Machiavellism, a word that goes back to the late sixteenth century, is a name for the theory and practice of amoral politics. In its ideal, simply abstract sense, it is not meant to coincide exactly with the views or practices of any historical individual, even Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) himself. When Machiavelli praises the citizens of the ancient republic of Rome as noble and pu…
Machos are not born; they are made. For the same reason, the term machismo refers to a concept that has been invented and not to a primordial cultural trait of any particular group of people. In the United States, machismo was "discovered" by social scientists and feminists much as the New World was "discovered" by Europeans five centuries earlier: U.S. scholars and fem…
Magic is the performance of acts or rites that are intended to influence a person, object, or event. It can also be performed to counter other magic. Magical acts or rites are usually performed with the assistance of mystical power. People who engage in the different activities magic encompasses can be called magicians, shamans, healers, sorcerers, or priests/priestesses. In some societies the kno…
Manichaeism arose in a highly cosmopolitan culture, in full awareness of antecedent west Asian religions such as Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and various pagan and Gnostic sects, as well as the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions of South Asia. According to Manichaean teaching, Mani was the last of a series of divinely inspired prophets that included Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Jesus Christ. Thes…
Maoism is not a term that is easy to define. While it is common sense that Maoism refers to the vision, ideology, and political viewpoint of Mao Zedong (1893–1976), it is difficult to pinpoint the specific contents and basic features of Mao's conceptual world in the context of the evolving course of the Chinese Communist revolution. Despite Mao's adoption of Marxist-Leninist t…
Cartography, the art and science of mapmaking, began before the invention of writing and continues to be fundamental to an understanding of the phenomena it represents graphically. Although typically associated with Earth, or parts of this body, its methods are applicable to the delineation of both the microcosm and the macrocosm. Thus, there is mapping of the human brain on the one hand, and the …
Prior to the nineteenth century, the image of the patriarchal family was a crucial component of both moral injunction (as in the Judeo-Christian fourth commandment to "honor thy father and mother") and political organization. Marriage was the keystone in the arch of social solidarities; it also signaled the creation of a new reproductive unit. For the individuals involved, marriage w…
Few sets of ideas are richer and more conflicted than those that have been put forward under the heading of Marxism. Marxism's founder, the German philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883), had a wide-ranging curiosity about many aspects of humankind and a stamina matching his curiosity. But as the American philosopher Sidney Hook pointed out in his article on Marxism in the 1973 edition of …
The writings of Karl Marx offer both a critique and a celebration of modern capitalism. On the one hand, Marx presented a devastating moral indictment of the capitalist exploitation of labor and the drowning of all human relationships in "the icy waters of egotistical calculation." On the other, Marx saw capitalism as a necessary and progressive phase of historical development, yield…
Throughout the twentieth century, Latin Americans wrestled with the enduring problems of foreign domination, social inequality, and poverty. Marxist popular movements, political parties, and intellectuals were often key players in these struggles, forming an important basis for trenchant social critique, mass social movement, and revolutionary organization. Even in countries where Marxist ideas, p…
Given that masks and the performance complex of masking, known as the masquerade, are found in practically all cultures at one time or another, there must be some fundamental reasons for the emergence of such a cultural practice. The development of shamanism seems to go hand in hand with masking and masquerading. As humans began to observe nature empirically, including their own behavior, parts of…
Materialism is the generic name of a variety of doctrines that deny the existence of non-material substances. Materialism may be either a metaphysical or a methodological concept. In its most coherent and radical form, it is a type of monism, the metaphysical position stating that there is only one principle—matter and its properties—in terms of which all reality is to be explained. …
This article comprises a compact survey of the development of mathematics from ancient times until the early twentieth century. The treatment is broadly chronological, and most of it is concerned with Europe. …
Matriarchy is usually defined as a political system in which women are the dominant political actors, as opposed to patriarchy, in which men are the exclusive or primary heads of families, social groups, or political states. But matriarchy has always been a controversial term, since whenever it is mentioned, there are debates about whether matriarchies are imagined utopias or real societies, wheth…
The mechanical philosophy was a philosophy of nature, popular in the seventeenth century, that sought to explain all natural phenomena in terms of matter and motion without recourse to any kind of action at a distance (cause and effect without any physical contact). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many natural philosophers rejected Aristotelianism, which had provided the form of an…
The term media history is almost a tautology when the historic is distinguished from the prehistoric by the presence of recording media. History is always already mediated. A distinct domain of historiography whose object is human communication technologies will to this extent always be tempted to assimilate all human history to itself. Among late-twentieth-and early-twenty-first-century media his…
In most of early medieval Europe, only a few classical medical treatises survived, primarily in the libraries of monastic institutions, and most medical practitioners had little education. The outcome was a split between theory and practice. In China there was no such split. Almost all of the literature, including works on doctrinal foundations, was written by practitioners. The Inner Canon define…
The ancient Greeks had many ways of healing the sick. Plant gatherers and drug sellers, especially of herbal medicines, were the key people in the establishment of the vast Greek pharmacopoeia. Women healers had their own special categorization. And there were two groups making up a motley crew specializing in diagnosis and treatment calling on the gods and their evil relatives. One constant in Gr…
The systematic doctrines of ayurvedic medicine included a humoral theory somewhat akin to that of Hippocrates and Galen. Indian medicine admitted three humoral substances, namely, wind, bile, and phlegm. However, a certain indecision is visible within the tradition as to the status of blood, which shared with the humors the critical feature of being able to cause illness through becoming corrupt, …
Islamic medicine refers to the range of health-promoting beliefs common to and actions taken in Muslim societies, whether by Muslims or others. As with other traditional medical systems, Muslim medicine was composed of several subsystems, each involving a unique etiology and practice and each enjoying a different legitimacy. These subsystems were not independent of each other and none enjoyed comp…
Many religious traditions have practices that could possibly be labeled meditation. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, these practices are usually associated with prayer, contemplation, or recitation of sacred texts. In the religious traditions of the Native Americans, Australian aboriginals, Siberian peoples, and many others, what could be identified as meditation techniques are incorporated wi…
Meme is indeed an interesting and apt subject to include in a dictionary of the history of ideas, for it is nothing less than a meta-concept for describing the transmission of knowledge among persons and cultures. Memetics—the study of memes—is, briefly stated, evolutionary theory applied to ideas. The word itself was coined by the British biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book T…
The history of the idea of memory is associated with the cultural uses of two kinds of memory, episodic and semantic. Episodic memory concerns the conscious recall of particular events. Interest in its nature dates from antiquity, and mnemonic techniques for strengthening memory's resources, known as the "art of memory," were developed as rhetorical skills. Semantic memory dea…
Most human cultures, perhaps all, have accounts of gender relations, explaining and illustrating what it is to be a woman or a man, and how women and men are interrelated. The forms taken by these accounts vary greatly—ancestor myths, moral exhortation, exemplary narratives, drama, social science, philosophical speculation, and visual imagery. In many, there is a specific account of the dom…
The concept of mestizaje expresses the tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities of its birth in the New World. More important, it is a concept that continues to have spiritual and aesthetic dimensions. Mestizaje refers to racial and/or cultural mixing of Amerindians with Europeans, but the literal connotation of the word does not illuminate its theoretical applications and its more recent transfo…
The dominant Aristotelian idea of metaphor is not, however, either a balanced opposition or mixture of metaphor's two primary aspects. Of the two, Aristotle chooses to emphasize the formal view—perhaps because it confirms the primacy of reason and cooperates with his systematic and pedagogical motives. The philosophical and cultural consequences of Aristotle's formal emphasis …
In the early twenty-first century metaphysics is a term used fairly loosely to describe philosophical investigation of the fundamental constituents of reality. But, in the Middle Ages, there was great debate about what was the subject of metaphysics, and that controversy had ancient roots. …
Metaphysics, in its most basic sense, is an account of what exists. It may include accounts of what sorts of things exist; of what really exists as opposed to what merely appears to exist; of what exists necessarily rather than by accident; of what it is that underlies everything else; or of the most general laws governing existing things. This article will describe some of the most important meta…
Microcosm and macrocosm are two aspects of a theory developed by ancient Greek philosophers to describe human beings and their place in the universe. These early thinkers viewed the individual human being as a little world (mikros kosmos) whose composition and structure correspond to that of the universe, or great world (makros kosmos, or megas kosmos). Kosmos at this time meant "order�…
Historically, migration has been a way of life in Africa. Over the generations African people have migrated in response to demographic, economic, political, and other factors, including environmental disasters and conflicts. The histories of many African communities record their migratory movements from one area to another or the incursions of more powerful migrant groups who conquered and reorgan…
Migration is a central aspect of human existence. This is evident from the debate about the origins of the human species, which spread, according to the evidence, from Africa across all continents. On the level of ideas and prejudices, this has resulted in racialized debates about white distinctiveness and Afrocentrism. In prehistoric times, some thirty to forty thousand years ago, human beings m…
Amerindians, Pilgrim fathers, immigrants, slaves, Asian–Americans, Hispanics—all denote historical population groups in the United States and in the Americas, but each group is placed in a different frame of reference. All of them arrived as migrants with norms, values, and belief systems of their ancestors and premigration society as a whole. Before immigrating they also had experie…
Millenarianism refers to religious beliefs about a thousand-year period at the end of the world. This period, the millennium (from two Latin words, mille, thousand, and annum, year), is described in the Bible's Book of Revelation (20:1–6). Millenarians, while believing that Christ's Second Coming will usher in this earthly kingdom for the faithful, differ on the timing of the …
By contrast, the Shiite messianic vision was based upon the return of the Twelfth Imam (descended from the Prophet Muhammad), who went into occultation in 874. The Twelfth Imam will arise either in the east, as in the Sunni version, or in Mecca in some other versions and will similarly purify the Muslim world and take vengeance upon those who have oppressed the Shiites. However, in both the Sunni …
The history of humankind is replete with the desire for better times, a more just order, and leaders who can bring their people into a better world, often having to defeat or destroy a world that is viewed as unjust and inequitable. These desires have frequently been fueled by faith or have taken specifically religious forms; and in addition have often been organized around or contained elements o…
The science of mind is the empirical and theoretical search for the foundations of our mental lives. Unlike other subjects of scientific investigation, such as stars or rocks, human mental lives defy easy definition. Yet few would dispute that such a definition would have to encompass consciousness, emotions, reasoning, language, memory, and perception. As far back as ancient Greece, one can find …
The term minority group and its opposite, majority group, have been widely used both among social scientists and the general public in recent decades. In social scientific (and often popular) use of these terms, they do not usually refer per se to a numerical minority or majority. Rather, the social-scientific meaning of a minority group is a group that is assigned an inferior status in society, o…
Miracles, miracle workers, and their stories are found in the life and literature of all ancient societies and are not limited to religious texts. In ancient Greece figures like Epimenides, Pythagoras, and Apollonius of Tyana were all renowned for working miracles. To this day, healing remains the form that most claimed miracles take, and many of these miracles are associated with visitations to t…
A movement of indeterminate origin and span, modernism nevertheless retains the distinctiveness of a major episode in the history of culture. Its most renowned manifestations performed a radical break with the dominant arts of the nineteenth century. They were direct provocations to prevailing norms: norms of beauty, of the representational integrity of the human body, of the continuity of forms, …
Modernism (sometimes referred to as modern art or, even less precisely, as modernity in the arts) is a term for various experimental languages in the arts with multiple meanings and conflicting aims, and was ascendant from the 1880s to the 1960s (although certain artistic techniques and tactics of early modernist art, such as collage and photomontage, have enjoyed a potent afterlife since the 1960…
Modernity is best understood as a condition, rather than as the designation for some particular period of time. Aspects of the modern condition can arise at any time and place, but they are most generally associated with historical trends arising out of Cartesian philosophy, industrial capitalism, revolutionary politics, and the cultural changes of the turn of the nineteenth century. The main less…
The debates and controversies over modernity, from its origins in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century western Europe to the various sites of its deployment following the formation of colonial empires, have given rise to an abundance of literature. Non-Western societies, by and large, in the formation of their cultural, political, economic, and social identities and their reactions to it, have approp…
Modernity (kindaisei in Japanese, and xiandaixing in Chinese) is a relatively recent term in the intellectual vocabulary of East Asia, becoming current only after World War II. Differing conceptions of "the modern" start much earlier, when terms long available in both languages acquired new connotations, as the region felt the impact of the West. The classical Chinese jin (close, nea…
The term modernization conjures images of social change in the direction of general improvement over the past. In contemporary social sciences, the notion has been the basis of a theoretical orientation—variously referred to as modernization theory, approach, paradigm, or framework—to the study of the development of Third World or underdeveloped societies. The conception of developme…
For roughly one decade until the second half of the 1960s, modernization theory was in vogue in the social sciences, especially in the United States. The word modernization appeared widely in titles, the concept was commonly invoked in efforts to explain long-term change, and it figured in critiques of Marxist theory and discussions of Cold War differences over how newly independent countries shou…
Few reliable details are known of the life of Mozi. Most scholars agree that he was a person of relatively humble origin from one of the eastern Chinese states (either Song, Qi, or Lu). Like Confucius, he traveled through neighboring states in search of better appointments, but apparently to no avail. Even more than Confucius, he succeeded as an educator and organizer, turning his followers into a…
Monarchy derives from a Greek term that refers literally to rule by one person (as distinct from oligarchy, rule by the few, or democracy, rule by the people). Among political systems of a post-tribal nature, monarchy is certainly the most common form of human governance globally throughout human history. While the modern Western world tends to venerate nonmonarchic constitutions of the pastȁ…
It was only in 661 at the accession of Mu'awiya that the Umayyad caliphate (661–750) became the first Islamic dynastic and caliphal monarchy. Knowledge of the Umayyad family is difficult to extract from the generally negative portrayal of them in later historical sources, but one criticism of them did highlight the fact that they were considered by some to be temporal kings (Ar., mul…
The "idea of monasticism" invites a misconception, because monasticism is not an idea but a practice. It is a discipline of life, encapsulated in a vow to obey a rule. Monasticism is not a theory about the good life, and still less an escape from practicality, but rather a commitment to live according to a rule handed down from a founder. In its classical Western form deriving from S…
Monism is the doctrine that there is only one principle in terms of which all reality is to be explained. Doctrines differ as to the nature and activity of this principle and its relations to the appearance and experience of multiplicity. Monists explain multiplicity or plurality in the world either as derivative from the one principle or as an illusion. Monism is found in philosophical, religious…
Sentimentalism, of which moral sense theory was a part, initially had a short run. Until the end of the twentieth century, all the major versions of the theory were produced within a sixty-year period in eighteenth-century Britain. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), initiated the sentimentalist line of thought with his theory that morality is grounded in the refle…
Motherhood the world over is commonly understood in terms of a generic terminology. Regardless of country, clime, or class, age-old mythologies in all cultures eulogize motherhood and impart to it an importance that goes well beyond the physical act of birthing. At the level of twenty-first-century popular culture, however, motherhood and maternity have been appropriated by modern-day consumerism,…
George Steiner has described culture as a matrix of recurrent and interrelated elements, a motor fueled by revolving constants. Broadly speaking, cultural literacy relies on our ability to recognize these constants—in literature, music, painting, or any other form of cultural production—and to work out relationships between them, to translate and recycle the meaning we inherit from t…
A motif is a small but recognizable musical unit. The motif might consist merely of a series of pitches or a distinctive rhythm, or it might be harmonically conceived; quite often, pitch and rhythm are combined in a motif to create a discrete melodic fragment. No matter what its constituent elements, the motif needs to be repeated before it can be recognized as a unit. The repetition may be nearly…
Multiculturalism means different things to different people. For some it is directly linked to the politics of recognition and of difference (Taylor). In this regard, it concerns an appreciation of the necessity to deal with diversity in ways that affirm the value of different cultures and to respect the various claims made by minority groups. For others, multiculturalism concerns an explicit poli…
It is often assumed that museums have been a permanent feature of society, simply because they contain some of the oldest things in the world. In fact, in their current form, museums are surprisingly recent in origin, almost entirely Western in conception, internally confused about their identity, and unsure of their future role. The British Museum, effectively the mother of all modern museums, wa…
The phrase anthropology of music is most closely associated with Alan P. Merriam's 1964 landmark book bearing this title. In this prescriptive text, influential through the 1980s, Merriam defines ethnomusicology as the study of music in culture in relation to the mutual interactions of sound, behavior, and concepts. In consonance with many ethnomusicologists to this day, Mieczyslaw Kolinski…
Musical performance is an organized presentation of musical sounds (and, arguably, controlled silences), usually for the entertainment, edification, or enrichment of listeners. The parameters of a performance are often determined by culturally understood boundaries—symphony audiences disregard the warming up and tuning of orchestral musicians, whereas listeners to Indian classical music und…
Musicology is the scholarly study of music, where music can be considered either as a fixed object of investigation or as a process whose participants are the composer, the performer, and the listener. As a field of knowledge, it encompasses every aspect of the aesthetic, physical, psychological, and cultural dimensions of the musical art. In practice, consequently, the discipline includes not jus…
The term mysticism represents a modern approach to a cultural path rooted in antiquity, and given anthropological considerations it is timeless. Mysticism usually concerns any work, study, or praxis that aims at transcendence (the experiencing "self" moving beyond normal limits) or union with the divine. It was (is) often private or even secret, perhaps involving special teachers. To…
Since the Baroque age, the concept of mysticism (first in French, la mystique) has been used to describe religious phenomena that can hardly be restricted to a certain geographical space or a certain epoch. These phenomena are primarily symbolic expressions (in act, speech, literature, art, music, etc.), of persons trying to communicate knowledge that has been gained through mystical experiences. …
The mystical dimension of the Islamic religious tradition has roots in the divinely revealed text of the Koran. One passage often pointed to in this regard is the "Light Verse" (24:35), in which God is described as the Light of a blessed lamp, lit by a burning oil "neither of the East nor the West." One episode from the Koran, involving the prophet Moses, provided key e…
There are a number of mystical movements within Islam, but by far the dominant tradition is that of Sufism, one of the most dynamic and interesting dimensions of Islamic religious and cultural expression. Sufism is an umbrella term for a variety of philosophical, social, and literary phenomena occurring within the Islamic world. In its narrowest sense, the term refers to a number of schools of Isl…
Kabbalah is a Hebrew term that has many meanings. Its basic meaning is derived from the root QBL, which means to receive, and thus the term means "reception." In rabbinic literature it stands mainly for a tradition that is received orally. However, beginning in the tenth century, testimonies appeared for a more specific form of Kabbalah: an esoteric tradition dealing basically with …
The term mysticism typically denotes a complex of beliefs and practices related to the personal experience of the divine. Much, although not all, mystical thought and practice derives from or draws upon formal religious doctrines, emphasizing reflective, introspective, and meditative practices as the keys to cultivating perception and awareness that will ultimately lead to knowledge of and communi…
The study of myth across the disciplines is united by the questions asked. The main questions are those of origin, function, and subject matter. Origin in this context means why and how myth arises; function, why and how myth persists. The answer to the why of origin and function is usually a need, which myth arises to fulfill and persists by continuing to fulfill. What that need is varies from th…
Although the study of narrative goes back as far as Aristotle's Poetics, narrative theory emerged as a distinct field of inquiry only in the second half of the twentieth century. At that point, work on the theory of the novel intersected with structuralism's project of writing the grammar of stories and storytelling. This intersection in turn opened out to other streams of traffic in…
Natio derives from the Latin verb to be born (nasci) and refers to societies constituted by (assumed) common birth or descent, a meaning akin to the English word race. …
The professionalization of history in nineteenth-and twentieth-century European universities was so closely related to the construction of the nation-state that national histories came to be seen as the only objective form of historical writing—indeed, criticism of national histories was seen not only as unpatriotic, but as a threat to the integrity of the historical profession and its clai…
Nationalism is one of the most significant political ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the heart of worldwide and local conflicts penetrating every region of the globe. It can be defined simply as a political ideology that aims to bring about or to increase the political representation or power of "the nation" and has appeared in many forms in a wide variety of circ…
The topic of African nationalism has been repeatedly contested and redefined over the past century. At the end of the nineteenth century, the European powers divided the continent and ruled virtually all of Africa, and African nations lost their sovereignty. During the 1950s and 1960s, when Africans began to seriously resist colonial rule, Africa underwent a major transformation and each colony ev…
Literary critics and historians use cultural nationalism to refer to collective practices that form modern political communities within, unsanctioned by, or even undercutting state authority. Such collective practices include the "high" culture disseminated via public media, established in publicly funded institutions such as universities and museums; as well as the "low…
Nationalism is generally regarded as a recent development in the Middle East, a contingent phenomenon produced by the unique conditions of the modern era. Prior to the nineteenth century, concepts of collective identity and allegiance appear to have been defined primarily on the basis of lineage, locale, or religion—communities of sentiment and solidarity either smaller or larger than the n…
Nationalism in music has traditionally been described as a late-nineteenth-century phenomenon associated with countries or regions aspiring to nationhood whose composers strove to wed a national (most often folk-based) musical idiom to existing "main-stream" genres. Some of these accounts begin with Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849), but he is more often understood as �…
Before Europeans from a variety of countries began arriving on the shores of the two continents of the western hemisphere in the late fifteenth century, there were no "Indians." At that point in time, millions of human beings, members of hundreds of distinctive societies speaking mutually unintelligible languages, inhabited the lands between Alaska and Patagonia. The category of per…
Natural history, the study of natural objects, has been a feature of all literate civilizations. In the Western tradition, starting with Aristotle, natural history has engaged scholars and has been an important feature of Western literature. The perspective with which writers have approached natural objects, and the aspects of interest to them, have varied as much as their cultures. Natural histor…
Naturalism was one of a wave of "isms" that swept through the cultural world of the late nineteenth century. Its most vocal advocate was the French author Émile Zola (1840–1902), a prolific novelist, dramatist, essayist, and critic. Highly controversial in the period between the heyday of realism (1830–1860) and the emergence of early forms of modernism at the end …
Naturalism, a term widely used in the nineteenth century, was employed by novelists, artists, and art critics as a synonym for realism. But, in fact, naturalism was a much more complex term. The term derived from the theory of positivism developed by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857). The roots of scientific naturalism, emerging from the eighteenth century and coming to frui…
Natural jurisprudential approaches to ethics have proved difficult to integrate into the historiography of philosophy because of just this same ambiguous relationship to history itself. On the one hand, natural law was viewed as a set of eternal verities presented by God to humanity in finished and perfect shape, and found embodied in the moral and civil order as evidence of its divine fashioning,…
The primary sense of the term natural theology rests on the contrast between natural and revealed knowledge. Natural theology concerns knowledge of the existence and attributes of God arrived at using only the natural faculties of sense and reason. Philosophical arguments for the existence, intelligence, power, and goodness of God based on the order and beauty of the world, or on purely intellectu…
No interpretation of the idea of nature is good for all people in all places at all times. The interpretive position here reflects pivotal conceptual developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Charles Darwin's century brought home forcefully the reality of time, of evolutionary process that ultimately transforms all things. Darwin's contemporary T. H. Huxley believed tha…
Naturphilosophie refers both to the specific philosophical program Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) initiated with his Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797; Ideas for a philosophy of nature) and to the movement during the German Romantic period that Schelling's work is said to have spawned. The context of both is the achievement of Immanuel Kant (1724–1…
An aesthetic and literary movement inaugurated in the 1930s that centers on the creative potential of black consciousness, negritude was one of the premier cultural phenomena of the twentieth century. Curiously, negritude has no originating text as such; it took root and flourished in Paris in the mid-1930s, fed by the writings of two black scholars from the French colonies, Aimé Césaire…
Neocolonialism can be defined as the continuation of the economic model of colonialism after a colonized territory has achieved formal political independence. This concept was applied most commonly to Africa in the latter half of the twentieth century. European countries had colonized most of the continent in the late nineteenth century, instituting a system of economic exploitation in which Afric…
The concept of neoliberalism is an interesting one in that, first, it is a label commonly used by its opponents rather than by its adherents. As with all such labels, the tendency for caricature may at times overtake the need for faithful rendition of the underlying idea. As the term implies, neoliberalism refers to what some view as a new form of liberalism, and what others view as a mere reasser…
Neoplatonism initially had a negative connotation. Enlightenment historians developed the term to dissociate the Platonists of the late Roman Empire from Plato, believing that they had distorted his philosophy beyond all recognition by their eclecticism. Jacob Brucker (Historia critica philosophiae, 1742–1744) branded them "the Eclectic Sect" before A. F. Büsching (Grundr…
The New Criticism is the name given to the work of a school of formalist-oriented Anglo-American literary critics whose writings appeared in the years following World War I and came to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s. John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974) coined the moniker itself in his 1941 study The New Criticism, in which he provided an overview of the work of key "New" Critics,…
A standard definition of Newtonianism or Newtonian philosophy found in early eighteenth-century dictionaries such as John Harris's Lexicon Technicum (5th ed., 1736) is: "The doctrine of the universe, and particularly of the heavenly bodies; their laws, affections, etc., as delivered by Sir Isaac Newton." An almost identical definition appears around thirty years later in the E…
In a history that spans more than two and a half centuries, the term nihilism has been employed to denote a wide range of phenomena. It has been variously used to express contempt or horror on the one side, approval and admiration on the other. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it has almost always been an emotional and axiological term, frequently employed to cut off debate on a moral …
While numerous types of migrating peoples can be referred to as nomads, this entry focuses on pastoral nomadism, defined as human cultures that depend solely or primarily on herds of domesticated animals. People in these cultures as a result are required to relocate their homes to new pastures on a regular basis in order to sustain these herds—what anthropologists call transhumance. Such no…
Gandhian nonviolence (ahimsa) is an active civic virtue that habitually disposes individuals, social groups, and political authorities to resist violence through non-violent means and to resolve conflicts using peaceful methods. It recognizes violence as a fact and nonviolence as a norm of social life. Its normative character arises from the assumed natural sociability of human beings. Its focal p…
The nuclear age began in mid-July 1945 when an 18.6-kiloton nuclear bomb was detonated at the Trinity test site near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Three weeks later, on 6 August 1945, the world became aware of the existence of nuclear weapons when a U.S. B-29 bomber known as Enola Gay dropped a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. That was followed three days later by the dropping of another …
Although the English word nude is derived from the Latin nudus meaning "naked," "bare," it connotes, especially in such phrases as "in the nude" or "The Nude," more than a state of undress; rather it indicates a work of art, a cultural convention, and a socioreligious attitude. The term The Nude signifies a Western cultural ideology while nud…
Objectivity is the idea that the truth can be known independently of viewpoint, perspective, or bias. For example, "Gustav Mahler completed nine symphonies," is an objectively true statement, independent of the person who utters it. "Gustav Mahler was the greatest composer in history" is not an objective truth—some people would agree, others would disagree, depen…
Since Plato wrote of political obligation in his dialogue Crito, obligation in general has been of ongoing interest to philosophers. In that dialogue, Socrates argues that he was under an obligation to obey the laws of Athens and comply with a sentence of death. During the course of the argument, he raises and offers solutions to many of the central issues about obligation that philosophers still …
The term Occidentalism refers primarily to the many ways in which non-Western intellectuals, artists, and the general public perceive and present the West. Though it seems to be an inversion of Orientalism, it has acquired some unique aspects defying a simple definition. In fact, the practices and discourses of Occidentalism vary a great deal, from time to time and region to region. If we can arbi…
The challenge of reconstructing the history of nonliterate or preliterate societies makes necessary the study and interpretation of oral traditions. Many such societies have gone to great extents to preserve and transmit the knowledge of their past in oral forms. The phrase oral traditions refers to folklore, legends, tales, taboos, and stories through which knowledge of the past is preserved and …
For the vast majority of human history, the only way people could transmit information has been by speaking, listening, and remembering. Indeed, the capacity for speech and the connected capacities for learning and remembering might be thought of as the defining elements of human consciousness, shared perhaps with other, now extinct, members of the hominid lineage but not shared with any other exi…
Organicism refers to the idea that some object or entity shares an important property or quality in common with a living or animate being. It is related to, although remains distinct from, holism, in the sense that organicist doctrines tend to uphold the view that the living creature is an integrated whole containing precisely the range and number of parts necessary for the maintenance of its exis…
The Arab-American political activist and professor of European literature Edward Said (1935–2003) durably redefined the term Orientalism with the publication in 1978 of his book by the same name. Before Said's book, Orientalism had two distinct meanings. Both were politically neutral and marginal to the central concerns of the humanities and social sciences. After Said's Orien…
Edward Said's 1978 book, Orientalism, is the harshest critique to date of Western scholarship on the Muslim orient. However, its focus is almost exclusively on the Near and Middle East. The policy statements of William Ponty, the French governor-general in Senegal (1907–1915), quoted below suggest a link between Orientalism, as understood by Edward Said, and colonial scholarship on M…
The very suggestion of a unified tradition implicit in the idea of the word orthodox renders its meaning problematic for the simple reason that conceptions of any religion's traditions are notoriously pluralist. Moreover, the term is hardly universal, since it is seldom applied to indigenous traditions around the world, even though there are some beliefs and practices within each aboriginal…
The term orthopraxy means "right practice," and stands as a contrast term for orthodoxy "right belief." It is often said of Asian traditions generally that—in contrast to most Western traditions—right practice is of more importance that right belief, and to a certain extent this is true. For instance, Confucianism is primarily concerned with the rituals an…
Orthopraxy or orthopraxis (from Greek orthos, "correct," and praxis, "action") denotes proper action, particularly in a religious context. It is contrasted with orthodoxy (orthos and doxa, "opinion"), which denotes proper belief. The word orthopraxy is of relatively recent invention and has been used above all in connection with Latin American "libe…
All epistemological and hermeneutical investigations are predicated on the observation that the human self, like all objects around a person, gains an understanding of its identity through the binary opposition of self and other. No value can be established for any element in the material and abstract world without the differentiation from "the Other." The famous linguist Ferdinand …
The issues summoned up by the term pacifism are complex and varied because different concepts, traditions, and definitions exist throughout the world, often creating misunderstanding and confusion—sometimes intentionally so. For example, the term may be used pejoratively in political debates by individuals seeking to portray opponents who refuse to support a specific military action, or by …
Because it refers neither to a single political ideology nor a clearly discernible philosophical tradition, Pan-Africanism is difficult to define. Many scholars avoid defining it, noting that black internationalism has varied drastically according to time and place. Indeed, various conceptions of Pan-Africanism have been aligned with disparate political and theoretical positions, from largely reli…
Pan-Arabism is the concept that all Arabs form one nation and should be politically united in one Arab state. The intellectual foundations of pan-Arabism were laid down in the early decades of the twentieth century, in the context first of Arab alienation from Ottoman rule and later in response to the imperialist partition of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. The doctrine…
Pan-Asianism as a general term refers to a wide range of ideas and movements that called for the solidarity of Asian peoples to counter Western influences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Japan, where Pan-Asianism had a decisive influence on the course of its modern history and served as an ideological justification for its military expansionism through 1945, it is referred…
A term of European origin, pan-Islamism denotes the intellectual and institutional trends toward Islamic unity that emerged among Muslim peoples, starting in the mid–nineteenth century and continuing throughout the twentieth century. The need for a unified Islamic identity was a product of the challenges posed by Western intervention in and domination of Muslim societies during the colonial…
The term Pan-Turkism refers to an intellectual and political movement advocating the union of all Turkic peoples. Although some promoters of this ideology went as far as calling for a political union including all Turkic groups, many others envisioned only a cultural unity. …
Paradigm is the key term in Thomas Kuhn's (1922–1996) very influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). As is frequently the case when new ideas are presented, Kuhn took an existing term and gave it a specialized meaning. The term paradigm now occurs frequently in every kind of discourse, usually to mean something like "way of thinking" or "a…
The word paradise develops in Western languages from the Greek word paradeisos, the old Persian word pairidaeza, and the modern Arabic and Persian firdaus, all of which originally denoted a walled garden. In the arid environment of the Near East, a garden must be carefully and laboriously constructed with watercourses for irrigation, and its precious flowers and fruits protected from theft by a su…
Patriotism is one of a large class of words that are linked to the virtues of membership. To participate in relations of, for example, friendship, community, nationhood, citizenship, or marriage implies normative conventions. In other words, there are value expectations built into such membership. One important dimension of any membership relation is an expectation of loyalty. Fidelity or loyalty …
The peace concept has a long history both in the Western and Eastern intellectual traditions. While Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian ideas regarding peace have expanded and changed over time, this is not so much the case in Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist thought. …
Currently concentrated in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the peasantry has been defined differently by various scholars, depending on the degree of emphasis placed on any one of several characteristics. Definitions of the peasantry embrace some of the following characteristics: ownership and use of land, production methods, subordination to other social sectors, and the degree of integration int…
Periodization, which became a branch of historical method and the philosophy of history in the twentieth century, has to do with the division of time's arrow—the theoretical timeline of the movement from past to present and future. In Western tradition this speculative aspect of history has its roots in myth and in the Bible—in Hesiod's succession of gold, silver, and b…
Notions of boundaries, categories, and periods frame discussions of art and visual culture. The desire to organize visual information and material into clearly defined, manageable units has provided an irresistible impetus for periodization since the emergence of art historical and critical studies in the Renaissance. The application of periods to art and visual culture was extended in the ninetee…
Western European ideas about the person have long centered on the duality between body and soul (in religious discourse) or between body and mind (in the domains of philosophy and psychology). Consequently, early anthropological interest in non-European ideas of the person tended to mirror such deep-seated European conceptualizations, focusing on the origins of the concept of the soul. The preoccu…
What is a person? Two basic types of considerations are apparent in African answers to this question. The first is ontological, the second ethical. Ontologically a person is a combination of a physical constituent, namely the body and a set of two or in some cases three constituents of a rarefied character requiring careful elucidation. The nonbodily constituent on which all the accounts of person…
In the visual arts, the English word perspective refers to the optical illusion whereby a picture on a flat, two-dimensional plane appears to be three-dimensional; as if the represented objects were actually in a deep space receding behind the picture surface (like looking at them through a window or in a mirror), and in some cases seeming even to project forward in front of the picture. The term …
Phenomenology is the study of experience, how things appear to us. The word comes from the Greek but was elaborated in the early nineteenth century on the basis of Immanuel Kant's conception of the world as phenomenon, the world of our experience (as opposed to the world as noumenon, the world as it is "in itself"). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel famously employed the term in P…
Active in English usage by the seventeenth century, philanthropy has been shown more recently to have a long, complex, and controversial history displaying multiple meanings of the term. Now philanthropy is normally construed as love of mankind, a voluntary, practical benevolence toward others, or an effort to promote the welfare of humanity by gifts without self-benefit. However, philanthropy ove…
Ancient Egypt has been offered as a point of origin of African metaphysical speculation. According to the work of Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop, Egypt is to Africa what the Greco-Latin civilization is to the West, and texts such as The Book of the Dead, written more than 3,500 years ago, could play the role of a founding text for a tradition of philosophical thinking on the African contine…
American philosophies are as varied and diverse as the many backgrounds and cultures that collaborate to form American life. Even so, there are some similar emphases that cross these differences. Often, philosophies in America valorize action and the practical aspects of thought; American philosophers are regularly concerned with problems of race, class, gender, and other ethical and political for…
The term feminism is used both in reference to social movements, such as the late-nineteenth century women's rights movement or the mid-twentieth century women's movement in Europe and the United States, and to theories that identify and critique injustices against women, such as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) or The Book of the City of…
All Muslims hold the Koran as the very word of God, who provides guidance and understanding of creation and proper human conduct by divine wisdom (hikma). This wisdom is also reflected in the oral statements of the prophet Muhammad collected in the Traditions (hadith) and in the reports of the life and deeds (sunna) of the Prophet. The study of these in the traditional Islamic religious sciences o…
The dialectic between religious and secular philosophy and the split between those who think of philosophy as akin to poetry and those who insist that it be exact and rigorous are not the only oppositions that rend modern philosophy. There is also the perennial tug-of-war between those philosophers who stubbornly hold onto the ancient paradigm of philosophy as the more or less practical search for…
For Plato, the first characteristic of philosophical wisdom is that it meet the needs of rational inquiry. As he suggests at Apology 22, this criterion precludes all types of quotidian knowledge and other homespun verities in favor of genuine philosophical insight. Neither the statesman, the artisan, nor the poet can explain why he is doing what is he doing, for none of them has formulated a clear…
A respected Princeton philosopher keeps a sign on his office door forbidding the discussion therein of any philosophy more than ten years old. At this late stage in his career the restriction includes a good deal of his own work. This may well be the limit case of the antihistorical attitude that prevailed throughout much academic philosophy of the twentieth century, motivated by the view that phi…
Morality consists of two parts: first, morality in the strict sense; and second, morality as custom or mores. The defining principle of the first is the golden rule, that of the second, local utility, idiosyncrasy, or even accident. The first is known to be universal to all human cultures. This has to be so of a necessity, in view of what the rule entails. The golden rule, to follow Harry Gensler,…
Our picture of Socrates derives mainly from several short, inconclusive dialogues by his disciple Plato. In these, Socrates, believing that "the unexamined life is not worth living," typically challenges the conventional beliefs of his fellows, both ordinary people and more sophisticated thinkers, with questions about how human life should be lived. When his inter-locutors prove unab…
Moral philosophy in the medieval West derived from two main sources: Christianity and classical ethics. The attempt to reconcile these different traditions and develop a viable synthesis of the two was a central concern of moral philosophy throughout the period. …
The moral philosophy of the modern period traditionally included ethics as well as natural-law theories of rights and the normative foundations of state authority. Nowadays, the term moral philosophy tends to be used mainly with reference to ethics proper, while modern natural-law theories and their history are often treated under the headings of political philosophy and philosophy of law. In keep…
In the works of Aristotle, criticisms of popular misconceptions of divinity and genuine moments of piety are combined. More important for later thinking about theology, however, are Aristotle's arguments for the existence of a divine prime mover of the universe and his account of that entity. At the end of Physics (book 8) and in Metaphysics (book 12), he argues that the impossibility of an…
Issues related to the mind are an important component in contemporary philosophy. While colleagues in psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive ethology do empirical scientific studies of the mind, philosophers tend to focus on more general questions: What is the nature of mind, such as it may be found in any creature or thing? Philosophers tend to concentrate on questions such as: How is mind relat…
The mind is a modern notion. But like many modern notions, it did not emerge from nowhere. What contemporary philosophers mean when they talk about the mind is part of a long tradition, stretching back through the Middle Ages to Greek and Roman antiquity. The mind in its modern sense is best understood in opposition to the body, the extended, flesh-and-blood entity that it seems to inhabit and mov…
A well-established discipline in early-twenty-first-century Western philosophy, the subject known as "the philosophy of religion" has not always been easily demarcated with respect to its nature and scope. The reason for this is historical. The long engagement of philosophy with the claims of religion has manifested itself from antiquity to the early twenty-first century in a wide va…
Phrenology, a science popular from the early to the mid-nineteenth century, was dedicated to the discernment of one's character or traits of personality from reading—that is, feeling the shape and size of—the bumps on one's skull. As formulated by the German physician and anatomist Franz Josef Gall (1758–1828) and as popularized by his student and follower Johann…
