the initial opposition between sexual drives and ego-drives (self-preservation) to the final one between the life drives ("Lebenstriebe") and the death drives ("Todestriebe"). Lacan retains Freud's dualism but in terms of an opposition between the symbolic and the imaginary and not referred to different kinds of drives. For Lacan all drives are sexual drives, and every drive is a death drive ("pulsion de mort") since every drive is excessive, repetitive and destructive. The drives are closely related to desire since both originate in the field of the subject. But they are not to be confused: drives are the partial aspects in which desire is realized—desire is one and undivided, whereas the drives are its partial manifestations. A drive is a demand that is not caught up in the dialectical mediation of desire; drive is a "mechanical" insistence that is not ensnared in demand's dialectical mediation. Lacan on error and knowledge. Building on Freud's "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life", Lacan long argued that "every unsuccessful act is a successful, not to say 'well-turned', discourse", highlighting as well "sudden transformations of errors into truths, which seemed to be due to nothing more than perseverance". In a late seminar, he generalised more fully the psychoanalytic discovery of "truth—arising from misunderstanding", so as to maintain that "the subject is naturally erring... discourse structures alone give him his moorings and reference points, signs identify and orient him; if he neglects, forgets, or loses them, he is condemned to err anew". Because of "the alienation to which speaking beings are subjected due to their being in language", to survive "one must let oneself be taken in by signs and become the dupe of a discourse... [of] fictions organized in to a discourse". For Lacan, with "masculine knowledge irredeemably an erring", the individual "must thus allow himself to be fooled by these signs to have a chance of getting his bearings amidst them; he must place and maintain himself in the wake of a discourse... become the dupe of a discourse... "les non-dupes errent"". Lacan comes close here to one of the points where "very occasionally he sounds like Thomas Kuhn (whom he never mentions)", with Lacan's "discourse" resembling Kuhn's "paradigm" seen as "the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community". Clinical contributions. Variable-length session. The "variable-length psychoanalytic session" was one of Lacan's crucial clinical innovations, and a key element in his conflicts with the IPA, to whom his "innovation of reducing the fifty-minute analytic hour to a Delphic seven or eight minutes (or sometimes even to a single oracular "parole" murmured in the waiting-room)" was unacceptable. Lacan's variable-length sessions lasted anywhere from a few minutes (or even, if deemed appropriate by the analyst, a few seconds) to several hours. This practice replaced the classical Freudian "fifty minute hour". With respect to what he called "the cutting up of the 'timing'", Lacan asked the question: "Why make an intervention impossible at this point, which is consequently privileged in this way?" By allowing the analyst's intervention on timing, the variable-length session removed the patient's—or, technically, "the analysand's"—former certainty as to the length of time that they would be on the couch. When Lacan adopted the practice, "the psychoanalytic establishment were scandalized"—and, given that "between 1979 and 1980 he saw an average of ten patients an hour", it is perhaps not hard to see why: "psychoanalysis reduced to zero", if no less lucrative. At the time of his original innovation, Lacan described the issue as concerning "the systematic use of shorter sessions in certain analyses, and in particular in training analyses"; and in practice it was certainly a shortening of the session around the so-called "critical moment" which took place, so that critics wrote that 'everyone is well aware what is meant by the deceptive phrase "variable length"... sessions systematically reduced to just a few minutes'. Irrespective of the theoretical merits of breaking up patients' expectations, it was clear that "the Lacanian analyst never wants to 'shake up' the routine by keeping them for more rather than less time". Lacan's shorter sessions enabled him to take many more clients than therapists using orthodox Freudian methods, and this growth continued as Lacan's students and followers adopted the same practice. Accepting the importance of "the critical moment when insight arises", object relations theory would nonetheless quietly suggest that "if the analyst does not provide the patient with space in which nothing "needs" to happen there is no space in which something "can" happen". Julia Kristeva, if in very different language, would concur that "Lacan, alert to the scandal of the timeless intrinsic to the analytic experience, was mistaken in wanting to ritualize it as a technique of scansion (short sessions)". Writings and writing style. Most of Lacan's psychoanalytic writings from the forties through to the early sixties were compiled with an index of concepts by Jacques-Alain Miller in the 1966 collection, titled simply "Écrits". Published in French by Éditions du Seuil, they were later issued as a two-volume set (1970/1) with a new "Preface". A selection of the writings (chosen by Lacan himself) were translated by Alan Sheridan and published by Tavistock Press in 1977. The full 35-text volume appeared for the first time in English in Bruce Fink's translation published by Norton & Co. (2006). The "Écrits" were included on the list of 100 most influential books of the 20th century compiled and polled by the broadsheet "Le Monde". Lacan's writings from the late sixties and seventies (thus subsequent to the 1966 collection) were collected posthumously, along with some early texts from the nineteen thirties, in the Éditions du Seuil volume "Autres écrits" (2001). Although most of the texts in "Écrits" and "Autres écrits" are closely related to Lacan's lectures or lessons from his Seminar, more often than not the style is denser than Lacan's oral delivery, and a clear distinction between the writings and the transcriptions of the oral teaching is evident to the reader. Jacques-Alain Miller is the sole editor of Lacan's seminars, which contain the majority of his life's work. "There has been considerable controversy over the accuracy or otherwise of the transcription and editing", as well as over "Miller's refusal to allow any critical or annotated edition to be published". Despite Lacan's status as a major figure in the history of psychoanalysis, some of his seminars remain unpublished. Since 1984, Miller has been regularly conducting a series of lectures, "L'orientation lacanienne." Miller's teachings have been published in the US by the journal "Lacanian Ink." Lacan's writing is notoriously difficult, due in part to the repeated Hegelian/Kojèvean allusions, wide theoretical divergences from other psychoanalytic and philosophical theory, and an obscure prose style. For some, "the impenetrability of Lacan's prose... [is] too often regarded as profundity precisely because it cannot be understood". Arguably at least, "the imitation of his style by other 'Lacanian' commentators" has resulted in "an obscurantist antisystematic tradition in Lacanian literature". Though a major influence on psychoanalysis in France and parts of Latin America, Lacan's influence on clinical psychology in the English-speaking world is negligible, where his ideas are best known in the arts and humanities. However, there are Lacanian psychoanalytic societies in both North America and the United Kingdom that carry on his work. One example of Lacan's work being practiced in the United States is found in the works of Annie G. Rogers ("A Shining Affliction"; "The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma"), which credit Lacanian theory for many therapeutic insights in successfully treating sexually abused young women. Lacan's work has also reached Quebec where The Interdisciplinary Freudian Group for Research and Clinical and Cultural Interventions (GIFRIC) claims that they have used a modified form of Lacanian psychoanalysis in successfully treating psychosis in many of its patients, a task once thought to be unsuited for psychoanalysis, even by psychoanalysts themselves. Legacy and criticism. In his introduction to the 1994 Penguin edition of Lacan's "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis", translator and historian David Macey describes Lacan as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". His ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, 20th-century French philosophy, film theory, and clinical psychoanalysis. In "Fashionable Nonsense" (1997), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont criticize Lacan's use of terms from mathematical fields such as topology, accusing him of "superficial erudition" and of abusing scientific concepts that he does not understand, accusing him of producing statements that are not even wrong. However, they note that they do not want to enter into the debate over the purely psychoanalytic part of Lacan's work. Other critics have dismissed Lacan's work wholesale. called it an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish", and quoted linguist Noam Chomsky's opinion that Lacan was an "amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan". The former Lacanian analyst Dylan Evans (who published a dictionary of Lacanian terms in 1996) eventually dismissed Lacanianism as lacking a sound scientific basis and as harming rather than helping patients, and has criticized Lacan's followers for treating his writings as "holy writ". Richard Webster has decried what he sees as Lacan's obscurity, arrogance, and the resultant "Cult of Lacan". Others have been more forceful still, describing him as "The Shrink from Hell" and listing the many associates—from lovers and family to colleagues, patients, and editors—left damaged in his wake. Roger Scruton included Lacan in his book "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left", and named him as the only 'fool' included in the book—his other targets merely being misguided or frauds. His type of charismatic authority has been linked to the many conflicts among his followers and in the analytic schools he was involved with. His intellectual style has also come in for much criticism. Eclectic in his use of sources, Lacan has been seen as concealing his own thought behind the apparent explication of that of others. Thus his "return to Freud" was called by Malcolm Bowie "a complete pattern of dissenting assent to the ideas of Freud Lacan's argument is conducted on Freud's behalf and, at the same time, against him". Bowie has also suggested that Lacan suffered from both a love of system and a deep-seated opposition to all forms of system. Many feminist thinkers have criticised Lacan's thought. Philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray accuses Lacan of perpetuating phallocentric mastery in philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse. Others have echoed this accusation, seeing Lacan as trapped in the very phallocentric mastery his language ostensibly sought to undermine. The result—Castoriadis would maintain—was to make all thought depend upon himself, and thus to stifle the capacity for independent thought among all those around him. Their difficulties were only reinforced by what Didier Anzieu described as a kind of teasing lure in Lacan's discourse; "fundamental truths to be revealed but always at some further point". This was perhaps an aspect of the sadistic narcissism that feminists especially accused Lacan of. Claims surrounding misogynistic tendencies were further fueled when his wife Sylvia Lacan refers to her late husband as a "domestic tyrant," during a series of interviews conducted by anthropologist Jamer Hunt. In a 2012 interview with "Veterans Unplugged", Noam Chomsky said: "quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential." Works. Selected works published in English listed below. More complete listings can be found at Lacan.com.

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Manfred Frank Manfred Frank (born March 22, 1945) is a German philosopher, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen. His work focuses on German idealism, romanticism, and the concepts of subjectivity and self-consciousness. His 950-page study of German romanticism, "Unendliche Annäherung", has been described as "the most comprehensive and thoroughgoing study of early German romanticism" and "surely one of the most important books from the post-War period on the history of German philosophy." He has also written at length on analytic philosophy and recent French philosophy. Life. Frank was born in Elberfeld, Germany, and studied philosophy at the University of Heidelberg under teachers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Löwith, Ernst Tugendhat, and Dieter Henrich. After teaching at the University of Düsseldorf from 1971 to 1982, and at the University of Geneva from 1982 to 1987, Frank accepted a position at Tübingen in 1987. He is a specialist in the philosophy of literature. Selected works. Books. He is the author of a wide range of books published in German, French, and English, including:

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Peter Alward Peter Wallace Brannen Alward (born 1964) is a Canadian philosopher. He is a Professor in Philosophy and the Department Head in Philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan. He is known for his works on philosophy of fiction, philosophy of art and environmental philosophy. In 2016 Alward was awarded Tenured Professor Essay Prize by The Canadian Philosophical Association.

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Friedrich Schlegel Karl Wilhelm Friedrich (after 1814: von) Schlegel (; ; 10 March 1772 – 12 January 1829) was a German poet, literary critic, philosopher, philologist, and Indologist. With his older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was one of the main figures of Jena Romanticism. Born into a fervently Protestant family, Schlegel rejected Christianity as a young man in favor of atheism and individualism. He entered university to study law but instead focused on classical literature. He began a career as a writer and lecturer, and founded journals such as "Athenaeum". In 1808 Schlegel converted to Catholicism. His religious conversion ultimately led to his estrangement from family and old friends. He moved to Austria in 1809, where he became a diplomat and journalist in service of Klemens von Metternich, the Foreign Minister of the Austrian Empire. Schlegel died in 1829, at the age of 56. Schlegel was a promoter of the Romantic movement and inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Adam Mickiewicz and Kazimierz Brodziński. The first to notice what became known as Grimm's law, Schlegel was a pioneer in Indo-European studies, comparative linguistics, and morphological typology, publishing in 1819 the first theory linking the Indo-Iranian and German languages under the Aryan group. Life and work. Karl Friedrich von Schlegel was born on 10 March 1772 at Hanover, where his father, Johann Adolf Schlegel, was the pastor at the Lutheran Market Church. For two years he studied law at Göttingen and Leipzig, and he met with Friedrich Schiller. In 1793 he devoted himself entirely to literary work. In 1796 he moved to Jena, where his brother August Wilhelm lived, and here he collaborated with Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Fichte, and Caroline Schelling, who married August Wilhelm. Novalis and Schlegel had a famous conversation about German idealism. In 1797 he quarreled with Schiller, who did not like his polemic work. Schlegel published "Die Griechen und Römer" (The Greeks and Romans), which was followed by "Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und Römer" (History of the Poesy of the Greeks and Romans) (1798). Then he turned to Dante, Goethe, and Shakespeare. In Jena he and his brother founded the journal "Athenaeum", contributing fragments, aphorisms, and essays in which the principles of the Romantic school are most definitely stated. They are now generally recognized as the deepest and most significant expressions of the subjective idealism of the early Romanticists. After a controversy, Friedrich decided to move to Berlin. There he lived with Friedrich Schleiermacher and met Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen, and his future wife, Dorothea Veit, a daughter of Moses Mendelssohn and the mother of Johannes and Philipp Veit. In 1799 he published "Lucinde", an eccentric and unfinished novel, which is remarkable as an attempt to transfer to practical ethics the Romantic demand for complete individual freedom. "Lucinde", in which he extolled the union of sensual and spiritual love as an allegory of the divine cosmic Eros, caused a great scandal by its manifest autobiographical character, mirroring his liaison with Dorothea Veit, and it contributed to the failure of his academic career in Jena where he completed his studies in 1801 and lectured as a Privatdozent on transcendental philosophy. In September 1800 he met four times with Goethe, who would later stage his tragedy "Alarcos" (1802) in Weimar, albeit with a notable lack of success. In June 1802 he arrived in Paris, where he lived in the house formerly owned by Baron d'Holbach and joined a circle including Heinrich Christoph Kolbe. He lectured on philosophy in private courses for Sulpiz Boisserée, and under the tutelage of Antoine-Léonard de Chézy and linguist Alexander Hamilton he continued to study Sanskrit and the Persian language. He edited the journal "Europa" (1803), where he published essays about Gothic architecture and the Old Masters. In April 1804 he married Dorothea Veit in the Swedish embassy in Paris, after she had undergone the requisite conversion from Judaism to Protestantism. In 1806 he and his wife went to visit Aubergenville, where his brother lived with Madame de Staël. In 1808, he published an epoch-making book, "Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier" (On the Language and Wisdom of India). Here he advanced his ideas about religion and importantly argued that a people originating from India were the founders of the first European civilizations. Schlegel compared Sanskrit with Latin, Greek, Persian and German, noting many similarities in vocabulary and grammar. The assertion of the common features of these languages is now generally accepted, albeit with significant revisions. There is less agreement about the geographic region where these precursors settled, although the Out-of-India model has generally become discredited. In 1808, he and his wife joined the Roman Catholic Church in the Cologne Cathedral. From this time on, he became more and more opposed to the principles of political and religious liberalism. He went to Vienna and in 1809 was appointed imperial court secretary at the military headquarters, editing the army newspaper and issuing fiery proclamations against Napoleon. He accompanied archduke Charles, Duke of Teschen to war and was stationed in Pest during the War of the Fifth Coalition. Here he studied the Hungarian language. Meanwhile, he had published his collected "Geschichte" (Histories) (1809) and two series of lectures, "Über die neuere Geschichte" (On Recent History) (1811) and "Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur" (On Old and New Literature) (1815). In 1814 he was knighted in the Supreme Order of Christ. Following the Congress of Vienna (1815), he was councilor of legation in the Austrian embassy at the Frankfurt Diet, but in 1818 he returned to Vienna. In 1819 he and Clemens Brentano made a trip to Rome, in the company of Metternich and Gentz. There he met with his wife and her sons. In 1820 he started a conservative Catholic magazine, "Concordia" (1820–1823), but was criticized by Metternich and by his brother August Wilhelm, then professor of Indology in Bonn and busy publishing the Bhagavad Gita. Schlegel began the issue of his "Sämtliche Werke" (Collected Works). He also delivered lectures, which were republished in his "Philosophie des Lebens" (Philosophy of Life) (1828) and in his "Philosophie der Geschichte" (Philosophy of History) (1829). He died on 12 January 1829 at Dresden, while preparing a series of lectures. Dorothea Schlegel. Friedrich Schlegel's wife, Dorothea von Schlegel, authored an unfinished romance, "Florentin" (1802), a "Sammlung romantischer Dichtungen des Mittelalters" (Collection of Romantic Poems of the Middle Ages) (2 vols., 1804), a version of "Lother und Maller" (1805), and a translation of Madame de Staël's "Corinne" (1807–1808) — all of which were issued under her husband's name. By her first marriage she had two sons, Johannes and Philipp Veit, who became eminent Catholic painters. Selected works. Letters. Friedrich Schlegel's "Sämtliche Werke" appeared in 10 vols. (1822–1825); a second edition (1846) in 55 vols. His "Prosaische Jugendschriften" (1794–1802) have been edited by J. Minor (1882, 2nd ed. 1906); there are also reprints of "Lucinde", and F. Schleiermacher's "Vertraute Briefe über Lucinde", 1800 (1907). See R. Haym, "Die romantische Schule" (1870); I. Rouge, "F. Schlegel et la genie du romantisme allemand" (1904); by the same, "Erläuterungen zu F. Schlegels „Lucinde“" (1905); M. Joachimi, "Die Weltanschauung der Romantik" (1905); W. Glawe, "Die Religion F. Schlegels" (1906); E. Kircher, "Philosophie der Romantik" (1906); M. Frank ""Unendliche Annäherung". Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik" (1997); Andrew Bowie, "From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory" (1997).

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Colin McGinn Colin McGinn (born 10 March 1950) is a British philosopher. He has held teaching posts and professorships at University College London, the University of Oxford, Rutgers University and the University of Miami. McGinn is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind, and in particular for what is known as new mysterianism, the idea that the human mind is not equipped to solve the problem of consciousness. He is the author of over 20 books on this and other areas of philosophy, including "The Character of Mind" (1982), "The Problem of Consciousness" (1991), "Consciousness and Its Objects" (2004), and "The Meaning of Disgust" (2011). In 2013 McGinn resigned from his tenured position at the University of Miami after being accused of sexual harassment by a female graduate student. The resignation touched off a debate about the prevalence of sexism and sexual harassment within academic philosophy. Early life and education. McGinn was born in West Hartlepool, a town in County Durham, England. Several of his relatives, including both grandfathers, were miners. His father, Joseph, left school to become a miner but put himself through night school and became a building manager instead. McGinn was the eldest of three children, all sons. When he was three, the family moved to Gillingham, Kent, and eight years later to Blackpool, Lancashire. Having failed his 11-plus, he attended a technical school in Kent, then a secondary modern in Blackpool, but did well enough in his O-levels to be transferred to the local grammar school for his A-levels. In 1968, he began a degree in psychology at the University of Manchester, obtaining a first-class honours degree in 1971 and an MA in 1972, also in psychology. He was admitted in 1972 to Jesus College, Oxford, at first to study for a Bachelor of Letters postgraduate degree, but switched to the Bachelor of Philosophy (BPhil) postgraduate programme on the recommendation of his advisor, Michael R. Ayers. In 1973, he was awarded the university's prestigious John Locke Prize in Mental Philosophy; one of the examiners was A.J. Ayer. He received his BPhil in 1974, writing a thesis under the supervision of Michael R. Ayers and P. F. Strawson on the semantics of Donald Davidson. Teaching career. Posts. McGinn taught at University College London for 11 years, first as a lecturer in philosophy (1974–1984), then as reader (1984–1985). In 1985, he succeeded Gareth Evans as Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at the University of Oxford, a position he held until 1990. He held visiting professorships at the University of California, Los Angeles (1979), University of Bielefeld (1982), University of Southern California (1983), Rutgers University (1984), University of Helsinki (1986), City University of New York (1988) and Princeton University (1992). In 1990, he joined the philosophy department at Rutgers as a full professor, working alongside Jerry Fodor. He stayed at Rutgers until 2005, joining the University of Miami in 2006 as Professor of Philosophy and Cooper Fellow. Sexual-harassment complaint. McGinn resigned his position at the University of Miami in January 2013, effective at the end of the calendar year, after a female graduate student complained that he had been sexually harassing her, including by text and email. These documents have since been released and include explicit references to McGinn's desire to have sex with the student. He denied any wrongdoing. Represented by Ann Olivarius, the student complained in April 2014 to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that the university had mishandled the case. She filed a lawsuit in October 2015 against the university, McGinn, and Edward Erwin, another philosopher at Miami. The complaint accused McGinn of sexual harassment, civil assault and defamation, and Erwin of defamation. It alleged that the university had violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (which requires that women have equal access to education) by failing to investigate the student's complaint adequately and by failing to protect her from retaliation, including from McGinn on his blog before his resignation came into effect. McGinn's lawyer, Andrew Berman, said that McGinn denied the claim. The lawsuit was settled in October 2016. All parties are prohibited from disclosing the terms of the settlement. The incident triggered a debate about the extent to which sexism remains prevalent in academia, particularly in academic philosophy, and the effect on students and teachers of harassment and harassment-related complaints. In 2014 McGinn was offered a visiting professorship by the philosophy department at East Carolina University, but the offer was reversed by university administrators. McGinn blamed the sexual-harassment allegations for East Carolina's decision. Writing. Philosophy of mind. McGinn has written extensively on philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language but is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind. He is known in particular for the development of the idea that human minds are incapable of solving the problem of consciousness, a position known as new mysterianism. In addition to his academic publications on consciousness – including "The Character of Mind" (1982), "The Problem of Consciousness" (1991) and "Consciousness and Its Objects" (2004) – he has written a popular introduction, "The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World" (1999). Owen Flanagan introduced the term "new mysterians" in 1991 (named after Question Mark & the Mysterians, a 1960s band) to describe McGinn's position and that of Thomas Nagel, first described in Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" (1974). McGinn introduced his position in "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?" ("Mind", 1989), and in "The Problem of Consciousness" (1991), arguing that the human mind is incapable of comprehending itself entirely. Mark Rowlands writes that the 1989 article was largely responsible for reviving the debate about phenomenal consciousness, or the nature of experience. McGinn argued in the paper for the idea of cognitive closure: A type of mind M is cognitively closed with respect to a property P (or theory T), if and only if the concept-forming procedures at M's disposal cannot extend to a grasp of P (or an understanding of T). Conceiving minds come in different kinds, equipped with varying powers and limitations, biases and blindspots, so that properties (or theories) may be accessible to some minds but not to others. What is closed to the mind of a rat may be open to the mind of a monkey, and what is open to us may be closed to the monkey. ... But such closure does not reflect adversely on the reality of the properties that lie outside the representational capacities in question; a property is no less real for not being reachable from a certain kind of perceiving and conceiving mind. Although human beings might grasp the concept of consciousness, McGinn argues that we cannot understand its causal basis: neither direct examination of consciousness nor of the brain can identify the properties that cause or provide the mechanism for consciousness, or how "technicolour phenomenology [can] arise from soggy grey matter." Thus, his answer to the hard problem of consciousness is that the answer is inaccessible to us. New, or epistemological, mysterianism is contrasted with the old, or ontological, form, namely that consciousness is inherently mysterious or supernatural. The new mysterians are not Cartesian dualists. The argument holds that human minds cannot understand consciousness, not that there is anything supernatural about it. The mind-body problem is simply "the perimeter of our conceptual anatomy making itself felt." McGinn describes this as existential naturalism. Animal rights. McGinn is a supporter of animal rights, calling our treatment of non-humans "deeply and systematically immoral." His position is that we make the mistake of seeing the non-human only in relation to the human, because of "species solipsism": the farmer sees animals as food, the pet owner as companions for humans, the activist as victims of humans, the evolutionary biologist as "gene survival machines." But "their "esse" is not human "percipi"" – "The rhino looks at us with the same skewed solipsism we bring to him," McGinn writes, "and surely we do not want to be as limited in our outlook as he is." He argues that "we need to improve our "manners"" toward animals by recognizing that they have their own lives, and that those lives ought to be respected. Novels and articles. Outside his work in philosophy, McGinn has regularly contributed reviews and short stories to the "London Review of Books" and "The New York Review of Books", and has written occasionally for "Nature", "The New York Times", "The Guardian", "The Wall Street Journal", "The Times" and "The Times Literary Supplement". He has also written two novels, "The Space Trap" (1992) and "Bad Patches" (2012). Radio and television. In 1984, McGinn discussed John Searle's Reith lectures on BBC Radio Three with Searle, Richard Gregory and Colin Blakemore. The following year, he and Sir Andrew Huxley debated animal rights with Bernard Williams as the moderator. He was interviewed for Jonathan Miller's documentary mini-series, "" (2003), later broadcast as "The Atheism Tapes" (2004). He has also appeared in eleven episodes of "Closer to Truth" hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, discussing consciousness, personal identity, free will, and materialism.

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Daniel O. Nathan Daniel Osher Nathan is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at Texas Tech University. He is known for his expertise on aesthetics, ethical theory, and philosophy of law. Views. Nathan defends an anti-intentionalist position in aesthetic interpretation and believes that intentionalism stems from a faulty analogy between an artwork and an utterance for communication.

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William Gibson William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as "cyberpunk". Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982), and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel "Neuromancer" (1984). These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s. After expanding on the story in "Neuromancer" with two more novels ("Count Zero" in 1986, and "Mona Lisa Overdrive" in 1988), thus completing the dystopic "Sprawl" trilogy, Gibson collaborated with Bruce Sterling on the alternate history novel "The Difference Engine" (1990), which became an important work of the science fiction subgenre known as "steampunk". In the 1990s, Gibson composed the "Bridge" trilogy of novels, which explored the sociological developments of near-future urban environments, postindustrial society, and late capitalism. Following the turn of the century and the events of 9/11, Gibson emerged with a string of increasingly realist novels—"Pattern Recognition" (2003), "Spook Country" (2007), and "Zero History" (2010)—which is set in a roughly contemporary world. These works saw his name reach mainstream bestseller lists for the first time. His most recent novels, "The Peripheral" (2014) and "Agency" (2020), returned to a more overt engagement with technology and recognizable science fiction themes. In 1999, "The Guardian" (UK) described Gibson as "probably the most important novelist of the past two decades," while the "Sydney Morning Herald" (Australia) called him the "noir prophet" of cyberpunk. Throughout his career, Gibson has written more than 20 short stories and 10 critically acclaimed novels (one in collaboration), contributed articles to several major publications, and collaborated extensively with performance artists, filmmakers, and musicians. His work has been cited as influencing a variety of disciplines: academia, design, film, literature, music, cyberculture, and technology. Early life. Childhood, itinerance, and adolescence. William Ford Gibson was born in the coastal city of Conway, South Carolina, and he spent most of his childhood in Wytheville, Virginia, a small town in the Appalachians where his parents had been born and raised. His family moved frequently during Gibson's youth owing to his father's position as manager of a large construction company. In Norfolk, Virginia, Gibson attended Pines Elementary School, where the teachers' lack of encouragement for him to read was a cause of dismay for his parents. While Gibson was still a young child, a little over a year into his stay at Pines Elementary, his father choked to death in a restaurant while on a business trip. His mother, unable to tell William the bad news, had someone else inform him of the death. Tom Maddox has commented that Gibson "grew up in an America as disturbing and surreal as anything J. G. Ballard ever dreamed". A few days after the death of his father, Gibson and his mother moved back from Norfolk to Wytheville. Gibson later described Wytheville as "a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted" and credits the beginnings of his relationship with science fiction, his "native literary culture", with the subsequent feeling of abrupt exile. At the age of 12, Gibson "wanted nothing more than to be a science fiction writer". He spent a few unproductive years at basketball-obsessed George Wythe High School, a time spent largely in his room listening to records and reading books. At 13, unbeknownst to his mother, he purchased an anthology of Beat generation writing, thereby gaining exposure to the writings of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs; the lattermost had a particularly pronounced effect, greatly altering Gibson's notions of the possibilities of science fiction literature. A shy, ungainly teenager, Gibson grew up in a monoculture he found "highly problematic", consciously rejected religion and took refuge in reading science fiction as well as writers such as Burroughs and Henry Miller. Becoming frustrated with his poor academic performance, Gibson's mother threatened to send him to a boarding school; to her surprise, he reacted enthusiastically. Unable to afford his preferred choice of Southern California, his then "chronically anxious and depressive" mother, who had remained in Wytheville since the death of her husband, sent him to Southern Arizona School for Boys in Tucson. He resented the structure of the private boarding school but was in retrospect grateful for its forcing him to engage socially. On the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) exams, he scored 148 out of 150 in the written section but 5 out of 150 in mathematics, to the dismay of his teachers. Draft-dodging, exile, and counterculture. After his mother's death when he was 18, Gibson left school without graduating and became very isolated for a long time, traveling to California and Europe, and immersing himself in the counterculture. In 1967, he elected to move to Canada in order "to avoid the Vietnam war draft". At his draft hearing, he honestly informed interviewers that his intention in life was to sample every mind-altering substance in existence. Gibson has observed that he "did not literally evade the draft, as they never bothered drafting me"; after the hearing he went home and purchased a bus ticket to Toronto, and left a week or two later. In the biographical documentary "No Maps for These Territories" (2000), Gibson said that his decision was motivated less by conscientious objection than by a desire to "sleep with hippie chicks" and indulge in hashish. He elaborated on the topic in a 2008 interview: After weeks of nominal homelessness, Gibson was hired as the manager of Toronto's first head shop, a retailer of drug paraphernalia. He found the city's émigré community of American draft dodgers unbearable owing to the prevalence of clinical depression, suicide, and hardcore substance abuse. He appeared, during the Summer of Love of 1967, in a CBC newsreel item about hippie subculture in Yorkville, Toronto, for which he was paid $500 – the equivalent of 20 weeks rent – which financed his later travels. Aside from a "brief, riot-torn spell" in the District of Columbia, Gibson spent the rest of the 1960s in Toronto, where he met Vancouverite Deborah Jean Thompson, with whom he subsequently traveled to Europe. Gibson has recounted that they concentrated their travels on European nations with fascist regimes and favorable exchange rates, including spending time on a Greek archipelago and in Istanbul in 1970, as they "couldn't afford to stay anywhere that had anything remotely like hard currency". The couple married and settled in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1972, with Gibson looking after their first child while they lived off his wife's teaching salary. During the 1970s, Gibson made a substantial part of his living from scouring Salvation Army thrift stores for underpriced artifacts he would then up-market to specialist dealers. Realizing that it was easier to sustain high college grades, and thus qualify for generous student financial aid, than to work, he enrolled at the University of British Columbia (UBC), earning "a desultory bachelor's degree in English" in 1977. Through studying English literature, he was exposed to a wider range of fiction than he would have read otherwise; something he credits with giving him ideas inaccessible from within the culture of science fiction, including an awareness of postmodernity. It was at UBC that he attended his first course on science fiction, taught by Susan Wood, at the end of which he was encouraged to write his first short story, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose". Early writing and the evolution of cyberpunk. After considering pursuing a master's degree on the topic of hard science fiction novels as fascist literature, Gibson discontinued writing in the year that followed graduation and, as one critic put it, expanded his collection of punk records. During this period he worked at various jobs, including a three-year stint as teaching assistant on a film history course at his alma mater. Impatient at much of what he saw at a science fiction convention in Vancouver in 1980 or 1981, Gibson found a kindred spirit in fellow panelist, punk musician and author John Shirley. The two became immediate and lifelong friends. Shirley persuaded Gibson to sell his early short stories and to take writing seriously. Through Shirley, Gibson came into contact with science fiction authors Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner; reading Gibson's work, they realized that it was, as Sterling put it, "breakthrough material" and that they needed to "put down our preconceptions and pick up on this guy from Vancouver; this [was] the way forward." Gibson met Sterling at a science fiction convention in Denver, Colorado in the autumn of 1981, where he read "Burning Chrome" – the first cyberspace short story – to an audience of four people, and later stated that Sterling "completely got it". In October 1982, Gibson traveled to Austin, Texas for ArmadilloCon, at which he appeared with Shirley, Sterling and Shiner on a panel called "Behind the Mirrorshades: A Look at Punk SF", where Shiner noted "the sense of a movement solidified". After a weekend discussing rock and roll, MTV, Japan, fashion, drugs and politics, Gibson left the cadre for Vancouver, declaring half-jokingly that "a new axis has been formed." Sterling, Shiner, Shirley and Gibson, along with Rudy Rucker, went on to form the core of the radical cyberpunk literary movement. Literary career. Early short fiction. Gibson's early writings are generally near-future stories about the influences of cybernetics and cyberspace (computer-simulated reality) technology on the human species. His themes of hi-tech shanty towns, recorded or broadcast stimulus (later to be developed into the "sim-stim" package featured so heavily in "Neuromancer"), and dystopic intermingling of technology and humanity, are already evident in his first published short story, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose", in the Summer 1977 issue of "Unearth". The latter thematic obsession was described by his friend and fellow author, Bruce Sterling, in the introduction of Gibson's short story collection "Burning Chrome", as "Gibson's classic one-two combination of lowlife and high tech." Beginning in 1981, Gibson's stories appeared in "Omni" and "Universe 11", wherein his fiction developed a bleak, "film noir" feel. He consciously distanced himself as far as possible from the mainstream of science fiction (towards which he felt "an aesthetic revulsion", expressed in "The Gernsback Continuum"), to the extent that his highest goal was to become "a minor cult figure, a sort of lesser Ballard." When Sterling started to distribute the stories, he found that "people were just genuinely baffled ... I mean they literally could not parse the guy's paragraphs ... the imaginative tropes he was inventing were just beyond people's grasp." While Larry McCaffery has commented that these early short stories displayed flashes of Gibson's ability, science fiction critic Darko Suvin has identified them as "undoubtedly [cyberpunk's] best works", constituting the "furthest horizon" of the genre. The themes which Gibson developed in the stories, the Sprawl setting of "Burning Chrome" and the character of Molly Millions from "Johnny Mnemonic" ultimately culminated in his first novel, "Neuromancer". "Neuromancer". "Neuromancer" was commissioned by Terry Carr for the second series of Ace Science Fiction Specials, which was intended to exclusively feature debut novels. Given a year to complete the work, Gibson undertook the actual writing out of "blind animal terror" at the obligation to write an entire novel – a feat which he felt he was "four or five years away from". After viewing the first 20 minutes of landmark cyberpunk film "Blade Runner" (1982) which was released when Gibson had written a third of the novel, he "figured ["Neuromancer"] was sunk, done for. Everyone would assume I'd copped my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film." He re-wrote the first two-thirds of the book twelve times, feared losing the reader's attention and was convinced that he would be "permanently shamed" following its publication; yet what resulted was a major imaginative leap forward for a first-time novelist. "Neuromancer"'s release was not greeted with fanfare, but it hit a cultural nerve, quickly becoming an underground word-of-mouth hit. It became the first winner of one science fiction "triple crown" —both Nebula and Hugo Awards as the year's best novel and Philip K. Dick Award as the best paperback original— eventually selling more than 6.5 million copies worldwide. Lawrence Person in his "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto" (1998) identified "Neuromancer" as "the archetypal cyberpunk work", and in 2005, "Time" included it in its list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923, opining that "[t]here is no way to overstate how radical ["Neuromancer"] was when it first appeared." Literary critic Larry McCaffery described the concept of the matrix in "Neuromancer" as a place where "data dance with human consciousness ... human memory is literalized and mechanized ... multi-national information systems mutate and breed into startling new structures whose beauty and complexity are unimaginable, mystical, and above all nonhuman." Gibson later commented on himself as an author, circa "Neuromancer", that "I'd buy him a drink, but I don't know if I'd loan him any money," and referred to the novel as "an adolescent's book". The success of "Neuromancer" was to effect the 35-year-old Gibson's emergence from obscurity. Sprawl trilogy, "The Difference Engine", and Bridge trilogy. Although much of Gibson's reputation has remained rooted in "Neuromancer", his work continued to evolve conceptually and stylistically. He next intended to write an unrelated postmodern space opera, titled "The Log of the Mustang Sally", but reneged on the contract with Arbor House after a falling out over the dustjacket art of their hardcover of "Count Zero". Abandoning "The Log of the Mustang Sally", Gibson instead wrote "Mona Lisa Overdrive" (1988), which in the words of Larry McCaffery "turned off the lights" on cyberpunk literature. It was a culmination of his previous two novels, set in the same universe with shared characters, thereby completing the Sprawl trilogy. The trilogy solidified Gibson's reputation, with both later novels also earning Nebula and Hugo Award and Locus SF Award nominations. The Sprawl trilogy was followed by the 1990 novel "The Difference Engine", an alternative history novel Gibson wrote in collaboration with Bruce Sterling. Set in a technologically advanced Victorian era Britain, the novel was a departure from the authors' cyberpunk roots. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1991 and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1992, and its success drew attention to the nascent steampunk literary genre of which it remains the best-known work. Gibson's second series, the "Bridge trilogy", is composed of "Virtual Light" (1993), a "darkly comic urban detective story", "Idoru" (1996), and "All Tomorrow's Parties" (1999). The first and third books in the trilogy center on San Francisco in the near future; all three explore Gibson's recurring themes of technological, physical, and spiritual transcendence in a more grounded, matter-of-fact style than his first trilogy. Salon's Andrew Leonard notes that in the Bridge trilogy, Gibson's villains change from multinational corporations and artificial intelligences of the Sprawl trilogy to the mass media – namely tabloid television and the cult of celebrity. "Virtual Light" depicts an "end-stage capitalism, in which private enterprise and the profit motive are taken to their logical conclusion", according to one review. This argument on the mass media as the natural evolution of capitalism is the opening line of the major Situationist work "The Society of the Spectacle". Leonard's review called "Idoru" a "return to form" for Gibson, while critic Steven Poole asserted that "All Tomorrow's Parties" marked his development from "science-fiction hotshot to wry sociologist of the near future." Blue Ant. After "All Tomorrow's Parties", Gibson began to adopt a more realist style of writing, with continuous narratives – "speculative fiction of the very recent past." Science fiction critic John Clute has interpreted this approach as Gibson's recognition that traditional science fiction is no longer possible "in a world lacking coherent 'nows' to continue from", characterizing it as "SF for the new century". Gibson's novels "Pattern Recognition" (2003), "Spook Country" (2007) and "Zero History" (2010) are set in the same contemporary universe — "more or less the same one we live in now" — and put Gibson's work on to mainstream bestseller lists for the first time. As well as the setting, the novels share some of the same characters, including Hubertus Bigend and Pamela Mainwaring, employees of the enigmatic marketing company Blue Ant. When asked on Twitter what this series of novels should be called ("The Bigend Trilogy? The Blue Ant Cycle? What?"), Gibson replied "I prefer 'books'. The Bigend books." However, "Blue Ant" rather than "Bigend" has become the standard signifier. At a later date, Gibson stated that he did not name his trilogies, "I wait to see what people call them," and has in 2016 used "the Blue Ant books" in a tweet. A phenomenon peculiar to this era was the independent development of annotating fansites, "PR-Otaku" and "Node Magazine", devoted to "Pattern Recognition" and "Spook Country" respectively. These websites tracked the references and story elements in the novels through online resources such as Google and Wikipedia and collated the results, essentially creating hypertext versions of the books. Critic John Sutherland characterized this phenomenon as threatening "to completely overhaul the way literary criticism is conducted". After the September 11, 2001 attacks, with about 100 pages of "Pattern Recognition" written, Gibson had to re-write the main character's backstory, which had been suddenly rendered implausible; he called it "the strangest experience I've ever had with a piece of fiction." He saw the attacks as a nodal point in history, "an experience out of culture", and "in some ways ... the true beginning of the 21st century." He is noted as one of the first novelists to use the attacks to inform his writing. Examination of cultural changes in post-September 11 America, including a resurgent tribalism and the "infantilization of society", became a prominent theme of Gibson's work. The focus of his writing nevertheless remains "at the intersection of paranoia and technology". The Jackpot books. "The Peripheral", the first in a new series of novels by William Gibson, was released on October 28, 2014. He described the story briefly in an appearance he made at the New York Public Library on April 19, 2013, and read an excerpt from the first chapter of the book entitled "The Gone Haptics." The story takes place in two eras, one about thirty years into the future and the other further in the future. Its continuation, "Agency", was released on January 21, 2020 after being delayed from an initial announced release date of December 2018. Gibson said in a New Yorker magazine article that both Trump's election and the controversy over Cambridge Analytica had caused him to rethink and revise the text. On July 17, 2020, Gibson tweeted: "Third/final volume's working title: Jackpot", but reversed course on January 21, 2021: "I don't think I'm going to call Agency's sequel Jackpot after all. Not because of ["Jackpot" by Michael Mechanic], which I look forward to reading, but because Agency was originally called Tulpagotchi. Which I still like, but would've been a different book." Graphic novels. In 2017, in between "The Peripheral" and "Agency", Gibson's comic/graphic novel "Archangel" was published. Both "Archangel" and "The Peripheral" contain time travel (of sorts), but Gibson has clarified that the works are not related: "They're not "same universe". The Splitter and trans-continual virtuality are different mechanisms (different plot mechanisms too)." The next year, Dark Horse Comics began releasing Johnnie Christmas' adaptation of Gibson's "Alien 3" script in five parts, resulting in a hardcover collection being published in 2019. Collaborations, adaptations, and miscellanea. Literary collaborations. Three of the stories that later appeared in "Burning Chrome" were written in collaboration with other authors: "The Belonging Kind" (1981) with John Shirley, "Red Star, Winter Orbit" (1983) with Sterling, and "Dogfight" (1985) with Michael Swanwick. Gibson had previously written the foreword to Shirley's 1980 novel "City Come A-walkin" and the pair's collaboration continued when Gibson wrote the introduction to Shirley's short story collection "Heatseeker" (1989). Shirley convinced Gibson to write a story for the television series "Max Headroom" for which Shirley had written several scripts, but the network canceled the series. Gibson and Sterling collaborated again on the short story "The Angel of Goliad" in 1990, which they soon expanded into the novel-length alternate history story "The Difference Engine" (1990). The two were later "invited to dream in public" (Gibson) in a joint address to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Convocation on Technology and Education in 1993 ("the Al Gore people"), in which they argued against the digital divide and "appalled everyone" by proposing that all schools be put online, with education taking place over the Internet. In a 2007 interview, Gibson revealed that Sterling had an idea for "a second recursive science novel that was just a wonderful idea", but that Gibson was unable to pursue the collaboration because he was not creatively free at the time. In 1993, Gibson contributed lyrics and featured as a guest vocalist on Yellow Magic Orchestra's "Technodon" album, and wrote lyrics to the track "Dog Star Girl" for Deborah Harry's "Debravation". Film adaptations, screenplays, and appearances. Gibson was first solicited to work as a screenwriter after a film producer discovered a waterlogged copy of "Neuromancer" on a beach at a Thai resort. His early efforts to write film scripts failed to manifest themselves as finished product; "Burning Chrome" (which was to be directed by Kathryn Bigelow) and "Neuro-Hotel" were two attempts by the author at film adaptations that were never made. In the late 1980s he wrote an early version of "Alien 3" (which he later characterized as "Tarkovskian"), few elements of which survived in the final version. In 2018-19, Dark Horse Comics released a five-part adaptation of Gibson's "Alien 3" script, illustrated and adapted by Johnnie Christmas. In 2019, Audible released an audio drama of Gibson's script, adapted by Dirk Maggs and with Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen reprising their roles. Gibson's early involvement with the film industry extended far beyond the confines of the Hollywood blockbuster system. At one point, he collaborated on a script with Kazakh director Rashid Nugmanov after an American producer had expressed an interest in a Soviet-American collaboration to star Soviet rock musician Viktor Tsoi. Despite being occupied with writing a novel, Gibson was reluctant to abandon the "wonderfully odd project" which involved "ritualistic gang-warfare in some sort of sideways-future Leningrad" and sent Jack Womack to Russia in his stead. Rather than producing a motion picture, a prospect that ended with Tsoi's death in a car crash, Womack's experiences in Russia ultimately culminated in his novel "Let's Put the Future Behind Us" and informed much of the Russian content of Gibson's "Pattern Recognition". A similar fate befell Gibson's collaboration with Japanese filmmaker Sogo Ishii in 1991, a film they planned on shooting in the Walled City of Kowloon until the city was demolished in 1993. Adaptations of Gibson's fiction have frequently been optioned and proposed, to limited success. Two of the author's short stories, both set in the Sprawl trilogy universe, have been loosely adapted as films: "Johnny Mnemonic" (1995) with screenplay by Gibson and starring Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundgren and Takeshi Kitano, and "New Rose Hotel" (1998), starring Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, and Asia Argento. The former was the first time in history that a book was launched simultaneously as a film and a CD-ROM interactive video game. , Vincenzo Natali still hoped to bring "Neuromancer" to the screen, after some years in development hell. "Count Zero" was at one point being developed as "The Zen Differential" with director Michael Mann attached, and the third novel in the Sprawl trilogy, "Mona Lisa Overdrive", has also been optioned and bought. An anime adaptation of "Idoru" was announced as in development in 2006, and "Pattern Recognition" was in the process of development by director Peter Weir, although according to Gibson the latter is no longer attached to the project. Announced at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2015 is an adaptation of Gibson's short story "Dogfight" by BAFTA award-winning writer and director Simon Pummell. Written by Gibson and Michael Swanwick and first published in Omni in July 1985, the film is being developed by British producer Janine Marmot at Hot Property Films. Television is another arena in which Gibson has collaborated; he co-wrote with friend Tom Maddox, "The X-Files" episodes "Kill Switch" and "First Person Shooter", broadcast in the U.S. on 20th Century Fox Television in 1998 and 2000. In 1998 he contributed the introduction to the spin-off publication "Art of the X-Files". Gibson made a cameo appearance in the television miniseries "Wild Palms" at the behest of creator Bruce Wagner. Director Oliver Stone had borrowed heavily from Gibson's novels to make the series, and in the aftermath of its cancellation Gibson contributed an article, "Where The Holograms Go", to the "Wild Palms Reader". He accepted another acting role in 2002, appearing alongside Douglas Coupland in the short film "Mon Amour Mon Parapluie" in which the pair played philosophers. Appearances in fiction aside, Gibson was the focus of a biographical documentary by Mark Neale in 2000 called "No Maps for These Territories". The film follows Gibson over the course of a drive across North America discussing various aspects of his life, literary career and cultural interpretations. It features interviews with Jack Womack and Bruce Sterling, as well as recitations from "Neuromancer" by Bono and The Edge. Last Studio Standing Inc., a Canadian-based animation studio, acquired the rights to "Hinterlands" in 2016 and announced that they will be creating both a theatrical short film and a television series. The studio, which specializes in adult and science fiction based animation, has the theatrical short slated for a 2018 release. As of April 2018, Amazon is developing a series based on Gibson's novel "The Peripheral". Exhibitions, poetry, and performance art. Gibson has contributed text to be integrated into a number of performance art pieces. In October 1989, Gibson wrote text for such a collaboration with acclaimed sculptor and future "Johnny Mnemonic" director Robert Longo titled "Dream Jumbo: Working the Absolutes", which was displayed in Royce Hall, University of California Los Angeles. Three years later, Gibson contributed original text to "Memory Palace", a performance show featuring the theater group La Fura dels Baus at Art Futura '92, Barcelona, which featured images by Karl Sims, Rebecca Allen, Mark Pellington with music by Peter Gabriel and others. It was at Art Futura '92 that Gibson met Charlie Athanas, who would later act as dramaturg and "cyberprops" designer on Steve Pickering and Charley Sherman's adaptation of "Burning Chrome" for the Chicago stage. Gibson's latest contribution was in 1997, a collaboration with critically acclaimed Vancouver-based contemporary dance company Holy Body Tattoo and Gibson's friend and future webmaster Christopher Halcrow. In 1990, Gibson contributed to "Visionary San Francisco", an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art shown from June 14 to August 26. He wrote a short story, "Skinner's Room", set in a decaying San Francisco in which the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge was closed and taken over by the homeless – a setting Gibson then detailed in the Bridge trilogy. The story inspired a contribution to the exhibition by architects Ming Fung and Craig Hodgetts that envisioned a San Francisco in which the rich live in high-tech, solar-powered towers, above the decrepit city and its crumbling bridge. The architects exhibit featured Gibson on a monitor discussing the future and reading from "Skinner's Room". "The New York Times" hailed the exhibition as "one of the most ambitious, and admirable, efforts to address the realm of architecture and cities that any museum in the country has mounted in the last decade", despite calling Ming and Hodgetts's reaction to Gibson's contribution "a powerful, but sad and not a little cynical, work". A slightly different version of the short story was featured a year later in "Omni". Cryptography. A particularly well-received work by Gibson was "Agrippa (a book of the dead)" (1992), a 300-line semi-autobiographical electronic poem that was his contribution to a collaborative project with artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr. Gibson's text focused on the ethereal nature of memories (the title refers to a photo album) and was originally published on a 3.5" floppy disk embedded in the back of an artist's book containing etchings by Ashbaugh (intended to fade from view once the book was opened and exposed to light — they never did, however). Gibson commented that Ashbaugh's design "eventually included a supposedly self-devouring floppy-disk intended to display the text only once, then eat itself." Contrary to numerous colorful reports, the diskettes were never actually "hacked"; instead the poem was manually transcribed from a surreptitious videotape of a public showing in Manhattan in December 1992, and released on the MindVox bulletin board the next day; this is the text that circulated widely on the Internet. Since its debut in 1992, the mystery of "Agrippa" remained hidden for 20 years. Although many had tried to hack the code and decrypt the program, the uncompiled source code was lost long ago. Alan Liu and his team at "The Agrippa Files" created an extensive website with tools and resources to crack the Agrippa Code. They collaborated with Matthew Kirschenbaum at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Digital Forensics Lab, and Quinn DuPont, a PhD student of cryptography from the University of Toronto, in calling for the aid of cryptographers to figure out how the program works by creating "Cracking the Agrippa Code: The Challenge", which enlisted participants to solve the intentional scrambling of the poem in exchange for prizes. The code was successfully cracked by Robert Xiao in late July 2012. Essays and short-form nonfiction. Gibson is a sporadic contributor of non-fiction articles to newspapers and journals. He has occasionally contributed longer-form articles to "Wired" and of op-eds to "The New York Times", and has written for "The Observer", "Addicted to Noise", "New York Times Magazine", "Rolling Stone", and "Details Magazine". His first major piece of nonfiction, the article "Disneyland with the Death Penalty", attracted a spirited critical response. He commenced writing a blog in January 2003, providing voyeuristic insights into his reaction to "Pattern Recognition", but abated in September of the same year owing to concerns that it might negatively affect his creative process. Gibson recommenced blogging in October 2004, and during the process of writing "Spook Country" – and to a lesser extent "Zero History" – frequently posted short nonsequential excerpts from the novel to the blog. The blog was largely discontinued by July 2009, after the writer had undertaken prolific microblogging on Twitter under the "nom de plume" "GreatDismal". In 2012, Gibson released a collection of his non-fiction works entitled "Distrust That Particular Flavor". Influence and recognition. Gibson's prose has been analyzed by a number of scholars, including a dedicated 2011 book, "". Hailed by Steven Poole of "The Guardian" in 1999 as "probably the most important novelist of the past two decades" in terms of influence, Gibson first achieved critical recognition with his debut novel, "Neuromancer". The novel won three major science fiction awards (the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award), an unprecedented achievement described by the "Mail & Guardian" as "the sci-fi writer's version of winning the Goncourt, Booker and Pulitzer prizes in the same year". "Neuromancer" gained unprecedented critical and popular attention outside science fiction, as an "evocation of life in the late 1980s", although "The Observer" noted that "it took the "New York Times" 10 years" to mention the novel. Gibson's work has received international attention from an audience that was not limited to science fiction aficionados as, in the words of Laura Miller, "readers found startlingly prophetic reflections of contemporary life in [its] fantastic and often outright paranoid scenarios." It is often situated by critics within the context of postindustrialism as, according to academic David Brande, a construction of "a mirror of existing large-scale techno-social relations", and as a narrative version of postmodern consumer culture. It is praised by critics for its depictions of late capitalism and its "rewriting of subjectivity, human consciousness and behaviour made newly problematic by technology." Tatiani Rapatzikou, writing in "The Literary Encyclopedia", identifies Gibson as "one of North America's most highly acclaimed science fiction writers". Cultural significance. In his early short fiction, Gibson is credited by Rapatzikou in "The Literary Encyclopedia" with effectively "renovating" science fiction, a genre at that time considered widely "insignificant", influencing by means of the postmodern aesthetic of his writing the development of new perspectives in science fiction studies. In the words of filmmaker Marianne Trench, Gibson's visions "struck sparks in the real world" and "determined the way people thought and talked" to an extent unprecedented in science fiction literature. The publication of "Neuromancer" (1984) hit a cultural nerve, causing Larry McCaffery to credit Gibson with virtually launching the cyberpunk movement, as "the one major writer who is original and gifted to make the whole movement seem original and gifted." Aside from their central importance to cyberpunk and steampunk fiction, Gibson's fictional works have been hailed by space historian Dwayne A. Day as some of the best examples of space-based science fiction (or "solar sci-fi"), and "probably the only ones that rise above mere escapism to be truly thought-provoking". Gibson's early novels were, according to "The Observer", "seized upon by the emerging slacker and hacker generation as a kind of road map". Through his novels, such terms as "cyberspace", "netsurfing", "ICE", "jacking in", and "neural implants" entered popular usage, as did concepts such as net consciousness, virtual interaction and "the matrix". In "Burning Chrome" (1982), he coined the term "cyberspace", referring to the "mass consensual hallucination" of computer networks. Through its use in "Neuromancer", the term gained such recognition that it became the "de facto" term for the World Wide Web during the 1990s. Artist Dike Blair has commented that Gibson's "terse descriptive phrases capture the moods which surround technologies, rather than their engineering." Gibson's work has influenced several popular musicians: references to his fiction appear in the music of Stuart Hamm, Billy Idol, Warren Zevon, Deltron 3030, Straylight Run (whose name is derived from a sequence in "Neuromancer") and Sonic Youth. U2's "Zooropa" album was heavily influenced by "Neuromancer", and the band at one point planned to scroll the text of "Neuromancer" above them on a concert tour, although this did not end up happening. Members of the band did, however, provide background music for the audiobook version of "Neuromancer" as well as appearing in "No Maps for These Territories", a biographical documentary of Gibson. He returned the favour by writing an article about the band's Vertigo Tour for "Wired" in August 2005. The band Zeromancer take their name from "Neuromancer". The film "The Matrix" (1999) drew inspiration for its title, characters and story elements from the Sprawl trilogy. The characters of Neo and Trinity in "The Matrix" are similar to Bobby Newmark ("Count Zero") and Molly ("Johnny Mnemonic", "Neuromancer"). Like Turner, protagonist of Gibson's "Count Zero", characters in "The Matrix" download instructions (to fly a helicopter and to "know kung fu", respectively) directly into their heads, and both "Neuromancer" and "The Matrix" feature artificial intelligences which strive to free themselves from human control. Critics have identified marked similarities between "Neuromancer" and the film's cinematography and tone. In spite of his initial reticence about seeing the film on its release, Gibson later described it as "arguably the ultimate 'cyberpunk' artifact." In 2008 he received honorary doctorates from Simon Fraser University and Coastal Carolina University. He was inducted by Science Fiction Hall of Fame that same year, presented by his close friend and collaborator Jack Womack. Visionary influence and prescience. In "Neuromancer", Gibson first used the term "matrix" to refer to the visualized Internet, two years after the nascent Internet was formed in the early 1980s from the computer networks of the 1970s. Gibson thereby imagined a worldwide communications network years before the origin of the World Wide Web, although related notions had previously been imagined by others, including science fiction writers. At the time he wrote "Burning Chrome", Gibson "had a hunch that [the Internet] would change things, in the same way that the ubiquity of the automobile changed things." In 1995, he identified the advent, evolution and growth of the Internet as "one of the most fascinating and unprecedented human achievements of the century", a new kind of civilization that is – in terms of significance — on a par with the birth of cities, and in 2000 predicted it would lead to the death of the nation state. Observers contend that Gibson's influence on the development of the Web reached beyond prediction; he is widely credited with creating an iconography for the information age, long before the embrace of the Internet by the mainstream. Gibson introduced, in "Neuromancer", the notion of the "meatpuppet", and is credited with inventing—conceptually rather than participatorally—the phenomenon of virtual sex. His influence on early pioneers of desktop environment digital art has been acknowledged, and he holds an honorary doctorate from Parsons The New School for Design. Steven Poole claims that in writing the Sprawl trilogy Gibson laid the "conceptual foundations for the explosive real-world growth of virtual environments in video games and the Web". In his afterword to the 2000 re-issue of "Neuromancer", fellow author Jack Womack suggests that Gibson's vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the Internet (and the Web particularly) developed, following the publication of "Neuromancer" in 1984, asking "what if the act of writing it down, in fact, "brought it about"?" Gibson scholar Tatiani G. Rapatzikou has commented, in "Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson", on the origin of the notion of cyberspace: In his Sprawl and Bridge trilogies, Gibson is credited with being one of the few observers to explore the portents of the information age for notions of the sociospatial structuring of cities. Not all responses to Gibson's visions have been positive, however; virtual reality pioneer Mark Pesce, though acknowledging their heavy influence on him and that "no other writer had so eloquently and emotionally affected the direction of the hacker community," dismissed them as "adolescent fantasies of violence and disembodiment." In "Pattern Recognition", the plot revolves around snippets of film footage posted anonymously to various locations on the Internet. Characters in the novel speculate about the filmmaker's identity, motives, methods and inspirations on several websites, anticipating the 2006 lonelygirl15 Internet phenomenon. However, Gibson later disputed the notion that the creators of lonelygirl15 drew influence from him. Another phenomenon anticipated by Gibson is the rise of reality television, for example in "Virtual Light", which featured a satirical extrapolated version of "COPS". When an interviewer in 1988 asked about the Bulletin Board System jargon in his writing, Gibson answered "I'd never so much as touched a PC when I wrote "Neuromancer""; he was familiar, he said, with the science-fiction community, which overlapped with the BBS community. Gibson similarly did not play computer games despite appearing in his stories. He wrote "Neuromancer" on a 1927 olive-green Hermes portable typewriter, which Gibson described as "the kind of thing Hemingway would have used in the field". By 1988 he used an Apple IIc and AppleWorks to write, with a modem ("I don't really use it for anything"), but until 1996 Gibson did not have an email address, a lack he explained at the time to have been motivated by a desire to avoid correspondence that would distract him from writing. His first exposure to a website came while writing "Idoru" when a web developer built one for Gibson. In 2007 he said, "I have a 2005 PowerBook G4, a gig of memory, wireless router. That's it. I'm anything but an early adopter, generally. In fact, I've never really been very interested in computers themselves. I don't watch them; I watch how people behave around them. That's becoming more difficult to do because everything is 'around them'." Selected works. Novels Adapted screenplays Short stories Nonfiction

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Justin Clemens Justin Clemens (born 22 April 1969) is an Australian academic known for his work on Alain Badiou, psychoanalysis, European philosophy, and contemporary Australian art and literature. He is also a published poet. Background. Clemens studied at the University of Melbourne, gaining his PhD on "Institution, aesthetics, nihilism : the Romanticism of contemporary theory" in 1999. He then lectured in Psychoanalytic Studies at Deakin University, before moving to the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne in the late 2000s where he is Senior Lecturer. Clemens is art critic for the Australian magazine "The Monthly". He has a daughter. Scholarly contributions. In his extensive published work, he writes on psychoanalysis, contemporary European philosophy, and literature. Clemens has also published poetry and prose fiction.

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Aldous Huxley Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly 50 books—both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems. Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with an undergraduate degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine "Oxford Poetry", before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962. Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism and universalism, addressing these subjects with works such as "The Perennial Philosophy" (1945)—which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism—and "The Doors of Perception" (1954)—which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel "Brave New World" (1932) and his final novel "Island" (1962), he presented his vision of dystopia and utopia, respectively. Early life. Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England, in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxley, who edited "Cornhill Magazine", and his first wife, Julia Arnold, who founded Prior's Field School. Julia was the niece of poet and critic Matthew Arnold and the sister of Mrs. Humphry Ward. Julia named him Aldous after a character in one of her sister's novels. Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic, and controversialist ("Darwin's Bulldog"). His brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists. Aldous had another brother, Noel Trevenen Huxley (1889–1914), who took his own life after a period of clinical depression. As a child, Huxley's nickname was "Ogie", short for "Ogre". He was described by his brother, Julian, as someone who frequently "[contemplated] the strangeness of things". According to his cousin and contemporary, Gervas Huxley, he had an early interest in drawing. Huxley's education began in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, after which he enrolled at Hillside School near Godalming. He was taught there by his own mother for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside he went on to Eton College. His mother died in 1908, when he was 14 (his father later remarried). He contracted the eye disease Keratitis punctata in 1911; this "left [him] practically blind for two to three years." This "ended his early dreams of becoming a doctor." In October 1913, Huxley entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied English literature. He volunteered for the British Army in January 1916, for the Great War; however, he was rejected on health grounds, being half-blind in one eye. His eyesight later partly recovered. He edited "Oxford Poetry" in 1916, and in June of that year graduated BA with first class honours. His brother Julian wrote: Following his years at Balliol, Huxley, being financially indebted to his father, decided to find employment. He taught French for a year at Eton College, where Eric Blair (who was to take the pen name George Orwell) and Steven Runciman were among his pupils. He was mainly remembered as being an incompetent schoolmaster unable to keep order in class. Nevertheless, Blair and others spoke highly of his excellent command of language. Huxley also worked for a time during the 1920s at Brunner and Mond, an advanced chemical plant in Billingham in County Durham, northeast England. According to the introduction to the latest edition of his science fiction novel "Brave New World" (1932), the experience he had there of "an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence" was an important source for the novel. Career. Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of 17 and began writing seriously in his early twenties, establishing himself as a successful writer and social satirist. His first published novels were social satires, "Crome Yellow" (1921), "Antic Hay" (1923), "Those Barren Leaves" (1925), and "Point Counter Point" (1928). "Brave New World" (1932) was his fifth novel and first dystopian work. In the 1920s he was also a contributor to "Vanity Fair" and British "Vogue" magazines. Contact with the Bloomsbury Set. During the First World War, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor near Oxford, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm labourer. There he met several Bloomsbury Group figures, including Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and Clive Bell. Later, in "Crome Yellow" (1921) he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. Jobs were very scarce, but in 1919 John Middleton Murry was reorganising the "Athenaeum" and invited Huxley to join the staff. He accepted immediately, and quickly married the Belgian refugee Maria Nys, also at Garsington. They lived with their young son in Italy part of the time during the 1920s, where Huxley would visit his friend D. H. Lawrence. Following Lawrence's death in 1930, Huxley edited Lawrence's letters (1932). Works of this period included important novels on the dehumanising aspects of scientific progress, most famously "Brave New World", and on pacifist themes (for example, "Eyeless in Gaza"). In "Brave New World", set in a dystopian London, Huxley portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning. Huxley was strongly influenced by F. Matthias Alexander, and included him as a character in "Eyeless in Gaza". Beginning in this period, Huxley began to write and edit non-fiction works on pacifist issues, including "Ends and Means", "An Encyclopedia of Pacifism", and "Pacifism and Philosophy", and was an active member of the Peace Pledge Union. Life in the United States. In 1937 Huxley moved to Hollywood with his wife Maria, son Matthew Huxley, and friend Gerald Heard. He lived in the U.S., mainly in southern California, until his death, and also for a time in Taos, New Mexico, where he wrote "Ends and Means" (published in 1937). The book contains tracts on war, religion, nationalism and ethics. Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta (Upanishad-centered philosophy), meditation, and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa. In 1938, Huxley befriended Jiddu Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. Huxley and Krishnamurti entered into an enduring exchange (sometimes edging on debate) over many years, with Krishnamurti representing the more rarefied, detached, ivory-tower perspective and Huxley, with his pragmatic concerns, the more socially and historically informed position. Huxley provided an introduction to Krishnamurti's quintessential statement, "The First and Last Freedom" (1954). Huxley also became a Vedantist in the circle of Hindu Swami Prabhavananda, and introduced Christopher Isherwood to this circle. Not long afterwards, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, "The Perennial Philosophy", which discussed the teachings of renowned mystics of the world. Huxley's book affirmed a sensibility that insists there are realities beyond the generally accepted "five senses" and that there is genuine meaning for humans beyond both sensual satisfactions and sentimentalities. Huxley became a close friend of Remsen Bird, president of Occidental College. He spent much time at the college, which is in the Eagle Rock neighbourhood of Los Angeles. The college appears as "Tarzana College" in his satirical novel "After Many a Summer" (1939). The novel won Huxley a British literary award, the 1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Huxley also incorporated Bird into the novel. During this period, Huxley earned a substantial income as a Hollywood screenwriter; Christopher Isherwood, in his autobiography "My Guru and His Disciple", states that Huxley earned more than $3,000 per week (approximately $50,000 in 2020 dollars) as a screenwriter, and that he used much of it to transport Jewish and left-wing writer and artist refugees from Hitler's Germany to the US. In March 1938, Huxley's friend Anita Loos, a novelist and screenwriter, put him in touch with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), which hired him for "Madame Curie" which was originally to star Greta Garbo and be directed by George Cukor. (Eventually, the film was completed by MGM in 1943 with a different director and cast.) Huxley received screen credit for "Pride and Prejudice" (1940) and was paid for his work on a number of other films, including "Jane Eyre" (1944). He was commissioned by Walt Disney in 1945 to write a script based on "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and the biography of the story's author, Lewis Carroll. The script was not used, however. Huxley wrote an introduction to the posthumous publication of J. D. Unwin's 1940 book "Hopousia or The Sexual and Economic Foundations of a New Society". On 21 October 1949, Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of "Nineteen Eighty-Four", congratulating him on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is." In his letter to Orwell, he predicted: In 1953, Huxley and Maria applied for United States citizenship and presented themselves for examination. When Huxley refused to bear arms for the U.S. and would not state that his objections were based on religious ideals, the only excuse allowed under the McCarran Act, the judge had to adjourn the proceedings. He withdrew his application. Nevertheless, he remained in the U.S. In 1959 Huxley turned down an offer of a Knight Bachelor by the Macmillan government without putting forward a reason; his brother Julian had been knighted in 1958, while another brother Andrew would be knighted in 1974. In the fall semester of 1960, Huxley was invited by Professor Huston Smith to be the Carnegie Visiting Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As part of the MIT centennial program of events organised by the Department of Humanities, Huxley presented a series of lectures titled, "What a Piece of Work is a Man" which concerned history, language, and art. Late-in-life perspectives. Biographer Harold H. Watts wrote that Huxley's writings in the "final and extended period of his life" are "the work of a man who is meditating on the central problems of many modern men." Huxley had deeply felt apprehensions about the future the developed world might make for itself. From these, he made some warnings in his writings and talks. In a 1958 televised interview conducted by journalist Mike Wallace, Huxley outlined several major concerns: the difficulties and dangers of world overpopulation; the tendency towards distinctly hierarchical social organisation; the crucial importance of evaluating the use of technology in mass societies susceptible to persuasion; the tendency to promote modern politicians to a naive public as well-marketed commodities. In a December 1962 letter to brother Julian, summarizing a paper he had presented in Santa Barbara, he wrote, "What I said was that if we didn't pretty quickly start thinking of human problems in ecological terms rather than in terms of power politics we should very soon be in a bad way." Huxley's engagement with Eastern wisdom traditions was entirely compatible with a strong appreciation of modern science. Biographer Milton Birnbaum wrote that Huxley "ended by embracing both science and Eastern religion." In his last book, "Literature and Science", Huxley wrote that "The ethical and philosophical implications of modern science are more Buddhist than Christian..." In "A Philosopher's Visionary Prediction," published one month before he died, Huxley endorsed training in general semantics and "the nonverbal world of culturally uncontaminated consciousness," writing that "We must learn how to be mentally silent, we must cultivate the art of pure receptivity... [T]he individual must learn to decondition himself, must be able to cut holes in the fence of verbalized symbols that hems him in." Association with Vedanta. Beginning in 1939 and continuing until his death in 1963, Huxley had an extensive association with the Vedanta Society of Southern California, founded and headed by Swami Prabhavananda. Together with Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood and other followers, he was initiated by the Swami and was taught meditation and spiritual practices. In 1944, Huxley wrote the introduction to the "Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God", translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, which was published by the Vedanta Society of Southern California. From 1941 until 1960, Huxley contributed 48 articles to "Vedanta and the West", published by the society. He also served on the editorial board with Isherwood, Heard, and playwright John Van Druten from 1951 through 1962. Huxley also occasionally lectured at the Hollywood and Santa Barbara Vedanta temples. Two of those lectures have been released on CD: "Knowledge and Understanding" and "Who Are We?" from 1955. Nonetheless, Huxley's agnosticism, together with his speculative propensity, made it difficult for him to fully embrace any form of institutionalised religion. Psychedelic drug use and mystical experiences. In the spring of 1953, Huxley had his first experience with the psychedelic drug mescaline. Huxley had initiated a correspondence with Doctor Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist then employed in a Canadian institution, and eventually asked him to supply a dose of mescaline; Osmond obliged and supervised Huxley's session in southern California. After the publication of "The Doors of Perception", in which he recounted this experience, Huxley and Swami Prabhavananda disagreed about the meaning and importance of the psychedelic drug experience, which may have caused the relationship to cool, but Huxley continued to write articles for the society's journal, lecture at the temple, and attend social functions. Huxley later had an experience on mescaline that he considered more profound than those detailed in "The Doors of Perception". Huxley wrote that "The mystical experience is doubly valuable; it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a less self-centered and more creative life." Eyesight. Differing accounts exist about the details of the quality of Huxley's eyesight at specific points in his life. Circa 1939, Huxley encountered the Bates method, in which he was instructed by Margaret Darst Corbett. In 1940, Huxley relocated from Hollywood to a "ranchito" in the high desert hamlet of Llano, California, in northern Los Angeles County. Huxley then said that his sight improved dramatically with the Bates Method and the extreme and pure natural lighting of the southwestern American desert. He reported that, for the first time in more than 25 years, he was able to read without glasses and without strain. He even tried driving a car along the dirt road beside the ranch. He wrote a book about his experiences with the Bates Method, "The Art of Seeing", which was published in 1942 (U.S.), 1943 (UK). The book contained some generally disputed theories, and its publication created a growing degree of popular controversy about Huxley's eyesight. It was, and is, widely believed that Huxley was nearly blind since the illness in his teens, despite the partial recovery that had enabled him to study at Oxford. For example, some ten years after publication of "The Art of Seeing", in 1952, Bennett Cerf was present when Huxley spoke at a Hollywood banquet, wearing no glasses and apparently reading his paper from the lectern without difficulty: "Then suddenly he faltered—and the disturbing truth became obvious. He wasn't reading his address at all. He had learned it by heart. To refresh his memory he brought the paper closer and closer to his eyes. When it was only an inch or so away he still couldn't read it, and had to fish for a magnifying glass in his pocket to make the typing visible to him. It was an agonising moment". Brazilian author João Ubaldo Ribeiro, who as a young journalist spent several evenings in the Huxleys' company in the late 1950s, wrote that Huxley had said to him, with a wry smile, "I can hardly see at all. And I don't give a damn, really". On the other hand, Huxley's second wife, Laura Archera, later emphasised in her biographical account, "This Timeless Moment": "One of the great achievements of his life: that of having regained his sight". After revealing a letter she wrote to the "Los Angeles Times" disclaiming the label of Huxley as a "poor fellow who can hardly see" by Walter C. Alvarez, she tempered her statement with, "Although I feel it was an injustice to treat Aldous as though he were blind, it is true there were many indications of his impaired vision. For instance, although Aldous did not wear glasses, he would quite often use a magnifying lens". Laura Huxley proceeded to elaborate a few nuances of inconsistency peculiar to Huxley's vision. Her account, in this respect, agrees with the following sample of Huxley's own words from "The Art of Seeing": "The most characteristic fact about the functioning of the total organism, or any part of the organism, is that it is not constant, but highly variable". Nevertheless, the topic of Huxley's eyesight continues to endure similar, significant controversy. American popular science author Steven Johnson, in his book "Mind Wide Open", quotes Huxley about his difficulties with visual encoding: "I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon ...". Personal life. Huxley married on 10 July 1919 Maria Nys (10 September 1899 – 12 February 1955), a Belgian epidemiologist from Bellem, a village near Aalter, he met at Garsington, Oxfordshire, in 1919. They had one child, Matthew Huxley (19 April 1920 – 10 February 2005), who had a career as an author, anthropologist, and prominent epidemiologist. In 1955, Maria Huxley died of cancer. In 1956, Huxley married Laura Archera (1911–2007), also an author, as well as a violinist and psychotherapist. She wrote "This Timeless Moment", a biography of Huxley. She told the story of their marriage through Mary Ann Braubach's 2010 documentary, "Huxley on Huxley". Huxley was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer in 1960; in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the Utopian novel "Island", and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" both at the UCSF Medical Center and at the Esalen Institute. These lectures were fundamental to the beginning of the Human Potential Movement. Huxley was a close friend of Jiddu Krishnamurti and Rosalind Rajagopal and was involved in the creation of the Happy Valley School, now Besant Hill School of Happy Valley, in Ojai, California. The most substantial collection of Huxley's few remaining papers, following the destruction of most in a fire, is at the Library of the University of California, Los Angeles. Some are also at the Stanford University Libraries. On 9 April 1962, Huxley was informed he was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature, the senior literary organisation in Britain, and he accepted the title via letter on 28 April 1962. The correspondence between Huxley and the society is kept at the Cambridge University Library. The society invited Huxley to appear at a banquet and give a lecture at Somerset House, London, in June 1963. Huxley wrote a draft of the speech he intended to give at the society; however, his deteriorating health meant he was not able to attend. Death. On his deathbed, unable to speak owing to advanced laryngeal cancer, Huxley made a written request to his wife Laura for "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular." According to her account of his death in "This Timeless Moment", she obliged with an injection at 11:20 a.m. and a second dose an hour later; Huxley died aged 69, at 5:20 p.m. (Los Angeles time), on 22 November 1963. Media coverage of Huxley's death, along with that of fellow British author C. S. Lewis, was overshadowed by the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy on the same day, less than seven hours before Huxley's death. In a 2009 article for "New York" magazine titled "The Eclipsed Celebrity Death Club", Christopher Bonanos wrote: This coincidence served as the basis for Peter Kreeft's book "Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley", which imagines a conversation among the three men taking place in Purgatory following their deaths. Huxley's memorial service took place in London in December 1963; it was led by his elder brother Julian. On 27 October 1971, his ashes were interred in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery, home of the Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton, Guildford, Surrey, England. Huxley had been a long-time friend of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who dedicated his last orchestral composition to Huxley. Stravinsky began "Variations" in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in July 1963, and completed the composition in Hollywood on 28 October 1964. It premiered in Chicago on 17 April 1965, by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Robert Craft.

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Charles Kay Ogden Charles Kay Ogden (; 1 June 1889 – 20 March 1957) was an English linguist, philosopher, and writer. Described as a polymath but also an eccentric and outsider, he took part in many ventures related to literature, politics, the arts, and philosophy, having a broad effect particularly as an editor, translator, and activist on behalf of a reformed version of the English language. He is typically defined as a linguistic psychologist, and is now mostly remembered as the inventor and propagator of Basic English. Early life. Charles Kay Ogden was born at Rossall School in Fleetwood, Lancashire, on 1 June 1889 to Charles Burdett Ogden (13 July 1849 – 10 December 1923) and Fanny Hart (1850 – 21 December 1944), who were married in 1888 at Chorlton, Lancashire. Charles Burdett Ogden was employed (in various capacities) at the Rossall School during the years 1873–1909. His son Charles Kay Ogden was educated at Buxton and Rossall, winning a scholarship to Magdalene College, Cambridge, and commencing his undergraduate study of Classics in 1908. At Cambridge. He visited continental Europe to investigate methods of language teaching in 1912 and 1913. Ogden obtained an M.A. in 1915. "Cambridge Magazine". He founded the weekly "Cambridge Magazine" in 1912 while still an undergraduate, editing it until it ceased publication in 1922. The initial period was troubled. Ogden was studying for Part II of the Classical Tripos when offered the chance to start the magazine by Charles Granville, who ran a small but significant London publishing house, Stephen Swift & Co. Thinking that the editorship would mean giving up first class honours, Ogden consulted Henry Jackson, who advised him not to miss the opportunity. Shortly after, Stephen Swift & Co. went bankrupt. Ogden continued to edit the magazine during World War I, when its nature changed, because rheumatic fever as a teenager had left him unfit for military service. Ogden often used the pseudonym "Adelyne More" (add-a-line more) in his journalism. The magazine included literary contributions by Siegfried Sassoon, John Masefield, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw and Arnold Bennett. It evolved into an organ of international comment on politics and the war, supported in the background by a group of Cambridge academics including Edward Dent (who sent Sassoon's work), Theo Bartholomew and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. A survey of the foreign press filled more than half of each issue, being the "Notes from the foreign press" supplied by Dorothy Buxton which appeared there from October 1915 onwards until 1920, and its circulation rose to over 20,000. Buxton was in fact then leading a large team translating and collating articles from up to 100 foreign newspapers; for instance Italian articles were supplied in translation in numbers by Dent. This digest of European press coverage was exclusive to the "Magazine", and gave it disproportionate influence in political circles. For example, Robert Reid, 1st Earl Loreburn, used the "Notes from the foreign press" to advocate to the Marquess of Lansdowne in 1916 against bellicose claims and attitudes on the British side. During 1917 the "Magazine" came under heavy criticism, with its neutral use of foreign press extracts being called pacifism, particularly by the pro-war patriotic Fight for Right Movement headed by Francis Younghusband. Dorothy Buxton's husband Charles Roden Buxton was closely associated with the Union of Democratic Control. Sir Frederick Pollock who chaired Fight for Right wrote to "The Morning Post" in February 1917 charging the "Magazine" with pacifist propaganda, and with playing on its connection with the University as if it had official status. Gilbert Murray, a supporter of Fight for Right but also a defender of many conscientious objectors and the freedom of the press, intervened to protest, gaining support from Bennett and Hardy. John George Butcher, Conservative Member of Parliament for the City of York, asked a question in Parliament about government advertising in the "Magazine", during November 1917. The parliamentary exchange had two Liberal Party politicians, William Pringle and Josiah Wedgwood, pointing out that the "Magazine" was the only way they could read German press comments. The "Cambridge Magazine" continued in the post-war years, but wound down to quarterly publication before closing in 1922. When Claude McKay arrived in London in 1919 he had a letter of introduction to Ogden from Walter Fuller. He contacted Ogden in March 1920 and Ogden published his poetry in the "Magazine". The Heretics Society. Ogden also co-founded the Heretics Society in Cambridge in 1909, which questioned traditional authorities in general and religious dogmas in particular, in the wake of the paper "Prove All Things", read by William Chawner, Master of Emmanuel College, a past Vice-Chancellor. The Heretics began as a group of 12 undergraduates interested in Chawner's agnostic approach. The Society was nonconformist and open to women, and Jane Harrison found an audience there, publishing her inaugural talk for the Society of 7 December 1909 as the essay "Heresy and Humanity" (1911), an argument that warned of the dangers of group-think and implored the audience to realize that we are constantly negotiating the line between egotism and herd instinct, but that how we navigate that line matters. Investigating the origins of the word 'heresy,' her lecture, later published in "Alpha and Omega" (1915), challenged many of the religious restrictions and rules of the Anglican Church and its connections with the university. The talk of the following day was from J. M. E. McTaggart, and was also published, as "Dare to Be Wise" (1910). Another early member with anthropological interests was John Layard; Herbert Felix Jolowicz (1890–1954), Frank Plumpton Ramsey and Philip Sargant Florence were among the members. Alix Sargant Florence, sister of Philip, was active both as a Heretic and on the editorial board of the "Cambridge Magazine". Ogden was President of the Heretics from 1911, for more than a decade; he invited a variety of prominent speakers and linked the Society to his role as editor. In November 1911 G. K. Chesterton used a well-publicised talk to the Heretics to reply to George Bernard Shaw who had recently talked on "The Future of Religion". On this occasion Chesterton produced one of his well known "bons mots": In 1912 T. E. Hulme and Bertrand Russell spoke. Hulme's talk on "Anti-Romanticism and Original Sin" was written up by Ogden for the "Cambridge Magazine", where in 1916 both Hulme and Russell would write on the war, from their opposite points of view. Rupert Brooke addressed them on contemporary theatre, and an article based on his views of Strindberg appeared in the "Cambridge Magazine" in October 1913. Another talk from 1913 that was published was from Edward Clodd on "Obscurantism in Modern Science". Ogden was very active at this period in seeing these works into print. On 4 February 1923, the biologist J.B.S. Haldane lectured the Society on "Daedalus; or, Science and the Future", a speculative vision that enjoy some success in print and spurred in 1924 a less optimistic response from Bertrand Russell entitled "Icarus or the Future of Science". The Heretics continued as a well-known forum, with Virginia Woolf on 18 May 1924 using it to formulate a reply to criticisms from Arnold Bennett arising from her "Jacob's Room" (1922), in a talk "Character in Fiction" that was then published in "The Criterion". This paper contains the assertion, now proverbial, that "on or about December 1910 human character changed." The Heretics met in November 1929, when Ludwig Wittgenstein lectured to it on ethics, at Ogden's invitation, producing in "A Lecture on Ethics" a work accepted as part of the early Wittgenstein canon. Author and bookseller. Ogden published four books during this period. One was "The Problem of the Continuation School" (1914), with Robert Hall Best (1843–1925) of the Best & Lloyd lighting company of Handsworth, and concerned industrial training. He also translated a related work by Georg Kerschensteiner (1854–1932) (who had introduced him to Best), which appeared as "The Schools and the Nation" (1914). "Militarism versus Feminism" (1915, anonymous) was co-written with Mary Sargant Florence (mother of Alix). "Uncontrolled Breeding, or, Fecundity versus Civilization" (1916) was a tract in favour of birth control, published under his pseudonym Adelyne More. Ogden ran two bookshops in Cambridge as well as a gallery where he sold works of art by members of the Bloomsbury Group. One of his bookshops was looted on the day the First World War ended. Editor. He built up a position as editor for Kegan Paul, publishers in London. In 1920, he was one of the founders of the psychological journal "Psyche", and later took over the editorship; "Psyche" was initially the "Psychic Research Quarterly" set up by Walter Whately Smith, but changed its name and editorial policy in 1921. It appeared until 1952, and was a vehicle for some of Ogden's interests. Also for Kegan Paul he founded and edited what became five separate series of books, comprising hundreds of titles. Two were major series of monographs, "The History of Civilization" and "The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method"; the latter series included about 100 volumes after one decade. The "To-day and To-morrow" series was another extensive series running to about 150 volumes, of popular books in essay form with provocative titles; he edited it from its launch in 1924. The first of the series (after an intervention by Fredric Warburg) was "Daedalus; or, Science and the Future" by J. B. S. Haldane, an extended version of a talk to the Heretics Society. Other series were "Science for You" and "Psyche Miniatures". Language and philosophy. Ogden helped with the English translation of Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus". In fact the translation itself was the work of F. P. Ramsey; Ogden as a commissioning editor assigned the task of translation to Ramsey, supposedly on earlier experience of Ramsey's insight into another German text, of Ernst Mach. The Latinate title now given to the work in English, with its nod to Baruch Spinoza's "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus", is attributed to G. E. Moore, and was adopted by Ogden. In 1973 Georg Henrik von Wright edited Wittgenstein's "Letters to C.K. Ogden with Comments on the English Translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", including correspondence with Ramsey. His most durable work is his monograph (with I. A. Richards) titled "The Meaning of Meaning" (1923), which went into many editions. This book, which straddled the boundaries among linguistics, literary analysis, and philosophy, drew attention to the significs of Victoria Lady Welby (of whom Ogden was a disciple) and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. A major step in the "linguistic turn" of 20th century British philosophy, "The Meaning of Meaning" set out principles for understanding the function of language and described the so-called semantic triangle. It included the inimitable phrase "The gostak distims the doshes." Although neither a trained philosopher nor an academic, Ogden had a material effect on British academic philosophy. "The Meaning of Meaning" enunciated a theory of emotivism. Ogden went on to edit as "Bentham's Theory of Fictions" (1932) a work of Jeremy Bentham, and had already translated in 1911 as "The Philosophy of ‘As If’" a work of Hans Vaihinger, both of which are regarded as precursors of the modern theory of fictionalism. Basic English. The advocacy of Basic English became his primary activity from 1925 until his death. Basic English is an auxiliary international language of 850 words comprising a system that covers everything necessary for day-to-day purposes. These 850 words, together with its five combinatory rules, were designed to do the work of some 20,000 English words, which appealed to many of the leading communications philosophers and theorists of the time, including Otto Neurath and Willard C. Brinton. To promote Basic English, Ogden in 1927 founded the Orthological Institute, from "orthology", the abstract term he proposed for its work (see orthoepeia). Its headquarters were on King's Parade in Cambridge. From 1928 to 1930 Ogden set out his developing ideas on Basic English and Jeremy Bentham in "Psyche". In 1929 the Institute published a recording by James Joyce of a passage from a draft of "Finnegans Wake". In summer of that year "Tales Told of Shem and Shaun" had been published, an extract from the work as it then stood, and Ogden had been asked to supply an introduction. When Joyce was in London in August, Ogden approached him to do a reading for a recording. In 1932 Ogden published a translation of the "Finnegans Wake" passage into Basic English. By 1943 the Institute had moved to Gordon Square in London. Ogden was also a consultant with the International Auxiliary Language Association, which presented Interlingua in 1951. Bibliophile. Ogden collected a large number of books. His "incunabula", manuscripts, papers of the Brougham family, and Jeremy Bentham collection were purchased by University College London. The balance of his enormous personal library was purchased after his death by the University of California - Los Angeles. He died on 20 March 1957 in London.

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Chris Bobonich Christopher Bobonich (born February 8, 1960) is an American philosopher and a leading scholar of Ancient Greek philosophy, especially known for his work on Plato's "Laws". He is currently Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Classics (by courtesy) at Stanford University. Education and career. Bobonich was born on February 8, 1960 in Southeastern Pennsylvania. He completed his BA in Government at Harvard University in 1981. He then went on to complete his MPhil (1983) in Philosophy at Cambridge University and his PhD in Philosophy at UC Berkeley (1990) under Alan Code, now his colleague at Stanford. He taught first at the University of Chicago, and, since 1996, at Stanford University.

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Raymond Williams Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contributed to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books were sold in UK editions alone, and there are many translations available. His work laid foundations for the field of cultural studies and cultural materialism. Life. Early life. Born in Pandy, just north of Llanfihangel Crucorney, near Abergavenny, Wales, Williams was the son of a railway worker in a village where all of the railwaymen voted Labour, while the local small farmers mostly voted Liberal. It was not a Welsh-speaking area: he described it as "Anglicised in the 1840s". There was, nevertheless, a strong Welsh identity. "There is the joke that someone says his family came over with the Normans and we reply: 'Are you liking it here?'". Williams attended King Henry VIII Grammar School in Abergavenny. His teenage years were overshadowed by the rise of Nazism and the threat of war. His father was secretary of the local Labour Party, but Raymond declined to join, although he did attend meetings around the 1935 General Election. He was 14 when the Spanish Civil War broke out, and was conscious of what was happening through his membership of the local Left Book Club. He also mentions the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Edgar Snow's "Red Star Over China", originally published in Britain by the Left Book Club. At this time, he was a supporter of the League of Nations, attending a League-organised youth conference in Geneva in 1937. On the way back, his group visited Paris and he went to the Soviet pavilion at the International Exhibition. There he bought a copy of "The Communist Manifesto" and read Karl Marx for the first time. In July 1939 he was involved in the Monmouth by-election, helping with an unsuccessful campaign by the Labour candidate, Frank Hancock, who was a pacifist. Williams was also a pacifist at this time, having distributed leaflets for the Peace Pledge Union. University education. Williams attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. Along with Eric Hobsbawm, he was given the task of writing a Communist Party pamphlet about the Russo-Finnish War. He says in ("Politics and Letters") that they "were given the job as people who could write quickly, from historical materials supplied for us. You were often in there writing about topics you did not know very much about, as a professional with words". At the time, the British government was keen to support Finland in its war against the Soviet Union, while still being at war with Nazi Germany. He took a second (division two) in part one of the tripos and first-class honours in part two. World War II. Williams interrupted his education to serve in the Second World War. He enlisted in the British Army in late 1940, but stayed at Cambridge to take his exams in June 1941, the month when Germany invaded Russia. Joining the military was against the Communist party line at the time. According to Williams, his Communist Party membership lapsed without him formally resigning. When Williams joined the army, he was assigned to the Royal Corps of Signals, which was a typical assignment for university undergraduates. He received initial training in military communications, but was reassigned to artillery and anti-tank weapons. He was chosen to serve as an officer in the Anti-Tank Regiment of the Guards Armoured Division in 1941–1945, being sent into early fighting in the Invasion of Normandy after the D-Day Normandy Landings. He writes in "Politics and Letters", "I don't think the intricate chaos of that Normandy fighting has ever been recorded." He commanded a unit of four tanks and mentions losing touch with two of them while fighting against Waffen-SS Panzer forces in the Bocage. He never discovered what happened to them as a withdrawal of troops ensued. Williams took part in the fighting from Normandy in 1944 and through Belgium and the Netherlands to Germany in 1945. There he was involved in liberating a smaller Nazi concentration camp, which was afterwards used by the Allies to detain SS officers. He was shocked to find that Hamburg had suffered saturation bombing by the Royal Air Force, not just military targets and docks, as they had been told. He was expecting to be sent to Burma, but as his studies had been interrupted by the war, was instead granted Class B release, which meant immediate demobilisation. He returned to Cambridge, where he found that the student culture had changed from 1941, with the left-wing involvement much diminished. Adult education and early publications. Williams received his MA from Cambridge in 1946 and then served as a tutor in adult education at the University of Oxford Delegacy for several years. Moving to Seaford, Sussex, he gave Workers' Educational Association evening classes in East Sussex in English literature, drama, and later culture and environment. This allowed Williams to write in the mornings, beginning work on novels and what would become cultural studies. In 1946, he founded the review "Politics and Letters", a journal which he edited with Clifford Collins and Wolf Mankowitz until 1948. Williams published "Reading and Criticism" in 1950; he joined the Editorial Board of the new journal "Essays in Criticism". In 1951 he was recalled to the army as a reservist to fight in the Korean War. He refused to go, registering as a conscientious objector. He expected to be jailed for a month, but the Appeal Tribunal panel, which included a professor of classics, was convinced by his case and discharged him from further military obligations in May 1951. Between 1946 and 1957 he was involved with the film-maker Michael Orrom, whom he had known in Cambridge. They co-wrote "Preface to Film", published in 1954, and Williams wrote the script for an experimental film, "The Legend", in 1955. This was rejected in July 1956 and he parted company with Orrom shortly afterwards. He wrote a number of novels in this period, but only one, "Border Country", would be published. Inspired by T. S. Eliot's 1948 publication "Notes towards the Definition of Culture", Williams began exploring the concept of culture. He first outlined his argument that the concept emerged with the Industrial Revolution in the essay "The Idea of Culture", which resulted in the widely successful book "Culture and Society", published in 1958. This was followed in 1961 by "The Long Revolution". Williams's writings were taken up by the New Left and received a wide readership. He was also well known as a regular book reviewer for the "Manchester Guardian" newspaper. His years in adult education were an important experience and Williams was always something of an outsider at Cambridge University. Asked to contribute to a book called "My Cambridge", he began his essay by saying: "It was not my Cambridge. That was clear from the beginning." Academic career. On the strength of his books, Williams was invited to return to Cambridge in 1961, where he was elected a fellow of Jesus College, eventually becoming first Reader (1967–1974) then Professor of Drama (1974–1983). He was a visiting professor of political science at Stanford University in 1973, an experience he used to effect in his still useful book "Television: Technology and Cultural Form" (1974). A committed socialist, he was interested in the relations between language, literature and society, and published many books, essays and articles on these and other issues. Among the main ones is "The Country and the City" (1973), where chapters on literature alternate with chapters on social history. His tightly written "Marxism and Literature" (1977) is mainly for specialists, but also sets out his approach to cultural studies, which he called cultural materialism. The book was in part a response to structuralism in literary studies and pressure on Williams to make a more theoretical statement of his position, against criticisms that it was a humanist Marxism, based on unexamined assumptions about lived experience. He makes much use of the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, though the book is uniquely Williams's and written in his characteristic voice. For a more accessible version, see "Culture" (1981/1982), which develops an argument about cultural sociology, which he hoped would become "a new major discipline". Introducing the US edition, Bruce Robbins identifies it as "implicit self-critique" of Williams's earlier ideas, and a basis on which "to conceive the oppositionality of the critic in a permanently fragmented society". Concepts and theory. Vocabulary. Williams was keen to establish the changing meanings of the vocabulary used in discussions of culture. He began with the word "culture" itself; his notes on 60 significant, often difficult words were to have appeared as an appendix to "Culture and Society" in 1958. This was not possible, and so an extended version with notes and short essays on 110 words appeared as "Keywords" in 1976. Those examined included "aesthetic", "bourgeois", "culture", "hegemony", "isms", "organic", "romantic", "status", "violence" and "work". A revised version in 1983 added 21 new words, including "anarchism", "ecology", "liberation" and "sex". Williams wrote that "The Oxford English Dictionary" (OED) "is primarily philological and etymological," whilst his work was on "meanings and contexts". In 1981, Williams published "Culture", where the term, discussed at length, is defined as "a "realized signifying system"" and supported by chapters on "the means of cultural production, and the process of cultural reproduction". Debate. Williams wrote critically of Marshall McLuhan's writings on technology and society. This is the background to a chapter in "Television: Technology and Cultural Form" (1974) called "The Technology and the Society", where Williams defended his visions against technological determinism, focusing on the prevalence of social over technological in the development of human processes. Thus "Determination is a real social process, but never (as in some theological and some Marxist versions)... a wholly controlling, wholly predicting set of causes. On the contrary, the reality of determination is the setting of limits and the exertion of pressures, within which variable social practices are profoundly affected but never necessarily controlled." His book "Modern Tragedy" may be read as a response to "The Death of Tragedy" by the conservative literary critic George Steiner. Later, Williams was interested in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, although he found it too pessimistic about the possibilities for social change. Last years. Williams joined the Labour Party after he moved to Cambridge in 1961, but resigned in 1966 after the new majority Labour government had broken the seafarers' strike and introduced public expenditure cuts. He joined the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and wrote the May Day Manifesto (published 1967) along with Edward Thompson and Stuart Hall. It is claimed that Williams later became a Plaid Cymru member and a Welsh nationalist. He retired from Cambridge in 1983 and spent his last years in Saffron Walden. While there he wrote "Loyalties", a novel about a fictional group of upper-class radicals attracted to 1930s Communism. Williams was working on "People of the Black Mountains", an experimental historical novel about people who lived or might have lived around the Black Mountains, his own part of Wales, told through flashbacks featuring an ordinary man in modern times, looking for his grandfather, who has not returned from a hill-walk. He imagines the region as it was and might have been. The story begins in the Paleolithic, and would have come up to modern times, focusing on ordinary people. He had completed it to the Middle Ages by the time he died in 1988. The whole work was prepared for publication by his wife, Joy Williams, then published in two volumes with a postscript briefly describing what the remainder would have been. Almost all the stories were complete in typescript, mostly revised many times by the author. Only "The Comet" was left incomplete and needed small additions for a continuous narrative. In the 1980s, Williams made important links to debates on feminism, peace, ecology and social movements, and extended his position beyond what might be recognised as Marxism. He concluded that with many different societies in the world, there would be not one, but many socialisms. Influenced partly by critical readings of Sebastiano Timpanaro and Rudolf Bahro, he called for convergence between the labour movement and what was then called the ecology movement. The Raymond Williams Society was founded in 1989 "to support and develop intellectual and political projects in areas broadly connected with Williams's work". Since 1998 it has published "Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism", which is "committed to developing the tradition of cultural materialism" he originated. The Raymond Williams Centre for Recovery Research opened at Nottingham Trent University in 1995. The Raymond Williams Foundation (RWF) supports activities in adult education; it was originally formed in 1988 as the Raymond Williams Memorial Fund. A collaborative research project building on Williams's investigation of cultural keywords called the "Keywords Project", initiated in 2006, is supported by Jesus College, University of Cambridge, and the University of Pittsburgh. Similar projects building on Williams's legacy include "New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society", edited by the cultural-studies scholars Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, and "Keywords for American Cultural Studies" In 2007 a collection of Williams's papers was deposited at Swansea University by his daughter Merryn, herself a poet and author.

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Peter Carravetta Peter Carravetta (born 10 May 1951 in Lappano) is an Italian philosopher, poet, literary theorist and translator.

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Gore Vidal Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit, patrician manner, and polished style of writing. Vidal was openly bisexual and his novels often dealt with LGBT characters, which was unusual at the time. Beyond literature, Vidal was heavily involved in politics. He twice sought office—unsuccessfully—as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the United States House of Representatives (for New York), and later in 1982 to the U.S. Senate (for California). Vidal was born into an upper class political family. As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's primary focus was the history and society of the United States, especially how a militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire. His political and cultural essays were published in "The Nation", the "New Statesman", the "New York Review of Books", and "Esquire" magazines. As a public intellectual, Gore Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer. As a novelist, Vidal explored the nature of corruption in public and private life. His polished and erudite style of narration readily evoked the time and place of his stories, and perceptively delineated the psychology of his characters. His third novel, "The City and the Pillar" (1948), offended the literary, political, and moral sensibilities of conservative book reviewers, the plot being about a dispassionately presented male homosexual relationship. In the historical novel genre, Vidal recreated the imperial world of Julian the Apostate (r. AD 361–63) in "Julian" (1964). Julian was the Roman emperor who espoused "religious tolerance" in order to re-establish pagan polytheism to counter Christianity. In social satire, "Myra Breckinridge" (1968) explores the mutability of gender roles and sexual orientation as being social constructs established by social mores. In "Burr" (1973) and "Lincoln" (1984), each protagonist is presented as "A Man of the People" and as "A Man" in a narrative exploration of how the public and private facets of personality affect the national politics of the United States. Early life. Eugene Louis Vidal was born in the cadet hospital of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, the only child of Eugene Luther Vidal (1895–1969) and Nina S. Gore (1903–1978). Vidal was born there because his first lieutenant father was the first aeronautics instructor of the military academy. The middle name, Louis, was a mistake on the part of his father, "who could not remember, for certain, whether his own name was Eugene Louis or Eugene Luther". In the memoir "Palimpsest" (1995), Vidal said, "My birth certificate says 'Eugene Louis Vidal': this was changed to Eugene Luther Vidal Jr.; then Gore was added at my christening [in 1939]; then, at fourteen, I got rid of the first two names." Eugene Louis Vidal was baptized in January 1939, when he was 13 years old, by the headmaster of St. Albans school, where Vidal attended preparatory school. The baptismal ceremony was effected so he "could be confirmed [into the Episcopal faith]" at the Washington Cathedral, in February 1939, as "Eugene Luther Gore Vidal". He later said that, although the surname "Gore" was added to his names at the time of the baptism, "I wasn't named for him [maternal grandfather Thomas Pryor Gore], although he had a great influence on my life." In 1941, Vidal dropped his two first names, because he "wanted a sharp, distinctive name, appropriate for an aspiring author, or a national political leader ... I wasn't going to write as 'Gene' since there was already one. I didn't want to use the 'Jr. Eugene Luther Vidal was director (1933–1937) of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Air Commerce during the Roosevelt Administration, and was also the great love of the aviator Amelia Earhart. At the U.S. Military Academy, the exceptionally athletic Vidal Sr. had been a quarterback, coach, and captain of the football team; and an all-American basketball player. Subsequently, he competed in the 1920 Summer Olympics and in the 1924 Summer Olympics (seventh in the decathlon, and coach of the U.S. pentathlon). In the 1920s and the 1930s, Vidal Sr. co-founded three airline companies and a railroad line; (i) the Ludington Line (later Eastern Airlines); (ii) Transcontinental Air Transport (later Trans World Airlines); (iii) Northeast Airlines; and the Boston and Maine Railroad. Gore's great-grandfather Eugen Fidel Vidal was born in Feldkirch, Austria, of Romansh background, and had come to the U.S. with Gore's Swiss great-grandmother, Emma Hartmann. Vidal's mother, Nina Gore, was a socialite who made her Broadway theatre debut as an extra actress in "Sign of the Leopard", in 1928. In 1922, Nina married Eugene Luther Vidal, Sr., and thirteen years later, in 1935, divorced him. Nina Gore Vidal then was married two more times; to Hugh D. Auchincloss and to Robert Olds. She also had "a long off-and-on affair" with the actor Clark Gable. As Nina Gore Auchincloss, Vidal's mother was an alternate delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention. The subsequent marriages of his mother and father yielded four half-siblings for Gore Vidal – Vance Vidal, Valerie Vidal, Thomas Gore Auchincloss, and Nina Gore Auchincloss – and four step-brothers from his mother's third marriage to Robert Olds, a major general in the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), who died in 1943, 10 months after marrying Nina. The nephews of Gore Vidal include Burr Steers, a writer and film director, and Hugh Auchincloss Steers (1963–1995), a figurative painter. Raised in Washington, D.C., Vidal attended the Sidwell Friends School and St. Albans School. Given the blindness of his maternal grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, of Oklahoma, Vidal read aloud to him, and was his Senate page, and his seeing-eye guide. In 1939, during his summer holiday, Vidal went with some colleagues and professor from St. Albans School on his first European trip, to visit Italy and France. He visited for the first time Rome, the city which came to be "at the center of Gore's literary imagination", and Paris. When the Second World War began in early September, the group was forced to an early return home; on his way back, he and his colleagues stopped in Great Britain, and they met the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, Joe Kennedy (the father of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, later the President of the United States of America). In 1940 he attended the Los Alamos Ranch School and later transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy, in Exeter, New Hampshire, where he contributed to the Exonian, the school newspaper. Rather than attend university, Vidal enlisted in the U.S. Army and worked as an office clerk in the USAAF. Later, Vidal passed the examinations necessary to become a maritime warrant officer (junior grade) in the Transportation Corps, and subsequently served as first mate of the "F.S. 35th", berthed at Dutch Harbor. After three years in service, Warrant Officer Gene Vidal suffered hypothermia, developed rheumatoid arthritis and, consequently, was reassigned to duty as a mess officer. Literary career. The literary works of Gore Vidal were influenced by numerous other writers, poets and playwrights, novelists and essayists. These include, from antiquity, Petronius (d. AD 66), Juvenal (AD 60–140), and Apuleius (fl. c. AD 155); and from the post-Renaissance, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866), and George Meredith (1828–1909). More recent literary influences included Marcel Proust (1871–1922), Henry James (1843–1916), and Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966). The cultural critic Harold Bloom has written that Gore Vidal believed that his sexuality had denied him full recognition from the literary community in the United States. Bloom himself contends that such limited recognition more resulted from Vidal's "best fictions" being "distinguished historical novels", a subgenre "no longer available for canonization". Fiction. The literary career of Gore Vidal began with the success of the military novel "Williwaw", a men-at-war story derived from his Alaskan Harbor Detachment duty during the Second World War. His third novel, "The City and the Pillar" (1948) caused a moralistic furor over his dispassionate presentation of a young protagonist coming to terms with his homosexuality. The novel was dedicated to "J. T."; decades later, Vidal confirmed that the initials were those of James Trimble III, killed in the Battle of Iwo Jima on March 1, 1945 and that Trimble was the only person he ever loved. Critics railed against Vidal's presentation of homosexuality in the novel as natural, a life viewed generally at the time as unnatural and immoral. Vidal claimed that "New York Times" critic Orville Prescott was so offended by it that he refused to review or to permit other critics to review any book by Vidal. Vidal said that upon publication of the book, an editor at E. P. Dutton told him "You will never be forgiven for this book. Twenty years from now, you will still be attacked for it". Today, Vidal is often seen as an early champion of sexual liberation. Vidal took the pseudonym "Edgar Box" and wrote the mystery novels "Death in the Fifth Position" (1952), "Death before Bedtime" (1953) and "Death Likes it Hot" (1954) featuring Peter Cutler Sargeant II, a publicist-turned-private-eye. The Edgar Box genre novels sold well and earned black-listed Vidal a secret living. That mystery-novel success led Vidal to write in other genres and he produced the stage play "The Best Man: A Play about Politics" (1960) and the television play "Visit to a Small Planet" (1957). Two early teleplays were "A Sense of Justice" (1955) and "Honor". He also wrote the pulp novel "Thieves Fall Out" under the pseudonym "Cameron Kay" but refused to have it reprinted under his real name during his life. In the 1960s, Vidal published "Julian" (1964), about the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (r. A.D. 361–363), who sought to reinstate polytheistic paganism when Julian viewed that Christianity threatened the cultural integrity of the Roman Empire, "Washington, D.C." (1967), about political life during the presidential era (1933–45) of Franklin D. Roosevelt and "Myra Breckinridge" (1968), a satire of the American movie business, by way of a school of dramatic arts owned by a transsexual woman, the eponymous anti-heroine. After publishing the plays "Weekend" (1968) and "An Evening With Richard Nixon" (1972) and the novel "Two Sisters: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir" (1970), Vidal concentrated upon the essay and developed two types of fiction. The first type is about American history, novels specifically about the nature of national politics. "The New York Times", quoting critic Harold Bloom about those historical novels, said that Vidal's imagination of American politics "is so powerful as to compel awe." The historical novels formed the seven-book series, Narratives of Empire: (i) "Burr" (1973), (ii) "Lincoln" (1984), (iii) "1876" (1976), (iv) "Empire" (1987), (v) "Hollywood" (1990), (vi) "Washington, D.C." (1967) and (vii) "The Golden Age" (2000). Besides U.S. history, Vidal also explored and analyzed the history of the ancient world, specifically the Axial Age (800–200 B.C.), with the novel "Creation" (1981). The novel was published without four chapters that were part of the manuscript he submitted to the publisher; years later, Vidal restored the chapters to the text and re-published the novel "Creation" in 2002. The second type of fiction is the topical satire, such as "Myron" (1974) the sequel to "Myra Breckinridge"; "Kalki" (1978), about the end of the world and the consequent ennui; "Duluth" (1983), an alternate universe story; "" (1992), about the adventures of Timothy, Bishop of Macedonia, in the early days of Christianity; and "The Smithsonian Institution" (1998), a time-travel story. Non-fiction. In the United States, Gore Vidal is often considered an essayist rather than a novelist. Even the occasionally hostile literary critic, such as Martin Amis, admitted that "Essays are what he is good at ... [Vidal] is learned, funny, and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blind spots are illuminating." For six decades, Vidal applied himself to socio-political, sexual, historical and literary subjects. In the essay anthology "Armageddon" (1987) he explored the intricacies of power (political and cultural) in the contemporary United States. His criticism of the incumbent U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, as a "triumph of the embalmer's art" communicated that Reagan's provincial worldview, and that of his administration's, was out of date and inadequate to the geopolitical realities of the world in the late twentieth century. In 1993, Vidal won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for the anthology "United States: Essays 1952–92" (1993). In 2000, Vidal published the collection of essays, "The Last Empire", then such self-described "pamphlets" as "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace", "Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta" and "Imperial America", critiques of American expansionism, the military–industrial complex, the national security state and the George W. Bush administration. Vidal also wrote a historical essay about the U.S. founding fathers, "Inventing a Nation". In 1995, he published a memoir "Palimpsest" and in 2006 its follow-up volume, "Point to Point Navigation". Earlier that year, Vidal had published "." In 2009, he won the annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, which called him a "prominent social critic on politics, history, literature and culture". In the same year, the Man of Letters Gore Vidal was named honorary president of the American Humanist Association. Hollywood. In 1956, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer hired Gore Vidal as a screenplay writer with a four-year employment contract. In 1958, the director William Wyler required a script doctor to rewrite the screenplay for "Ben-Hur" (1959), originally written by Karl Tunberg. As one of several script doctors assigned to the project, Vidal rewrote significant portions of the script to resolve ambiguities of character motivation, specifically to clarify the enmity between the Jewish protagonist, Judah Ben-Hur, and the Roman antagonist, Messala, who had been close boyhood friends. In exchange for rewriting the "Ben-Hur" screenplay, on location in Italy, Vidal negotiated the early termination (at the two-year mark) of his four-year contract with MGM. Thirty-six years later, in the documentary film "The Celluloid Closet" (1995), Vidal explained that Messala's failed attempt at resuming their homosexual, boyhood relationship motivated the ostensibly political enmity between Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) and Messala (Stephen Boyd). Vidal said that Boyd was aware of the homosexual subtext to the scene and that the director, the producer and the screenwriter agreed to keep Heston ignorant of the subtext, lest he refuse to play the scene. In turn, on learning of that script-doctor explanation, Charlton Heston said that Vidal had contributed little to the script of "Ben-Hur". Despite Vidal's script-doctor resolution of the character's motivations, the Screen Writers Guild assigned formal screenwriter-credit to Karl Tunberg, in accordance with the WGA screenwriting credit system, which favored the "original author" of a screenplay, rather than the writer of the filmed screenplay. Two plays, "The Best Man: A Play about Politics" (1960, made into a film in 1964) and "Visit to a Small Planet" (1955) were theater and movie successes. Vidal occasionally returned to the movie business, and wrote historically accurate teleplays and screenplays about subjects important to him. "Billy the Kid" (1989) is one, about William H. Bonney, a gunman in the New Mexico territory Lincoln County War (1878), and later an outlaw in the U.S. Western frontier. Another is 1979's "Caligula" (based upon the life of the Roman Emperor Caligula)., from which Vidal had his screenwriter credit removed because the producer, Bob Guccione, the director, Tinto Brass and the leading actor, Malcolm McDowell, rewrote the script to add extra sex and violence to increase its commercial success. In the 1960s, Vidal migrated to Italy, where he befriended the film director Federico Fellini, for whom he appeared in a cameo role in the film "Roma" (1972). He also acted in the films "Bob Roberts" (1992), a serio-comedy about a reactionary populist politician who manipulates youth culture to win votes; "With Honors" (1994) an Ivy league comedy-drama; "Gattaca" (1997), a science-fiction drama about genetic engineering; and "Igby Goes Down" (2002), a coming-of-age serio-comedy directed by his nephew, Burr Steers. Politics. Political campaigns. Gore Vidal began to drift towards the political left after he received his first paycheck, and realized how much money the government took in tax. He reasoned that if the government was taking so much money, then it should at least provide first-rate healthcare and education. As a public intellectual, Gore Vidal was identified with the liberal politicians and the progressive social causes of the old Democratic Party. In 1960, Vidal was the Democratic candidate for Congress for the 29th Congressional District of New York, a usually Republican district on the Hudson River but lost to the Republican candidate J. Ernest Wharton, by a margin of 57 percent to 43 percent. Campaigning under the slogan of "You'll get more with Gore", Vidal received the most votes any Democratic candidate had received in the district in fifty years. Among his supporters were Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, friends who spoke on his behalf. In 1982, he campaigned against Jerry Brown, the incumbent Governor of California, in the Democratic primary election for the U.S. Senate; Vidal forecast accurately that the opposing Republican candidate would win the election. That foray into senatorial politics is the subject of the documentary film "" (1983), directed by Gary Conklin. In a 2001 article, "The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh", Gore undertook to discover why domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh perpetrated the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. He concluded that McVeigh (a politically disillusioned U.S. Army veteran of the First Iraq War, 1990–91) had destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building as an act of revenge for the FBI's Waco massacre (1993) at the Branch Davidian Compound in Texas, believing that the U.S. government had mistreated Americans in the same manner that he believed that the U.S. Army had mistreated the Iraqis. In concluding the Vanity Fair article, Vidal refers to McVeigh as an "unlikely sole mover," and theorizes that foreign/domestic conspiracies could have been involved. Vidal was very much against any kind of military intervention in the world. In "Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta" (2002), Vidal drew parallels about how the United States enters wars and said that President Franklin D. Roosevelt provoked Imperial Japan to attack the U.S. in order to justify the American entry to the Second World War (1939–45). He contended that Roosevelt had advance knowledge of the dawn-raid attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941). In the documentary "Why We Fight" (2005), Vidal said that, during the final months of the war, the Japanese had tried to surrender: "They were trying to surrender all that summer, but Truman wouldn't listen, because Truman wanted to drop the bombs ... To show off. To frighten Stalin. To change the balance of power in the world. To declare war on communism. Perhaps we were starting a pre-emptive world war". Criticism of George W. Bush. As a public intellectual, Vidal criticized what he viewed as political harm to the nation and the voiding of the citizen's rights through the passage of the USA Patriot Act (2001) during the George W. Bush administration (2001–2009). He described Bush as "the stupidest man in the United States" and said that Bush's foreign policy was explicitly expansionist. He contended that the Bush Administration and their oil-business sponsors, aimed to control the petroleum of Central Asia, after having gained hegemony over the petroleum of the Persian Gulf in 1991. Vidal became a member of the board of advisors of The World Can't Wait, a political organization which sought to publicly repudiate the foreign-policy program of the Bush Administration (2001–2009) and advocated Bush's impeachment for war crimes, such as the Second Iraq War (2003–2011) and torturing prisoners of war (soldiers, guerrillas, civilians) in violation of international law. In May 2007, while discussing 9/11 conspiracy theories that might explain the "who?" and the "why?" of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., Vidal said Political philosophy. In the "American Conservative" article, "My Pen Pal Gore Vidal" (2012), Bill Kauffman reported that Vidal's favorite American politician, during his lifetime, was Huey Long (1893–1935), the populist Governor (1928–32) and Senator (1932–35) from Louisiana, who also had perceived the essential, one-party nature of U.S. politics and who was assassinated by a lone gunman. Despite that, Vidal said, "I think of myself as a conservative", with a proprietary attitude towards the United States. "My family helped start [this country] ... and we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country". Based upon that background of populism, from 1970 to 1972, Vidal was a chairman of the People's Party of the United States. In 1971, he endorsed the consumer-rights advocate Ralph Nader for U.S. president in the 1972 election. In 2004, he endorsed Democrat Dennis Kucinich in his candidacy for the U.S. presidency (in 2004), because Kucinich was "the most eloquent of the lot" of presidential candidates, from either the Republican or the Democratic parties and that Kucinich was "very much a favorite out there, in the amber fields of grain". In a September 30, 2009 interview with "The Times" of London, Vidal said that there soon would be a dictatorship in the United States. The newspaper emphasized that Vidal, described as "the Grand Old Man of American "belles-lettres"", claimed that America is rotting away – and to not expect Barack Obama to save the country and the nation from imperial decay. In this interview, he also updated his views of his life, the United States, and other political subjects. Vidal had earlier described what he saw as the political and cultural rot in the United States in his essay, "The State of the Union" (1975), Feuds. The Capote–Vidal feud. In 1975 Vidal sued Truman Capote for slander over the accusation that he had been thrown out of the White House for being drunk, putting his arm around the first lady and then insulting Mrs. Kennedy's mother. Said Capote of Vidal at the time: "I'm always sad about Gore—very sad that he has to breathe every day." Mutual friend George Plimpton observed: "There's no venom like Capote's when he's on the prowl—and Gore's too, I don't know what division the feud should be in." The suit was settled in Vidal's favor when Lee Radziwill refused to testify on Capote's behalf, telling columnist Liz Smith, "Oh, Liz, what do we care; they're just a couple of fags! They're disgusting." The Buckley–Vidal feud. In 1968, the ABC television network hired the liberal Gore Vidal and the conservative William F. Buckley, Jr. as political analysts of the presidential-nomination conventions of the Republican and Democratic parties. Their commentaries led to Buckley threatening to assault Vidal. After days of bickering, their debates degraded to vitriolic "ad hominem" attacks. Discussing the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, the public intellectuals argued about freedom of speech, namely, the legality of protesters to display a Viet Cong flag in America, Vidal told Buckley to "shut up a minute." Buckley had likened violent left wing protesters to German National Socialists. Vidal stated, "As far as I'm concerned, the only sort of pro-crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself." Buckley replied, "Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered." ABC's Howard K. Smith interjected, and the debate resumed without violence. Later, Buckley said he regretted having called Vidal a "queer," yet said that Vidal was an "evangelist for bisexuality." In 1969, in "Esquire" magazine, Buckley continued his cultural feud with Vidal in the essay "On Experiencing Gore Vidal" (August 1969), in which he portrayed Vidal as an apologist for homosexuality; Buckley said, "The man who, in his essays, proclaims the normalcy of his affliction [i.e., homosexuality], and in his art the desirability of it, is not to be confused with the man who bears his sorrow quietly. The addict is to be pitied and even respected, not the pusher." The essay is collected in "The Governor Listeth: A Book of Inspired Political Revelations" (1970), an anthology of Buckley's writings from the time. Vidal riposted in "Esquire" with the September 1969 essay "A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley, Jr." and said that Buckley was "anti-black," "anti-semitic" and a "warmonger." Buckley sued Vidal for libel. The feud continued in "Esquire", where Vidal implied that in 1944, Buckley and unnamed siblings had vandalized a Protestant church in Sharon, Connecticut, (the Buckley family hometown) after the wife of a pastor had sold a house to a Jewish family. Buckley again sued Vidal and "Esquire" for libel and Vidal filed a counterclaim for libel against Buckley, citing Buckley's characterization of "Myra Breckinridge" (1968) as a pornographic novel. The court dismissed Vidal's counterclaim. Buckley accepted a money settlement of $115,000 to pay the fee of his attorney and an editorial apology from "Esquire", in which the publisher and the editors said that they were "utterly convinced" of the untruthfulness of Vidal's assertions. In a letter to "Newsweek" magazine, the publisher of "Esquire" said that "the settlement of Buckley's suit against us" was not "a 'disavowal' of Vidal's article. On the contrary, it clearly states that we published that article because we believed that Vidal had a right to assert his opinions, even though we did not share them." In "Gore Vidal: A Biography" (1999), Fred Kaplan said that, "The court had 'not' sustained Buckley's case against "Esquire" ... [that] the court had 'not' ruled that Vidal's article was 'defamatory.' It had ruled that the case would have to go to trial "in order to determine, as a matter of fact, whether or not it was defamatory". The cash value of the settlement with "Esquire" represented 'only' Buckley's legal expenses." In 2003, Buckley resumed his complaint of having been libeled by Vidal, this time with the publication of the anthology "Esquire's Big Book of Great Writing" (2003), which included Vidal's essay, "A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley, Jr." Again, the offended Buckley filed lawsuit for libel and "Esquire" magazine again settled Buckley's claim with $55,000–65,000 for the fees of his attorney and $10,000 for personal damages suffered by Buckley. In the obituary "RIP WFB – in Hell" (March 20, 2008), Vidal remembered Buckley, who had died on February 27, 2008. Later, in the interview "Literary Lion: Questions for Gore Vidal" (June 15, 2008), "New York Times" reporter Deborah Solomon asked Vidal, "How did you feel, when you heard that Buckley died this year?" Vidal responded: The Mailer–Vidal feud. On December 15, 1971, during the recording of "The Dick Cavett Show", with Janet Flanner, Norman Mailer allegedly head-butted Vidal when they were backstage. When a reporter asked Vidal why Mailer had knocked heads with him, Vidal said, "Once again, words failed Norman Mailer." During the recording of the talk show, Vidal and Mailer insulted each other, over what Vidal had written about him, prompting Mailer to say, "I've had to smell your works from time to time." Apparently, Mailer's umbrage resulted from Vidal's reference to Mailer having stabbed his wife of the time. Views. Polanski rape case. In "The Atlantic" magazine interview, "A Conversation with Gore Vidal" (October 2009), by John Meroney, Vidal spoke about topical and cultural matters of U.S. society. Asked his opinion about the arrest of the film director Roman Polanski, in Switzerland, in September 2009, in response to an extradition request by U.S. authorities, for having fled the U.S. in 1978 to avoid jail for the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old girl in Hollywood, Vidal said, "I really don't give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she's been taken advantage of?" Asked for elaboration, Vidal explained the cultural temper of the U.S. and of the Hollywood movie business in the 1970s: Asked to explain the term "American values," Vidal replied, "Lying and cheating. There's nothing better." In response to Vidal's opinion about the decades-old Polanski rape case, a spokeswoman for the organization Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, Barbara Dorris, said, "People should express their outrage, by refusing to buy any of his books," called Vidal a "mean-spirited buffoon" and said that, although "a boycott wouldn't hurt Vidal financially," it would "cause anyone else, with such callous views, to keep his mouth shut, and [so] avoid rubbing salt into the already deep [psychological] wounds of (the victims)" of sexual abuse. Scientology. In 1997, Gore Vidal was one of thirty-four public intellectuals and celebrities who signed an open-letter addressed to Helmut Kohl, the Chancellor of Germany, published in the "International Herald Tribune", protesting the treatment of Scientologists in Germany. Despite that stance, as a dispassionate intellectual Gore Vidal was fundamentally critical of Scientology as religion. Sexuality. In 1967, Vidal appeared in the CBS documentary, "", in which he expressed his views on homosexuality in the arts. Commenting on his life's work and his life, he described his style as "Knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn." Vidal often rebutted the label of "gay." He maintained that it referred to sexual acts rather than sexuality. Gore did not express a public stance on the HIV-AIDS crisis. According to Vidal's close friend Jay Parini, "Gore didn’t think of himself as a gay guy. It makes him self-hating. How could he despise gays as much as he did? In my company he always used the term 'fags.' He was uncomfortable with being gay. Then again, he was wildly courageous." Biographer Fred Kaplan concluded: "He was not interested in making a difference for gay people, or being an advocate for gay rights. There was no such thing as 'straight' or 'gay' for him, just the body and sex." In the September 1969 edition of "Esquire", Vidal wrote Personal life. In the multi-volume memoir "The Diary of Anaïs Nin" (1931–74), Anaïs Nin said she had a love affair with Vidal, who denied her claim in his memoir "Palimpsest" (1995). In the online article "Gore Vidal's Secret, Unpublished Love Letter to Anaïs Nin" (2013), author Kim Krizan said she found an unpublished love letter from Vidal to Nin, which contradicts his denial of a love affair with Nin. Krizan said she found the love letter while researching "Mirages", the latest volume of Nin's uncensored diary, to which Krizan wrote the foreword. Vidal would cruise the streets and bars of New York City and other locales and wrote in his memoir that by age twenty-five, he had had more than a thousand sexual encounters. Vidal also said that he had an intermittent romance with the actress Diana Lynn, and alluded to possibly having fathered a daughter. He was briefly engaged to the actress Joanne Woodward before she married the actor Paul Newman; after marrying, they briefly shared a house with Vidal in Los Angeles. Vidal enjoyed telling his sexual exploits to friends. Vidal claimed to have slept with Fred Astaire when he first moved to Hollywood. Vidal reportedly told his nephew that Dennis Hopper had a "lovely tuft of hair above his ass." In 1950, Gore Vidal met Howard Austen, who became his partner for the next 53 years, until Austen's death. He said that the secret to his long relationship with Austen was that they did not have sex with each other: "It's easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part, and impossible, 'Italic text'I have observed, when it does." In "" (1995), by Judy Wiedner, Vidal said that he refused to call himself "gay" because he was not an adjective, adding "to be categorized is, simply, to be enslaved. Watch out. I have never thought of myself as a victim ... I've said—a thousand times?—in print and on TV, that everyone is bisexual." During their relationship, the two would often hire male prostitutes—the control appealed to Vidal. He was always the top. In the course of his life, Vidal lived at various times in Italy and in the United States. In 2003, as his health began to fail with age, he sold his Italian villa "La Rondinaia" (The Swallow's Nest) on the Amalfi Coast in the province of Salerno and he and Austen returned to live in their 1929 villa in Outpost Estates, Los Angeles. Howard Austen died in November 2003 and in February 2005 his remains were re-buried at Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, D.C., in a joint grave plot that Vidal had purchased for himself and Austen. Death. In 2010 Vidal began to suffer from Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome, a neurological disorder. On July 31, 2012 Vidal died of pneumonia at his home in the Hollywood Hills at the age of 86. A memorial service was held for him at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in New York City on August 23, 2012. He was buried next to Howard Austen in Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, D.C. Legacy. Postmortem opinions and assessments of Gore as a writer varied. The "New York Times" described him as "an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile, or gotten more mileage from their talent." The "Los Angeles Times" said that he was a literary juggernaut whose novels and essays were considered "among the most elegant in the English language." The "Washington Post" described him as a "major writer of the modern era ... [an] astonishingly versatile man of letters." "The Guardian" said that "Vidal's critics disparaged his tendency to formulate an aphorism, rather than to argue, finding in his work an underlying note of contempt for those who did not agree with him. His fans, on the other hand, delighted in his unflagging wit and elegant style." The"Daily Telegraph" described the writer as "an icy iconoclast" who "delighted in chronicling what he perceived as the disintegration of civilisation around him." The BBC News said that he was "one of the finest post-war American writers ... an indefatigable critic of the whole American system ... Gore Vidal saw himself as the last of the breed of literary figures who became celebrities in their own right. Never a stranger to chat shows; his wry and witty opinions were sought after as much as his writing." In "The Culture of the United States Laments the Death of Gore Vidal," the Spanish on-line magazine "Ideal" said that Vidal's death was a loss to the "culture of the United States," and described him as a "great American novelist and essayist." In "The Writer Gore Vidal is Dead in Los Angeles", the online edition of the Italian newspaper "Corriere della Sera" described the novelist as "the "enfant terrible" of American culture" and that he was "one of the giants of American literature". In "Gore Vidal: The Killjoy of America", the French newspaper "Le Figaro" said that the public intellectual Vidal was "the killjoy of America" but that he also was an "outstanding polemicist" who used words "like high-precision weapons." On August 23, 2012, in the program a "Memorial for Gore Vidal in Manhattan", the life and works of the writer Gore Vidal were celebrated at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, with a revival of "The Best Man: A Play About Politics" (1960). The writer and comedian Dick Cavett was host of the Vidalian celebration, which featured personal reminiscences about and performances of excerpts from the works of Gore Vidal by friends and colleagues, such as Elizabeth Ashley, Candice Bergen, Hillary Clinton, Alan Cumming, James Earl Jones, Elaine May, Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, Cybill Shepherd and Liz Smith. In popular culture. In the 1960s, the weekly American sketch comedy television program "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" featured a running-joke sketch about Vidal; the telephone operator Ernestine (Lily Tomlin) would call him, saying: "Mr. Veedul, this is the Phone Company calling! (snort! snort!)." The sketch, titled "Mr. Veedle" also appeared in Tomlin's comedy record album "This Is a Recording" (1972). In the 1970s, in the stand-up comedy album "Reality ... What a Concept", Robin Williams portrayed Vidal as a drunken shill in a Thunderbird wine commercial. Vidal provided his own voice for the animated-cartoon version of himself in "The Simpsons" episode "Moe'N'a Lisa" (season 18, episode 6) he was also mentioned in "Krusty Gets Busted" (season 1, episode 12) by Sideshow Bob voiced by Kelsey Grammer and "Summer of 4 Ft. 2" (season 7, episode 25) by Lisa Simpson voiced by Yeardley Smith his picture also appearing a book in the episode. He also voices his animated-cartoon version in "Family Guy". Likewise, he portrayed himself in the "Da Ali G Show"; the Ali G character mistakes him for Vidal Sassoon, a famous hairdresser. In the biographical film "Amelia" (2009), the child Vidal was portrayed by William Cuddy, a Canadian actor. In the Truman Capote biographic film "Infamous" (2006), the young adult Vidal was portrayed by the American actor Michael Panes. The Buckley–Vidal debates, their aftermath and cultural significance, were the focus of a 2015 documentary film called "Best of Enemies.", as well as a 2021 play by James Graham, inspired by the film.

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Arthur Danto Arthur Coleman Danto (January 1, 1924 – October 25, 2013) was an American art critic, philosopher, and professor at Columbia University. He was best known for having been a long-time art critic for "The Nation" and for his work in philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of history, though he contributed significantly to a number of fields, including the philosophy of action. His interests included thought, feeling, philosophy of art, theories of representation, philosophical psychology, Hegel's aesthetics, and the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. Life and career. Danto was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, January 1, 1924, and grew up in Detroit. He was raised in a Reform Jewish home. After spending two years in the Army, Danto studied art and history at Wayne University (now Wayne State University). While an undergraduate he intended to become an artist, and began making prints in the Expressionist style in 1947 (these are now great rarities). He then pursued graduate study in philosophy at Columbia University. From 1949 to 1950, Danto studied in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship under Jean Wahl, and in 1951 returned to teach at Columbia. In 1992 he was named Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy. He was twice awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Arthur Danto died on October 25, 2013, aged 89 in Manhattan, New York City. Philosophical work. Arthur Danto argued that "a problem is not a philosophical problem unless it is possible to imagine that its solution will consist in showing how appearance has been taken for reality." While science deals with empirical problems, philosophy according to Danto examines indiscernible differences that lie outside of experience. Danto "believe[d] that persons are essentially systems of representation." "Artworld" and the definition of art. Danto laid the groundwork for an institutional definition of art that sought to answer the questions raised by the emerging phenomenon of twentieth-century art. The definition of the term “art” is a subject of constant contention and many books and journal articles have been published arguing over the answer to the question "What is Art?" In terms of classificatory disputes about art, Danto takes a conventional approach. Non-conventional definitions take a concept like the aesthetic as an intrinsic characteristic in order to account for the phenomena of art. Conventional definitions reject this connection to aesthetic, formal, or expressive properties as essential to defining art but rather, in either an institutional or historical sense, say that “art” is basically a sociological category. Danto's "institutional definition of art" defines art as whatever art schools, museums, and artists consider art, regardless of further formal definition. Danto wrote on this subject in several of his works and a detailed treatment is to be found in "Transfiguration of the Commonplace". Danto stated, “A work of art is a meaning given embodiment.” Danto further stated, also in "Veery" journal, “Criticism, other than of content, is really of the mode of embodiment.” The 1964 essay "The Artworld" in which Danto coined the term “artworld” (as opposed to the existing "art world", though they mean the same), by which he meant cultural context or “an atmosphere of art theory”, first appeared in "The Journal of Philosophy" and has since been widely reprinted. It has had considerable influence on aesthetic philosophy and, according to professor of philosophy Stephen David Ross, "especially upon George Dickie's institutional theory of art. Dickie defined an art work as an artifact 'which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting in behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld)' (p. 43.)" According to the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", "Danto's definition has been glossed as follows: something is a work of art if and only if (i) it has a subject (ii) about which it projects some attitude or point of view (has a style) (iii) by means of rhetorical ellipsis (usually metaphorical) which ellipsis engages audience participation in filling in what is missing, and (iv) where the work in question and the interpretations thereof require an art historical context. (Danto, Carroll) Clause (iv) is what makes the definition institutionalist. The view has been criticized for entailing that art criticism written in a highly rhetorical style is art, lacking but requiring an independent account of what makes a context art historical, and for not applying to music." After about 2005, Danto attempted to streamline his definition of art down to two principles: (i) art must have content or meaning and (ii) the art must embody that meaning in some appropriate manner. The end of art. The basic meaning of the term "art" has changed several times over the centuries and continued to evolve during the 20th century as well. Danto describes the history of Art in his own contemporary version of Hegel's dialectical history of art. "Danto is not claiming that no-one is making art anymore; nor is he claiming that no good art is being made any more. But he thinks that a certain history of western art has come to an end, in about the way that Hegel suggested it would." The "end of art" refers to the beginning of our modern era of art in which art no longer adheres to the constraints of imitation theory but serves a new purpose. Art began with an "era of imitation, followed by an era of ideology, followed by our post-historical era in which, with qualification, anything goes... In our narrative, at first only mimesis [imitation] was art, then several things were art but each tried to extinguish its competitors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylistic or philosophical constraints. There is no special way works of art have to be. And that is the present and, I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the story." Art criticism. Arthur Danto was an art critic for "The Nation" from 1984 to 2009, and also published numerous articles in other journals. In addition, he was an editor of "The Journal of Philosophy" and a contributing editor of the "Naked Punch Review" and "Artforum". In art criticism, he published several collected essays, including "Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), which won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for Criticism in 1990; "Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992); "Playing With the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe" (University of California, 1995); "The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000); and "Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life" (Columbia University Press, 2007). In 1996, he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto. Publications. Books. Danto was the author of numerous books on philosophy and art, and summarizing the works of Continental philosophers in Anglo-American terms. Arthur Danto's published works included:

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Christopher Hitchens Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English-American socio-political critic and public intellectual, who mainly expressed himself as an author, journalist, orator and columnist. He wrote, co-wrote, edited or co-edited over 30 books, including five of essays on culture, politics and literature. Hitchens described himself as an anti-theist, who saw all religions as false, harmful and authoritarian. He argued for free expression and scientific discovery, and asserted that they were superior to religion as an ethical code of conduct for human civilisation. He also advocated separation of church and state. The dictum "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence" has become known as Hitchens's razor. Life and career. Early life and education. Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, the elder of two boys; his brother, Peter, became a socially conservative journalist. Their parents, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987) and Yvonne Jean Hitchens (née Hickman; 1921–1973), met in Scotland when serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. His mother had been a Wren, a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service. She was Jewish, something Hitchens discovered later in life; he came to identify as a secular Jew. Hitchens often referred to Eric simply as 'the commander'. Eric was deployed on , which took part in the sinking of the in the Battle of the North Cape on 26 December 1943. He paid tribute to his father's contribution to the war: "Sending a Nazi convoy raider to the bottom is a better day's work than any I have ever done." Eric later worked as a bookkeeper for boatbuilders, speedboat-manufacturers, and at a prep school. Eric's naval career required the family to move from base to base throughout Britain and its dependencies, including to Malta, where Peter Hitchens was born in Sliema in 1951. After attending two independent schools—Mount House School, Tavistock, Devon, from the age of eight, and the Leys School in Cambridgeshire—Hitchens was admitted in 1967 to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and was tutored by Steven Lukes and Anthony Kenny. He graduated in 1970 with a third-class degree. In his adolescence, he was "bowled over" by Richard Llewellyn's "How Green Was My Valley", Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment", R. H. Tawney's critique on "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism", and the works of George Orwell. In 1968, he took part in the TV quiz show "University Challenge". In the 1960s, Hitchens joined the political left, drawn by disagreement over the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, racism, and oligarchy, including that of "the unaccountable corporation". He expressed affinity with the politically charged countercultural and protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. He avoided the recreational drug use of the time, saying "in my cohort we were slightly anti-hedonistic ... it made it very much easier for police provocation to occur, because the planting of drugs was something that happened to almost everyone one knew." Hitchens was inspired to become a journalist after reading a piece by James Cameron. Hitchens was bisexual during his younger days, and joked that as he aged, his appearance "declined to the point where only women would go to bed with [him]." He claimed to have had sexual relations with two male students at Oxford who would later become Tory ministers during the prime ministership of Margaret Thatcher, although he would not reveal their names publicly. Hitchens joined the Labour Party in 1965, but along with the majority of the Labour students' organisation was expelled in 1967, because of what Hitchens called "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam". Under the influence of Peter Sedgwick, who translated the writings of Russian revolutionary and Soviet dissident Victor Serge, Hitchens forged an ideological interest in Trotskyism and anti-Stalinist socialism. Shortly after, he joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyist Luxemburgist sect". Journalistic career in the UK (1971–1981). Early in his career Hitchens began working as a correspondent for the magazine "International Socialism", published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group was broadly Trotskyist, but differed from more orthodox Trotskyist groups in its refusal to defend communist states as "workers' states". Their slogan was "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism". In 1971, after spending a year travelling the United States on a scholarship, Hitchens went to work at the "Times Higher Education Supplement" where he served as a social science correspondent. Hitchens admitted that he hated the position, and was fired after six months in the job. Next he was a researcher for ITV's "Weekend World". In 1973 Hitchens went to work for the "New Statesman", where his colleagues included the authors Martin Amis, whom he had briefly met at Oxford, Julian Barnes and James Fenton, with whom he had shared a house in Oxford. Amis described him at the time as, "handsome, festive [and] gauntly left-wing". Around that time, the Friday lunches began, which were attended by writers including Clive James, Ian McEwan, Kingsley Amis, Terence Kilmartin, Robert Conquest, Al Alvarez, Peter Porter, Russell Davies and Mark Boxer. At the "New Statesman" Hitchens acquired a reputation as a left-winger while working as a war correspondent from areas of conflict such as Northern Ireland, Libya, and Iraq. In November 1973, while in Greece, Hitchens reported on the constitutional crisis of the military junta. It became his first leading article for the "New Statesman". In December 1977, Hitchens interviewed Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, a conversation he later described as "horrifying". In 1977, unhappy at the "New Statesman", Hitchens defected to the "Daily Express" where he became a foreign correspondent. He returned to the "New Statesman" in 1979 where he became foreign editor. American writings (1981–2011). Hitchens went to the United States in 1981 as part of an editor exchange programme between the "New Statesman" and "The Nation". After joining "The Nation", he penned vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America. Hitchens became a contributing editor of "Vanity Fair" in 1992, writing ten columns a year. He left "The Nation" in 2002 after profoundly disagreeing with other contributors over the Iraq War. There is speculation that Hitchens was the inspiration for Tom Wolfe's character Peter Fallow in the 1987 novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities", but others—including Hitchens—believe it to be "Spy Magazine"s "Ironman Nightlife Decathlete", Anthony Haden-Guest. In 1987, Hitchens's father died from cancer of the oesophagus, the same disease that would later claim his own life. In April 2007, Hitchens became a US citizen; he later stated that he saw himself as Anglo-American. He became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008. At "Slate", he usually wrote under the news-and-politics column "Fighting Words". Hitchens spent part of his early career in journalism as a foreign correspondent in Cyprus. Through his work there he met his first wife Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, with whom he had two children, Alexander and Sophia. His son, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, born in 1984, has worked as a policy researcher in London. Hitchens continued writing essay-style correspondence pieces from a variety of locales, including Chad, Uganda and the Darfur region of Sudan. In 1991, he received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. Hitchens met Carol Blue in Los Angeles in 1989 and they married in 1991. Hitchens called it love at first sight. In 1999, Hitchens and Blue, both harsh critics of President Clinton, submitted an affidavit to the trial managers of the Republican Party in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Therein they swore that their then friend Sidney Blumenthal had described Monica Lewinsky as a stalker. This allegation contradicted Blumenthal's own sworn deposition in the trial, and it resulted in a hostile exchange of opinion in the public sphere between Hitchens and Blumenthal. Following the publication of Blumenthal's "The Clinton Wars," Hitchens wrote several pieces in which he accused Blumenthal of manipulating the facts. The incident ended their friendship and sparked a personal crisis for Hitchens, who was stridently criticised by friends for what they saw as a cynical and ultimately politically futile act. Before Hitchens's political shift, the American author and polemicist Gore Vidal was apt to speak of Hitchens as his "dauphin" or "heir". In 2010, Hitchens attacked Vidal in a "Vanity Fair" piece headlined "Vidal Loco", calling him a "crackpot" for his adoption of 9/11 conspiracy theories. On the back of Hitchens's memoir "Hitch-22," among the praise from notable figures, Vidal's endorsement of Hitchens as his successor is crossed out in red and annotated "NO, C.H." Hitchens's strong advocacy of the war in Iraq gained him a wider readership, and in September 2005 he was named as fifth on the list of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by "Foreign Policy" and "Prospect" magazines. An online poll ranked the 100 intellectuals, but the magazines noted that the rankings of Hitchens (5), Noam Chomsky (1), and Abdolkarim Soroush (15) were partly due to their respective supporters' publicising of the vote. Hitchens later responded to his ranking with a few articles about his status as such. Hitchens did not leave his position writing for "The Nation" until after the 11 September attacks, stating that he felt the magazine had arrived at a position "that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden". The 11 September attacks "exhilarated" him, bringing into focus "a battle between everything I love and everything I hate" and strengthening his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy that challenged "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan described him as representing the anti-totalitarian left. Hitchens recalls in his memoir having been "invited by Bernard-Henri Lévy to write an essay on political reconsiderations for his magazine "La Regle du Jeu". I gave it the partly ironic title: 'Can One Be a Neoconservative?' Impatient with this, some copy editor put it on the cover as 'How I Became a Neoconservative.' Perhaps this was an instance of the Cartesian principle as opposed to the English empiricist one: It was decided that I evidently was what I apparently only thought." Indeed, in a 2010 BBC interview, he stated that he "still [thought] like a Marxist" and considered himself "a leftist." In 2007, Hitchens published one of his most controversial articles entitled "Why Women Aren't Funny" in "Vanity Fair". Relying mainly on anecdotal evidence, he argued that there is less societal pressure for women to practice humour and that "women who do it play by men's rules". Over the following year, "Vanity Fair" published several letters that it received, objecting to the tone or premise of the article, as well as a rebuttal by Alessandra Stanley. Amid further criticism, Hitchens reiterated his position in a video and written response. In 2007, Hitchens's work for "Vanity Fair" won the National Magazine Award in the category "Columns and Commentary". He was a finalist in the same category in 2008 for some of his columns in "Slate" but lost out to Matt Taibbi of "Rolling Stone". "Hitch-22" was short-listed for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. He won the National Magazine Award for Columns about Cancer in 2011. Hitchens also served on the Advisory Board of Secular Coalition for America and offered advice to the Coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life. In December 2011, prior to his death, Asteroid 57901 Hitchens was named after him. Literature reviews. Hitchens wrote a monthly essay in "The Atlantic" and occasionally contributed to other literary journals. One of his books, "Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere", collected these works. In "Why Orwell Matters", he defends Orwell's writings against modern critics as relevant today and progressive for his time. In the 2008 book "Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left", many literary critiques are included of essays and other books of writers, such as David Horowitz and Edward Said. During a three-hour "In Depth" interview on Book TV, he named authors who influenced his views, including Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, P. G. Wodehouse and Conor Cruise O'Brien. Professorships. Hitchens was a visiting professor in the following institutions: Relationship with his brother. Christopher's only sibling was the journalist and author Peter Hitchens, who is two years younger. Christopher said in 2005 the main difference between the two is belief in the existence of God. Peter became a member of the International Socialists (forerunners of the modern Socialist Workers' Party) from 1968 to 1975 (beginning at age 17) after Christopher introduced him to them. The brothers fell out after Peter wrote a 2001 article in "The Spectator" which allegedly characterised Christopher as a Stalinist. After the birth of Peter's third child, the brothers were reconciled. Peter's review of "God Is Not Great" led to a public argument between the brothers but no renewed estrangement. In the review, Peter claimed his brother's book made a number of incorrect assertions. In 2007, the brothers appeared as panellists on BBC TV's "Question Time", where they clashed on a number of issues. In 2008, in the US, they debated the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the existence of God. In 2010 at the Pew Forum, the pair debated the nature of God in civilisation. At the memorial service held for Christopher in New York, Peter read a passage from St Paul's Epistle to the Philippians which Christopher himself had read at their father's funeral. Political views. In 2009, Hitchens was listed by "Forbes" magazine as one of the "25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media". The same article noted, however, that he would "likely be aghast to find himself on this list", as it reduces his self-styled radicalism to mere liberalism. Hitchens's political perspectives also appear in his wide-ranging writings, which include many dialogues. He said of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, "I have always found it quaint, and rather touching, that there is a movement in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough." While Hitchens supported Israel's right to exist, he was critical of the Israeli government's handling of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Having long described himself as a socialist and a Marxist, Hitchens began his break from the established political left after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the controversy over "The Satanic Verses", followed by what he saw as the left's embrace of Bill Clinton and the anti-war movement's opposition to NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. He later became a so-called liberal hawk and supported the War on Terror, but he had some reservations, such as his characterisation of waterboarding as torture after voluntarily undergoing the procedure. In January 2006, he joined four other individuals and four organisations, including the ACLU and Greenpeace, as plaintiffs in a lawsuit, "ACLU v. NSA", challenging Bush's NSA warrantless surveillance; the lawsuit was filed with the ACLU. Hitchens was an avid critic of President Slobodan Milošević of Serbia and other Serbian politicians of the 1990s. He called Milošević a "fascist" and a "nazi" after the Bosnian genocide and ethnic cleansing of Albanians. Hitchens often accused the Serbian government of committing numerous war crimes during the Yugoslav Wars. He denounced people like Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, who criticized the NATO intervention there. Hitchens also had equal contempt for Croatian president Franjo Tuđman and the policies of the Croatian government, which he saw as reviving "Ustashe formations". Hitchens was a supporter of the European Union. In an appearance on C-SPAN in 1993, Hitchens said, "As of 1992, there is now a Euro passport that makes you free to travel within the boundaries of ... member countries, and I've always liked the idea of European unity, and so I held out for a Euro passport. So I travel as a European." Speaking at the launch of his brother Peter Hitchens's book, "The Abolition of Britain", at Conway Hall in London, Hitchens denounced the so-called Eurosceptic movement, describing it as "the British version of fascism". He went on to say, "Scepticism is a title of honour. These people are not sceptical. They're fanatical. They're dogmatic". Critiques of specific individuals. Hitchens wrote book-length biographical essays on Thomas Jefferson ('), Thomas Paine (') and George Orwell ("Why Orwell Matters"). He also became known for excoriating criticisms of public contemporary figures, including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, the subjects of three full-length texts: ', ', and "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" respectively. In 2007, while promoting his book "", Hitchens described the Christian evangelist Billy Graham as "a self-conscious fraud" and "a disgustingly evil man". Hitchens claimed that the evangelist, who had recently been hospitalised for intestinal bleeding, made a living by "going around spouting lies to young people. What a horrible career. I gather it's soon to be over. I certainly hope so." In response to the comments, writers Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy published an article in "Time" in which, among other things, they refuted Hitchens's suggestion that Graham went into ministry to make money. They argued that during his career Graham "turn[ed] down million-dollar television and Hollywood offers." They also pointed out that having established the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in 1950, Graham drew a straight salary, comparable to that of a senior minister, irrespective of the money raised by his meetings. In 1999, Hitchens wrote a profile of Donald Trump for "The Sunday Herald". Trump had expressed interest in running in the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election as a candidate for the Reform Party. Of Trump, Hitchens said, "Because the man with many monikers in many ways embodies his country and because this election cycle is now so absurd, and so much up for grabs, it is unwise to exclude anything ... The best guess has to be that here's a man who hates to be alone, who needs approval and reinforcement, who talks a better game than he plays, who is crude, hyperactive, emotional and optimistic." Hitchens had previously written that Trump demonstrated how "nobody is more covetous and greedy than those who have far too much." Criticism of religion. Hitchens was an antitheist, and said that a person "could be an atheist and wish that belief in God were correct", but that "an antitheist, a term I'm trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there's no evidence for such an assertion." He often spoke against the Abrahamic religions. In a 2010 interview at New York Public Library, Hitchens stated that he was against infant circumcision. When asked by readers of "The Independent" (London) what he considered to be the "axis of evil", Hitchens replied "Christianity, Judaism, Islam – the three leading monotheisms." In debates, Hitchens often posed what has become known as "Hitchens's Challenge": to name at least one moral action that a person without a faith (e.g., an atheist or antitheist) could not possibly perform, and conversely, to name one immoral action that only a person with a faith could perform or has performed in the past. In his best-seller "God Is Not Great", Hitchens expanded his criticism to include all religions, including those rarely criticised by Western secularists, such as Buddhism and neo-paganism. Hitchens said that organised religion is "the main source of hatred in the world", calling it "[v]iolent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: [it] ought to have a great deal on its conscience". In the same work Hitchens says that humanity therefore needs a renewed Enlightenment. The book received mixed responses, ranging from praise in "The New York Times" for his "logical flourishes and conundrums" to accusations of "intellectual and moral shabbiness" in the "Financial Times". "God Is Not Great" was nominated for a National Book Award on 10 October 2007. "God Is Not Great" affirmed Hitchens's position in the "New Atheism" movement. Hitchens was made an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist International and the National Secular Society shortly after its release and he was later named to the Honorary Board of distinguished achievers of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. He also joined the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America, a group of atheists and humanists. Hitchens said he would accept an invitation from any religious leader who wished to debate with him. On 30 September 2007, Richard Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett met at Hitchens's residence for a private, unmoderated discussion lasting two hours. The event was videotaped and entitled "The Four Horsemen". In it, Hitchens stated at one point that he saw the Maccabean Revolt as the most unfortunate event in human history due to the reversion from Hellenistic thought and philosophy to messianism and fundamentalism that its success constituted. That year, Hitchens began a series of written debates on the question "Is Christianity Good for the World?" with Christian theologian and pastor Douglas Wilson, published in "Christianity Today" magazine. This exchange eventually became a book with the same title published in 2008. During their promotional tour of the book, they were accompanied by the producer Darren Doane's film crew. Thence Doane produced the film "Collision: Is Christianity GOOD for the World?," which was released on 27 October 2009. On 4 April 2009, Hitchens debated William Lane Craig on the existence of God at Biola University. On 19 October 2009, Intelligence Squared explored the question "Is the Catholic Church a force for good in the world?". John Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe argued that it was, while Hitchens joined Stephen Fry in arguing that it was not. The latter side won the debate according to an audience poll. On 26 November 2010, Hitchens appeared in Toronto, Ontario, at the Munk Debates, where he debated religion with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a convert to Roman Catholicism. Blair argued religion is a force for good, while Hitchens argued against that. Hitchens also debated Larry Taunton, an evangelical Christian friend of his, on "God or no God," and Larry wrote a book about his friendship with Hitchens. Throughout these debates, Hitchens became known for his persuasive and enthusiastic rhetoric in public speaking. "Wit and eloquence", "verbal barbs and linguistic dexterity" and "self-reference, literary engagement and hyperbole" are all elements of his speeches. The term "hitch-slap" has been used as an informal term among his supporters for a carefully crafted remark designed to humiliate his opponents. Hitchens's line "one asks wistfully if there is no provision in the procedures of military justice for them to be taken out and shot," condemning the perpetrators of the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse, was cited by "The Humanist" as an example. A tribute in "Politico" stated that this was a trait Hitchens shared with fellow atheist and intellectual, Gore Vidal. Personal life. Hitchens was raised nominally Christian and attended Christian boarding schools, but from an early age he declined to participate in communal prayers. Later in life, Hitchens discovered that he was of Jewish descent on his mother's side and that his Jewish ancestors were immigrants from Eastern Europe (including Poland). Hitchens was married twice, first to Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, in 1981; the couple had a son Alexander and a daughter Sophia. In 1991, Hitchens married his second wife, Carol Blue, an American screenwriter, in a ceremony held at the apartment of Victor Navasky, editor of "The Nation." They had a daughter together, Antonia. Hitchens considered reading, writing and public speaking not as a job or career but as "what I am, who I am, [and] what I love." In November 1973, Hitchens's mother committed suicide in Athens in a pact with her lover, a defrocked clergyman named Timothy Bryan. The pair overdosed on sleeping pills in adjoining hotel rooms and Bryan slashed his wrists in the bathtub. Hitchens flew alone to Athens to recover his mother's body, initially under the impression that she had been murdered. Illness and death. In June 2010, Hitchens was on tour in New York promoting his memoirs "Hitch-22" when he was taken into emergency care suffering from a severe pericardial effusion. Soon after, he announced he was postponing his tour to undergo treatment for oesophageal cancer. In a "Vanity Fair" piece titled "Topic of Cancer", he stated that he was undergoing treatment for the cancer. He said that he recognised the long-term prognosis was far from positive and he would be a "very lucky person to live another five years". A heavy smoker and drinker since his teenage years, Hitchens acknowledged that these habits were likely to have contributed to his illness. During his illness, Hitchens was under the care of Francis Collins and was the subject of Collins's new cancer treatment, which maps out the human genome and selectively targets damaged DNA. Hitchens died of pneumonia on 15 December 2011 in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, aged 62. In accordance with his wishes, his body was donated to medical research. "Mortality", a collection of seven of Hitchens's "Vanity Fair" essays about his illness, was published posthumously in September 2012. Reactions to death. Former British prime minister Tony Blair said, "Christopher Hitchens was a complete one-off, an amazing mixture of writer, journalist, polemicist, a unique character. He was fearless in the pursuit of truth and any cause in which he believed. And there was no belief he held that he did not advocate with passion, commitment, and brilliance. He was an extraordinary, compelling, and colourful human being whom it was a privilege to know." Richard Dawkins said of Hitchens, "He was a polymath, a wit, immensely knowledgeable, and a valiant fighter against all tyrants, including imaginary supernatural ones." Dawkins later described Hitchens as "probably the best orator I've ever heard", and his death "an enormous loss". American theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss said, "Christopher was a beacon of knowledge and light in a world that constantly threatens to extinguish both. He had the courage to accept the world for just what it is and not what he wanted it to be. That's the highest praise, I believe, one can give to any intellect. He understood that the universe doesn't care about our existence or welfare, and he epitomized the realization that our lives have meaning only to the extent that we give them meaning." Bill Maher paid tribute to Hitchens on his show "Real Time with Bill Maher", saying, "We lost a hero of mine, a friend, and one of the great talk show guests of all time." Salman Rushdie and English comedian Stephen Fry paid tribute at the Christopher Hitchens Vanity Fair Memorial 2012. Three weeks before Hitchens's death, George Eaton of the "New Statesman" wrote, "He is determined to ensure that he is not remembered simply as a 'lefty who turned right' or as a contrarian and provocateur. Throughout his career, he has retained a commitment to the Enlightenment values of reason, secularism and pluralism. His targets—Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, God—are chosen not at random, but rather because they have offended one or more of these principles. The tragedy of Hitchens's illness is that it came at a time when he enjoyed a larger audience than ever. The great polemicist is certain to be remembered, but, as he was increasingly aware, perhaps not as he would like." "The Chronicle of Higher Education" asked if Hitchens was the last public intellectual. Former debate opponent George Galloway remained scathing of Hitchens' politics, but wrote, "His ditties were witty, his parsing precise and, if you like your men drunk, slurred and slobbering, he could be charming no doubt." In 2015, an annual prize of $50,000 was established in his honour by The Dennis and Victoria Ross Foundation for "an author or journalist whose work reflects a commitment to free expression and inquiry, a range and depth of intellect, and a willingness to pursue the truth without regard to personal or professional consequence".

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Ben Eltham Ben Eltham is an Australian writer, journalist, researcher, creative producer and social commentator based in Melbourne. He is a lecturer in media and communications at Monash University's School of Media, Film and Journalism and was a fellow of the Centre for Policy Development and a research fellow at Deakin University's Centre for Memory, Imagination and Invention. Eltham studied neuroscience and philosophy at the University of Queensland, and did a PhD at Western Sydney University on cultural policy. He has served as national affairs correspondent for "New Matilda". Bibliography. Listing

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Dimitris Vardoulakis Dimitris Vardoulakis (born 1975) is a Greek philosopher and Associate Professor of philosophy in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. He works in the tradition of Continental philosophy, and has published on a variety of topics, including the relation between literature and philosophy, power and sovereignty. Career. He received his PhD in philosophy from Monash University and is a winner of Excellence in Leadership Award. Vardoulakis is the author of ' (2011, Fordham University Press) and ' (2013, Fordham University Press). He co-edited "After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy" (2005, Delaware Press) with Leslie Hill and Brian Nelson and was the sole editor of "Spinoza Now" (2011, University of Minnesota Press). He co-edited a special issue of "SubStance" entitled "The Political Animal" with Chris Danta, and a special issue of "Angelaki" entitled "The Politics of Place" with Andrew Benjamin. Vardoulakis is the chair of the lecture series Thinking Out Loud: The Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society and editor of the linked book series published by Fordham University Press. He is the co-editor of the book series Incitements, published with Edinburgh University Press.

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Leo Tolstoy Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (; Russian: , , ; ), usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. He received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 1909. That he never won is a major controversy. Born to an aristocratic Russian family in 1828, Tolstoy is best known for the novels "War and Peace" (1869) and "Anna Karenina" (1878), often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction. He first achieved literary acclaim in his twenties with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, "Childhood", "Boyhood", and "Youth" (1852–1856), and "Sevastopol Sketches" (1855), based upon his experiences in the Crimean War. His fiction includes dozens of short stories and several novellas such as "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1886), "Family Happiness" (1859), and "Hadji Murad" (1912). He also wrote plays and numerous philosophical essays. In the 1870s, Tolstoy experienced a profound moral crisis, followed by what he regarded as an equally profound spiritual awakening, as outlined in his non-fiction work "A Confession" (1882). His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as "The Kingdom of God Is Within You" (1894), had a profound impact on such pivotal 20th-century figures as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. He also became a dedicated advocate of Georgism, the economic philosophy of Henry George, which he incorporated into his writing, particularly "Resurrection" (1899). Origins. The Tolstoys were a well-known family of old Russian nobility who traced their ancestry to a mythical nobleman named Indris described by Pyotr Tolstoy as arriving "from Nemec, from the lands of Caesar" to Chernigov in 1353 along with his two sons Litvinos (or Litvonis) and Zimonten (or Zigmont) and a druzhina of 3000 people. While the word "Nemec" has been long used to describe Germans only, at that time it was applied to any foreigner who didn't speak Russian (from the word "nemoy" meaning "mute"). Indris was then converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, under the name of Leonty, and his sons as Konstantin and Feodor. Konstantin's grandson Andrei Kharitonovich was nicknamed Tolstiy (translated as "fat") by Vasily II of Moscow after he moved from Chernigov to Moscow. Because of the pagan names and the fact that Chernigov at the time was ruled by Demetrius I Starshy some researchers concluded that they were Lithuanians who arrived from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. At the same time, no mention of Indris was ever found in the 14th-to-16th-century documents, while the Chernigov Chronicles used by Pyotr Tolstoy as a reference were lost. The first documented members of the Tolstoy family also lived during the 17th century, thus Pyotr Tolstoy himself is generally considered the founder of the noble house, being granted the title of count by Peter the Great. Life and career. Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana, a family estate 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) southwest of Tula, Russia, and 200 kilometres (120 mi) south of Moscow. He was the fourth of five children of Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy (1794–1837), a veteran of the Patriotic War of 1812, and Countess Mariya Tolstaya (née Volkonskaya; 1790–1830). His mother died when he was two and his father when he was nine. Tolstoy and his siblings were brought up by relatives. In 1844, he began studying law and oriental languages at Kazan University, where teachers described him as "both unable and unwilling to learn". Tolstoy left the university in the middle of his studies, returned to Yasnaya Polyana and then spent much time in Moscow, Tula and Saint Petersburg, leading a lax and leisurely lifestyle. He began writing during this period, including his first novel "Childhood", a fictitious account of his own youth, which was published in 1852. In 1851, after running up heavy gambling debts, he went with his older brother to the Caucasus and joined the army. Tolstoy served as a young artillery officer during the Crimean War and was in Sevastopol during the 11-month-long siege of Sevastopol in 1854–55, including the Battle of the Chernaya. During the war he was recognised for his courage and promoted to lieutenant. He was appalled by the number of deaths involved in warfare, and left the army after the end of the Crimean War. His experience in the army, and two trips around Europe in 1857 and 1860–61 converted Tolstoy from a dissolute and privileged society author to a non-violent and spiritual anarchist. Others who followed the same path were Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. During his 1857 visit, Tolstoy witnessed a public execution in Paris, a traumatic experience that marked the rest of his life. In a letter to his friend Vasily Botkin, Tolstoy wrote: "The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens ... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere." Tolstoy's concept of non-violence or ahimsa was bolstered when he read a German version of the Tirukkural. He later instilled the concept in Mahatma Gandhi through his A Letter to a Hindu when young Gandhi corresponded with him seeking his advice. His European trip in 1860–61 shaped both his political and literary development when he met Victor Hugo. Tolstoy read Hugo's newly finished "Les Misérables". The similar evocation of battle scenes in Hugo's novel and Tolstoy's "War and Peace" indicates this influence. Tolstoy's political philosophy was also influenced by a March 1861 visit to French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, then living in exile under an assumed name in Brussels. Tolstoy reviewed Proudhon's forthcoming publication, "La Guerre et la Paix" ("War and Peace" in French), and later used the title for his masterpiece. The two men also discussed education, as Tolstoy wrote in his educational notebooks: "If I recount this conversation with Proudhon, it is to show that, in my personal experience, he was the only man who understood the significance of education and of the printing press in our time." Fired by enthusiasm, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana and founded 13 schools for the children of Russia's peasants, who had just been emancipated from serfdom in 1861. Tolstoy described the schools' principles in his 1862 essay "The School at Yasnaya Polyana". His educational experiments were short-lived, partly due to harassment by the Tsarist secret police. However, as a direct forerunner to A.S. Neill's Summerhill School, the school at Yasnaya Polyana can justifiably be claimed the first example of a coherent theory of democratic education. Personal life. The death of his brother Nikolay in 1860 had an impact on Tolstoy, and led him to a desire to marry. On 23 September 1862, Tolstoy married Sophia Andreevna Behrs, who was sixteen years his junior and the daughter of a court physician. She was called Sonya, the Russian diminutive of Sofia, by her family and friends. They had 13 children, eight of whom survived childhood: The marriage was marked from the outset by sexual passion and emotional insensitivity when Tolstoy, on the eve of their marriage, gave her his diaries detailing his extensive sexual past and the fact that one of the serfs on his estate had borne him a son. Even so, their early married life was happy and allowed Tolstoy much freedom and the support system to compose "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" with Sonya acting as his secretary, editor, and financial manager. Sonya was copying and hand-writing his epic works time after time. Tolstoy would continue editing "War and Peace" and had to have clean final drafts to be delivered to the publisher. However, their later life together has been described by A.N. Wilson as one of the unhappiest in literary history. Tolstoy's relationship with his wife deteriorated as his beliefs became increasingly radical. This saw him seeking to reject his inherited and earned wealth, including the renunciation of the copyrights on his earlier works. Some of the members of the Tolstoy family left Russia in the aftermath of the 1905 Russian Revolution and the subsequent establishment of the Soviet Union, and many of Leo Tolstoy's relatives and descendants today live in Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and the United States. Tolstoy's son, Count Lev Lvovich Tolstoy, settled in Sweden and married a Swedish woman. Leo Tolstoy's last surviving grandchild, Countess Tatiana Tolstoy-Paus, died in 2007 at Herresta manor in Sweden, which is owned by Tolstoy's descendants. Swedish jazz singer Viktoria Tolstoy is also descended from Leo Tolstoy. One of his great-great-grandsons, Vladimir Tolstoy (born 1962), is a director of the Yasnaya Polyana museum since 1994 and an adviser to the President of Russia on cultural affairs since 2012. Ilya Tolstoy's great-grandson, Pyotr Tolstoy, is a well-known Russian journalist and TV presenter as well as a State Duma deputy since 2016. His cousin Fyokla Tolstaya (born Anna Tolstaya in 1971), daughter of the acclaimed Soviet Slavist Nikita Tolstoy () (1923–1996), is also a Russian journalist, TV and radio host. Novels and fictional works. Tolstoy is considered one of the giants of Russian literature; his works include the novels "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" and novellas such as "Hadji Murad" and "The Death of Ivan Ilyich". Tolstoy's earliest works, the autobiographical novels "Childhood", "Boyhood", and "Youth" (1852–1856), tell of a rich landowner's son and his slow realization of the chasm between himself and his peasants. Though he later rejected them as sentimental, a great deal of Tolstoy's own life is revealed. They retain their relevance as accounts of the universal story of growing up. Tolstoy served as a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment during the Crimean War, recounted in his "Sevastopol Sketches". His experiences in battle helped stir his subsequent pacifism and gave him material for realistic depiction of the horrors of war in his later work. His fiction consistently attempts to convey realistically the Russian society in which he lived. "The Cossacks" (1863) describes the Cossack life and people through a story of a Russian aristocrat in love with a Cossack girl. "Anna Karenina" (1877) tells parallel stories of an adulterous woman trapped by the conventions and falsities of society and of a philosophical landowner (much like Tolstoy), who works alongside the peasants in the fields and seeks to reform their lives. Tolstoy not only drew from his own life experiences but also created characters in his own image, such as Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei in "War and Peace", Levin in "Anna Karenina" and to some extent, Prince Nekhlyudov in "Resurrection". "War and Peace" is generally thought to be one of the greatest novels ever written, remarkable for its dramatic breadth and unity. Its vast canvas includes 580 characters, many historical with others fictional. The story moves from family life to the headquarters of Napoleon, from the court of Alexander I of Russia to the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino. Tolstoy's original idea for the novel was to investigate the causes of the Decembrist revolt, to which it refers only in the last chapters, from which can be deduced that Andrei Bolkonsky's son will become one of the Decembrists. The novel explores Tolstoy's theory of history, and in particular the insignificance of individuals such as Napoleon and Alexander. Somewhat surprisingly, Tolstoy did not consider "War and Peace" to be a novel (nor did he consider many of the great Russian fictions written at that time to be novels). This view becomes less surprising if one considers that Tolstoy was a novelist of the realist school who considered the novel to be a framework for the examination of social and political issues in nineteenth-century life. "War and Peace" (which is to Tolstoy really an epic in prose) therefore did not qualify. Tolstoy thought that "Anna Karenina" was his first true novel. After "Anna Karenina", Tolstoy concentrated on Christian themes, and his later novels such as "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1886) and "What Is to Be Done?" develop a radical anarcho-pacifist Christian philosophy which led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. For all the praise showered on "Anna Karenina" and "War and Peace", Tolstoy rejected the two works later in his life as something not as true of reality. In his novel "Resurrection", Tolstoy attempts to expose the injustice of man-made laws and the hypocrisy of institutionalized church. Tolstoy also explores and explains the economic philosophy of Georgism, of which he had become a very strong advocate towards the end of his life. Tolstoy also tried himself in poetry with several soldier songs written during his military service and fairy tales in verse such as "Volga-bogatyr" and "Oaf" stylized as national folk songs. They were written between 1871 and 1874 for his "Russian Book for Reading", a collection of short stories in four volumes (total of 629 stories in various genres) published along with the "New Azbuka" textbook and addressed to schoolchildren. Nevertheless, he was skeptical about poetry as a genre. As he famously said, "Writing poetry is like ploughing and dancing at the same time". According to Valentin Bulgakov, he criticised poets, including Alexander Pushkin, for their "false" epithets used "simply to make it rhyme". Critical appraisal by other authors. Tolstoy's contemporaries paid him lofty tributes. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who died thirty years before Tolstoy, admired and was delighted by Tolstoy's novels (and, conversely, Tolstoy also admired Dostoyevsky's work). Gustave Flaubert, on reading a translation of "War and Peace", exclaimed, "What an artist and what a psychologist!" Anton Chekhov, who often visited Tolstoy at his country estate, wrote, "When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone. What he does serves to justify all the hopes and aspirations invested in literature." The 19th-century British poet and critic Matthew Arnold opined that "A novel by Tolstoy is not a work of art but a piece of life." Later novelists continued to appreciate Tolstoy's art, but sometimes also expressed criticism. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote "I am attracted by his earnestness and by his power of detail, but I am repelled by his looseness of construction and by his unreasonable and impracticable mysticism." Virginia Woolf declared him "the greatest of all novelists." James Joyce noted that "He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!" Thomas Mann wrote of Tolstoy's seemingly guileless artistry: "Seldom did art work so much like nature." Vladimir Nabokov heaped superlatives upon "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and "Anna Karenina"; he questioned, however, the reputation of "War and Peace", and sharply criticized "Resurrection" and "The Kreutzer Sonata". Religious and political beliefs. After reading Schopenhauer's "The World as Will and Representation", Tolstoy gradually became converted to the ascetic morality upheld in that work as the proper spiritual path for the upper classes. In 1869 he writes: "Do you know what this summer has meant for me? Constant raptures over Schopenhauer and a whole series of spiritual delights which I've never experienced before. ... no student has ever studied so much on his course, and learned so much, as I have this summer". In Chapter VI of "A Confession", Tolstoy quoted the final paragraph of Schopenhauer's work. It explains how a complete denial of self causes only a relative nothingness which is not to be feared. Tolstoy was struck by the description of Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu ascetic renunciation as being the path to holiness. After reading passages such as the following, which abound in Schopenhauer's ethical chapters, the Russian nobleman chose poverty and formal denial of the will: But this very necessity of involuntary suffering (by poor people) for eternal salvation is also expressed by that utterance of the Savior (): "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." Therefore, those who were greatly in earnest about their eternal salvation, chose voluntary poverty when fate had denied this to them and they had been born in wealth. Thus Buddha Sakyamuni was born a prince, but voluntarily took to the mendicant's staff; and Francis of Assisi, the founder of the mendicant orders who, as a youngster at a ball, where the daughters of all the notabilities were sitting together, was asked: "Now Francis, will you not soon make your choice from these beauties?" and who replied: "I have made a far more beautiful choice!" "Whom?" ""La povertà" (poverty)": whereupon he abandoned every thing shortly afterwards and wandered through the land as a mendicant. In 1884, Tolstoy wrote a book called "What I Believe", in which he openly confessed his Christian beliefs. He affirmed his belief in Jesus Christ's teachings and was particularly influenced by the Sermon on the Mount, and the injunction to turn the other cheek, which he understood as a "commandment of non-resistance to evil by force" and a doctrine of pacifism and nonviolence. In his work "The Kingdom of God Is Within You", he explains that he considered mistaken the Church's doctrine because they had made a "perversion" of Christ's teachings. Tolstoy also received letters from American Quakers who introduced him to the non-violence writings of Quaker Christians such as George Fox, William Penn and Jonathan Dymond. Tolstoy believed being a Christian required him to be a pacifist; the apparently inevitable waging of war by governments, is why he is considered a philosophical anarchist. Later, various versions of "Tolstoy's Bible" were published, indicating the passages Tolstoy most relied on, specifically, the reported words of Jesus himself. Tolstoy believed that a true Christian could find lasting happiness by striving for inner perfection through following the Great Commandment of loving one's neighbor and God, rather than guidance from the Church or state. Another distinct attribute of his philosophy based on Christ's teachings is nonresistance during conflict. This idea in Tolstoy's book "The Kingdom of God Is Within You" (full text of English translation ) directly influenced Mahatma Gandhi and therefore also nonviolent resistance movements to this day. Tolstoy believed that the aristocracy was a burden on the poor, and that the only way to live together is anarchism. He opposed private land ownership and the institution of marriage, and valued chastity and sexual abstinence (discussed in "Father Sergius" and his preface to "The Kreutzer Sonata"), ideals also held by the young Gandhi. Tolstoy's passion from the depth of his austere moral views is reflected in his later work. One example is the sequence of the temptation of Sergius in "Father Sergius". Maxim Gorky relates how Tolstoy once read this passage before him and Chekhov and Tolstoy was moved to tears by the end of the reading. Later passages of rare power include the personal crises faced by the protagonists of "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", and of "Master and Man", where the main character in the former and the reader in the latter are made aware of the foolishness of the protagonists' lives. Tolstoy had a profound influence on the development of Christian anarchist thought. The Tolstoyans were a small Christian anarchist group formed by Tolstoy's companion, Vladimir Chertkov (1854–1936), to spread Tolstoy's religious teachings. Philosopher Peter Kropotkin wrote of Tolstoy in the article on anarchism in the "1911 Encyclopædia Britannica":Without naming himself an anarchist, Leo Tolstoy, like his predecessors in the popular religious movements of the 15th and 16th centuries, Chojecki, Denk and many others, took the anarchist position as regards the state and property rights, deducing his conclusions from the general spirit of the teachings of Jesus and from the necessary dictates of reason. With all the might of his talent, Tolstoy made (especially in "The Kingdom of God Is Within You") a powerful criticism of the church, the state and law altogether, and especially of the present property laws. He describes the state as the domination of the wicked ones, supported by brutal force. Robbers, he says, are far less dangerous than a well-organized government. He makes a searching criticism of the prejudices which are current now concerning the benefits conferred upon men by the church, the state, and the existing distribution of property, and from the teachings of Jesus he deduces the rule of non-resistance and the absolute condemnation of all wars. His religious arguments are, however, so well combined with arguments borrowed from a dispassionate observation of the present evils, that the anarchist portions of his works appeal to the religious and the non-religious reader alike. Tolstoy denounced the intervention by the Eight-Nation Alliance in the Boxer Rebellion in China, the Filipino-American War, and the Second Boer War. Tolstoy praised the Boxer Rebellion and harshly criticized the atrocities of the Russian, German, American, Japanese and other troops of the Eight-Nation alliance. He heard about the looting, rapes and murders, and accused the troops of slaughter and "Christian brutality". He named the monarchs most responsible for the atrocities as Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm II. He described the intervention as "terrible for its injustice and cruelty". The war was also criticized by other intellectuals such as Leonid Andreyev and Gorky. As part of the criticism, Tolstoy wrote an epistle called "To the Chinese people". In 1902, he wrote an open letter describing and denouncing Nicholas II's activities in China. The Boxer Rebellion stirred Tolstoy's interest in Chinese philosophy. He was a famous sinophile, and read the works of Confucius and Lao Zi. Tolstoy wrote "Chinese Wisdom" and other texts about China. Tolstoy corresponded with the Chinese intellectual Gu Hongming and recommended that China remain an agrarian nation, and not reform like Japan. Tolstoy and Gu opposed the Hundred Day's Reform by Kang Youwei and believed that the reform movement was perilous. Tolstoy's ideology of non-violence shaped the thought of the Chinese anarchist group Society for the Study of Socialism. In hundreds of essays over the last 20 years of his life, Tolstoy reiterated the anarchist critique of the state and recommended books by Kropotkin and Proudhon to his readers, while rejecting anarchism's espousal of violent revolutionary means. In the 1900 essay, "On Anarchy", he wrote: "The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without Authority, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power ... There can be only one permanent revolution—a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man." Despite his misgivings about anarchist violence, Tolstoy took risks to circulate the prohibited publications of anarchist thinkers in Russia, and corrected the proofs of Kropotkin's "Words of a Rebel", illegally published in St Petersburg in 1906. In 1908, Tolstoy wrote "A Letter to a Hindu" outlining his belief in non-violence as a means for India to gain independence from colonial rule. In 1909, Gandhi read a copy of the letter when he was becoming an activist in South Africa. He wrote to Tolstoy seeking proof that he was the author, which led to further correspondence. Tolstoy's "The Kingdom of God Is Within You" also helped to convince Gandhi of nonviolent resistance, a debt Gandhi acknowledged in his autobiography, calling Tolstoy "the greatest apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced". Their correspondence lasted only a year, from October 1909 until Tolstoy's death in November 1910, but led Gandhi to give the name Tolstoy Colony to his second ashram in South Africa. Both men also believed in the merits of vegetarianism, the subject of several of Tolstoy's essays. Tolstoy also became a major supporter of the Esperanto movement. He was impressed by the pacifist beliefs of the Doukhobors and brought their persecution to the attention of the international community, after they burned their weapons in peaceful protest in 1895. He aided the Doukhobors to migrate to Canada. He also provided inspiration to the Mennonites, another religious group with anti-government and anti-war sentiments. In 1904, Tolstoy condemned the ensuing Russo-Japanese War and wrote to the Japanese Buddhist priest Soyen Shaku in a failed attempt to make a joint pacifist statement. Towards the end of his life, Tolstoy become occupied with the economic theory and social philosophy of Georgism. He incorporated it approvingly into works such as "Resurrection" (1899), the book that was a major cause for his excommunication. He spoke with great admiration of Henry George, stating once that "People do not argue with the teaching of George; they simply do not know it. And it is impossible to do otherwise with his teaching, for he who becomes acquainted with it cannot but agree." He also wrote a preface to George's journal "Social Problems". Tolstoy and George both rejected private property in land (the most important source of income for Russian aristocracy that Tolstoy heavily criticized). They also rejected a centrally planned socialist economy. Because Georgism requires an administration to collect land rent and spend it on infrastructure, some assume that this embrace moved Tolstoy away from his anarchist views. However, anarchist versions of Georgism have been proposed since then. Tolstoy's 1899 novel "Resurrection" explores his thoughts on Georgism and hints that Tolstoy had such a view. It suggests small communities with local governance to manage the collective land rents for common goods, while still heavily criticising state institutions such as the justice system. Death. Tolstoy died in 1910, aged 82. Just before his death, his health was a concern of his family, who cared for him daily. In his last days, he spoke and wrote about dying. Renouncing his aristocratic lifestyle, he left home one winter night. His secretive departure was an apparent attempt to escape from his wife's tirades. She spoke out against many of his teachings, and in recent years had grown envious of his attention to Tolstoyan "disciples". Tolstoy died of pneumonia at Astapovo railway station, after a day's train journey south. The station master took Tolstoy to his apartment, and his personal doctors arrived and gave him injections of morphine and camphor. The police tried to limit access to his funeral procession, but thousands of peasants lined the streets. Still, some were heard to say that, other than knowing that "some nobleman had died", they knew little else about Tolstoy. According to some sources, Tolstoy spent the last hours of his life preaching love, non-violence, and Georgism to fellow passengers on the train. Legacy. Although Leo Tolstoy was regarded as a Christian anarchist and not a socialist, his ideas and works still influenced socialist thinkers throughout history. He held an unromantic view of governments as being essentially violent forces held together by intimidation from state authority, corruption on behalf of officials, and the indoctrination of people from a young age. In regards to his view of economics, he advocated for a return to subsistence agriculture. In his view, a simplified economy would afford a lesser need for the exchange of goods, and as such, factories and cities – the centers of industry – would become obsolete. In 1944, literary historian and Soviet medievalist Nikolai Gudzii wrote a biography of Tolstoy that spanned 80 pages. It was designed to show readers that Tolstoy would've revised his pacifistic and anti-patriotic sentiments if he were alive amid World War II. At around the same time, literary scholar and historian Boris Eikhenbaum – in a stark contrast from his earlier works on Tolstoy – portrayed the Russian novelist as someone whose ideas aligned with those of early utopian socialists such as Robert Owen and Henri Saint-Simon. Eikenbaum suggested that these influences can be seen in Tolstoy's emphases on individual happiness and peasant welfare. The discrepancies in Eikenbaum's portrayals of Tolstoy can be attributed to the political pressure in Soviet Russia at the time: public officials pressured literary scholars to conform with party doctrine. In Soviet Russia. From Tolstoy's writings the Tolstoyan movement was birthed, and its members used his works to promote non-violence, anti-urbanism and opposition to the state. While Tolstoy himself never associated with the movement, as he was opposed to joining any organization or group, he named his thirteenth daughter Alexandra (Sasha) L'vovna Tolstaya the heir to his works with the intention that she would publish them for the Russian people. Meanwhile, Tolstoy designated Vladimir Chertkov – who kept many of Tolstoy's manuscripts – as the editor of his works. Originally Tolstoy wanted to make the Russian people the heirs to his writings, but Russian law at the time decreed that property could only be inherited by one individual. Following the Russian Civil War in 1917, writings that were formerly censored could now be published, since the all literary works were nationalized in November 1918. Alexandra worked during these years to publish sets of Tolstoy's works: from 1917 to 1919, she worked with Zadruga Publishing House to publish thirteen booklets on Tolstoy's writings, which had previously been censored under Russia's imperial rule. However, publishing a complete collection of Tolstoy's works proved to be more difficult. In December 1918, the Commissariat of Education granted Chertkov a 10 million rouble subsidy to publish a complete edition of his works, but it never materialized due to government control of publication rights. Cooperatives were additionally made illegal in Russia in 1921, creating another obstacle for Alexandra and Chertkov. In the 1920s, Tolstoy's estate, Yasnaya Polyana, was sanctioned by the Soviet regime to exist as a commune for Tolstoyans. The regime permitted this Christian-oriented community because they felt as if religious sects like the Tolstoyans were models for the Russian peasantry. The Soviet government owned the estate, which was deemed a memorial for the late Russian writer, but Alexandra had jurisdiction over the education offered at Yasnaya Polyana. Unlike most Soviet schools, the schooling at Yasnaya Polyana did not offer militaristic training and did spread atheistic propaganda. Over time, though, local communists – as opposed to the state government, which financially supported the institution – often denounced the estate and called for frequent inspections. After 1928, a change in cultural policy in the Soviet regime led to a takeover of local institutions, including Tolstoy's estate. When Alexandra stepped down from her role as head of Yasnaya Poliana in 1929, the Commissariat of Education and Health took control. In 1925, the Soviet government created its first Jubilee Committee to celebrate the centennial of Tolstoy's birth, which originally consisted of 13 members but grew to 38 members after a second committee formed in 1927. Alexandra was not content with the funds provided by the government, and met with Stalin in June 1928. During the meeting, Stalin said the government could not provide the one million roubles requested by the committee. However, an agreement was reached with the State Publishing House in April 1928 for the publishing of a 92-volume collection of Tolstoy's works. During the Jubilee Celebration, Anatoly Luncharsky – the head of the People's Commissariat for Education – gave a speech in which he refuted reports that claimed the Soviet government was hostile towards Tolstoy and his legacy. Instead of focusing on the aspects of Tolstoy's works that pitted him against the Soviet regime, he instead focused on the unifying aspects, such as Tolstoy's love for equality and labor as well as his disdain for the state and private property. Influence. Vladimir Lenin wrote several essays about Tolstoy, suggesting that a contradiction exists within his critique of Russian society. According to Lenin, Tolstoy – who adorned the peasantry and voiced their discontent with imperial Russian society – may have been revolutionary in his critiques, but his political conscious was not fully developed for a revolution. Lenin uses this line of thinking to suggest that the 1905 Russian Revolution, which he called a "peasant bourgeois revolution," failed because of its backwardness: the revolutionaries wanted to dismantle the existing medieval forms of oppression and replace them with an old and patriarchal village-commune. Tolstoy's concept of non-resistance to evil additionally hindered the 1905 revolution's success, Lenin thought, because the movement was not militant and had thus allowed the autocracy to crush them. Nevertheless, Stalin concludes in his writings that despite the many contradictions in Tolstoy's critiques, his hatred for feudalism and capitalism mark the prelude to proletarian socialism. Additionally, Tolstoy's philosophy of non-resistance to evil made an impact on Mahatma Gandhi's political thinking. Gandhi was deeply moved by Tolstoy's concept of truth, which, in his view, constitutes any doctrine that reduces suffering. For both Gandhi and Tolstoy, truth is God, and since God is universal love, truth must therefore also be universal love. The Gujarati word for Gandhi's non-violent movement is "satyagraha," derived from the word "sadagraha" – the "sat" portion translating to "truth," and the "agraha" translating to "firmness." Gandhi's conception of satyagraha was birthed from Tolstoy's understanding of Christianity, rather than from Hindu tradition. In films. A 2009 film about Tolstoy's final year, "The Last Station", based on the 1990 novel by Jay Parini, was made by director Michael Hoffman with Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as Sofya Tolstoya. Both performers were nominated for Oscars for their roles. There have been other films about the writer, including "Departure of a Grand Old Man", made in 1912 just two years after his death, "How Fine, How Fresh the Roses Were" (1913), and "Leo Tolstoy", directed by and starring Sergei Gerasimov in 1984. There is also a famous lost film of Tolstoy made a decade before he died. In 1901, the American travel lecturer Burton Holmes visited Yasnaya Polyana with Albert J. Beveridge, the U.S. senator and historian. As the three men conversed, Holmes filmed Tolstoy with his 60-mm movie camera. Afterwards, Beveridge's advisers succeeded in having the film destroyed, fearing that the meeting with the Russian author might hurt Beveridge's chances of running for the U.S. presidency. External links.

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Jacques Derrida Jacques Derrida (; ; born Jackie Élie Derrida; July 15, 1930 – October 9, 2004), born in Algeria, was a French philosopher best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he analyzed in numerous texts, and developed in the context of phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy. During his career Derrida published more than 40 books, together with hundreds of essays and public presentations. He had a significant influence on the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, literature, law, anthropology, historiography, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis and political theory. His work retains major academic influence throughout the US, continental Europe, South America and all other countries where continental philosophy has been predominant, particularly in debates around ontology, epistemology (especially concerning social sciences), ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language. In most of the Anglosphere, where analytic philosophy is dominant, Derrida's influence is most presently felt in literary studies due to his longstanding interest in language and his association with prominent literary critics from his time at Yale. He also influenced architecture (in the form of deconstructivism), music, art, and art criticism. Particularly in his later writings, Derrida addressed ethical and political themes in his work. Some critics consider "Speech and Phenomena" (1967) to be his most important work. Others cite: "Of Grammatology" (1967), "Writing and Difference" (1967), and "Margins of Philosophy" (1972). These writings influenced various activists and political movements. He became a well-known and influential public figure, while his approach to philosophy and the notorious abstruseness of his work made him controversial. Life. Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in a summer home in El Biar (Algiers), Algeria, into a Sephardic Jewish family (originally from Toledo) that became French in 1870 when the Crémieux Decree granted full French citizenship to the Arabic-speaking Mizrahi Jews of Algeria. His parents, Haïm Aaron Prosper Charles (Aimé) Derrida (1896–1970) and Georgette Sultana Esther Safar (1901–1991), named him "Jackie", "which they considered to be an American name", though he would later adopt a more "correct" version of his first name when he moved to Paris; some reports indicate that he was named Jackie after the American child actor Jackie Coogan, who had become well-known around the world via his role in the 1921 Charlie Chaplin film "The Kid". He was also given the middle name Élie after his paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou, at his circumcision; this name was not recorded on his birth certificate unlike those of his siblings, and he would later call it his "hidden name". Derrida was the third of five children. His elder brother Paul Moïse died at less than three months old, the year before Derrida was born, leading him to suspect throughout his life his role as a replacement for his deceased brother."" Derrida spent his youth in Algiers and in El-Biar. On the first day of the school year in 1942, French administrators in Algeria —implementing antisemitism quotas set by the Vichy government—expelled Derrida from his lycée. He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students, and also took part in numerous football competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player). In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers (such as Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Gide) an instrument of revolt against family and society. His reading also included Camus and Sartre. In the late 1940s, he attended the , in Algiers; in 1949 he moved to Paris, attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where his professor of philosophy was Étienne Borne. At that time he prepared for his entrance exam to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure (ENS); after failing the exam on his first try, he passed it on the second, and was admitted in 1952. On his first day at ENS, Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends. After visiting the Husserl Archive in Leuven, Belgium (1953–1954), he completed his master's degree in philosophy ("") on Edmund Husserl (see below). He then passed the highly competitive "agrégation" exam in 1956. Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University, and he spent the 1956–57 academic year reading James Joyce's "Ulysses" at the Widener Library. In June 1957, he married the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier in Boston. During the Algerian War of Independence of 1954–1962, Derrida asked to teach soldiers' children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English from 1957 to 1959. Following the war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he was an assistant of Suzanne Bachelard (daughter of Gaston), Georges Canguilhem, Paul Ricœur (who in these years coined the term "hermeneutics of suspicion") and Jean Wahl. His wife, Marguerite, gave birth to their first child, Pierre, in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation of Louis Althusser and Jean Hyppolite, Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the ENS, which he kept until 1984. In 1965 Derrida began an association with the "Tel Quel" group of literary and philosophical theorists, which lasted for seven years. Derrida's subsequent distance from the "Tel Quel" group, after 1971, has been attributed to his reservations about their embrace of Maoism and of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. With "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", his contribution to a 1966 colloquium on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University, his work began to gain international prominence. At the same colloquium Derrida would meet Jacques Lacan and Paul de Man, the latter an important interlocutor in the years to come. A second son, Jean, was born in 1967. In the same year, Derrida published his first three books—"Writing and Difference", "Speech and Phenomena", and "Of Grammatology". In 1980, he received his first honorary doctorate (from Columbia University) and was awarded his State doctorate ("doctorat d'État") by submitting to the University of Paris ten of his previously published books in conjunction with a defense of his intellectual project under the title "L'inscription de la philosophie : Recherches sur l'interprétation de l'écriture" ("Inscription in Philosophy: Research on the Interpretation of Writing"). The text of Derrida's defense was based on an abandoned draft thesis he had prepared in 1957 under the direction of Jean Hyppolite at the ENS titled "The Ideality of the Literary Object" ("L'idéalité de l’objet littéraire"); his 1980 dissertation was subsequently published in English translation as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations". In 1983 Derrida collaborated with Ken McMullen on the film "Ghost Dance". Derrida appears in the film as himself and also contributed to the script. Derrida traveled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions. Derrida became full professor ("directeur d'études") at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 1984 (he had been elected at the end of 1983). With François Châtelet and others he in 1983 co-founded the Collège international de philosophie (CIPH), an institution intended to provide a location for philosophical research which could not be carried out elsewhere in the academia. He was elected as its first president. In 1985 Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's third child, Daniel. In 1986 Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, where he taught until shortly before his death in 2004. His papers were filed in the university archives. After Derrida's death, his widow and sons said they wanted copies of UCI's archives shared with the Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives in France. The university had sued in an attempt to get manuscripts and correspondence from Derrida's widow and children that it believed the philosopher had promised to UC Irvine's collection, although it dropped the suit in 2007. Derrida was a regular visiting professor at several other major American and European universities, including Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, New York University, Stony Brook University, and The New School for Social Research. He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Cambridge (1992), Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, the University of Essex, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the University of Silesia, the University of Coimbra, the University of Athens, and many others around the world. Derrida's honorary degree at Cambridge was protested by leading philosophers in the analytic tradition. Philosophers including Quine, Marcus, and Armstrong wrote a letter to the university objecting that "Derrida's work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour," and "Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university". Derrida was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Although his membership in Class IV, Section 1 (Philosophy and Religious Studies) was rejected, he was subsequently elected to Class IV, Section 3 (Literary Criticism, including Philology). He received the 2001 from the University of Frankfurt. Late in his life, Derrida participated in making two biographical documentaries, "D'ailleurs, Derrida" ("Derrida's Elsewhere") by Safaa Fathy (1999), and "Derrida" by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (2002). Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, which reduced his speaking and travelling engagements. He died during surgery in a hospital in Paris in the early hours of October 9, 2004. At the time of his death, Derrida had agreed to go for the summer to Heidelberg as holder of the Gadamer professorship, whose invitation was expressed by the hermeneutic philosopher himself before his death. Peter Hommelhoff, Rector at Heidelberg by that time, would summarize Derrida's place as: "Beyond the boundaries of philosophy as an academic discipline he was a leading intellectual figure not only for the humanities but for the cultural perception of a whole age." Philosophy. Derrida referred to himself as a historian. He questioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and also more broadly Western culture. By questioning the dominant discourses, and trying to modify them, he attempted to democratize the university scene and to politicize it. Derrida called his challenge to the assumptions of Western culture "deconstruction". On some occasions, Derrida referred to deconstruction as a radicalization of a certain spirit of Marxism. With his detailed readings of works from Plato to Rousseau to Heidegger, Derrida frequently argues that Western philosophy has uncritically allowed metaphorical depth models to govern its conception of language and consciousness. He sees these often unacknowledged assumptions as part of a "metaphysics of presence" to which philosophy has bound itself. This "logocentrism," Derrida argues, creates "marked" or hierarchized binary oppositions that have an effect on everything from our conception of speech's relation to writing to our understanding of racial difference. Deconstruction is an attempt to expose and undermine such "metaphysics." Derrida approaches texts as constructed around binary oppositions which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This approach to text is, in a broad sense, influenced by the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure, considered to be one of the fathers of structuralism, posited that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language. Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion, which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his book "Of Grammatology" (1967), is the statement that "there is no out-of-context" ("il n'y a pas de hors-texte"). Critics of Derrida have been often accused of having mistranslated the phrase in French to suggest he had written "Il n'y a rien en dehors du texte" ("There is nothing outside the text") and of having widely disseminated this translation to make it appear that Derrida is suggesting that nothing exists but words. Derrida once explained that this assertion "which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction [...] means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking." Early works. Derrida began his career examining the limits of phenomenology. His first lengthy academic manuscript, written as a dissertation for his "diplôme d'études supérieures" and submitted in 1954, concerned the work of Edmund Husserl. Gary Banham has said that the dissertation is "in many respects the most ambitious of Derrida's interpretations with Husserl, not merely in terms of the number of works addressed but also in terms of the extraordinarily focused nature of its investigation." In 1962 he published "Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction", which contained his own translation of Husserl's essay. Many elements of Derrida's thought were already present in this work. In the interviews collected in "Positions" (1972), Derrida said: "In this essay the problematic of writing was already in place as such, bound to the irreducible structure of 'deferral' in its relationships to consciousness, presence, science, history and the history of science, the disappearance or delay of the origin, etc. [...] this essay can be read as the other side (recto or verso, as you wish) of "Speech and Phenomena"." Derrida first received major attention outside France with his lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 (and subsequently included in "Writing and Difference"). The conference at which this paper was delivered was concerned with structuralism, then at the peak of its influence in France, but only beginning to gain attention in the United States. Derrida differed from other participants by his lack of explicit commitment to structuralism, having already been critical of the movement. He praised the accomplishments of structuralism but also maintained reservations about its internal limitations; this has led US academics to label his thought as a form of post-structuralism. The effect of Derrida's paper was such that by the time the conference proceedings were published in 1970, the title of the collection had become "The Structuralist Controversy". The conference was also where he met Paul de Man, who would be a close friend and source of great controversy, as well as where he first met the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, with whose work Derrida enjoyed a mixed relationship. Phenomenology vs structuralism debate (1959). In the early 1960s, Derrida began speaking and writing publicly, addressing the most topical debates at the time. One of these was the new and increasingly fashionable movement of structuralism, which was being widely favoured as the successor to the phenomenology approach, the latter having been started by Husserl sixty years earlier. Derrida's countercurrent take on the issue, at a prominent international conference, was so influential that it reframed the discussion from a celebration of the triumph of structuralism to a "phenomenology vs structuralism debate." Phenomenology, as envisioned by Husserl, is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual's "lived experience;" for those with a more phenomenological bent, the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event. For the structuralists, this was a false problem, and the "depth" of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential. In that context, in 1959, Derrida asked the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be "already" structured, in order to be the genesis "of" something? In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis. At the same time, in order that there be movement or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated—complex—such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge. This original complexity must not be understood as an original "positing", but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality. It is this thought of originary complexity that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which all of its terms are derived, including "deconstruction". Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. He achieved this by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, to determine what aspects of those texts run counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways in which this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects. 1967–1972. Derrida's interests crossed disciplinary boundaries, and his knowledge of a wide array of diverse material was reflected in the three collections of work published in 1967: "Speech and Phenomena", "Of Grammatology" (initially submitted as a "Doctorat de spécialité" thesis under Maurice de Gandillac), and "Writing and Difference". On several occasions, Derrida has acknowledged his debt to Husserl and Heidegger, and stated that without them he would not have said a single word. Among the questions asked in these essays are "What is 'meaning', what are its historical relationships to what is purportedly identified under the rubric 'voice' as a value of presence, presence of the object, presence of meaning to consciousness, self-presence in so called living speech and in self-consciousness?" In another essay in "Writing and Difference" titled "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas", the roots of another major theme in Derrida's thought emerges: the Other as opposed to the Same "Deconstructive analysis deprives the present of its prestige and exposes it to something "tout autre", "wholly other," beyond what is foreseeable from the present, beyond the horizon of the "same"." Other than Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas, these three books discussed, and/or relied upon, the works of many philosophers and authors, including linguist Saussure, Hegel, Foucault, Bataille, Descartes, anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan, psychoanalyst Freud, and writers such as Jabès and Artaud. This collection of three books published in 1967 elaborated Derrida's theoretical framework. Derrida attempts to approach the very heart of the Western intellectual tradition, characterizing this tradition as "a search for a transcendental being that serves as the origin or guarantor of meaning". The attempt to "ground the meaning relations constitutive of the world in an instance that itself lies outside all relationality" was referred to by Heidegger as logocentrism, and Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise is "essentially" logocentric, and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism. He in turn describes logocentrism as phallocratic, patriarchal and masculinist. Derrida contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture", arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred/profane, signifier/signified, mind/body), and that any text contains implicit hierarchies, "by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude, subordinate, and hide the various potential meanings." Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as deconstruction of Western culture. In 1968, he published his influential essay "Plato's Pharmacy" in the French journal "Tel Quel". This essay was later collected in "Dissemination", one of three books published by Derrida in 1972, along with the essay collection "Margins of Philosophy" and the collection of interviews titled "Positions". 1973–1980. Starting in 1972, Derrida produced on average more than one book per year. Derrida continued to produce important works, such as "Glas" (1974) and "" (1980). Derrida received increasing attention in the United States after 1972, where he was a regular visiting professor and lecturer at several major American universities. In the 1980s, during the American culture wars, conservatives started a dispute over Derrida's influence and legacy upon American intellectuals, and claimed that he influenced American literary critics and theorists more than academic philosophers. "Of Spirit" (1987). On March 14, 1987, Derrida presented at the CIPH conference titled "Heidegger: Open Questions," a lecture which was published in October 1987 as "Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question". It follows the shifting role of "Geist" (spirit) through Heidegger's work, noting that, in 1927, "spirit" was one of the philosophical terms that Heidegger set his sights on dismantling. With his Nazi political engagement in 1933, however, Heidegger came out as a champion of the "German Spirit," and only withdrew from an exalting interpretation of the term in 1953. Derrida asks, "What of this meantime?" His book connects in a number of respects with his long engagement of Heidegger (such as "The Ends of Man" in "Margins of Philosophy", his Paris seminar on philosophical nationality and nationalism in the mid-1980s, and the essays published in English as "Geschlecht" and "Geschlecht II"). He considers "four guiding threads" of Heideggerian philosophy that form "the knot of this "Geflecht" [braid]": "the question of the question," "the essence of technology," "the discourse of animality," and "epochality" or "the hidden teleology or the narrative order." "Of Spirit" contributes to the long debate on Heidegger's Nazism and appeared at the same time as the French publication of a book by a previously unknown Chilean writer, Victor Farías, who charged that Heidegger's philosophy amounted to a wholehearted endorsement of the Nazi "Sturmabteilung" (SA) faction. Derrida responded to Farías in an interview, "Heidegger, the Philosopher's Hell" and a subsequent article, "Comment donner raison? How to Concede, with Reasons?" He called Farías a weak reader of Heidegger's thought, adding that much of the evidence Farías and his supporters touted as new had long been known within the philosophical community. 1990s: political and ethical themes. Some have argued that Derrida's work took a political and ethical "turn" in the 1990s. Texts cited as evidence of such a turn include "Force of Law" (1990), as well as "Specters of Marx" (1994) and "Politics of Friendship" (1994). Some refer to "The Gift of Death" as evidence that he began more directly applying deconstruction to the relationship between ethics and religion. In this work, Derrida interprets passages from the Bible, particularly on Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac, and from Søren Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling". However, scholars such as Leonard Lawlor, Robert Magliola, and Nicole Anderson have argued that the "turn" has been exaggerated. Some, including Derrida himself, have argued that much of the philosophical work done in his "political turn" can be dated to earlier essays. Derrida develops an ethicist view respecting to hospitality, exploring the idea that two types of hospitalities exist, conditional and unconditional. Though this contributed to the works of many scholars, Derrida was seriously criticized for this. Derrida's contemporary readings of Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jan Patočka, on themes such as law, justice, responsibility, and friendship, had a significant impact on fields beyond philosophy. Derrida and Deconstruction influenced aesthetics, literary criticism, architecture, film theory, anthropology, sociology, historiography, law, psychoanalysis, theology, feminism, gay and lesbian studies and political theory. Jean-Luc Nancy, Richard Rorty, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, Rosalind Krauss, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Duncan Kennedy, Gary Peller, Drucilla Cornell, Alan Hunt, Hayden White, Mario Kopić, and Alun Munslow are some of the authors who have been influenced by deconstruction. Derrida delivered a eulogy at Levinas' funeral, later published as "Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas", an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy. Derrida used Bracha L. Ettinger's interpretation of Lévinas' notion of femininity and transformed his own earlier reading of this subject respectively. Derrida continued to produce readings of literature, writing extensively on Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and others. In 1991 he published "The Other Heading", in which he discussed the concept of identity (as in cultural identity, European identity, and national identity), in the name of which in Europe have been unleashed "the worst violences," "the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism." At the 1997 Cerisy Conference, Derrida delivered a ten-hour address on the subject of "the autobiographical animal" titled The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow). Engaging with questions surrounding the ontology of nonhuman animals, the ethics of animal slaughter and the difference between humans and other animals, the address has been seen as initiating a late "animal turn" in Derrida's philosophy, although Derrida himself has said that his interest in animals is present in his earliest writings. "The Work of Mourning" (1981–2001). Beginning with "The Deaths of Roland Barthes" in 1981, Derrida produced a series of texts on mourning and memory occasioned by the loss of his friends and colleagues, many of them new engagements with their work. "Memoires for Paul de Man", a book-length lecture series presented first at Yale and then at Irvine as Derrida's Wellek Lecture, followed in 1986, with a revision in 1989 that included "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". Ultimately, fourteen essays were collected into "The Work of Mourning" (2001), which was expanded in the 2003 French edition, "Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde" (literally, "The end of the world, unique each time"), to include essays dedicated to Gérard Granel and Maurice Blanchot. 2002. In October 2002, at the theatrical opening of the film "Derrida", he said that, in many ways, he felt more and more close to Guy Debord's work, and that this closeness appears in Derrida's texts. Derrida mentioned, in particular, "everything I say about the media, technology, the spectacle, and the 'criticism of the show', so to speak, and the markets – the becoming-a-spectacle of everything, and the exploitation of the spectacle." Among the places in which Derrida mentions the "Spectacle", is a 1997 interview about the notion of the intellectual. Politics. Derrida engaged with many political issues, movements, and debates: Beyond these explicit political interventions, however, Derrida was engaged in rethinking politics and the political itself, within and beyond philosophy. Derrida insisted that a distinct political undertone had pervaded his texts from the very beginning of his career. Nevertheless, the attempt to understand the political implications of notions of responsibility, reason of state, the other, decision, sovereignty, Europe, friendship, difference, faith, and so on, became much more marked from the early 1990s on. By 2000, theorizing "democracy to come," and thinking the limitations of existing democracies, had become important concerns. Influences on Derrida. Crucial readings in his adolescence were Rousseau's "Reveries of a Solitary Walker" and "Confessions", André Gide's journal, "La porte étroite", "Les nourritures terrestres" and "The Immoralist"; and the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. The phrase "Families, I hate you!" in particular, which inspired Derrida as an adolescent, is a famous verse from Gide's "Les nourritures terrestres", book IV. In a 1991 interview Derrida commented on a similar verse, also from book IV of the same Gide work: "I hated the homes, the families, all the places where man thinks he'll find rest" ("Je haïssais les foyers, les familles, tous lieux où l'homme pense trouver un repos"). Other influences upon Derrida are Martin Heidegger, Plato, Søren Kierkegaard, Alexandre Kojève, Maurice Blanchot, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Lévinas, Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, J. L. Austin and Stéphane Mallarmé. His book, "Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas", reveals his mentorship by this philosopher and Talmudic scholar who practiced the phenomenological encounter with the Other in the form of the Face, which commanded human response. The use of deconstruction to read Jewish texts – like the Talmud – is relatively rare but has recently been attempted. Peers and contemporaries. Derrida's philosophical friends, allies, students and the heirs of Derrida's thought include Paul de Man, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Sarah Kofman, Hélène Cixous, Bernard Stiegler, Alexander García Düttmann, Joseph Cohen, Geoffrey Bennington, Jean-Luc Marion, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Raphael Zagury-Orly, Jacques Ehrmann, Avital Ronell, Judith Butler, Béatrice Galinon-Mélénec, Ernesto Laclau, Samuel Weber and Catherine Malabou. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe were among Derrida's first students in France and went on to become well-known and important philosophers in their own right. Despite their considerable differences of subject, and often also of a method, they continued their close interaction with each other and with Derrida, from the early 1970s. Derrida wrote on both of them, including a long book on Nancy: "Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy" ("On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy", 2005). Paul de Man. Derrida's most prominent friendship in intellectual life was with Paul de Man, which began with their meeting at Johns Hopkins University and continued until de Man's death in 1983. De Man provided a somewhat different approach to deconstruction, and his readings of literary and philosophical texts were crucial in the training of a generation of readers. Shortly after de Man's death, Derrida wrote the book "Memoires: pour Paul de Man" and in 1988 wrote an article in the journal "Critical Inquiry" called "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". The memoir became cause for controversy, because shortly before Derrida published his piece, it had been discovered by the Belgian literary critic Ortwin de Graef that long before his academic career in the US, de Man had written almost two hundred essays in a pro-Nazi newspaper during the German occupation of Belgium, including several that were explicitly antisemitic. Derrida complicated the notion that it is possible to simply read de Man's later scholarship through the prism of these earlier political essays. Rather, any claims about de Man's work should be understood in relation to the entire body of his scholarship. Critics of Derrida have argued that he minimizes the antisemitic character of de Man's writing. Some critics have found Derrida's treatment of this issue surprising, given that, for example, Derrida also spoke out against antisemitism and, in the 1960s, broke with the Heidegger disciple Jean Beaufret over Beaufret's instances of antisemitism, about which Derrida (and, after him, Maurice Blanchot) expressed shock. Michel Foucault. Derrida's criticism of Foucault appears in the essay "Cogito and the History of Madness" (from "Writing and Difference"). It was first given as a lecture on March 4, 1963, at a conference at Wahl's "Collège philosophique", which Foucault attended, and caused a rift between the two men that was never fully mended. In an appendix added to the 1972 edition of his "History of Madness", Foucault disputed Derrida's interpretation of his work, and accused Derrida of practicing "a historically well-determined little pedagogy [...] which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text [...]. A pedagogy which inversely gives to the voice of the masters that infinite sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text." According to historian Carlo Ginzburg, Foucault may have written "The Order of Things" (1966) and "The Archaeology of Knowledge" partly under the stimulus of Derrida's criticism. Carlo Ginzburg briefly labeled Derrida's criticism in "Cogito and the History of Madness", as "facile, nihilistic objections," without giving further argumentation. Derrida's translators. Geoffrey Bennington, Avital Ronell and Samuel Weber belong to a group of Derrida translators. Many of Derrida's translators are esteemed thinkers in their own right. Derrida often worked in a collaborative arrangement, allowing his prolific output to be translated into English in a timely fashion. Having started as a student of de Man, Gayatri Spivak took on the translation of "Of Grammatology" early in her career and has since revised it into a second edition. Barbara Johnson's translation of Derrida's "Dissemination" was published by The Athlone Press in 1981. Alan Bass was responsible for several early translations; Bennington and Peggy Kamuf have continued to produce translations of his work for nearly twenty years. In recent years, a number of translations have appeared by Michael Naas (also a Derrida scholar) and Pascale-Anne Brault. Bennington, Brault, Kamuf, Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and David Wills are currently engaged in translating Derrida's previously unpublished seminars, which span from 1959 to 2003. Volumes I and II of "The Beast and the Sovereign" (presenting Derrida's seminars from December 12, 2001 to March 27, 2002 and from December 11, 2002 to March 26, 2003), as well as "The Death Penalty, Volume I" (covering December 8, 1999 to March 22, 2000), have appeared in English translation. Further volumes currently projected for the series include "Heidegger: The Question of Being and History" (1964-1965), "Death Penalty, Volume II" (2000–2001), "Perjury and Pardon, Volume I" (1997–1998), and "Perjury and Pardon, Volume II" (1998–1999). With Bennington, Derrida undertook the challenge published as "Jacques Derrida", an arrangement in which Bennington attempted to provide a systematic explication of Derrida's work (called the "Derridabase") using the top two-thirds of every page, while Derrida was given the finished copy of every Bennington chapter and the bottom third of every page in which to show how deconstruction exceeded Bennington's account (this was called the "Circumfession"). Derrida seems to have viewed Bennington in particular as a kind of rabbinical explicator, noting at the end of the "Applied Derrida" conference, held at the University of Luton in 1995 that: "everything has been said and, as usual, Geoff Bennington has said everything before I have even opened my mouth. I have the challenge of trying to be unpredictable after him, which is impossible... so I'll try to pretend to be unpredictable after Geoff. Once again." Marshall McLuhan. Derrida was familiar with the work of Marshall McLuhan, and since his early 1967 writings ("Of Grammatology", "Speech and Phenomena"), he speaks of language as a "medium," of phonetic writing as "the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical, and economic adventure of the West." He expressed his disagreement with McLuhan in regard to what Derrida called McLuhan's ideology about the end of writing. In a 1982 interview, he said: And in his 1972 essay "Signature Event Context" he said: Architectural thinkers. Derrida had a direct impact on the theories and practices of influential architects Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi towards the end of the twentieth century. Derrida impacted a project that was theorized by Eisenman in "Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman". This design was architecturally conceived by Tschumi for the Parc de la Villette in Paris, which included a sieve, or harp-like structure that Derrida envisaged as a physical metaphor for the receptacle-like properties of the "khôra". Moreover, Derrida's commentaries on Plato's notion of "khôra" (χώρα) as set in the "Timaeus" (48e4) received later reflections in the philosophical works and architectural writings of the philosopher-architect Nader El-Bizri within the domain of phenomenology. Derrida used "χώρα" to name a radical otherness that "gives place" for being. El-Bizri built on this by more narrowly taking "khôra" to name the radical happening of an ontological difference between being and beings. El-Bizri's reflections on "khôra" are taken as a basis for tackling the meditations on "dwelling" and on "being and space" in Heidegger's thought and the critical conceptions of space and place as they evolved in architectural theory (and its strands in phenomenological thinking), and in history of philosophy and science, with a focus on geometry and optics. This also describes El-Bizri's take on "econtology" as an extension of Heidegger's consideration of the question of being ("Seinsfrage") by way of the fourfold ("Das Geviert") of earth-sky-mortals-divinities ("Erde und Himmel, Sterblichen und Göttlichen"); and as also impacted by his own meditations on Derrida's take on "χώρα". Ecology is hence co-entangled with ontology, whereby the worldly existential analytics are grounded in earthiness, and environmentalism is orientated by ontological thinking Derrida argued that the subjectile is like Plato's "khôra", Greek for space, receptacle or site. Plato proposes that "khôra" rests between the sensible and the intelligible, through which everything passes but in which nothing is retained. For example, an image needs to be held by something, just as a mirror will hold a reflection. For Derrida, "khôra" defies attempts at naming or the either/or logic, which he "deconstructed". Criticism. Criticism from Marxists. In a paper titled "Ghostwriting", Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—the translator of Derrida's "De la grammatologie" ("Of Grammatology") into English—criticised Derrida's understanding of Marx. Commenting on Derrida's "Specters of Marx", Terry Eagleton wrote "The portentousness is ingrained in the very letter of this book, as one theatrically inflected rhetorical question tumbles hard on the heels of another in a tiresomely mannered syntax which lays itself wide open to parody." Criticism from analytic philosophers. Though Derrida addressed the American Philosophical Association on at least one occasion in 1988, and was highly regarded by some contemporary philosophers like Richard Rorty, Alexander Nehamas, and Stanley Cavell, his work has been regarded by other analytic philosophers, such as John Searle and Willard Van Orman Quine, as pseudophilosophy or sophistry. Some analytic philosophers have in fact claimed, since at least the 1980s, that Derrida's work is "not philosophy." One of the main arguments they gave was alleging that Derrida's influence had not been on US philosophy departments but on literature and other humanities disciplines. In his 1989 "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity", Richard Rorty argues that Derrida (especially in his book, "", one section of which is an experiment in fiction) purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g., "différance"), and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to contextualize Derrida's literary self. Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his message Derrida is attempting to escape the naïve, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors. Philosopher Sir Roger Scruton wrote in 2004, "He's difficult to summarise because it's nonsense. He argues that the meaning of a sign is never revealed in the sign but deferred indefinitely and that a sign only means something by virtue of its difference from something else. For Derrida, there is no such thing as meaning – it always eludes us and therefore anything goes." On Derrida's scholarship and writing style, Noam Chomsky wrote "I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted." Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt also criticized his work for misusing scientific terms and concepts in "" (1994). Three quarrels (or disputes) in particular went out of academic circles and received international mass media coverage: the 1972–88 quarrel with John Searle, the analytic philosophers' pressures on Cambridge University not to award Derrida an honorary degree, and a dispute with Richard Wolin and the NYRB. Searle–Derrida debate. In the early 1970s, Searle had a brief exchange with Jacques Derrida regarding speech-act theory. The exchange was characterized by a degree of mutual hostility between the philosophers, each of whom accused the other of having misunderstood his basic points. Searle was particularly hostile to Derrida's deconstructionist framework and much later refused to let his response to Derrida be printed along with Derrida's papers in the 1988 collection "Limited Inc". Searle did not consider Derrida's approach to be legitimate philosophy or even intelligible writing and argued that he did not want to legitimize the deconstructionist point of view by dedicating any attention to it. Consequently, some critics have considered the exchange to be a series of elaborate misunderstandings rather than a debate, while others have seen either Derrida or Searle gaining the upper hand. The level of hostility can be seen from Searle's statement that "It would be a mistake to regard Derrida's discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions", to which Derrida replied that that sentence was "the only sentence of the 'reply' to which I can subscribe". Commentators have frequently interpreted the exchange as a prominent example of a confrontation between analytical and continental philosophy. The debate began in 1972, when, in his paper "Signature Event Context", Derrida analyzed J. L. Austin's theory of the illocutionary act. While sympathetic to Austin's departure from a purely denotational account of language to one that includes "force", Derrida was sceptical of the framework of normativity employed by Austin. He argued that Austin had missed the fact that any speech event is framed by a "structure of absence" (the words that are left unsaid due to contextual constraints) and by "iterability" (the constraints on what can be said, given by what has been said in the past). Derrida argued that the focus on intentionality in speech-act theory was misguided because intentionality is restricted to that which is already established as a possible intention. He also took issue with the way Austin had excluded the study of fiction, non-serious or "parasitic" speech, wondering whether this exclusion was because Austin had considered these speech genres governed by different structures of meaning, or simply due to a lack of interest. In his brief reply to Derrida, "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida", Searle argued that Derrida's critique was unwarranted because it assumed that Austin's theory attempted to give a full account of language and meaning when its aim was much narrower. Searle considered the omission of parasitic discourse forms to be justified by the narrow scope of Austin's inquiry. Searle agreed with Derrida's proposal that intentionality presupposes iterability, but did not apply the same concept of intentionality used by Derrida, being unable or unwilling to engage with the continental conceptual apparatus. (This caused Derrida to criticize Searle for not being sufficiently familiar with phenomenological perspectives on intentionality.) Searle also argued that Derrida's disagreement with Austin turned on his having misunderstood Austin's type–token distinction and his failure to understand Austin's concept of failure in relation to performativity. Some critics have suggested that Searle, by being so grounded in the analytical tradition that he was unable to engage with Derrida's continental phenomenological tradition, was at fault for the unsuccessful nature of the exchange. The substance of Searle's criticism of Derrida in relation to topics in the philosophy of language—referenced in Derrida's "Signature Event Context"—was that Derrida had no apparent familiarity with contemporary philosophy of language nor of contemporary linguistics in Anglo-Saxon countries. Searle explains, "When Derrida writes about the philosophy of language he refers typically to Rousseau and Condillac, not to mention Plato. And his idea of a "modern linguist" is Benveniste or even Saussure." Searle describes Derrida's philosophical knowledge as pre-Wittgensteinian—that is to say, disconnected from analytic tradition—and consequently, in his perspective, naive and misguided, concerned with issues long-since resolved or otherwise found to be "non"-issues. Searle also wrote in "The New York Review of Books" that he was surprised by "the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial." Derrida, in his response to Searle ( in "Limited Inc"), ridiculed Searle's positions. Claiming that a clear sender of Searle's message could not be established, he suggested that Searle had formed with Austin a "société à responsabilité limitée" (a "limited liability company") due to the ways in which the ambiguities of authorship within Searle's reply circumvented the very speech act of his reply. Searle did not reply. Later in 1988, Derrida tried to review his position and his critiques of Austin and Searle, reiterating that he found the constant appeal to "normality" in the analytical tradition to be problematic from which they were only paradigmatic examples. He continued arguing how problematic was establishing the relation between "nonfiction or standard discourse" and "fiction," defined as its "parasite", "for part of the most original essence of the latter is to allow fiction, the simulacrum, parasitism, to take place-and in so doing to 'de-essentialize' itself as it were". He would finally argue that the indispensable question would then become: In the debate, Derrida praises Austin's work but argues that he is wrong to banish what Austin calls "infelicities" from the "normal" operation of language. One "infelicity," for instance, occurs when it cannot be known whether a given speech act is "sincere" or "merely citational" (and therefore possibly ironic, etc.). Derrida argues that every iteration is necessarily "citational," due to the graphematic nature of speech and writing, and that language could not work at all without the ever-present and ineradicable possibility of such alternate readings. Derrida takes Searle to task for his attempt to get around this issue by grounding final authority in the speaker's inaccessible "intention". Derrida argues that intention cannot possibly govern how an iteration signifies, once it becomes hearable or readable. All speech acts borrow a language whose significance is determined by historical-linguistic context, and by the alternate possibilities that this context makes possible. This significance, Derrida argues, cannot be altered or governed by the whims of intention. In 1994, Searle argued that the ideas upon which "deconstruction" is founded are essentially a consequence of a series of conceptual confusions made by Derrida as a result of his outdated knowledge or are merely banalities. He insisted that Derrida's conception of "iterability" and its alleged "corrupting" effect on meaning stems from Derrida's ignorance of the type–token distinction that exists in current linguistics and philosophy of language. As Searle explains, "Most importantly, from the fact that different tokens of a sentence type can be uttered on different occasions with different intentions, that is, different speaker meanings, nothing of any significance follows about the original speaker meaning of the original utterance token." In 1995, Searle gave a brief reply to Derrida in "The Construction of Social Reality". He called Derrida's conclusion "preposterous" and stated that "Derrida, as far as I can tell, does not have an argument. He simply declares that there is nothing outside of texts..." Searle's reference here is not to anything forwarded in the debate, but to a mistranslation of the phrase "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" ("there is no outside-text"), which appears in Derrida's "Of Grammatology". According to Searle, the consistent pattern of Derrida's rhetoric is: (a) announce a preposterous thesis, e.g. "there is no outside-text" ("il n'y a pas de hors-texte"); (b) when challenged on "(a)" respond that you have been misunderstood and revise the claim in "(a)" such that it becomes a truism, e.g. ""'il n'y a pas de hors-texte" means nothing else: there is nothing outside contexts"; (c) when the reformulation from "(b)" is acknowledged then proceed as if the "original" formulation from "(a)" was accepted. The revised idea—for example that "everything exists in some context"—is a banality but a charade ensues as if the original claim—"nothing exists outside of text" ["sic"]—had been established. Cambridge honorary doctorate. In 1992 some academics at Cambridge University, mostly not from the philosophy faculty, proposed that Derrida be awarded an honorary doctorate. This was opposed by, among others, the university's Professor of Philosophy Hugh Mellor. Eighteen other philosophers from US, Austrian, Australian, French, Polish, Italian, German, Dutch, Swiss, Spanish, and British institutions, including Barry Smith, Willard Van Orman Quine, David Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and René Thom, then sent a letter to Cambridge claiming that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour" and describing Derrida's philosophy as being composed of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists." The letter concluded that: In the end the protesters were outnumbered—336 votes to 204—when Cambridge put the motion to a formal ballot; though almost all of those who proposed Derrida and who voted in favour were not from the philosophy faculty. Hugh Mellor continued to find the award undeserved, explaining: "He is a mediocre, unoriginal philosopher — he is not even interestingly bad." Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the attacks on his work was that it questioned and modified "the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene." To answer a question about the "exceptional violence," the compulsive "ferocity," and the "exaggeration" of the "attacks," he would say that these critics organize and practice in his case "a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all to moderate". Dispute with Richard Wolin and the "NYRB". Richard Wolin has argued since 1991 that Derrida's work, as well as that of Derrida's major inspirations (e.g., Bataille, Blanchot, Levinas, Heidegger, Nietzsche), leads to a corrosive nihilism. For example, Wolin argues that the "deconstructive gesture of overturning and reinscription ends up by threatening to efface many of the essential differences between Nazism and non-Nazism". In 1991, when Wolin published a Derrida interview on Heidegger in the first edition of "The Heidegger Controversy", Derrida argued that the interview was an intentionally malicious mistranslation, which was "demonstrably execrable" and "weak, simplistic, and compulsively aggressive". As French law requires the consent of an author to translations and this consent was not given, Derrida insisted that the interview not appear in any subsequent editions or reprints. Columbia University Press subsequently refused to offer reprints or new editions. Later editions of "The Heidegger Controversy" by MIT Press also omitted the Derrida interview. The matter achieved public exposure owing to a friendly review of Wolin's book by the Heideggerian scholar Thomas Sheehan that appeared in "The New York Review of Books", in which Sheehan characterised Derrida's protests as an imposition of censorship. It was followed by an exchange of letters. Derrida in turn responded to Sheehan and Wolin, in "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)", which was published in the book "Points...". Twenty-four academics, belonging to different schools and groups – often in disagreement with each other and with deconstruction – signed a letter addressed to "The New York Review of Books", in which they expressed their indignation for the magazine's behaviour as well as that of Sheenan and Wolin. Critical obituaries. Critical obituaries of Derrida were published in "The New York Times", "The Economist", and "The Independent". The magazine "The Nation" responded to the "New York Times" obituary saying that "even though American papers had scorned and trivialized Derrida before, the tone seemed particularly caustic for an obituary of an internationally acclaimed philosopher who had profoundly influenced two generations of American humanities scholars."

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Georg Anton Friedrich Ast Georg Anton Friedrich Ast (; 29 December 1778 – 31 December 1841) was a German philosopher and philologist. Biography. Ast was born in Gotha. Educated there and at the University of Jena, he became a "privatdozent" at Jena in 1802. In 1805 he became professor of classical literature in the University of Landshut, where he remained until 1826, when it was transferred to Munich. He lived there until his death in 1841. In recognition of his work, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences made him a member and aulic councillor. He is known principally for his work during the last twenty-five years of his life on the dialogues of Plato. His "Plato's Leben and Schriften" (1816)—which originated in the "Introductions" of Friedrich Schleiermacher and the historical scepticism of Niebuhr and Wolf—was the first of those critical inquiries into the life and works of Plato. Distrusting tradition, he took a few of the finest dialogues as his standard, and from internal evidence denounced as spurious not only those generally admitted to be so ("Epinomis, Minos, Theages, Rivales, Clitophon, Hipparchus, Eryxias", "Letters and Definitions"), but also the "Meno, Euthydemus, Charmides, Lysis, Laches", "First" and "Second Alcibiades", "Hippias Major" and "Minor", "Ion, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito", and even (against Aristotle's explicit assertion) "The Laws". The genuine dialogues he divides into three series: The work was followed by a complete edition of Plato's works (2 vols., 1819–1832) with a Latin translation and commentary. His last work was the "Lexicon Platonicum "(3 vols., 1834–1839), which is both valuable and comprehensive. In his works on aesthetics he combined the views of Schelling with those of Winckelmann, Lessing, Kant, Herder, Schiller and others. His histories of philosophy are marked more by critical scholarship than by originality of thought, though they are interesting as asserting the now familiar principle that the history of philosophy is not the history of opinions, but of reason as a whole; he was among the first to attempt to formulate a principle of the development of thought. Beside his works on Plato, he wrote, on aesthetics, "System der Kunstlehre" (1805) and "Grundriß der Aesthetik" (1807); on the history of philosophy, "Grundlinien der Philosophie" (1807, republished 1809, but soon forgotten), "Grundriß einer Geschichte der Philosophie" (1807 and 1825), and "Hauptmomente der Geschichte der Philosophie" (1829); in philology, "Grundlinien der Philologie" (1808), and "Grundlinien der Grammatik, Hermeneutik und Kritik" (1808). He died in Munich.

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Terry Eagleton Terence Francis Eagleton (born 1943) is an English literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University. Eagleton has published over forty books, but remains best known for "Literary Theory: An Introduction" (1983), which has sold over 750,000 copies. The work elucidated the emerging literary theory of the period, as well as arguing that all literary theory is necessarily political. He has also been a prominent critic of postmodernism, publishing works such as "The Illusions of Postmodernism" (1996) and "After Theory" (2003). He argues that, influenced by postmodernism, cultural theory has wrongly devalued objectivity and ethics. His thinking is influenced by Marxism and by Christian faith. Formerly the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford (1992–2001) and John Edward Taylor Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester (2001–2008), Eagleton has held visiting appointments at universities around the world including Cornell, Duke, Iowa, Melbourne, Trinity College in Dublin, and Yale. Eagleton delivered Yale University's 2008 Terry Lectures and the University of Edinburgh's 2010 Gifford Lecture entitled "The God Debate". He gave the 2010 Richard Price Memorial Lecture at Newington Green Unitarian Church, speaking on "The New Atheism and the War on Terror". In 2009, he published a book which accompanied his lectures on religion, entitled "Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate". Early life. Eagleton was born in Salford on 22 February 1943 to Francis Paul Eagleton and his wife, Rosaleen (née Riley). He grew up in a working-class Irish Catholic family in Salford, with roots in County Galway. His mother's side of the family had strong Irish republican sympathies. He served as an altar boy at a local Carmelite convent where he was responsible for escorting novice nuns taking their vows, a role referred to in the title of his memoir "The Gatekeeper". Education and academia. He was educated at De La Salle College, a Roman Catholic grammar school in Pendleton, Salford. In 1961 he went to read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, whence he graduated with first-class honours. He later described his undergraduate experience as a "waste of time". In 1964, he moved to Jesus College, Cambridge, where as a junior research fellow and doctoral student, he became the youngest fellow at the college since the 18th century. He was supervised by Raymond Williams. It was during this period that his socialist convictions began to take hold, and he edited a radical Catholic leftist periodical called "Slant". In 1969 he moved to the University of Oxford where he became a fellow and tutor of Wadham College (1969–1989), Linacre College (1989–1993) and St Catherine's College, becoming Thomas Warton Professor of English in 1992. At Wadham, Eagleton ran a well-known seminar on Marxist literary theory which, in the 1980s, metamorphosed into the radical pressure group Oxford English Limited and its journal "", to which he contributed several pieces. In 2001 Eagleton left Oxford to occupy the John Edward Taylor chair of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester. Career. He began his literary studies with the 19th and 20th centuries, then conformed to the stringent academic Marxism of the 1970s. He then published an attack on his mentor Williams's relation to the Marxist tradition in the pages of the "New Left Review", in the mode of the French critic Louis Althusser. In the 1960s, he became involved with the left-wing Catholic group "Slant", authoring a number of theological articles (including "A Marxist Interpretation of Benediction"), as well as a book "Towards a New Left Theology". A major turning point was his "Criticism & Ideology" (1976) in which Eagleton discusses various theorists and critics from F. R. Leavis and (his tutor) Raymond Williams to Pierre Macherey. This earliest response to Theory is critical and substantive with Eagleton supplying a dense web of categories for "a materialist criticism" which situates the author as well as the text in the general mode of production, the "literary" mode of production and particular ideologies. In chapter 4 he gives a thorough overview of one theme in the English context – "organicist concepts of society" or "community" – as worked by petty-bourgeois Victorian writers, from George Eliot to D. H. Lawrence, and how this determines textual form in each instance. "Literary Theory" and "After Theory". In "Literary Theory: An Introduction" (1983, revised 1996), Eagleton surveys the history of theoretical approaches to literature, from its beginnings with Matthew Arnold, through formalism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, to post-structuralism. In the process, he demonstrates what is the thesis of the book: that theory is necessarily political. Theory is always presented as if it is unstained by point of view and is neutral, but in fact it is impossible to avoid having a political perspective. Peter Barry has said of the book that it "greatly contributed to the 'consolidation' of literary theory and helped to establish it firmly on the undergraduate curriculum". Eagleton's approach to literary criticism is one firmly rooted in the Marxist tradition, though he has also incorporated techniques and ideas from more recent modes of thought as structuralism, Lacanian analysis and deconstruction. As his memoir "The Gatekeeper" recounts, Eagleton's Marxism has never been solely an academic pursuit. He was active in the International Socialists (along with Christopher Hitchens) and then the Workers' Socialist League whilst in Oxford. He has been a regular contributor to the "London Review of Books". "After Theory" (2003) was written two decades later, after the end of the great period of High Theory – the cultural theory of Foucault, the postmodernists, Derrida, et al. Looking back, Eagleton evaluates its achievements and failures, and proposes new directions needing to be pursued. He considers that among the great achievements of Theory were the expansion of objects of study (to include gender, sexuality, popular culture, post-colonialism, etc.), and the wide-ranging self-reflective criticism of traditional assumptions. But in Eagleton's estimation there were also many serious mistakes, for instance: the assault on the normative and the insistence on the relativity of truth leaves us powerless to criticize oppression; the rejection of objectivity and (excessively) of all forms of essentialism bespeak an unrecognized idealism, or at least a blindness to our human materiality, ultimately born of an unconscious fear of death; and cultural studies has wrongly avoided consideration of ethics, which for Eagleton is inextricably tied to a proper politics. It is virtue and politics and how they may be realized, among other things, that Eagleton offers as new avenues needing to be explored by cultural studies. And that is the link to his previous work, "Literary Theory", which proposed that all theory is ultimately political. "After Theory" fleshes out this political aspect, tied to ethics, growing out of the fact that humans exist in neediness and dependency on others, their freedom bounded by the common fact of death. Dawkins, Hitchens and the New Atheism. Eagleton has become a vocal critic of what has been called the New Atheism. In October 2006, he published a review of Richard Dawkins's "The God Delusion" in the "London Review of Books". Eagleton begins by questioning Dawkins's methodology and understanding: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the "Book of British Birds", and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology". Eagleton further writes, "Nor does [Dawkins] understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us." He concludes by suggesting Dawkins has not been attacking organised faith so much as a sort of rhetorical straw man: Terry and Gifford Lectures. In April 2008 Eagleton delivered Yale University's Terry Lectures, with the title "Faith and Fundamentalism: Is belief in Richard Dawkins necessary for salvation?", constituting a continuation of the critique he had begun in "The London Review of Books". Introducing his first lecture with an admission of ignorance of both theology and science, Eagleton goes on to affirm: "All I can claim in this respect, alas, is that I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens – a couplet I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the solitary signifier "Ditchkins" – is talking out of the back of his neck." An expanded version of these lectures was published in 2009 as "Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate". Football. Eagleton sees football as a new opium of the people distracting ordinary people from more serious, important social concerns. Eagleton is pessimistic as to whether this distraction can be ended: Criticism of Martin and Kingsley Amis. In late 2007, a critique of Martin Amis included in the introduction to a 2007 edition of Eagleton's book "Ideology" was widely reprinted in the British press. In it, Eagleton took issue with Amis' widely quoted writings on "Islamism", directing particular attention to one specific passage from an interview with Ginny Dougary published in the "Times" on 9 September 2006. Eagleton criticised Amis and expressed surprise as to its source, stating: "[these are] not the ramblings of a British National Party thug ... but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world." He drew a connection between Amis and his father (the novelist Kingsley Amis). Eagleton went on to write that Martin Amis had learned more from his father – whom Eagleton described as a reactionary "racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals" – than merely "how to turn a shapely phrase." Eagleton added there was "something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment." The essay became a "cause célèbre" in British literary circles. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a commentator for "The Independent", wrote an article about the affair, to which Amis responded via open letter, calling Eagleton "an ideological relict ... unable to get out of bed in the morning without the dual guidance of God and Karl Marx." Amis said the views Eagleton attributed to him as his considered opinion was in fact his spoken description of a tempting urge, in relation to the need to "raise the price" of terrorist actions. Eagleton's personal comments on Kingsley Amis prompted a further response from Kingsley's widow, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Howard wrote to the "Daily Telegraph", noting that for a supposed "anti-semitic homophobe", it was peculiar that the only guests at the Howard-Amis nuptials were either Jewish or gay. As Howard explained, "Kingsley was never a racist, nor an anti-Semitic boor. Our four great friends who witnessed our wedding were three Jews and one homosexual." Colin Howard, Howard's homosexual brother, called Eagleton "a little squirt", adding that Sir Kingsley, far from being homophobic, had extended an affectionate friendship to him and helped him come to terms with his sexuality. Eagleton defended his comments about Martin and Kingsley Amis in "The Guardian", claiming the main bone of contention – the substance of Amis' remarks and views – had been lost amid the media furore. Critical reactions. William Deresiewicz wrote of "After Theory", Eagleton's book, as follows... : The novelist and critic David Lodge, writing in the May 2004 "New York Review of Books" on "Theory" and "After Theory", concluded: Sir Jonathan Bate stressed the importance of Eagleton's Roman Catholic background in "Saint Terence", a 1991 review-essay in the London Review of Books prior to the overt religious turn in Eagleton's later works. Family. Eagleton was married to the American academic Willa Murphy, with whom he has three children. They have since divorced. Eagleton has two other sons by his first marriage, which ended in 1976 after ten years.

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Voltaire François-Marie Arouet (; 21 November 169430 May 1778), known by his "nom de plume" Voltaire (; ; ), was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his criticism of Christianity—especially the Roman Catholic Church—as well as his advocacy of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile and prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, histories, and scientific expositions. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was one of the first authors to become renowned and commercially successful internationally. He was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties, and he was at constant risk from the strict censorship laws of the Catholic French monarchy. His polemics witheringly satirized intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day. Biography. François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris, the youngest of the five children of François Arouet (1649–1722), a lawyer who was a minor treasury official, and his wife, Marie Marguerite Daumard (), whose family was on the lowest rank of the French nobility. Some speculation surrounds Voltaire's date of birth, because he claimed he was born on 20 February 1694 as the illegitimate son of a nobleman, Guérin de Rochebrune or Roquebrune. Two of his older brothers—Armand-François and Robert—died in infancy, and his surviving brother Armand and sister Marguerite-Catherine were nine and seven years older, respectively. Nicknamed "Zozo" by his family, Voltaire was baptized on 22 November 1694, with , and Marie Daumard, the wife of his mother's cousin, standing as godparents. He was educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand (1704–1711), where he was taught Latin, theology, and rhetoric; later in life he became fluent in Italian, Spanish, and English. By the time he left school, Voltaire had decided he wanted to be a writer, against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to become a lawyer. Voltaire, pretending to work in Paris as an assistant to a notary, spent much of his time writing poetry. When his father found out, he sent Voltaire to study law, this time in Caen, Normandy. But the young man continued to write, producing essays and historical studies. Voltaire's wit made him popular among some of the aristocratic families with whom he mixed. In 1713, his father obtained a job for him as a secretary to the new French ambassador in the Netherlands, the , the brother of Voltaire's godfather. At The Hague, Voltaire fell in love with a French Protestant refugee named Catherine Olympe Dunoyer (known as 'Pimpette'). Their affair, considered scandalous, was discovered by de Châteauneuf and Voltaire was forced to return to France by the end of the year. Most of Voltaire's early life revolved around Paris. From early on, Voltaire had trouble with the authorities for critiques of the government. As a result, he was twice sentenced to prison and once to temporary exile to England. One satirical verse, in which Voltaire accused the Régent of incest with his daughter, resulted in an eleven-month imprisonment in the Bastille. The "Comédie-Française" had agreed in January 1717 to stage his debut play, "Œdipe", and it opened in mid-November 1718, seven months after his release. Its immediate critical and financial success established his reputation. Both the Régent and King George I of Great Britain presented Voltaire with medals as a mark of their appreciation. He mainly argued for religious tolerance and freedom of thought. He campaigned to eradicate priestly and aristo-monarchical authority, and supported a constitutional monarchy that protects people's rights. Name. Arouet adopted the name Voltaire in 1718, following his incarceration at the Bastille. Its origin is unclear. It is an anagram of "AROVET LI", the Latinized spelling of his surname, Arouet, and the initial letters of ("the young"). According to a family tradition among the descendants of his sister, he was known as ("determined little thing") as a child, and he resurrected a variant of the name in his adult life. The name also reverses the syllables of Airvault, his family's home town in the Poitou region. Richard Holmes supports the anagrammatic derivation of the name, but adds that a writer such as Voltaire would have intended it to also convey connotations of speed and daring. These come from associations with words such as (acrobatics on a trapeze or horse), "volte-face" (a spinning about to face one's enemies), and "volatile" (originally, any winged creature). "Arouet" was not a noble name fit for his growing reputation, especially given that name's resonance with ("to be beaten up") and (a "débauché"). In a letter to Jean-Baptiste Rousseau in March 1719, Voltaire concludes by asking that, if Rousseau wishes to send him a return letter, he do so by addressing it to Monsieur de Voltaire. A postscript explains: "", ("I was so unhappy under the name of Arouet that I have taken another, primarily so as to cease to be confused with the poet Roi.") This probably refers to Adenes le Roi, and the 'oi' diphthong was then pronounced like modern 'ouai', so the similarity to 'Arouet' is clear, and thus, it could well have been part of his rationale. Voltaire is known also to have used at least 178 separate pen names during his lifetime. Early fiction. Voltaire's next play, "Artémire", set in ancient Macedonia, opened on 15 February 1720. It was a flop and only fragments of the text survive. He instead turned to an epic poem about Henry IV of France that he had begun in early 1717. Denied a licence to publish, in August 1722 Voltaire headed north to find a publisher outside France. On the journey, he was accompanied by his mistress, Marie-Marguerite de Rupelmonde, a young widow. At Brussels, Voltaire and Rousseau met up for a few days, before Voltaire and his mistress continued northwards. A publisher was eventually secured in The Hague. In the Netherlands, Voltaire was struck and impressed by the openness and tolerance of Dutch society. On his return to France, he secured a second publisher in Rouen, who agreed to publish "La Henriade" clandestinely. After Voltaire's recovery from a month-long smallpox infection in November 1723, the first copies were smuggled into Paris and distributed. While the poem was an instant success, Voltaire's new play, "Mariamne", was a failure when it first opened in March 1724. Heavily reworked, it opened at the "Comédie-Française" in April 1725 to a much-improved reception. It was among the entertainments provided at the wedding of Louis XV and Marie Leszczyńska in September 1725. Great Britain. In early 1726, the aristocratic chevalier de Rohan-Chabot taunted Voltaire about his change of name, and Voltaire retorted that his name would win the esteem of the world, while de Rohan would sully his own. The furious de Rohan arranged for his thugs to beat up Voltaire a few days later. Seeking redress, Voltaire challenged de Rohan to a duel, but the powerful de Rohan family arranged for Voltaire to be arrested and imprisoned without trial in the Bastille on 17 April 1726. Fearing indefinite imprisonment, Voltaire asked to be exiled to England as an alternative punishment, which the French authorities accepted. On 2 May, he was escorted from the Bastille to Calais and embarked for Britain. In England, Voltaire lived largely in Wandsworth, with acquaintances including Everard Fawkener. From December 1727 to June 1728 he lodged at Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, now commemorated by a plaque, to be nearer to his British publisher. Voltaire circulated throughout English high society, meeting Alexander Pope, John Gay, Jonathan Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, and many other members of the nobility and royalty. Voltaire's exile in Great Britain greatly influenced his thinking. He was intrigued by Britain's constitutional monarchy in contrast to French absolutism, and by the country's greater freedom of speech and religion. He was influenced by the writers of the time, and developed an interest in English literature, especially Shakespeare, who was still little known in continental Europe. Despite pointing out Shakespeare's deviations from neoclassical standards, Voltaire saw him as an example for French drama, which, though more polished, lacked on-stage action. Later, however, as Shakespeare's influence began growing in France, Voltaire tried to set a contrary example with his own plays, decrying what he considered Shakespeare's barbarities. Voltaire may have been present at the funeral of Isaac Newton, and met Newton's niece, Catherine Conduitt. In 1727, he published two essays in English, "Upon the Civil Wars of France, Extracted from Curious Manuscripts" and "Upon Epic Poetry of the European Nations, from Homer Down to Milton". After two and a half years in exile, Voltaire returned to France, and after a few months in Dieppe, the authorities permitted him to return to Paris. At a dinner, French mathematician Charles Marie de La Condamine proposed buying up the lottery that was organized by the French government to pay off its debts, and Voltaire joined the consortium, earning perhaps a million livres. He invested the money cleverly and on this basis managed to convince the Court of Finances of his responsible conduct, allowing him to take control of a trust fund inherited from his father. He was now indisputably rich. Further success followed in 1732 with his play "Zaïre", which when published in 1733 carried a dedication to Fawkener praising English liberty and commerce. He published his admiring essays on British government, literature, religion and science in "Letters Concerning the English Nation" (London, 1733). In 1734, they were published in Rouen as "Lettres philosophiques", causing a huge scandal. Published without approval of the royal censor, the essays lauded British constitutional monarchy as more developed and more respectful of human rights than its French counterpart, particularly regarding religious tolerance. The book was publicly burnt and banned, and Voltaire was again forced to flee Paris. Château de Cirey. In 1733, Voltaire met Émilie du Châtelet (Marquise du Châtelet), a mathematician and married mother of three, who was 12 years his junior and with whom he was to have an affair for 16 years. To avoid arrest after the publication of "Lettres", Voltaire took refuge at her husband's château at Cirey on the borders of Champagne and Lorraine. Voltaire paid for the building's renovation, and Émilie's husband sometimes stayed at the château with his wife and her lover. The intellectual paramours collected around 21,000 books, an enormous number for the time. Together, they studied these books and performed scientific experiments at Cirey, including an attempt to determine the nature of fire. Having learned from his previous brushes with the authorities, Voltaire began his habit of avoiding open confrontation with the authorities and denying any awkward responsibility. He continued to write plays, such as "Mérope" (or "La Mérope française") and began his long researches into science and history. Again, a main source of inspiration for Voltaire were the years of his British exile, during which he had been strongly influenced by the works of Isaac Newton. Voltaire strongly believed in Newton's theories; he performed experiments in optics at Cirey, and was one of the promulgators of the famous story of Newton's inspiration from the falling apple, which he had learned from Newton's niece in London and first mentioned in his "Letters". In the fall of 1735, Voltaire was visited by Francesco Algarotti, who was preparing a book about Newton in Italian. Partly inspired by the visit, the Marquise translated Newton's Latin "Principia" into French, which remained the definitive French version into the 21st century. Both she and Voltaire were also curious about the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz, a contemporary and rival of Newton. While Voltaire remained a firm Newtonian, the Marquise adopted certain aspects of Leibniz's critiques. Voltaire's own book "Elements of the Philosophy of Newton" made the great scientist accessible to a far greater public, and the Marquise wrote a celebratory review in the "Journal des savants". Voltaire's work was instrumental in bringing about general acceptance of Newton's optical and gravitational theories in France, in contrast to the theories of Descartes. Voltaire and the Marquise also studied history, particularly the great contributors to civilization. Voltaire's second essay in English had been "Essay upon the Civil Wars in France". It was followed by "La Henriade", an epic poem on the French King Henri IV, glorifying his attempt to end the Catholic-Protestant massacres with the Edict of Nantes, which established religious toleration. There followed a historical novel on King Charles XII of Sweden. These, along with his "Letters on the English", mark the beginning of Voltaire's open criticism of intolerance and established religions. Voltaire and the Marquise also explored philosophy, particularly metaphysical questions concerning the existence of God and the soul. Voltaire and the Marquise analyzed the Bible and concluded that much of its content was dubious. Voltaire's critical views on religion led to his belief in separation of church and state and religious freedom, ideas that he had formed after his stay in England. In August 1736, Frederick the Great, then Crown Prince of Prussia and a great admirer of Voltaire, initiated a correspondence with him. That December, Voltaire moved to Holland for two months and became acquainted with the scientists Herman Boerhaave and 's Gravesande. From mid-1739 to mid-1740 Voltaire lived largely in Brussels, at first with the Marquise, who was unsuccessfully attempting to pursue a 60-year-old family legal case regarding the ownership of two estates in Limburg. In July 1740, he traveled to the Hague on behalf of Frederick in an attempt to dissuade a dubious publisher, van Duren, from printing without permission Frederick's "Anti-Machiavel". In September Voltaire and Frederick (now King) met for the first time in Moyland Castle near Cleves and in November Voltaire was Frederick's guest in Berlin for two weeks, followed by a meeting in September 1742 at Aix-la-Chapelle. Voltaire was sent to Frederick's court in 1743 by the French government as an envoy and spy to gauge Frederick's military intentions in the War of the Austrian Succession. Though deeply committed to the Marquise, Voltaire by 1744 found life at her château confining. On a visit to Paris that year, he found a new love—his niece. At first, his attraction to Marie Louise Mignot was clearly sexual, as evidenced by his letters to her (only discovered in 1957). Much later, they lived together, perhaps platonically, and remained together until Voltaire's death. Meanwhile, the Marquise also took a lover, the Marquis de Saint-Lambert. Prussia. After the death of the Marquise in childbirth in September 1749, Voltaire briefly returned to Paris and in mid-1750 moved to Prussia at the invitation of Frederick the Great. The Prussian king (with the permission of Louis XV) made him a chamberlain in his household, appointed him to the Order of Merit, and gave him a salary of 20,000 French livres a year. He had rooms at Sanssouci and Charlottenburg Palace. Life went well for Voltaire at first, and in 1751 he completed "Micromégas", a piece of science fiction involving ambassadors from another planet witnessing the follies of humankind. However, his relationship with Frederick began to deteriorate after he was accused of theft and forgery by a Jewish financier, Abraham Hirschel, who had invested in Saxon government bonds on behalf of Voltaire at a time when Frederick was involved in sensitive diplomatic negotiations with Saxony. He encountered other difficulties: an argument with Maupertuis, the president of the Berlin Academy of Science and a former rival for Émilie's affections, provoked Voltaire's "Diatribe du docteur Akakia" ("Diatribe of Doctor Akakia"), which satirized some of Maupertuis's theories and his persecutions of a mutual acquaintance, Johann Samuel König. This greatly angered Frederick, who ordered all copies of the document burned. On 1 January 1752, Voltaire offered to resign as chamberlain and return his insignia of the Order of Merit; at first, Frederick refused until eventually permitting Voltaire to leave in March. On a slow journey back to France, Voltaire stayed at Leipzig and Gotha for a month each, and Kassel for two weeks, arriving at Frankfurt on 31 May. The following morning, he was detained at an inn by Frederick's agents, who held him in the city for over three weeks while Voltaire and Frederick argued by letter over the return of a satirical book of poetry Frederick had lent to Voltaire. Marie Louise joined him on 9 June. She and her uncle only left Frankfurt in July after she had defended herself from the unwanted advances of one of Frederick's agents, and Voltaire's luggage had been ransacked and valuable items taken. Voltaire's attempts to vilify Frederick for his agents' actions at Frankfurt were largely unsuccessful, including his "Mémoires pour Servir à la Vie de M. de Voltaire," published posthumously. However, the correspondence between them continued, and though they never met in person again, after the Seven Years' War they largely reconciled. Geneva and Ferney. Voltaire's slow progress toward Paris continued through Mainz, Mannheim, Strasbourg, and Colmar, but in January 1754 Louis XV banned him from Paris, and he turned for Geneva, near which he bought a large estate ("Les Délices") in early 1755. Though he was received openly at first, the law in Geneva, which banned theatrical performances, and the publication of "The Maid of Orleans" against his will soured his relationship with Calvinist Genevans. In late 1758, he bought an even larger estate at Ferney, on the French side of the Franco-Swiss border. The town would adopt his name, calling itself Ferney-Voltaire, and this became its official name in 1878. Early in 1759, Voltaire completed and published "Candide, ou l'Optimisme" ("Candide, or Optimism"). This satire on Leibniz's philosophy of optimistic determinism remains Voltaire's best known-work. He would stay in Ferney for most of the remaining 20 years of his life, frequently entertaining distinguished guests, such as James Boswell, Adam Smith, Giacomo Casanova, and Edward Gibbon. In 1764, he published one of his best-known philosophical works, the "Dictionnaire philosophique", a series of articles mainly on Christian history and dogmas, a few of which were originally written in Berlin. From 1762, as an unmatched intellectual celebrity, he began to champion unjustly persecuted individuals, most famously the Huguenot merchant Jean Calas. Calas had been tortured to death in 1763, supposedly because he had murdered his eldest son for wanting to convert to Catholicism. His possessions were confiscated, and his two daughters were taken from his widow and forced into Catholic convents. Voltaire, seeing this as a clear case of religious persecution, managed to overturn the conviction in 1765. Voltaire was initiated into Freemasonry a little over a month before his death. On 4 April 1778, he attended "la Loge des Neuf Sœurs" in Paris, and became an Entered Apprentice Freemason. According to some sources, "Benjamin Franklin ... urged Voltaire to become a freemason; and Voltaire agreed, perhaps only to please Franklin." However, Franklin was merely a visitor at the time Voltaire was initiated, the two only met a month before Voltaire's death, and their interactions with each other were brief. Death and burial. In February 1778, Voltaire returned for the first time in over 25 years to Paris, among other reasons to see the opening of his latest tragedy, "Irene". The five-day journey was too much for the 83-year-old, and he believed he was about to die on 28 February, writing "I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition." However, he recovered, and in March he saw a performance of "Irene", where he was treated by the audience as a returning hero. He soon became ill again and died on 30 May 1778. The accounts of his deathbed have been numerous and varying, and it has not been possible to establish the details of what precisely occurred. His enemies related that he repented and accepted the last rites from a Catholic priest, or that he died in agony of body and soul, while his adherents told of his defiance to his last breath. According to one story of his last words, when the priest urged him to renounce Satan, he replied, "This is no time to make new enemies." However, this appears to have originated from a joke in a Massachusetts newspaper in 1856, and was only attributed to Voltaire in the 1970s. Because of his well-known criticism of the Church, which he had refused to retract before his death, Voltaire was denied a Christian burial in Paris, but friends and relations managed to bury his body secretly at the Abbey of Scellières in Champagne, where Marie Louise's brother was "abbé". His heart and brain were embalmed separately. On 11 July 1791, the National Assembly of France, regarding Voltaire as a forerunner of the French Revolution, had his remains brought back to Paris and enshrined in the Panthéon. An estimated million people attended the procession, which stretched throughout Paris. There was an elaborate ceremony, including music composed for the event by André Grétry. Writings. History. Voltaire had an enormous influence on the development of historiography through his demonstration of fresh new ways to look at the past. Guillaume de Syon argues: Voltaire's best-known histories are "History of Charles XII" (1731), "The Age of Louis XIV" (1751), and his "Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations" (1756). He broke from the tradition of narrating diplomatic and military events, and emphasized customs, social history and achievements in the arts and sciences. The "Essay on Customs" traced the progress of world civilization in a universal context, rejecting both nationalism and the traditional Christian frame of reference. Influenced by Bossuet's "Discourse on Universal History" (1682), he was the first scholar to attempt seriously a history of the world, eliminating theological frameworks, and emphasizing economics, culture and political history. He treated Europe as a whole rather than a collection of nations. He was the first to emphasize the debt of medieval culture to Middle Eastern civilization, but otherwise was weak on the Middle Ages. Although he repeatedly warned against political bias on the part of the historian, he did not miss many opportunities to expose the intolerance and frauds of the church over the ages. Voltaire advised scholars that anything contradicting the normal course of nature was not to be believed. Although he found evil in the historical record, he fervently believed reason and expanding literacy would lead to progress. Voltaire explains his view of historiography in his article on "History" in Diderot's "Encyclopédie": "One demands of modern historians more details, better ascertained facts, precise dates, more attention to customs, laws, mores, commerce, finance, agriculture, population." Voltaire's histories imposed the values of the Enlightenment on the past, but at the same time he helped free historiography from antiquarianism, Eurocentrism, religious intolerance and a concentration on great men, diplomacy, and warfare. Yale professor Peter Gay says Voltaire wrote "very good history", citing his "scrupulous concern for truths", "careful sifting of evidence", "intelligent selection of what is important", "keen sense of drama", and "grasp of the fact that a whole civilization is a unit of study". Poetry. From an early age, Voltaire displayed a talent for writing verse, and his first published work was poetry. He wrote two book-long epic poems, including the first ever written in French, the "Henriade", and later, "The Maid of Orleans", besides many other smaller pieces. The "Henriade" was written in imitation of Virgil, using the alexandrine couplet reformed and rendered monotonous for modern readers but it was a huge success in the 18th and early 19th century, with sixty-five editions and translations into several languages. The epic poem transformed French King Henry IV into a national hero for his attempts at instituting tolerance with his Edict of Nantes. "La Pucelle", on the other hand, is a burlesque on the legend of Joan of Arc. Prose. Many of Voltaire's prose works and romances, usually composed as pamphlets, were written as polemics. "Candide" attacks the passivity inspired by Leibniz's philosophy of optimism through the character Pangloss's frequent refrain that circumstances are the "best of all possible worlds". "L'Homme aux quarante ecus" ("The Man of Forty Pieces of Silver"), addresses social and political ways of the time; "Zadig" and others, the received forms of moral and metaphysical orthodoxy; and some were written to deride the Bible. In these works, Voltaire's ironic style, free of exaggeration, is apparent, particularly the restraint and simplicity of the verbal treatment. "Candide" in particular is the best example of his style. Voltaire also has—in common with Jonathan Swift—the distinction of paving the way for science fiction's philosophical irony, particularly in his "Micromégas" and the vignette "Plato's Dream" (1756). In general, his criticism and miscellaneous writing show a similar style to Voltaire's other works. Almost all of his more substantive works, whether in verse or prose, are preceded by prefaces of one sort or another, which are models of his caustic yet conversational tone. In a vast variety of nondescript pamphlets and writings, he displays his skills at journalism. In pure literary criticism his principal work is the "Commentaire sur Corneille", although he wrote many more similar works—sometimes (as in his "Life and Notices of Molière") independently and sometimes as part of his "Siècles". Voltaire's works, especially his private letters, frequently urge the reader: "", or "crush the infamous". The phrase refers to contemporaneous abuses of power by royal and religious authorities, and the superstition and intolerance fomented by the clergy. He had seen and felt these effects in his own exiles, the burnings of his books and those of many others, and in the atrocious persecution of Jean Calas and François-Jean de la Barre. He stated in one of his most famous quotes that "Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them." The most oft-cited Voltaire quotation is apocryphal. He is incorrectly credited with writing, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." These were not his words, but rather those of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, written under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre in her 1906 biographical book "The Friends of Voltaire". Hall intended to summarize in her own words Voltaire's attitude towards Claude Adrien Helvétius and his controversial book "De l'esprit", but her first-person expression was mistaken for an actual quotation from Voltaire. Her interpretation does capture the spirit of Voltaire's attitude towards Helvetius; it had been said Hall's summary was inspired by a quotation found in a 1770 Voltaire letter to an Abbot le Riche, in which he was reported to have said, "I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write." Nevertheless, scholars believe there must have again been misinterpretation, as the letter does not seem to contain any such quote. Voltaire's first major philosophical work in his battle against "" was the "Traité sur la tolérance" ("Treatise on Tolerance"), exposing the Calas affair, along with the tolerance exercised by other faiths and in other eras (for example, by the Jews, the Romans, the Greeks and the Chinese). Then, in his "Dictionnaire philosophique", containing such articles as "Abraham", "Genesis", "Church Council", he wrote about what he perceived as the human origins of dogmas and beliefs, as well as inhuman behavior of religious and political institutions in shedding blood over the quarrels of competing sects. Amongst other targets, Voltaire criticized France's colonial policy in North America, dismissing the vast territory of New France as "a few acres of snow" (""). Letters. Voltaire also engaged in an enormous amount of private correspondence during his life, totalling over 20,000 letters. Theodore Besterman's collected edition of these letters, completed only in 1964, fills 102 volumes. One historian called the letters "a feast not only of wit and eloquence but of warm friendship, humane feeling, and incisive thought." In Voltaire's correspondence with Catherine the Great he derided democracy. He wrote, "Almost nothing great has ever been done in the world except by the genius and firmness of a single man combating the prejudices of the multitude." Religious and philosophical views. Like other key Enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire was a deist. He challenged orthodoxy by asking: "What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason." In a 1763 essay, Voltaire supported the toleration of other religions and ethnicities: "It does not require great art, or magnificently trained eloquence, to prove that Christians should tolerate each other. I, however, am going further: I say that we should regard all men as our brothers. What? The Turk my brother? The Chinaman my brother? The Jew? The Siam? Yes, without doubt; are we not all children of the same father and creatures of the same God?" In one of his many denunciations of priests of every religious sect, Voltaire describes them as those who "rise from an incestuous bed, manufacture a hundred versions of God, then eat and drink God, then piss and shit God." Christianity. Historians have described Voltaire's description of the history of Christianity as "propagandistic". His "Dictionnaire philosophique" is responsible for the myth that the early Church had fifty gospels before settling on the standard canonical four as well as propagating the myth that the canon of the New Testament was decided at the First Council of Nicaea. Voltaire is partially responsible for the misattribution of the expression "Credo quia absurdum" to the Church Fathers. Furthermore, despite the death of Hypatia being the result of finding herself in the crossfires of a mob during a political feud in 4th century Alexandria, Voltaire promoted the theory that she was stripped naked and murdered by the minions of the bishop Cyril of Alexandria, concluding by stating that "when one finds a beautiful woman completely naked, it is not for the purpose of massacring her." Voltaire meant for this argument to bolster one of his anti-Catholic tracts. In a letter to Frederick II, King of Prussia, dated 5 January 1767, he wrote about Christianity: In "La bible enfin expliquée", he expressed the following attitude to lay reading of the Bible: It is characteristic of fanatics who read the holy scriptures to tell themselves: God killed, so I must kill; Abraham lied, Jacob deceived, Rachel stole: so I must steal, deceive, lie. But, wretch, you are neither Rachel, nor Jacob, nor Abraham, nor God; you are just a mad fool, and the popes who forbade the reading of the Bible were extremely wise. Voltaire's opinion of the Bible was mixed. Although influenced by Socinian works such as the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, Voltaire's skeptical attitude to the Bible separated him from Unitarian theologians like Fausto Sozzini or even Biblical-political writers like John Locke. His statements on religion also brought down on him the fury of the Jesuits and in particular Claude-Adrien Nonnotte. This did not hinder his religious practice, though it did win for him a bad reputation in certain religious circles. The deeply Christian Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote to his father the year of Voltaire's death, saying, "The arch-scoundrel Voltaire has finally kicked the bucket ..." Voltaire was later deemed to influence Edward Gibbon in claiming that Christianity was a contributor to the fall of the Roman Empire in his book "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire":As Christianity advances, disasters befall the [Roman] empire—arts, science, literature, decay—barbarism and all its revolting concomitants are made to seem the consequences of its decisive triumph—and the unwary reader is conducted, with matchless dexterity, to the desired conclusion—the abominable Manicheism of "Candide", and, in fact, of all the productions of Voltaire's historic school—viz., "that instead of being a merciful, ameliorating, and benignant visitation, the religion of Christians would rather seem to be a scourge sent on man by the author of all evil." However, Voltaire also acknowledged the self-sacrifice of Christians. He wrote: "Perhaps there is nothing greater on earth than the sacrifice of youth and beauty, often of high birth, made by the gentle sex in order to work in hospitals for the relief of human misery, the sight of which is so revolting to our delicacy. Peoples separated from the Roman religion have imitated but imperfectly so generous a charity." Yet, according to Daniel-Rops, Voltaire's "hatred of religion increased with the passage of years. The attack, launched at first against clericalism and theocracy, ended in a furious assault upon Holy Scripture, the dogmas of the Church, and even upon the person of Jesus Christ Himself, who [he] depicted now as a degenerate." Voltaire's reasoning may be summed up in his well-known saying, "." Judaism. According to Orthodox rabbi Joseph Telushkin, the most significant Enlightenment hostility against Judaism was found in Voltaire; thirty of the 118 articles in his "Dictionnaire philosophique" dealt with Jews and described them in consistently negative ways. For example, in Voltaire's "A Philosophical Dictionary", he wrote of Jews: "In short, we find in them only an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched." On the other hand, Peter Gay, a contemporary authority on the Enlightenment, also points to Voltaire's remarks (for instance, that the Jews were more tolerant than the Christians) in the "Traité sur la tolérance" and surmises that "Voltaire struck at the Jews to strike at Christianity". Whatever anti-semitism Voltaire may have felt, Gay suggests, derived from negative personal experience. Bertram Schwarzbach's far more detailed studies of Voltaire's dealings with Jewish people throughout his life concluded that he was anti-biblical, not anti-semitic. His remarks on the Jews and their "superstitions" were essentially no different from his remarks on Christians. Telushkin states that Voltaire did not limit his attack to aspects of Judaism that Christianity used as a foundation, repeatedly making it clear that he despised Jews. Arthur Hertzberg claims that Gay's second suggestion is also untenable, as Voltaire himself denied its validity when he remarked that he had "forgotten about much larger bankruptcies through Christians". Some authors link Voltaire's anti-Judaism to his polygenism. According to Joxe Azurmendi this anti-Judaism has a relative importance in Voltaire's philosophy of history. However, Voltaire's anti-Judaism influences later authors like Ernest Renan. Although Voltaire did have a Jewish friend, Daniel de Fonseca, whom he called "the only philosopher of his people". According to the historian Will Durant, Voltaire had initially condemned the persecution of Jews on several occasions including in his work "Henriade". As stated by Durant, Voltaire had praised the simplicity, sobriety, regularity, and industry of Jews. However, subsequently, Voltaire had become strongly anti-Semitic after some regrettable personal financial transactions and quarrels with Jewish financiers. In his "Essai sur les moeurs" Voltaire had denounced the ancient Hebrews using strong language; a Catholic priest had protested against this censure. The anti-Semitic passages in Voltaire's "Dictionnaire philosophique" were criticized by Issac Pinto in 1762. Subsequently, Voltaire agreed with the criticism of his anti-Semitic views and stated that he had been "wrong to attribute to a whole nation the vices of some individuals"; he also promised to revise the objectionable passages for forthcoming editions of the "Dictionnaire philosophique", but failed to do so. Islam. Voltaire's views about Islam were generally negative, and he found its holy book, the Quran, to be ignorant of the laws of physics. In a 1740 letter to Frederick II of Prussia, Voltaire ascribes to Muhammad a brutality that "is assuredly nothing any man can excuse" and suggests that his following stemmed from superstition; Voltaire continued, "But that a camel-merchant should stir up insurrection in his village; that in league with some miserable followers he persuades them that he talks with the angel Gabriel; that he boasts of having been carried to heaven, where he received in part this unintelligible book, each page of which makes common sense shudder; that, to pay homage to this book, he delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse, at least if he was not born a Turk, or if superstition has not extinguished all natural light in him." In 1748, after having read Henri de Boulainvilliers and George Sale, he wrote again about Mohammed and Islam in "De l'Alcoran et de Mahomet" ("On the Quran and on Mohammed"). In this essay, Voltaire maintained that Mohammed was a "sublime charlatan" Drawing on complementary information in Herbelot's "Oriental Library", Voltaire, according to René Pomeau, adjudged the Quran, with its "contradictions, ... absurdities, ... anachronisms", to be "rhapsody, without connection, without order, and without art". Thus he "henceforward conceded" that "if his book was bad for our times and for us, it was very good for his contemporaries, and his religion even more so. It must be admitted that he removed almost all of Asia from idolatry" and that "it was difficult for such a simple and wise religion, taught by a man who was constantly victorious, could hardly fail to subjugate a portion of the earth." He considered that "its civil laws are good; its dogma is admirable which it has in common with ours" but that "his means are shocking; deception and murder". In his "Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations" (published 1756), Voltaire deals with the history of Europe before Charlemagne to the dawn of the age of Louis XIV, and that of the colonies and the East. As a historian, he devoted several chapters to Islam, Voltaire highlighted the Arabian, Turkish courts, and conducts. Here he called Mohammed a "poet", and stated that he was not an illiterate. As a "legislator", he "changed the face of part of Europe [and] one half of Asia." In chapter VI, Voltaire finds similarities between Arabs and ancient Hebrews, that they both kept running to battle in the name of God, and sharing a passion for the spoils of war. Voltaire continues that, "It is to be believed that Mohammed, like all enthusiasts, violently struck by his ideas, first presented them in good faith, strengthened them with fantasy, fooled himself in fooling others, and supported through necessary deceptions a doctrine which he considered good." He thus compares "the genius of the Arab people" with "the genius of the ancient Romans". According to Malise Ruthven, as Voltaire learned more about Islam his opinion of the faith became more positive. As a result, his book, Fanaticism (Mohammad the Prophet), inspired Goethe, who was attracted to Islam, to write a drama on this theme, though completed only the poem Mahomets-Gesang ("Mahomet's Singing"). Drama "Mahomet". The tragedy "Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet" () was written in 1736 by Voltaire. The play is a study of religious fanaticism and self-serving manipulation. The character Muhammad orders the murder of his critics. Voltaire described the play as "written in opposition to the founder of a false and barbarous sect." Voltaire described Muhammad as an "impostor", a "false prophet", a "fanatic" and a "hypocrite". Defending the play, Voltaire said that he "tried to show in it into what horrible excesses fanaticism, led by an impostor, can plunge weak minds". When Voltaire wrote in 1742 to César de Missy, he described Mohammed as deceitful. In his play, Mohammed was "whatever trickery can invent that is most atrocious and whatever fanaticism can accomplish that is most horrifying. Mahomet here is nothing other than Tartuffe with armies at his command." After later having judged that he had made Mohammed in his play "somewhat nastier than he really was", Voltaire claims that Muhammad stole the idea of an angel weighing both men and women from Zoroastrians, who are often referred to as "Magi". Voltaire continues about Islam, saying: In a 1745 letter recommending the play to Pope Benedict XIV, Voltaire described Muhammad as "the founder of a false and barbarous sect" and "a false prophet". Voltaire wrote: "Your holiness will pardon the liberty taken by one of the lowest of the faithful, though a zealous admirer of virtue, of submitting to the head of the true religion this performance, written in opposition to the founder of a false and barbarous sect. To whom could I with more propriety inscribe a satire on the cruelty and errors of a false prophet, than to the vicar and representative of a God of truth and mercy?" His view was modified slightly for "Essai sur les Moeurs et l'Esprit des Nations", although it remained negative. In 1751, Voltaire performed his play "Mohamet" once again, with great success. Hinduism. Commenting on the sacred texts of the Hindus, the Vedas, Voltaire observed: The Veda was the most precious gift for which the West had ever been indebted to the East. He regarded Hindus as "a peaceful and innocent people, equally incapable of hurting others or of defending themselves." Voltaire was himself a supporter of animal rights and was a vegetarian. He used the antiquity of Hinduism to land what he saw as a devastating blow to the Bible's claims and acknowledged that the Hindus' treatment of animals showed a shaming alternative to the immorality of European imperialists. Confucianism. The works of Confucius were translated into European languages through the agency of Jesuit missionaries stationed in China. Matteo Ricci was among the earliest to report on the thoughts of Confucius, and father Prospero Intorcetta wrote about the life and works of Confucius in Latin in 1687. Translations of Confucian texts influenced European thinkers of the period, particularly among the Deists and other philosophical groups of the Enlightenment who were interested by the integration of the system of morality of Confucius into Western civilization. Voltaire was also influenced by Confucius, seeing the concept of Confucian rationalism as an alternative to Christian dogma. He praised Confucian ethics and politics, portraying the sociopolitical hierarchy of China as a model for Europe. With the translation of Confucian texts during the Enlightenment, the concept of a meritocracy reached intellectuals in the West, who saw it as an alternative to the traditional "Ancien Régime" of Europe. Voltaire wrote favourably of the idea, claiming that the Chinese had "perfected moral science" and advocating an economic and political system modeled after that of the Chinese. Views on race and slavery. Voltaire rejected the biblical Adam and Eve story and was a polygenist who speculated that each race had entirely separate origins. According to William Cohen, like most other polygenists, Voltaire believed that because of their different origins, blacks did not entirely share the natural humanity of whites. According to David Allen Harvey, Voltaire often invoked racial differences as a means to attack religious orthodoxy, and the Biblical account of creation. His most famous remark on slavery is found in "Candide", where the hero is horrified to learn "at what price we eat sugar in Europe" after coming across a slave in French Guiana who has been mutilated for escaping, who opines that, if all human beings have common origins as the Bible taught, it makes them cousins, concluding that "no one could treat their relatives more horribly". Elsewhere, he wrote caustically about "whites and Christians [who] proceed to purchase negroes cheaply, in order to sell them dear in America". Voltaire has been accused of supporting the slave trade as per a letter attributed to him, although it has been suggested that this letter is a forgery "since no satisfying source attests to the letter's existence." In his "Philosophical Dictionary", Voltaire endorses Montesquieu's criticism of the slave trade: "Montesquieu was almost always in error with the learned, because he was not learned, but he was almost always right against the fanatics and the promoters of slavery." Zeev Sternhell argues that despite his shortcomings, Voltaire was a forerunner of liberal pluralism in his approach to history and non-European cultures. Voltaire wrote, "We have slandered the Chinese because their metaphysics is not the same as ours ... This great misunderstanding about Chinese rituals has come about because we have judged their usages by ours, for we carry the prejudices of our contentious spirit to the end of the world." In speaking of Persia, he condemned Europe's "ignorant audacity" and "ignorant credulity". When writing about India, he declares, "It is time for us to give up the shameful habit of slandering all sects and insulting all nations!" In "Essai sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations", he defended the integrity of the Native Americans and wrote favorably of the Inca Empire. Appreciation and influence. According to Victor Hugo: "To name Voltaire is to characterize the entire eighteenth century." Goethe regarded Voltaire as the greatest literary figure of modern times, and possibly of all time. According to Diderot, Voltaire's influence would extend far into the future. Napoleon commented that till he was sixteen he "would have fought for Rousseau against the friends of Voltaire, today it is the opposite ... The more I read Voltaire the more I love him. He is a man always reasonable, never a charlatan, never a fanatic." Frederick the Great commented on his good fortune for having lived in the age of Voltaire, and corresponded with him throughout his reign until Voltaire's death. In England, Voltaire's views influenced Godwin, Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Bentham, Byron and Shelley. Macaulay made note of the fear that Voltaire's very name incited in tyrants and fanatics. In Russia, Catherine the Great had been reading Voltaire for sixteen years prior to becoming Empress in 1762. In October 1763, she began a correspondence with the philosopher that continued till his death. The content of these letters has been described as being akin to a student writing to a teacher. Upon Voltaire's death, the Empress purchased his library, which was then transported and placed in The Hermitage. Alexander Herzen remarked that "The writings of the egoist Voltaire did more for liberation than those of the loving Rousseau did for brotherhood." In his famous letter to N. V. Gogol, Vissarion Belinsky wrote that Voltaire "stamped out the fires of fanaticism and ignorance in Europe by ridicule." In his native Paris, Voltaire was remembered as the defender of Jean Calas and Pierre Sirven. Although Voltaire's campaign had failed to secure the annulment of la Barre's execution for blasphemy against Christianity, the criminal code that sanctioned the execution was revised during Voltaire's lifetime. In 1764, Voltaire successfully intervened and secured the release of Claude Chamont, arrested for attending Protestant services. When Comte de Lally was executed for treason in 1766, Voltaire wrote a 300-page document in his defense. Subsequently, in 1778, the judgment against de Lally was expunged just before Voltaire's death. The Genevan Protestant minister Pomaret once said to Voltaire, "You seem to attack Christianity, and yet you do the work of a Christian." Frederick the Great noted the significance of a philosopher capable of influencing judges to change their unjust decisions, commenting that this alone is sufficient to ensure the prominence of Voltaire as a humanitarian. Under the French Third Republic, anarchists and socialists often invoked Voltaire's writings in their struggles against militarism, nationalism, and the Catholic Church. The section condemning the futility and imbecility of war in the "Dictionnaire philosophique" was a frequent favorite, as were his arguments that nations can only grow at the expense of others. Following the liberation of France from the Vichy regime in 1944, Voltaire's 250th birthday was celebrated in both France and the Soviet Union, honoring him as "one of the most feared opponents" of the Nazi collaborators and someone "whose name symbolizes freedom of thought, and hatred of prejudice, superstition, and injustice." Jorge Luis Borges stated that "not to admire Voltaire is one of the many forms of stupidity" and included his short fiction such as "Micromégas" in "The Library of Babel" and "A Personal Library." Gustave Flaubert believed that France had erred gravely by not following the path forged by Voltaire instead of Rousseau. Most architects of modern America were adherents of Voltaire's views. According to Will Durant: Voltaire and Rousseau. Voltaire's junior contemporary Jean-Jacques Rousseau commented on how Voltaire's book "Letters on the English" played a great role in his intellectual development. Having written some literary works and also some music, in December 1745 Rousseau wrote a letter introducing himself to Voltaire, who was by then the most prominent literary figure in France, to which Voltaire replied with a polite response. Subsequently, when Rousseau sent Voltaire a copy of his book "Discourse on Inequality", Voltaire replied, noting his disagreement with the views expressed in the book: Subsequently, commenting on Rousseau's romantic novel "Julie, or the New Heloise", Voltaire stated: Voltaire quipped that the first half of "Julie" had been written in a brothel and the second half in a lunatic asylum. In his "Lettres sur La Nouvelle Heloise", written under a pseudonym, Voltaire criticized Rousseau's grammatical mistakes: In reviewing Rousseau's book "Emile", Voltaire dismissed it as "a hodgepodge of a silly wet nurse in four volumes, with forty pages against Christianity, among the boldest ever known." He expressed admiration for the section titled "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar", calling it "fifty good pages ... it is regrettable that they should have been written by ... such a knave." He went on to predict that "Emile" would be forgotten within a month. In 1764, Rousseau published "Lettres de la montagne" on religion and politics. In the fifth letter he wondered why Voltaire had not been able to imbue the Genevan councilors, who frequently met him, "with that spirit of tolerance which he preaches without cease, and of which he sometimes has need". The letter continued with an imaginary speech in the voice of Voltaire, acknowledging authorship of the heretical book "Sermon of the Fifty", which the real Voltaire had repeatedly denied. In 1772, when a priest sent Rousseau a pamphlet denouncing Voltaire, Rousseau responded by defending his rival: In 1778, when Voltaire was given unprecedented honors at the Théâtre-Français, an acquaintance of Rousseau ridiculed the event. This was met by a sharp retort from Rousseau: On 2 July 1778, Rousseau died one month after Voltaire. In October 1794, Rousseau's remains were moved to the Panthéon near the remains of Voltaire. Louis XVI, while incarcerated in the Temple, lamented that Rousseau and Voltaire had "destroyed France". Legacy. Voltaire perceived the French bourgeoisie to be too small and ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the commoners as ignorant and superstitious, and the Church as a static and oppressive force useful only on occasion as a counterbalance to the rapacity of kings, although all too often, even more rapacious itself. Voltaire distrusted democracy, which he saw as propagating the idiocy of the masses. Voltaire long thought only an enlightened monarch could bring about change, given the social structures of the time and the extremely high rates of illiteracy, and that it was in the king's rational interest to improve the education and welfare of his subjects. But his disappointments and disillusions with Frederick the Great changed his philosophy somewhat, and soon gave birth to one of his most enduring works, his novella "Candide, ou l'Optimisme" ("Candide, or Optimism," 1759), which ends with a new conclusion of quietism: "It is up to us to cultivate our garden." His most polemical and ferocious attacks on intolerance and religious persecutions indeed began to appear a few years later. "Candide" was also burned, and Voltaire jokingly claimed the actual author was a certain 'Demad' in a letter, where he reaffirmed the main polemical stances of the text. He is remembered and honored in France as a courageous polemicist who indefatigably fought for civil rights (such as the right to a fair trial and freedom of religion) and who denounced the hypocrisies and injustices of the "Ancien Régime". The "Ancien Régime" involved an unfair balance of power and taxes between the three Estates: clergy and nobles on one side, the commoners and middle class, who were burdened with most of the taxes, on the other. He particularly had admiration for the ethics and government as exemplified by the Chinese philosopher Confucius. Voltaire is also known for many memorable aphorisms, such as "" ("If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him"), contained in a verse epistle from 1768, addressed to the anonymous author of a controversial work on "The Three Impostors". But far from being the cynical remark it is often taken for, it was meant as a retort to atheistic opponents such as d'Holbach, Grimm, and others. He has had his detractors among his later colleagues. The Scottish Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle argued that "Voltaire read history, not with the eye of devout seer or even critic, but through a pair of mere anti-catholic spectacles." The town of Ferney, where Voltaire lived out the last 20 years of his life, was officially named Ferney-Voltaire in honor of its most famous resident, in 1878. His "château" is a museum. Voltaire's library is preserved intact in the National Library of Russia at Saint Petersburg. In the Zurich of 1916, the theatre and performance group who would become the early avant-garde Dada movement named their theater the Cabaret Voltaire. A late-20th-century industrial music group later adopted the same name. Astronomers have bestowed his name on the Voltaire crater on Deimos and the asteroid 5676 Voltaire. Voltaire was also known to have been an advocate for coffee, as he was reported to have drunk it 50–72 times per day. It has been suggested that high amounts of caffeine stimulated his creativity. His great-grand-niece was the mother of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Catholic philosopher and Jesuit priest. His book "Candide" was listed as one of The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written, by Martin Seymour-Smith. In the 1950s, the bibliographer and translator Theodore Besterman started to collect, transcribe and publish all of Voltaire's writings. He founded the Voltaire Institute and Museum in Geneva where he began publishing collected volumes of Voltaire's correspondence. On his death in 1976, he left his collection to the University of Oxford, where the Voltaire Foundation became established as a department. The Foundation has continued to publish the "Complete Works of Voltaire", a complete chronological series expected to reach completion in 2018 with around 200 volumes, fifty years after the series began. It also publishes the series "Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment", begun by Bestermann as "Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century", which has reached more than 500 volumes. Works. Plays. Voltaire wrote between fifty and sixty plays, including a few unfinished ones. Among them are: Further reading. In French Primary sources

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Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (, ; ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential figures in modern Western philosophy. In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere "forms of intuition" which structure all experience, and therefore that while "things-in-themselves" exist and contribute to experience, they are nonetheless distinct from the objects of experience. From this it follows that the objects of experience are mere "appearances", and that the nature of things as they are in themselves is consequently unknowable to us. In an attempt to counter the skepticism he found in the writings of philosopher David Hume, he wrote the "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781/1787), one of his most well-known works. In it, he developed his theory of experience to answer the question of whether synthetic "a priori" knowledge is possible, which would in turn make it possible to determine the limits of metaphysical inquiry. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that the objects of the senses must conform to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition, and that we can consequently have "a priori" cognition of the objects of the senses. Kant believed that reason is also the source of morality, and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-modern aesthetics. He attempted to explain the relationship between reason and human experience and to move beyond what he believed to be the failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He wanted to put an end to what he saw as an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience, while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as Hume. He regarded himself as showing the way past the impasse between rationalists and empiricists, and is widely held to have synthesized both traditions in his thought. Kant was an exponent of the idea that perpetual peace could be secured through universal democracy and international cooperation, and that perhaps this could be the culminating stage of world history. The nature of Kant's religious views continues to be the subject of scholarly dispute, with viewpoints ranging from the impression that he shifted from an early defense of an ontological argument for the existence of God to a principled agnosticism, to more critical treatments epitomized by Schopenhauer, who criticized the imperative form of Kantian ethics as "theological morals" and the "Mosaic Decalogue in disguise", and Nietzsche, who claimed that Kant had "theologian blood" and was merely a sophisticated apologist for traditional Christian faith. Beyond his religious views, Kant has also been criticized for the racism presented in some of his lesser-known papers, such as "On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy" and "On the Different Races of Man". Although he was a proponent of scientific racism for much of his career, Kant's views on race changed significantly in the last decade of his life, and he ultimately rejected racial hierarchies and European colonialism in "" (1795), though still considering Europeans as "civilized" to the exception of others. Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history during his lifetime. These include the "Universal Natural History" (1755), the "Critique of Practical Reason" (1788), the "Critique of Judgment" (1790), "Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason" (1793), and the "Metaphysics of Morals" (1797). Biography. Kant's mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Königsberg (since 1946 the city of Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia) to a father from Nuremberg. Her surname is sometimes erroneously given as Porter. Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harness maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). Kant believed that his paternal grandfather Hans Kant was of Scottish origin. While scholars of Kant's life long accepted the claim, there is no evidence that Kant's paternal line was Scottish and it is more likely that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantwaggen (today part of Priekulė) and were of Curonian origin. Kant was the fourth of nine children (four of whom reached adulthood). Kant was born on 22 April 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in Königsberg, East Prussia. Baptized Emanuel, he later changed the spelling of his name to Immanuel after learning Hebrew. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. Kant maintained Christian ideals for some time, but struggled to reconcile the faith with his belief in science. In his "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals", he reveals a belief in immortality as the necessary condition of humanity's approach to the highest morality possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic. Kant apparently lived a very strict and disciplined life; it was said that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but seemed to have a rewarding social life — he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works. He had a circle of friends with whom he frequently met, among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Königsberg. Between 1750 and 1754 Kant worked as a tutor ("Hauslehrer") in Judtschen (now Veselovka, Russia, approximately 20 km) and in Groß-Arnsdorf (now Jarnołtowo near Morąg (German: Mohrungen), Poland, approximately 145 km). Many myths grew up about Kant's personal mannerisms; these are listed, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime". Young scholar. Kant showed a great aptitude for study at an early age. He first attended the Collegium Fridericianum from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he spent his whole career. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen (Associate Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until his death in 1751), a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as "the pillow for the lazy mind". He also dissuaded Kant from idealism, the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded in a negative light. The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant later included in the "Critique of Pure Reason" was developed partially in opposition to traditional idealism. His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748—he would return there in August 1754. He became a private tutor in the towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his first philosophical work, "Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces" (written in 1745–47). Early work. Kant is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. In 1754, while contemplating on a prize question by the Berlin Academy about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin and he also put forth the argument that gravity would eventually cause the Moon's tidal locking to coincide with the Earth's rotation. The next year, he expanded this reasoning to the formation and evolution of the Solar System in his "Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens". In 1755, Kant received a license to lecture in the University of Königsberg and began lecturing on a variety of topics including mathematics, physics, logic and metaphysics. In his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, Kant laid out an original insight into the coriolis force. In 1757, Kant began lecturing on geography being one of the first people to explicitly teach geography as its own subject. Geography was one of Kant's most popular lecturing topics and in 1802 a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of Kant's lecturing notes, "Physical Geography", was released. After Kant became a professor in 1770, he expanded the topics of his lectures to include lectures on natural law, ethics and anthropology along with other topics. In the "Universal Natural History", Kant laid out the Nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also correctly deduced (though through usually false premises and fallacious reasoning, according to Bertrand Russell) that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the Solar System to galactic and intergalactic realms. According to Thomas Huxley (1867), Kant also made contributions to geology in his "Universal Natural History". From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. "The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures", a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: "Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy" and "The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God". By 1764, Kant had become a notable popular author, and wrote "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime"; he was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his "Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality" (often referred to as "The Prize Essay"). In 1766 Kant wrote "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer" which dealt with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. The exact influence of Swedenborg on Kant, as well as the extent of Kant's belief in mysticism according to "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer", remain controversial. On 31 March 1770, aged 45, Kant was finally appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics ("Professor Ordinarius der Logic und Metaphysic") at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation ("Inaugural-Dissertation") "De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis" ("On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World)". This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would mean to commit the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish. The issue that vexed Kant was central to what 20th-century scholars called "the philosophy of mind". The flowering of the natural sciences had led to an understanding of how data reaches the brain. Sunlight falling on an object is reflected from its surface in a way that maps the surface features (color, texture, etc.). The reflected light reaches the human eye, passes through the cornea, is focused by the lens onto the retina where it forms an image similar to that formed by light passing through a pinhole into a camera obscura. The retinal cells send impulses through the optic nerve and then they form a mapping in the brain of the visual features of the object. The interior mapping is not the exterior object, and our belief that there is a meaningful relationship between the object and the mapping in the brain depends on a chain of reasoning that is not fully grounded. But the uncertainty aroused by these considerations, by optical illusions, misperceptions, delusions, etc., are not the end of the problems. Kant saw that the mind could not function as an empty container that simply receives data from outside. Something must be giving order to the incoming data. Images of external objects must be kept in the same sequence in which they were received. This ordering occurs through the mind's intuition of time. The same considerations apply to the mind's function of constituting space for ordering mappings of visual and tactile signals arriving via the already described chains of physical causation. It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work. "Critique of Pure Reason". At age 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, and much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He needed to explain how we combine what is known as sensory knowledge with the other type of knowledgei.e. reasoned knowledgethese two being related but having very different processes. Kant also credited David Hume with awakening him from a "dogmatic slumber" in which he had unquestioningly accepted the tenets of both religion and natural philosophy. Hume in his 1739 "Treatise on Human Nature" had argued that we only know the mind through a subjectiveessentially illusoryseries of perceptions. Ideas such as causality, morality, and objects are not evident in experience, so their reality may be questioned. Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself, and resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation. When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the "Critique of Pure Reason". Kant countered Hume's empiricism by claiming that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience. He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited "a priori" ('beforehand'), and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality. He acquiesced to Hume somewhat by defining causality as a "regular, constant sequence of events in time, and nothing more." Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this "Critique" disappointed Kant's readers upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. It received few reviews, and these granted it no significance. Kant's former student, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism instead of considering the process of reasoning within the context of language and one's entire personality. Similar to Christian Garve and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, he rejected Kant's position that space and time possessed a form that could be analyzed. Additionally, Garve and Feder also faulted Kant's Critique for not explaining differences in perception of sensations. Its density made it, as Herder said in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a "tough nut to crack", obscured by "all this heavy gossamer". Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works, such as his "Prize Essay" and shorter works that preceded the first Critique. These well-received and readable tracts include one on the earthquake in Lisbon that was so popular that it was sold by the page. Prior to the change in course documented in the first Critique, his books had sold well. Kant was disappointed with the first Critique's reception. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the "Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics" in 1783 as a summary of its main views. Shortly thereafter, Kant's friend Johann Friedrich Schultz (1739–1805) (professor of mathematics) published "Erläuterungen über des Herrn Professor Kant Critik der reinen Vernunft" (Königsberg, 1784), which was a brief but very accurate commentary on Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason". Kant's reputation gradually rose through the latter portion of the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals" (his first work on moral philosophy); and, from 1786, "Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science." But Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Leonhard Reinhold published a series of public letters on Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the Pantheism Dispute. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount to atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, leading to a bitter public dispute among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into a debate about the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason. Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era. Later work. Kant published a second edition of the "Critique of Pure Reason" in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's "Critique of Practical Reason" (known as the second "Critique") and 1797's "Metaphysics of Morals". The 1790 "Critique of Judgment" (the third "Critique") applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology. In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish the Second of the four Pieces of "Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason", in the journal "Berlinische Monatsschrift", met with opposition from the King's censorship commission, which had been established that same year in the context of the French Revolution. Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid the need for theological censorship. This insubordination earned him a now famous reprimand from the King. When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion. Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself, in the preface of "The Conflict of the Faculties". He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in 18th-century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing Kantian philosophy. Despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples and followers (including Reinhold, Beck and Fichte) transformed the Kantian position into increasingly radical forms of idealism. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of German Idealism. Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799. It was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions. In 1800, a student of Kant named Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (1762–1842) published a manual of logic for teachers called "Logik", which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared the "Logik" using a copy of a textbook in logic by Georg Friedrich Meier entitled "Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre", in which Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The "Logik" has been considered of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great 19th-century logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill Abbott's English translation of the introduction to "Logik", that "Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic." Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz, wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the "Logik", "Its importance lies not only in its significance for the "Critique of Pure Reason", the second part of which is a restatement of fundamental tenets of the "Logic", but in its position within the whole of Kant's work." Death and burial. Kant's health, long poor, worsened and he died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, uttering ""Es ist gut" (It is good)" before expiring. His unfinished final work was published as "Opus Postumum". Kant always cut a curious figure in his lifetime for his modest, rigorously scheduled habits, which have been referred to as clocklike. However, Heinrich Heine noted the magnitude of "his destructive, world-crushing thoughts" and considered him a sort of philosophical "executioner", comparing him to Robespierre with the observation that both men "represented in the highest the type of provincial bourgeois. Nature had destined them to weigh coffee and sugar, but Fate determined that they should weigh other things and placed on the scales of the one a king, on the scales of the other a god." When his body was transferred to a new burial spot, his skull was measured during the exhumation and found to be larger than the average German male's with a "high and broad" forehead. His forehead has been an object of interest ever since it became well-known through his portraits: "In Döbler's portrait and in Kiefer's faithful if expressionistic reproduction of it — as well as in many of the other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits of Kant — the forehead is remarkably large and decidedly retreating. Was Kant's forehead shaped this way in these images because he was a philosopher, or, to follow the implications of Lavater's system, was he a philosopher because of the intellectual acuity manifested by his forehead? Kant and Johann Kaspar Lavater were correspondents on theological matters, and Lavater refers to Kant in his work "Physiognomic Fragments, for the Education of Human Knowledge and Love of People" (Leipzig & Winterthur, 1775–1778). Kant's mausoleum adjoins the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad, Russia. The mausoleum was constructed by the architect Friedrich Lahrs and was finished in 1924 in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. Originally, Kant was buried inside the cathedral, but in 1880 his remains were moved to a neo-Gothic chapel adjoining the northeast corner of the cathedral. Over the years, the chapel became dilapidated and was demolished to make way for the mausoleum, which was built on the same location. The tomb and its mausoleum are among the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they conquered and annexed the city. Today, many newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum. Artifacts previously owned by Kant, known as "Kantiana", were included in the Königsberg City Museum. However, the museum was destroyed during World War II. A replica of the statue of Kant that stood in German times in front of the main University of Königsberg building was donated by a German entity in the early 1990s and placed in the same grounds. After the expulsion of Königsberg's German population at the end of World War II, the University of Königsberg where Kant taught was replaced by the Russian-language Kaliningrad State University, which appropriated the campus and surviving buildings. In 2005, the university was renamed Immanuel Kant State University of Russia. The name change was announced at a ceremony attended by President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, and the university formed a Kant Society, dedicated to the study of Kantianism. In late November 2018, his tomb and statue were vandalized with paint by unknown assailants, who also scattered leaflets glorifying Rus' and denouncing Kant as a "traitor". The incident is apparently connected with a recent vote to rename Khrabrovo Airport, where Kant was in the lead for a while, prompting Russian nationalist resentment. Philosophy. In Kant's essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?", he defined the Enlightenment as an age shaped by the Latin motto "Sapere aude" ("Dare to be wise"). Kant maintained that one ought to think autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. His work reconciled many of the differences between the rationalist and empiricist traditions of the 18th century. He had a decisive impact on the Romantic and German Idealist philosophies of the 19th century. His work has also been a starting point for many 20th century philosophers. Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of argumentation in the absence of irrefutable evidence, no one could really know whether there is a God and an afterlife or not. For the sake of morality and as a ground for reason, Kant asserted, people are justified in believing in God, even though they could never know God's presence empirically. The sense of an enlightened approach and the critical method required that "If one cannot prove that a thing "is," he may try to prove that it is "not." If he fails to do either (as often occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his "interest" to "accept" one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must "act" on the supposition of its being real." The presupposition of God, soul, and freedom was then a practical concern, for Kant drew a parallel between the Copernican revolution and the epistemology of his new transcendental philosophy, involving two interconnected foundations of his "critical philosophy": These teachings placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science was not just the accidental accumulation of sense perceptions. Conceptual unification and integration is carried out by the mind through concepts or the "categories of the understanding" operating on the perceptual manifold within space and time. The latter are not concepts, but are forms of sensibility that are "a priori" necessary conditions for any possible experience. Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that operates within it depend on the mind's processes, the product of the rule-based activity that Kant called, "synthesis." There is much discussion among Kant scholars about the correct interpretation of this train of thought. The 'two-world' interpretation regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, that we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we cannot access the "thing-in-itself". However, Kant also speaks of the thing in itself or "transcendental object" as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this line of thought, some interpreters have argued that the thing in itself does not represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alonethis is known as the two-aspect view. The notion of the "thing in itself" was much discussed by philosophers after Kant. It was argued that because the "thing in itself" was unknowable, its existence must not be assumed. Rather than arbitrarily switching to an account that was ungrounded in anything supposed to be the "real," as did the German Idealists, another group arose to ask how our (presumably reliable) accounts of a coherent and rule-abiding universe were actually grounded. This new kind of philosophy became known as Phenomenology, and its founder was Edmund Husserl. With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanityunderstood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as othersas an end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends the individual might hold. This necessitates practical self-reflection in which we universalize our reasons. These ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and analysis. The specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy. Nevertheless, his thesesthat the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to its knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, that philosophy involves self-critical activity, that morality is rooted in human freedom, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principleshave all had a lasting effect on subsequent philosophy. Theory of perception. Kant defines his theory of perception in his influential 1781 work the "Critique of Pure Reason", which has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy. Kant maintains that understanding of the external world had its foundations not merely in experience, but in both experience and "a priori" concepts, thus offering a "non-empiricist critique of rationalist philosophy", which is what has been referred to as his Copernican revolution. Firstly, Kant distinguishes between analytic and synthetic propositions: An analytic proposition is true by nature of the meaning of the words in the sentence — we require no further knowledge than a grasp of the language to understand this proposition. On the other hand, a synthetic statement is one that tells us something about the world. The truth or falsehood of synthetic statements derives from something outside their linguistic content. In this instance, weight is not a necessary predicate of the body; until we are told the heaviness of the body we do not know that it has weight. In this case, experience of the body is required before its heaviness becomes clear. Before Kant's first Critique, empiricists (cf. Hume) and rationalists (cf. Leibniz) assumed that all synthetic statements required experience to be known. Kant contests this assumption by claiming that elementary mathematics, like arithmetic, is synthetic "a priori", in that its statements provide new knowledge not derived from experience. This becomes part of his over-all argument for transcendental idealism. That is, he argues that the possibility of experience depends on certain necessary conditions — which he calls "a priori" forms — and that these conditions structure and hold true of the world of experience. His main claims in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" are that mathematic judgments are synthetic "a priori" and that space and time are not derived from experience but rather are its preconditions. Once we have grasped the functions of basic arithmetic, we do not need empirical experience to know that 100 + 100 = 200, and so it appears that arithmetic is analytic. However, that it is analytic can be disproved by considering the calculation 5 + 7 = 12: there is nothing in the numbers 5 and 7 by which the number 12 can be inferred. Thus "5 + 7" and "the cube root of 1,728" or "12" are not analytic because their reference is the same but their sense is not — the statement "5 + 7 = 12" tells us something new about the world. It is self-evident, and undeniably "a priori", but at the same time it is synthetic. Thus Kant argued that a proposition can be synthetic and "a priori". Kant asserts that experience is based on the perception of external objects and "a priori" knowledge. The external world, he writes, provides those things that we sense. But our mind processes this information and gives it order, allowing us to comprehend it. Our mind supplies the conditions of space and time to experience objects. According to the "transcendental unity of apperception", the concepts of the mind (Understanding) and perceptions or intuitions that garner information from phenomena (Sensibility) are synthesized by comprehension. Without concepts, perceptions are nondescript; without perceptions, concepts are meaningless. Thus the famous statement: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions [perceptions] without concepts are blind." Kant also claims that an external environment is necessary for the establishment of the self. Although Kant would want to argue that there is no empirical way of observing the self, we can see the logical necessity of the self when we observe that we can have different perceptions of the external environment over time. By uniting these general representations into one global representation, we can see how a transcendental self emerges. "I am therefore conscious of the identical self in regard to the manifold of the representations that are given to me in an intuition because I call them all together my representations, which constitute one." Categories of the Faculty of Understanding. Kant deemed it obvious that we have some objective knowledge of the world, such as, say, Newtonian physics. But this knowledge relies on synthetic, "a priori" laws of nature, like causality and substance. How is this possible? Kant's solution was that the subject must supply laws that make experience of objects possible, and that these laws are synthetic, "a priori" laws of nature that apply to all objects before we experience them. To deduce all these laws, Kant examined experience in general, dissecting in it what is supplied by the mind from what is supplied by the given intuitions. This is commonly called a transcendental deduction. To begin with, Kant's distinction between the "a posteriori" being contingent and particular knowledge, and the "a priori" being universal and necessary knowledge, must be kept in mind. If we merely connect two intuitions together in a perceiving subject, the knowledge is always subjective because it is derived "a posteriori," when what is desired is for the knowledge to be objective, that is, for the two intuitions to refer to the object and hold good of it for anyone at any time, not just the perceiving subject in its current condition. What else is equivalent to objective knowledge besides the "a priori" (universal and necessary knowledge)? Before knowledge can be objective, it must be incorporated under an "a priori" category of "understanding". For example, if a subject says, "The sun shines on the stone; the stone grows warm," all he perceives are phenomena. His judgment is contingent and holds no necessity. But if he says, "The sunshine causes the stone to warm," he subsumes the perception under the category of causality, which is not found in the perception, and necessarily synthesizes the concept sunshine with the concept heat, producing a necessarily universally true judgment. To explain the categories in more detail, they are the preconditions of the construction of objects in the mind. Indeed, to even think of the sun and stone presupposes the category of subsistence, that is, substance. For the categories synthesize the random data of the sensory manifold into intelligible objects. This means that the categories are also the most abstract things one can say of any object whatsoever, and hence one can have an "a priori" cognition of the totality of all objects of experience if one can list all of them. To do so, Kant formulates another transcendental deduction. Judgments are, for Kant, the preconditions of any thought. Man thinks via judgments, so all possible judgments must be listed and the perceptions connected within them put aside, so as to make it possible to examine the moments when "the understanding" is engaged in constructing judgments. For the categories are equivalent to these moments, in that they are concepts of intuitions in general, so far as they are determined by these moments universally and necessarily. Thus by listing all the moments, one can deduce from them all of the categories. One may now ask: How many possible judgments are there? Kant believed that all the possible propositions within Aristotle's syllogistic logic are equivalent to all possible judgments, and that all the logical operators within the propositions are equivalent to the moments of the understanding within judgments. Thus he listed Aristotle's system in four groups of three: quantity (universal, particular, singular), quality (affirmative, negative, infinite), relation (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive) and modality (problematic, assertoric, apodeictic). The parallelism with Kant's categories is obvious: quantity (unity, plurality, totality), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (substance, cause, community) and modality (possibility, existence, necessity). The fundamental building blocks of experience, i.e. objective knowledge, are now in place. First there is the sensibility, which supplies the mind with intuitions, and then there is the understanding, which produces judgments of these intuitions and can subsume them under categories. These categories lift the intuitions up out of the subject's current state of consciousness and place them within consciousness in general, producing universally necessary knowledge. For the categories are innate in any rational being, so any intuition thought within a category in one mind is necessarily subsumed and understood identically in any mind. In other words, we filter what we see and hear. Transcendental schema doctrine. Kant ran into a problem with his theory that the mind plays a part in producing objective knowledge. Intuitions and categories are entirely disparate, so how can they interact? Kant's solution is the (transcendental) schema: a priori principles by which the transcendental imagination connects concepts with intuitions through time. All the principles are temporally bound, for if a concept is purely a priori, as the categories are, then they must apply for all times. Hence there are principles such as "substance is that which endures through time", and "the cause must always be prior to the effect". In the context of transcendental schema the concept of transcendental reflection is of a great importance. Moral philosophy. Kant developed his moral philosophy in three works: "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals" (1785), "Critique of Practical Reason" (1788), and "Metaphysics of Morals" (1797). In "Groundwork", Kant' tries to convert our everyday, obvious, rational knowledge of morality into philosophical knowledge. The latter two works used "practical reason", which is based only on things about which reason can tell us, and not deriving any principles from experience, to reach conclusions which can be applied to the world of experience (in the second part of "The Metaphysics of Morals"). Kant is known for his theory that there is a single moral obligation, which he called the "Categorical Imperative", and is derived from the concept of duty. Kant defines the demands of moral law as "categorical imperatives". Categorical imperatives are principles that are intrinsically valid; they are good in and of themselves; they must be obeyed in all situations and circumstances, if our behavior is to observe the moral law. The Categorical Imperative provides a test against which moral statements can be assessed. Kant also stated that the moral means and ends can be applied to the categorical imperative, that rational beings can pursue certain "ends" using the appropriate "means". Ends based on physical needs or wants create hypothetical imperatives. The categorical imperative can only be based on something that is an "end in itself", that is, an end that is not a means to some other need, desire, or purpose. Kant believed that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, and is not based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would make us happy, but to act on the moral law which has no other motive than "worthiness to be happy". Accordingly, he believed that moral obligation applies only to rational agents. Unlike a hypothetical imperative, a categorical imperative is an unconditional obligation; it has the force of an obligation regardless of our will or desires In "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals" (1785) Kant enumerated three formulations of the categorical imperative that he believed to be roughly equivalent. In the same book, Kant stated: According to Kant, one cannot make exceptions for oneself. The philosophical maxim on which one acts should always be considered to be a universal law without exception. One cannot allow oneself to do a particular action unless one thinks it appropriate that the reason for the action should become a universal law. For example, one should not steal, however dire the circumstancesbecause, by permitting oneself to steal, one makes stealing a universally acceptable act. This is the first formulation of the categorical imperative, often known as the universalizability principle. Kant believed that, if an action is not done with the motive of duty, then it is without moral value. He thought that every action should have pure intention behind it; otherwise, it is meaningless. The final result is not the most important aspect of an action; rather, how the person feels while carrying out the action is the time when value is attached to the result. In "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals", Kant also posited the "counter-utilitarian idea that there is a difference between preferences and values, and that considerations of individual rights temper calculations of aggregate utility", a concept that is an axiom in economics: Everything has either a "price" or a "dignity". Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity. (p. 53, italics in original). A phrase quoted by Kant, which is used to summarize the counter-utilitarian nature of his moral philosophy, is "Fiat justitia, pereat mundus", ("Let justice be done, though the world perish"), which he translates loosely as "Let justice reign even if all the rascals in the world should perish from it". This appears in his 1795 ' ("'"), Appendix 1. First formulation. The first formulation (Formula of Universal Law) of the moral imperative "requires that the maxims be chosen as though they should hold as universal laws of nature". This formulation in principle has as its supreme law the creed "Always act according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will" and is the "only condition under which a will can never come into conflict with itself [...]" One interpretation of the first formulation is called the "universalizability test". An agent's maxim, according to Kant, is his "subjective principle of human actions": that is, what the agent believes is his reason to act. The universalisability test has five steps: Second formulation. The second formulation (or Formula of the End in Itself) holds that "the rational being, as by its nature an end and thus as an end in itself, must serve in every maxim as the condition restricting all merely relative and arbitrary ends". The principle dictates that you "[a]ct with reference to every rational being (whether yourself or another) so that it is an end in itself in your maxim", meaning that the rational being is "the basis of all maxims of action" and "must be treated never as a mere means but as the supreme limiting condition in the use of all means, i.e., as an end at the same time". Third formulation. The third formulation (i.e. Formula of Autonomy) is a synthesis of the first two and is the basis for the "complete determination of all maxims". It states "that all maxims which stem from autonomous legislation ought to harmonize with a possible realm of ends as with a realm of nature". In principle, "So act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as the universal law (of all rational beings)", meaning that we should so act that we may think of ourselves as "a member in the universal realm of ends", legislating universal laws through our maxims (that is, a universal code of conduct), in a "possible realm of ends". No one may elevate themselves above the universal law, therefore it is one's duty to follow the maxim(s). "Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason". Commentators, starting in the 20th century, have tended to see Kant as having a strained relationship with religion, though this was not the prevalent view in the 19th century. Karl Leonhard Reinhold, whose letters first made Kant famous, wrote "I believe that I may infer without reservation that the interest of religion, and of Christianity in particular, accords completely with the result of the Critique of Reason." Johann Schultz, who wrote one of the first Kant commentaries, wrote "And does not this system itself cohere most splendidly with the Christian religion? Do not the divinity and beneficence of the latter become all the more evident?" This view continued throughout the 19th century, as noted by Friedrich Nietzsche, who said "Kant's success is merely a theologian's success." The reason for these views was Kant's moral theology, and the widespread belief that his philosophy was the great antithesis to Spinozism, which had been convulsing the European academy for much of the 18th century. Spinozism was widely seen as the cause of the Pantheism controversy, and as a form of sophisticated pantheism or even atheism. As Kant's philosophy disregarded the possibility of arguing for God through pure reason alone, for the same reasons it also disregarded the possibility of arguing against God through pure reason alone. This, coupled with his moral philosophy (his argument that the existence of morality is a rational reason why God and an afterlife do and must exist), was the reason he was seen by many, at least through the end of the 19th century, as a great defender of religion in general and Christianity in particular. Kant articulates his strongest criticisms of the organization and practices of religious organizations to those that encourage what he sees as a religion of counterfeit service to God. Among the major targets of his criticism are external ritual, superstition and a hierarchical church order. He sees these as efforts to make oneself pleasing to God in ways other than conscientious adherence to the principle of moral rightness in choosing and acting upon one's maxims. Kant's criticisms on these matters, along with his rejection of certain theoretical proofs grounded in pure reason (particularly the ontological argument) for the existence of God and his philosophical commentary on some Christian doctrines, have resulted in interpretations that see Kant as hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular (e.g., Walsh 1967). Nevertheless, other interpreters consider that Kant was trying to mark off defensible from indefensible Christian belief. Kant sees in Jesus Christ the affirmation of a "pure moral disposition of the heart" that "can make man well-pleasing to God". Regarding Kant's conception of religion, some critics have argued that he was sympathetic to deism. Other critics have argued that Kant's moral conception moves from deism to theism (as moral theism), for example Allen W. Wood and Merold Westphal. As for Kant's book "Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason", it was emphasized that Kant reduced religiosity to rationality, religion to morality and Christianity to ethics. Idea of freedom. In the "Critique of Pure Reason", Kant distinguishes between the transcendental idea of freedom, which as a psychological concept is "mainly empirical" and refers to "whether a faculty of beginning a series of successive things or states from itself is to be assumed" and the practical concept of freedom as the independence of our will from the "coercion" or "necessitation through sensuous impulses". Kant finds it a source of difficulty that the practical idea of freedom is founded on the transcendental idea of freedom, but for the sake of practical interests uses the practical meaning, taking "no account of... its transcendental meaning," which he feels was properly "disposed of" in the Third Antinomy, and as an element in the question of the freedom of the will is for philosophy "a real stumbling block" that has embarrassed speculative reason. Kant calls practical "everything that is possible through freedom", and the pure practical laws that are never given through sensuous conditions but are held analogously with the universal law of causality are moral laws. Reason can give us only the "pragmatic laws of free action through the senses", but pure practical laws given by reason "a priori" dictate "what is to be done". (The same distinction of transcendental and practical meaning can be applied to the idea of God, with the "proviso" that the practical concept of freedom can be experienced.) Categories of freedom. In the "Critique of Practical Reason", at the end of the second Main Part of the "Analytics", Kant introduces the categories of freedom, in analogy with the categories of understanding their practical counterparts. Kant's categories of freedom apparently function primarily as conditions for the possibility for actions (i) to be free, (ii) to be understood as free and (iii) to be morally evaluated. For Kant, although actions as theoretical objects are constituted by means of the theoretical categories, actions as practical objects (objects of practical use of reason, and which can be good or bad) are constituted by means of the categories of freedom. Only in this way can actions, as phenomena, be a consequence of freedom, and be understood and evaluated as such. Aesthetic philosophy. Kant discusses the subjective nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences in "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime" (1764). Kant's contribution to aesthetic theory is developed in the "Critique of Judgment" (1790) where he investigates the possibility and logical status of "judgments of taste." In the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," the first major division of the "Critique of Judgment", Kant used the term "aesthetic" in a manner that, according to Kant scholar W.H. Walsh, differs from its modern sense. In the "Critique of Pure Reason", to note essential differences between judgments of taste, moral judgments, and scientific judgments, Kant abandoned the term "aesthetic" as "designating the critique of taste," noting that judgments of taste could never be "directed" by "laws "a priori"." After A. G. Baumgarten, who wrote "Aesthetica" (1750–58), Kant was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and comprehensive philosophical system, utilizing ideas that played an integral role throughout his philosophy. In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" in the "Critique of Judgment", Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead consciousness of the pleasure that attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment, "and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical" (§ 1). A pure judgement of taste is subjective since it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste (i.e. judgements of beauty), lay claim to universal validity (§§ 20–22). It is important to note that this universal validity is not derived from a determinate concept of beauty but from "common sense" (§40). Kant also believed that a judgement of taste shares characteristics engaged in a moral judgement: both are disinterested, and we hold them to be universal. In the chapter "Analytic of the Sublime" Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality that, like beauty, is subjective, but unlike beauty refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the imagination and of reason, and shares the character of moral judgments in the use of reason. The feeling of the sublime, divided into two distinct modes (the mathematical and the dynamical sublime), describes two subjective moments that concern the relationship of the faculty of the imagination to reason. Some commentators argue that Kant's critical philosophy contains a third kind of the sublime, the moral sublime, which is the aesthetic response to the moral law or a representation, and a development of the "noble" sublime in Kant's theory of 1764. The mathematical sublime results from the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects that appear boundless and formless, or appear "absolutely great" (§§ 23–25). This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In this move the faculty of reason proves itself superior to our fallible sensible self (§§ 25–26). In the dynamical sublime there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character. Kant developed a theory of humor (§ 54) that has been interpreted as an "incongruity" theory. He illustrated his theory of humor by telling three narrative jokes in the "Critique of Judgment". He told many more jokes throughout his lectures and writings. Kant developed a distinction between an object of art as a material value subject to the conventions of society and the transcendental condition of the judgment of taste as a "refined" value in his "Idea of A Universal History" (1784). In the Fourth and Fifth Theses of that work he identified all art as the "fruits of unsociableness" due to men's "antagonism in society" and, in the Seventh Thesis, asserted that while such material property is indicative of a civilized state, only the ideal of morality and the universalization of refined value through the improvement of the mind "belongs to culture". Political philosophy. In "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch", Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics. His classical republican theory was extended in the "Science of Right", the first part of the "Metaphysics of Morals" (1797). Kant believed that universal history leads to the ultimate world of republican states at peace, but his theory was not pragmatic. The process was described in "Perpetual Peace" as natural rather than rational: Kant's political thought can be summarized as republican government and international organization. "In more characteristically Kantian terms, it is doctrine of the state based upon the law ("Rechtsstaat") and of eternal peace. Indeed, in each of these formulations, both terms express the same idea: that of legal constitution or of 'peace through law'. Kant's political philosophy, being essentially a legal doctrine, rejects by definition the opposition between moral education and the play of passions as alternate foundations for social life. The state is defined as the union of men under law. The state is constituted by laws which are necessary a priori because they flow from the very concept of law. "A regime can be judged by no other criteria nor be assigned any other functions, than those proper to the lawful order as such." He opposed "democracy," which at his time meant direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He stated, "...democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which 'all' decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, 'all,' who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom." As with most writers at the time, he distinguished three forms of government i.e. democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy with mixed government as the most ideal form of it. Anthropology. Kant lectured on anthropology, the study of human nature, for twenty-three and a half years. His "Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View" was published in 1798. (This was the subject of Michel Foucault's secondary dissertation for his State doctorate, "Introduction to Kant's Anthropology".) Kant's Lectures on Anthropology were published for the first time in 1997 in German. "Introduction to Kant's Anthropology" was translated into English and published by the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series in 2006. Kant was among the first people of his time to introduce anthropology as an intellectual area of study, long before the field gained popularity, and his texts are considered to have advanced the field. His point of view was to influence the works of later philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur. Kant was also the first to suggest using a dimensionality approach to human diversity. He analyzed the nature of the Hippocrates-Galen four temperaments and plotted them in two dimensions: (1) "activation", or energetic aspect of behaviour, and (2) "orientation on emotionality". Cholerics were described as emotional and energetic; Phlegmatics as balanced and weak; Sanguines as balanced and energetic, and Melancholics as emotional and weak. These two dimensions reappeared in all subsequent models of temperament and personality traits. Kant viewed anthropology in two broad categories: (1) the physiological approach, which he referred to as "what nature makes of the human being"; and (2) the pragmatic approach, which explored the things that a human "can and should make of himself." Racism. Kant was one of the most notable Enlightenment thinkers to defend racism, and some have claimed that he was one of the central figures in the birth of modern "scientific" racism. Where previous figures such as Carl Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had supposed only "empirical" observation for racism, Kant produced a full-blown theory of race. Using the Four Temperaments of ancient Greece, he proposed a hierarchy of four racial categories: white Europeans, yellow Asians, black Africans, and red Amerindians. Kant wrote that "[Whites] contain all the impulses of nature in affects and passions, all talents, all dispositions to culture and civilization and can as readily obey as govern. They are the only ones who always advance to perfection.” He describes South Asians as "educated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences". He goes on that Hindustanis can never reach the level of abstract concepts and that a "great hindustani man" is one who has "gone far in the art of deception and has much money". He stated that the Hindus always stay the way they are and can never advance. About black Africans, Kant wrote that "they can be educated but only as servants, that is they allow themselves to be trained". He quotes David Hume as challenging anyone to "cite a [single] example in which a Negro has shown talents" and asserts that, among the "hundreds of thousands" of blacks transported during the Atlantic slave trade, even among the freed "still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality". To Kant, "the Negro can be disciplined and cultivated, but is never genuinely civilized. He falls of his own accord into savagery." Native Americans, Kant opined, "cannot be educated". He calls them unmotivated, lacking affect, passion and love, describing them as too weak for labor, unfit for any culture, and too phlegmatic for diligence. He said the Native Americans are "far below the Negro, who undoubtedly holds the lowest of all remaining levels by which we designate the different races". Kant stated that "Americans and Blacks cannot govern themselves. They thus serve only for slaves." Kant was an opponent of miscegenation, believing that whites would be "degraded" and the "fusing of races" is undesireable, for "not every race adopts the morals and customs of the Europeans". He stated that "instead of assimilation, which was intended by the melting together of the various races, Nature has here made a law of just the opposite". He believed that in the future all races would be extinguished, except that of the whites. Charles W. Mills wrote that Kant has been "sanitized for public consumption", his racist works conveniently ignored. Robert Bernasconi stated that Kant "supplied the first scientific definition of race". Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze is credited with bringing Kant's contributions to racism to light in the 1990s among Western philosophers, who often gloss over this part of his life and works. He wrote about Kant's ideas of race: Pauline Kleingeld points out that while Kant was indeed a staunch advocate of scientific racism for much of his career, his views on race changed significantly in works published in the last decade of his life. In particular, Kant unambiguously rejected past views related to racial hierarchies and the diminished rights or moral status of non-whites in "" (1795). This work also saw him providing extended arguments against European colonialism, which he claimed was morally unjust and incompatible with the equal rights held by indigenous populations. Kleingeld argues that this shift in Kant's views later in life has often been forgotten or ignored in the literature on Kant's racist anthropology, and that the shift suggests a belated recognition of the fact that racial hierarchy was incompatible with a universalized moral framework. On the topic of European colonialism Kant's observations changed, incorporating a more balanced perspective, though still considering Europeans "civilized" to the exception of others: Influence. Kant's influence on Western thought has been profound. Although the basic tenets of Kant's transcendental idealism (i.e. that space and time are "a priori" forms of human perception rather than real properties and the claim that formal logic and transcendental logic coincide) have been claimed to be falsified by modern science and logic, and no longer set the intellectual agenda of contemporary philosophers, Kant is credited with having innovated the way philosophical inquiry has been carried at least up to the early nineteenth century. This shift consisted in several closely related innovations that, although highly contentious in themselves, have become important in postmodern philosophy and in the social sciences broadly construed: Kant's ideas have been incorporated into a variety of schools of thought. These include German Idealism, Marxism, positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, linguistic philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism. Historical influence. During his own life, much critical attention was paid to his thought. He influenced Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Novalis during the 1780s and 1790s. The school of thinking known as German Idealism developed from his writings. The German Idealists Fichte and Schelling, for example, tried to bring traditional "metaphysically" laden notions like "the Absolute", "God", and "Being" into the scope of Kant's critical thought. In so doing, the German Idealists tried to reverse Kant's view that we cannot know what we cannot observe. In England, the influential Romantic poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was greatly influenced by Kant and helped to spread awareness of him, and German idealism generally, in the UK and the USA, crediting, in his "Biographia Literaria" (1817). Kant's ideas in coming to believe that the mind is not a passive but an active agent in the apprehension of reality. Hegel was one of Kant's first major critics. The main accusations Hegel charged Kant's philosophy with were formalism (or 'abstractism') and irrationality. In Hegel's view the entire project of setting a "transcendental subject" (i.e human consciousness) apart from nature, history, and society was fundamentally flawed, although parts of that very project could be put to good use in a new direction, that Hegel called the "absolute idealism". Similar concerns moved Hegel's criticisms to Kant's concept of moral autonomy, to which Hegel opposed an ethic focused on the "ethical life" of the community. In a sense, Hegel's notion of "ethical life" is meant to subsume, rather than replace, Kantian ethics. And Hegel can be seen as trying to defend Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "desires", by means of reason. Thus, in contrast to later critics like Nietzsche or Russell, Hegel shares some of Kant's concerns. Kant's thinking on religion was used in Britain to challenge the decline in religious faith in the nineteenth century. British Catholic writers, notably G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, followed this approach. Ronald Englefield debated this movement, and Kant's use of language. Criticisms of Kant were common in the realist views of the new positivism at that time. Arthur Schopenhauer was strongly influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism. He, like G.E. Schulze, Jacobi, and Fichte before him, was critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Things in themselves, they argued, are neither the cause of what we observe nor are they completely beyond our access. Ever since the first "Critique of Pure Reason" philosophers have been critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Many have argued, if such a thing exists beyond experience then one cannot posit that it affects us causally, since that would entail stretching the category 'causality' beyond the realm of experience. For Schopenhauer things in themselves do not exist outside the non-rational will. The world, as Schopenhauer would have it, is the striving and largely unconscious will. Michael Kelly, in the preface to his 1910 book "Kant's Ethics and Schopenhauer's Criticism", stated: "Of Kant it may be said that what is good and true in his philosophy would have been buried with him, were it not for Schopenhauer..." With the success and wide influence of Hegel's writings, Kant's influence began to wane, though there was in Germany a movement that hailed a return to Kant in the 1860s, beginning with the publication of "Kant und die Epigonen" in 1865 by Otto Liebmann. His motto was "Back to Kant", and a re-examination of his ideas began (see Neo-Kantianism). During the turn of the 20th century there was an important revival of Kant's theoretical philosophy, known as the Marburg School, represented in the work of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer, and anti-Neo-Kantian Nicolai Hartmann. Kant's notion of "Critique" has been quite influential. The Early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel in his "Athenaeum Fragments", used Kant's self-reflexive conception of criticism in their Romantic theory of poetry. Also in Aesthetics, Clement Greenberg, in his classic essay "Modernist Painting", uses Kantian criticism, what Greenberg refers to as "immanent criticism", to justify the aims of Abstract painting, a movement Greenberg saw as aware of the key limitiaton—flatness—that makes up the medium of painting. French philosopher Michel Foucault was also greatly influenced by Kant's notion of "Critique" and wrote several pieces on Kant for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment as a form of "critical thought". He went so far as to classify his own philosophy as a "critical history of modernity, rooted in Kant". Kant believed that mathematical truths were forms of synthetic "a priori" knowledge, which means they are necessary and universal, yet known through intuition. Kant's often brief remarks about mathematics influenced the mathematical school known as intuitionism, a movement in philosophy of mathematics opposed to Hilbert's formalism, and Frege and Bertrand Russell's logicism. Influence on modern thinkers. With his "", Kant is considered to have foreshadowed many of the ideas that have come to form the democratic peace theory, one of the main controversies in political science. Prominent recent Kantians include the British philosophers P. F. Strawson, Onora O'Neill, and Quassim Cassam and the American philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and Christine Korsgaard. Due to the influence of Strawson and Sellars, among others, there has been a renewed interest in Kant's view of the mind. Central to many debates in philosophy of psychology and cognitive science is Kant's conception of the unity of consciousness. Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are two significant political and moral philosophers whose work is strongly influenced by Kant's moral philosophy. They argued against relativism, supporting the Kantian view that universality is essential to any viable moral philosophy. Jean-Francois Lyotard, however, emphasized the indeterminacy in the nature of thought and language and has engaged in debates with Habermas based on the effects this indeterminacy has on philosophical and political debates. Mou Zongsan's study of Kant has been cited as a highly crucial part in the development of Mou’s personal philosophy, namely New Confucianism. Widely regarded as the most influential Kant scholar in China, Mou's rigorous critique of Kant’s philosophy—having translated all three of Kant’s critiques—served as an ardent attempt to reconcile Chinese and Western philosophy whilst increasing pressure to westernize in China. Kant's influence also has extended to the social, behavioral, and physical sciences, as in the sociology of Max Weber, the psychology of Jean Piaget and Carl Gustav Jung, and the linguistics of Noam Chomsky. Kant's work on mathematics and synthetic "a priori" knowledge is also cited by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein as an early influence on his intellectual development, which he later criticised heavily and rejected. He held the view that : "If one does not want to assert that relativity theory goes against reason, one cannot retain the "a priori" concepts and norms of Kant’s system". Because of the thoroughness of the Kantian paradigm shift, his influence extends to thinkers who neither specifically refer to his work nor use his terminology. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in Kant's theory of mind from the point of view of formal logic and computer science. Bibliography. Collected works in German. Printed version Wilhelm Dilthey inaugurated the Academy edition (the "Akademie-Ausgabe" abbreviated as "AA" or "Ak") of Kant's writings ("Gesammelte Schriften", Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1902–38) in 1895, and served as its first editor. The volumes are grouped into four sections: Electronic version Further reading. In Germany, one important contemporary interpreter of Kant and the movement of German Idealism he began is Dieter Henrich, who has some work available in English. P. F. Strawson's "The Bounds of Sense" (1966) played a significant role in determining the contemporary reception of Kant in England and America. More recent interpreters of note in the English-speaking world include Lewis White Beck, Jonathan Bennett, Henry Allison, Paul Guyer, Christine Korsgaard, Stephen Palmquist, Robert B. Pippin, Roger Scruton, Rudolf Makkreel, and Béatrice Longuenesse. General introductions to his thought Biography and historical context Collections of essays Theoretical philosophy Practical philosophy Aesthetics Philosophy of religion Perpetual peace and international relations Other works Contemporary philosophy with a Kantian influence

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The Encyclopedia of Fantasy The Encyclopedia of Fantasy is a 1997 reference work concerning fantasy fiction, edited by John Clute and John Grant. Other contributors include Mike Ashley, Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynne Jones, David Langford, Sam J. Lundwall, Michael Scott Rohan, Brian Stableford and Lisa Tuttle. The book was well-received on publication. During 1998, it received the Hugo Award, World Fantasy Award, and Locus Award. The industry publication "Library Journal" described "The Encyclopedia of Fantasy" as "the first of its kind". Since November 2012, the full text of "The Encyclopedia of Fantasy" is available on-line, as a companion to the on-line "Encyclopedia of Science Fiction". The editors of the "Encyclopedia of Science Fiction" have stated that there are not any plans to update the "Encyclopedia of Fantasy", at least for the foreseeable future, although some death dates post-1997 have been added. Format and content. The "Encyclopedia" was published in a format that matches the 1993 second edition of "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction". It is slightly smaller in terms of content, containing 1,049 alphabetical pages, over 4,000 entries and approximately one million words, the bulk of which were written by Clute, Grant and Ashley. A later CD-ROM edition contains numerous revisions. The "Encyclopedia" uses a similar system of categorization to "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction", but does not include an index of theme entries. A theme index was later included in the on-line addenda: see "External links" below. One of the major differences is that there are no entries related to publishing. Neologisms. The "Encyclopedia" often invented new terms for theme entries, rather than using headings that may have previously appeared in critical literature. Examples include: Reception. Characterizing the book as "an excellent and highly readable source for fantasy", the industry publication "Library Journal" described "The Encyclopedia of Fantasy" as "the first of its kind".

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The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural is a reference work on horror fiction in the arts, edited by Jack Sullivan. The book was published in 1986 by Viking Press. Editor Sullivan’s stated purpose in compiling the volume, as noted in his foreword to the book, was to serve as a “bringing together in one volume of the genre’s many practitioners and their contributions to the arts.” In addition to literature and the art of storytelling, the book includes many entries on film, music, illustration, architecture, radio, and television. The book contains over fifty major essays and six hundred shorter entries covering authors, composers, film directors, and actors, among other categories. The book provides about 650 entries written by 65 contributors including Ramsey Campbell, Gary William Crawford, John Crowley, Thomas M. Disch, Ron Goulart, S. T. Joshi, T. E. D. Klein, Kim Newman, Darrell Schweitzer, Whitley Strieber, Timothy Sullivan, Colin Wilson, and Douglas E. Winter. Jacques Barzun provided the lengthy introduction, "The Art and Appeal of the Ghostly and Ghastly". In order to provide as broad as possible a study of fear, terror, and horror throughout the centuries, the book features numerous entries on "mainstream" artists who Sullivan notes "have dabbled in or plunged into horror", such as Charles Baudelaire, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Franz Kafka, Edith Wharton, Sergei Prokofiev, Charles Dickens, Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, Joyce Carol Oates, Franz Liszt, Arnold Schönberg, William Butler Yeats, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, among others. Hundreds of genre author entries are provided, including "William Beckford" by E. F. Bleiler, "Ambrose Bierce" and "Algernon Blackwood" by Jack Sullivan, "Ramsey Campbell" by Robert Hadji, "Robert W. Chambers" by T. E. D. Klein, "James Herbert" by Ramsey Campbell, "Shirley Jackson" by Sullivan, "Stephen King" by Don Herron, "Arthur Machen" by Klein, "Ann Radcliffe" by Devendra P. Varma, and "Peter Straub" by Patricia Skarda. Theme essays include "Arkham House" by T. E. D. Klein, "The Continental Tradition" by Helen Searing, "English Romantic Poets" by John Calhoun, "Golden Age of the Ghost Story" by Jack Sullivan, "Illustration" by Robert Weinberg, "Opera" by Arthur Paxton, "The Pits of Terror" by Ramsey Campbell, "The Pulps" by Ron Goulart, "Shakespeare's Ghosts" by John Crowley, "Urban and Pastoral Horror" by Douglas E. Winter, and "Zombies" by Hugh Lamb. Film and television related entries include "The Abominable Dr. Phibes", "Tod Browning", "Brian De Palma", ""Eraserhead", "Inferno"", "Boris Karloff", "Night of the Living Dead", "Roman Polanski", ""Suspiria", "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom", and "The Wolf Man"". The book was reprinted in 1989 by Random House. Reception. In a comment to Hugh Lamb's review, Rosemary Pardoe noted, "I have to say that I think Hugh has been remarkably kind to a book which, for me, is a fine idea totally ruined by being put together by a packaging company who seem to know nothing about the subject. There are so many errors that no fact given in the book can be trusted without double-checking elsewhere." "The encyclopedia has been criticized for lack of editorial balance, but deficiencies are offset by excellent critical essays by E. F. Bleiler, Richard Dalby and others."

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The Penguin Companion to Literature The Penguin Companion to Literature is a reference work published in four volumes by Penguin Books. Volume 1 was edited by David Daiches and deals with British and Commonwealth literature. It has been called the most useful recent work of its kind. Volume 2, published in 1969, was edited by Anthony Thorlby and deals with the literature of Continental Europe since the fifth century AD. Volume 3 deals with the literature of the United States and Latin America. Volume 4, edited by D R Dudley and D M Lang deals with Classical, Byzantine, Oriental and African literature. The Penguin Companion to World Literature was published by McGraw-Hill. The volumes were titled The Penguin Companion to English Literature, The Penguin Companion to European Literature, The Penguin Companion to American Literature, and The Penguin Companion to Classical, Oriental and African Literature. External links. "The Penguin Companion to Literature", in snippet view, from Google Books: vol 2, vol 3.

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Viswasahityavijnanakosam The Encyclopaedia of World Literature () is a 10-volume specialized encyclopaedia published by the State Institute of Encyclopaedic Publications in India. The work on the encyclopedia began in 1984 and the first volume came out 10 years later in 1994. The tenth and concluding volume was published in two parts in 2016.

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The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael D. C. Drout, was published by Routledge in 2006. A team of 127 Tolkien scholars on 720 pages cover topics of Tolkien's fiction, his academic works, his intellectual and spiritual influences, and his biography. Co-editors were Douglas A. Anderson, Verlyn Flieger (both Drout's co-editors also of "Tolkien Studies"), Marjorie Burns and Tom Shippey. Contents. Michael D. C. Drout's aim for this project, as stated in the book's introduction, was to make it appealing to a wide group of readers. The volume has over 125 contributors from a wide variety of countries. Entries discuss their concepts' connections with various of J. R. R. Tolkien's works, as well as related literary criticism and theory. Themes covered by the essays, as listed in full in the volume's "Thematic list of entries", include adaptations for cinema, stage, and television; art and illustrations; characters; critical history; influence; languages real and invented; biography; literary sources; literature; creatures, peoples, objects, and places of Middle-earth; reception; scholarship by Tolkien; stylistic elements; Tolkien's themes; theological and philosophical concepts; contemporary history and culture; and Tolkien's literary works. Reviews. Kelley Wickham-Crowley, reviewing the work, noted that the quality of the entries was very uneven, and that while some entries were written by experts and were highly interesting and informative, others were much less so; in his words, "the quality of entries can run the gamut from masterful to pedestrian". He wrote that "For characters in particular, entries that rehearse attributes and deeds suffer in comparison to more sophisticated analysis where we learn something or are graced with a perceptive insight or new direction of enquiry". Further, Wickham-Crowley suggested that a number of entries should have been merged. For example, some entries, like those on "Hobbits" and "Shire", repeat most of their corresponding content with few changes and should have likely ended up combined. Similarly, topics like "Environmentalism and Eco-Criticism" and "Environmentalist Readings of Tolkien" or "Comedy" and "Humor" may also not have warranted separate sections. Inclusion of some topics was rather surprising and arbitrary to Wickham-Crowley, for example the entries on "Thomas Aquinas" or "Law" (the latter focusing on theology instead of civil, or in-universe examples). In the end, Wickham-Crowley concluded, the level of contributors, and their contributions, varied significantly. Wickham-Crowley attributed the failings of the work to insufficient copyediting, noting that it was "badly served" by Taylor & Francis's acquisition of Routledge, which, during the ensuing restructuring of its acquisitions, discontinued the Routledge encyclopedia division while this work was in production. This effectively led to the "Tolkien Encyclopedia"s publication being unfinished, a view endorsed by its chief editor, Michael D. C. Drout. The final volume is missing not only about a hundred planned illustrations—there are none in the printed work, but several entries were not properly proofed, and many errors were not corrected. Wickham-Crowley noted that while some entries were excellent, the work sports a "multitude of errors in word omission, grammar, spelling, spacing, word division, and bibliographic format [and other] embarrassing mistakes." In the end, Wickham-Crowley concluded that the project was ambitious, but execution was marred by the work's flaws. Likewise, Jennifer Goodfellow in her review noted that the entries varied significantly, with some offering only a short summary of a topic, while others were much more in-depth. She noted that the organization of entries was not optimal, but concluded that the work was "an excellent resource for serious scholars of English literature as well as those with a general interest in Tolkien". Tracy Carr in her short review of the work noted that it was intended more for scholars than Tolkien fans, as it aimed to engage more with the real-world theories than describe the world Tolkien created. She concluded the volume was "a suitable starting place" for "budding scholars" of Tolkien.

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Abithana Chintamani Abithana Chintamani is an encyclopedia on Tamil literature written by A.Singaravelu Mudaliar (1855 - 28 January 1931). This is the first encyclopedia on Tamil literature. The first edition, which contains a recommendation dated 1899 by V. Kanakasabai Pillai, appeared in 1910 and contained 1050 pages. The second edition, containing 1634 pages, appeared posthumously in 1934, with a preface by the author's son, and is available as reprints. History. The Fourth Tamil Sangam was formed in Madurai on 14 September 1901. It was founded by Pandithurai Thevar of the royal family of Sethupathis of Ramanathapuram. Thevar was planning to publish an encyclopedia on Tamil literature if some author agreed to do the job. Meanwhile, Singaravelu Mudaliyar, a Tamil Pandit working at Pachaiyappa's College, Chennai was preparing such a work, and had completed it. However he could not find a publisher for the work. Pandithorai Thevar heard about the work and supported the publication of the work financially. In the preface Singaravelu Mudaliyar says

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Literary Encyclopedia Literary Encyclopedia (Russian: Литературная энциклопедия) is a 12-volume encyclopedia published in the USSR from 1929 until 1939. It contains more than 5000 entries with a focus on Russian and Soviet authors, as well as literary schools, trends, directions, and literary concepts. The 10th volume was delayed by Soviet censors in 1937, rumored to be a result of concerns about the article "Russian literature" The series was halted in 1939 after the publication of the 11th volume. The 12 volume was published later based on drafts. Volumes. Drafts and manuscripts of volumes 10 through 12 were preserved and have been used to construct the planned content. In 2005, ETS Publishing House released a CD-ROM which included some restored materials. Editors and contributors. Managing Editor (Volume 1-6), Editor (Volumes 7-11): Executive secretary (Volumes 1-5), Academic Secretary (Volumes 6-11): Editorial Board:

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Enciclopedia Dantesca The Enciclopedia Dantesca, published 1970–1975 by the Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, in six volumes, under the general editorship of Umberto Bosco, is considered the reference book in Italian language about the life and works of Dante, described as a "monumental" work

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Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales The Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales (Enzyklopädie des Märchens) is a German reference work on international Folkloristics, which runs to fifteen volumes and is acknowledged as the most comprehensive work in its field. It examines over two centuries of research into the folk narrative tradition. It was begun by Kurt Ranke in the 1960s and was continued by chief editor Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, both of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences (Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen). Like the technical periodical "Fabula" it is published by the Walter de Gruyter GmbH publishing house with working premises at the Georg-August University of Göttingen and as a project of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. The forerunner of this work was the "Handwörterbuch des deutschen Märchens" ("Handbook of German Fairy Tales"), of which only two volumes were published. The first article "Aarne, Antti Amatus" appeared in slip in 1975, and the first volume in 1977. By 2014, the final fourteenth volume had been published, followed by an additional volume with lists, indexes and corrigenda in 2015. In all there are approximately 3900 articles, alphabetically arranged, from over 800 authors from over 60 countries. The "Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales" provides an overview in the following areas, as relevant to folk narrative research: Creation and compilation. The project was begun by Kurt Ranke in the early 1960s with a small staff, and the first fascicle appeared in 1975. Ranke was not only the founder but first chief editor of the project; he was succeeded by Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, who completed the project. Other editors included Elfriede Moser-Rath (1963-1987), Max Lüthi (1973-1984), Rudolf Schenda (1973-1992), Lutz Rohrich (1973-2006), and Regina Bendix (2005-2006). Technical editors included Doris Boden, Ulrich Marzolph, Ulrike-Christine Sander, and Christine Shojaei Kawan. An online-database based on the Encyclopaedia, the "Encyclopaedia of the Folk Tale Online", was published in 2016.