The communication of ideas in and from Africa is characterized by enormous changes over time and variations among societies. Historically, as might be expected for such a large and ancient continent—the second largest in the world and the one where humanity originated—African societies have exhibited high levels of cultural diversity, uneven patterns of political and socioeconomic de…
Anthropological research suggests a rich and historically deep tradition of oral communication among early Amerindian people in which linguistic diversity appears to have been considerable. Even within the usually accepted language groupings of North America—Eskimo-Aleut; Athabascan, or Na-Dene; Algonquian-Wakashan; Aztec-Tanoan; Hokan-Siouan; Penutian; and Arawakan—many dialects exi…
Asia comprises a vast amount of land divided into numerous countries, many of which have civilizations dating back thousands of years. Due to the huge scope of this topic, this entry will focus on India as an important hub for the transmission of ideas throughout Asia and how other Asian countries influenced the development of Indian civilization. When India became independent in 1947, the new gov…
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey occupy an important early niche in the history of European literature. It has been argued, however, that the Homeric epics, strictly speaking, are not even literature. In An Essay of the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (1775), the English diplomat and archaeologist Robert Wood initiated a continuing debate by arguing that Homer could not read or write and tha…
The great continental Eurasian landmass, with its vast steppes stretching east to west in a more or less uniform climatic belt, has been a useful path for the transit of ideas and techniques throughout history, with what is now the Arab world as the fulcrum of the exchange between China and Europe. Over roughly the first thirteen or fourteen centuries of the Common Era, there was a slow, steady di…
The communication of ideas is not basically different from any other type of human communication. It is founded on the unique human skill of speech, a highly developed and formalized system of audio communication, which links with animal sounds and other forms of the communicative act but is infinitely more sophisticated. The jury is still out on the question of the genetic component in spoken lan…
The Lao-Thai culture area, encompassing modern Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Burma (present-day Myanmar), has a common history of Hinduized states and Theravada Buddhism. Pali (the language of early Buddhist texts) and Sanskrit (the language of early Hinduism) are also Indian in origin. Vietnam, while sharing aspects of mainland Southeast Asian culture and society, represents the cultural influenc…
"A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism." The famous opening line to The Communist Manifesto evokes the expectations and fears that have been associated with European communism. Published in 1848 amid a tumultuous period of political unrest across the continent, this polemical pamphlet was an idealistic call to arms directed at an emerging male working class (&#…
Latin America in the 1890s was a society primed for the dissemination of socialist ideologies. It was ruled by autocrats and oligarchs who were exploiting an increasingly discontented peasant populace and perpetuating a sharply divided two-class social structure. During this time, increased productivity and foreign investment ushered in the earlier stages of exploitative capitalism as well as a wa…
This essay explores representative Africanist thought on personhood and community, highlighting especially the debate between Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye on communitarianism, defined generally as relating to social organization in small, cooperative, partially collectivist communities. The general debate on these issues in Africa can be traced to important studies of personhood and psychology…
The term composition (from the Latin com, together, and ponere, to put) is commonly applied in Western music to a notated work, and in non-Western systems to a consistently united progression or organization of sounds. Although Western music compositions have been defined by their narrative structure (i.e., progression toward a climax, etc.) a more accurate definition, encompassing modern Western …
The field called computer science was born in the 1940s, though its roots extend back to the nineteenth century and even earlier. One of the early founders of the field was Alan Turing (1912–1954), a citizen of Great Britain, who in 1937 published his famous paper entitled "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem." In this paper he introduced the …
The concepts the learners used were appropriated from the pre-Confucian discourse of a broad class of warriors across the North China Plain. In this discourse power and virtue ideally were one (de). The worlds of men and of spirits (gui or shen) were separate but communication between the two was possible, and so was mutual intervention. Shamans and oracles were the agents of communication, while …
Consciousness has three distinct meanings in the modern world. First it refers to immediate subjective experience. Second, it is the source of immediate and certain knowledge of mental states. For example, if I am in pain, I am conscious of pain and certain of this knowledge of my mental state. Third, it is self-consciousness, a concept of the self that answers the question "Who am I"…
Human consciousness in Chinese thought may be seen in three layers, each of which requires the other two for both development and understanding. While these three layers of consciousness are constructed for analytical purposes, in reality they are interconnected. Psychologically, they represent different frames of reference, but they are also different dimensions of the same individual and/or coll…
There is enormous diversity among the various traditions of classical Indian philosophy concerning the nature of consciousness and the place of humanity in the cosmos, but there are a number of presuppositions that are shared by many of India's great thinkers. Most classical Indian philosophical schools agree, for example, that living beings are reborn over and over again in a beginningless…
Conservatism lends itself to misunderstanding because its political designation is easily confused with popular usage. To be conservative in the sense of preferring the familiar to the unfamiliar is a common form of behavior. Since this attitude toward life is universal, it issues from no necessary political commitment. For any person, even the most bohemian, not to develop a settled habit or a li…
"Consilience of inductions" is a phrase that was invented by the nineteenth-century English historian and philosopher of science William Whewell (1794–1866; pronounced "Hule"), and introduced in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840). Whewell was trying to capture the notion of what Isaac Newton (1642–1727) had labeled a "true cause,"…
Constitutionalism is commonplace in modern political discourse in the West and beyond, yet it remains an elusive concept. Some have considered it impossible (and unnecessary) to give a definition of it. Nonetheless, one can discern several common features of the concept: the rule of law, not of men; limitations of political authority; the protection of civic rights and liberties; and rule based on…
Consumerism, the central economic and social policy of contemporary capitalism, is a doctrine of growing the economy through constantly increasing the consumption of commodities and services. The term consumerism is also used to describe movements to protect the rights and interests of consumers. …
It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in Italian, French, English, and German, that the term "context" (contesto, contexture, Kontext) began to be used with frequency. From the sentences before and after the passage to be interpreted, "context" came to refer to the coherence of a text, the relation of the parts and the whole. The term was also ex…
The term continental philosophy was coined by English-speaking analytic philosophers in Great Britain and the United States shortly after World War II. Since then, the term has been used primarily by English-speaking philosophers but not by western European philosophers, who see no need to call themselves "continental." The differences between analytic and continental philosophy are …
Consider the first sentence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1712–1778) Discours sur les arts et sciences (Discourse on the arts and sciences, 1750): "Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of mores, or their corruption?" Corruption denotes deterioration, a qualitative decline from an original (absolutely or relatively) natural or pristi…
While corruption, in one form or another, has perverted virtually all human societies throughout history, it has not had uniform impact on any one of them. Scholars who study corruption in an effort to find ways to minimize it have had to deal with the fact that it is difficult to define and measure, making empirical testing very difficult. …
While the Upanishads mark the end of the Vedas, the cosmologies introduced there continue to be developed in the subsequent texts (for example, the Manava Dharmashastra or Manusmriti [Laws of Manu], the Vishnu Purana, and sections of the Mahabharata). While these texts differ somewhat in content, they mutually inform what has come to be the prevailing cosmology in the Hindu tradition. This cosmolo…
Early cosmologies, or worldviews, envisioned a universe subject to the whims of gods and were anthropocentric: focused on the role and fate of human beings. As such, cosmology and religion were often intertwined. …
Cosmopolitanism refers to both a lifestyle incorporating aspects from all or many parts of the world and an ideology based upon the premise that every human shares, or should share, equal status as a "citizen of the world." The two are not exclusive of one another, but it is certainly possible to encounter either the ideal or the lifestyle without the presence of the other. Though si…
Creationism in a general sense refers to the theory that God made the world on his own, by miraculous means, out of nothing. In a more specific sense, the one encountered in America today, creationism is the theory that the Bible, particularly the early chapters of Genesis, is a literally true guide to the history of the universe and to the history of life, including us humans, down here on earth.…
Because creativity is a complex concept, it has multiple definitions. Of the various conceptions, however, three are currently most common. These are the product, person, and process definitions. According to the first, creativity is manifested in an identifiable outcome, such as a poem, painting, invention, or discovery. Moreover, this product must fulfill two essential conditions. First, it must…
The concept of creolization lies at the very center of discussions of transculturalism, transnationalism, multiculturalism, diversity, and hybridization. This essay begins by examining the term's roots in the ethnic and cultural complexities of the Caribbean experience. It then goes on to look at the transformation of this experience into a theoretical framework for pluralism that conscious…
The term crisis comes from the Greek noun krisis (choice, decision, judgment), deriving from the Greek verb krinein (to decide). The word makes an ancient debut in Greek historical writing via the legal, medical, and rhetorical terminology as the turning point in a decision, illness, or argument. Its definitive reappearance with reference to historical events, periods, or processes dates from the …
One of a family of related progressive movements in the law—others include critical legal studies, Latino critical legal studies ("Lat/Crit"), and feminist legal theory—critical race theory sprang up in the late l970s in response to a widespread perception that the powerful civil rights coalition of the 1960s and early 1970s had stalled. Conservative administrations an…
In the humanities, the term critical theory has had many meanings in different historical contexts. From the end of World War II through the 1960s, the term signified the use of critical and theoretical approaches within major disciplines of the humanities such as art history, literary studies, and more broadly, cultural studies. From the 1970s, the term entered into the rapidly evolving area of f…
The concept of cultural capital originated in the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1979, pp. 10, 12), who defined it as high cultural knowledge that ultimately redounds to the owner's financial and social advantage. An example would be knowing how to "dress for success." This cultural knowledge can pay off. Although they naturally seek competent personnel, employers also prefer execut…
As a discipline, cultural history is a bit over two centuries old, but it has an extensive prehistory going back to Renaissance scholarship, especially in areas of the history of literature and the history of philosophy. In the Renaissance, cultus or cultura was commonly associated with the cultivation of literature, philosophy, eloquence, law, arts, and sciences, whose fruits were the human virtu…
The term cultural revival refers to the formation of group identity around a common culture, where a claim is forwarded that the aspects of culture with which the group identifies have been recovered after losses due to colonization, forced or voluntary relocation, oppression, or modernization. Cultural revival is predominantly associated with minority populations and frequently underwrites demand…
Cultural studies is one of the more controversial intellectual formations of the 1990s and the first decade of the third millennium. It has experienced a period of rapid growth in the academy, appearing at many universities in a variety of forms and locations (although rarely as degree-granting departments). At the same time, it has been broadly attacked both from inside the university and outside…
The idea that history is composed of cycles is ancient. Many peoples (including the Egyptians, Chinese, Babylonians, Hindus, Maya, and Greeks) observed recurrences in astronomical phenomena. These early observations were often related to calendar systems and were the foundation for later written schemes of cosmic and historical cycles in various parts of the world. …
The word cynic generally conveys negative ideas in modern languages. It describes someone who is unduly critical and suspicious, apathetic about certain issues and rebellious in response to others, selfish, and indifferent toward traditions and accepted beliefs, and unconcerned with the public welfare. The cynic is often viewed as a person who has severed all ties with his social context. To be c…
Presided over by the poet and essayist Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), who served as its principal spokesman, dada was the first truly international avant-garde movement. Although the term dada was invented in Zurich, the movement's origins were by no means limited to Switzerland. The dada spirit existed previously in several other countries, where it expressed itself in outrageous avant-…
Dance is broadly conceived as physical movement organized into patterns in time and space. Writings on dance grounded in the European intellectual tradition have tended to distinguish dance from other systems of organized movement (such as sport, military drills, synchronized labor, festival processions, and sometimes ritual) by identifying a dimension of conscious craft or artistry. The disciplin…
Defining the features of Daoism (or Taoism) as one of the predominant trends in the history of Chinese thought involves accounting for its religious traits. As often happens outside the Western hemisphere—Buddhism may be the best-known example, but the same is true of Islam—the boundary between thought and religion in China is tenuous, unstable, and sometimes simply impossible to ide…
The idea of death—the irreversible end to life—has preoccupied, fascinated, and struck fear into human beings through the millennia. In the early twenty-first century, artists continue to sing about death, write about death, and depict it in paintings and photographs. Religious leaders are still talking about how to live a meaningful life in the face of death's inevitability. …
Islamic views of death and the afterlife encompass two broad streams: the individual and the collective or cosmological. The existence of an afterlife for individuals and final judgment of all creation are both central tenets of the faith. The Koran provides the foundation for Muslim views of death, with eschatological imagery leaping out from nearly every page. The Koran is supplemented by hadith…
Deism holds more meanings than one word should be asked to bear. Generally, to the point of almost being meaningless, it refers to the notion that reason plays an important role in determining religious knowledge. By this definition the pre-Socratic philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, Cicero, Lucretius, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad all qualify to varying degrees as Deists. …
Democracy, a direct translation of the Greek dēmokratia, means rule (kratos) by the people (dēmos). Both as a political idea, and as a political institution, democracy originated in the thought and practice of the ancient Greeks. They understood democracy literally: the people, deliberating and acting together in an assembly, was both sovereign and legislator. The people was not only t…
In the mid-1980s, democratic theory and politics in Africa entered a new phase as struggles for democratization spread across the continent and scholars began to vigorously debate the processes, prospects, and problems of Africa's democratic projects. This process was captured in an important collection edited by Peter Anyang Nyong'o, Popular Struggles for Democracy in Africa (1987),…
Demography is the study of human population and its changes due to deaths, births, marriages and divorces, and migration. The term demos denotes people in Greek—the term demography literally means the systematic study of people. In the early twenty-first century the discipline encompasses a broad array of subject matters, covering, among others, economic, social, public health, and politica…
Some years ago, Richard Cavendish, an eminent demonologist and student of the so-called black arts, observed that "[b]elief in the existence of evil supernatural beings" is so widespread that it "seems to be instinctive" (p. 8). Whether, as Cavendish suggests, these beliefs are in fact instinctive is still very much an open question. However, human beings do indeed app…
During the 1960s and 1970s, Latin American dependency theorists produced an important challenge to modernization and growth theories of development. Associated with a number of key intellectuals from Latin America—Andre Gunder Frank, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Peter Evans in Latin America, Samir Amin and Walter Rodney in Africa—the dependentistas turned modernization theory upsid…
The most general idea is that all events without exception are just effects. This idea has been associated with science since the seventeenth century, but it was put in some doubt by an interpretation of quantum theory in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century. Events are things that happen. Roughly speaking, they are such occurrences as a chair having such a property as a particular lo…
Development in biology refers to the process of growth and differentiation that is characteristic of living organisms. It describes the continuous changes during the life cycle of individual organisms from the early stage of a single cell until death. Development also refers to what is today known as the process of evolution, the transformation of species through time. Other meanings of developmen…
The Greek noun dialogos derives from the verb dialegesthai, meaning "to enter into a conversation." The term dialectic, or the art of argumentation (dialectike techne), is derived from this verb as well, but in the case of Socratic dialectic the relevant Greek term is elegkhos (elenchus). Elenchus means a testing, and, since those tested by Socratic questioning are often shown inadeq…
Dialectical argument is a tool of systematic analysis. In the Talmudic framework, everything is in the moving, or dialectical, argument, the give–and–take of unsparing rationality, which, through their own capacity to reason, later generations are expected to reconstitute. Following the argument as set forth in the Talmud affords access to the issues, the argument, and the prevailing…
The African diaspora, together with the Jewish diaspora—the etymological and epistemological source of the term diaspora—enjoys pride of place in the increasingly crowded pantheon of diaspora studies. Studies of African diasporas can be divided into two broad categories. First, there are those that discuss the patterns of dispersal of African peoples around the world and the kinds of…
The Greek term diaspora, meaning "dispersion," has been used since ancient times as a means of describing the Jewish experience as well as the fact of Jewish settlement outside of the Jewish homeland to the present day. Originally, the term diaspora was used with respect to only three groups whose populations were dispersed in classical times: the Greeks, the Jews, and the Armenians.…
It is a somewhat common refrain in Latin America that countries need the mano dura (strong hand) of a military dictatorship in order to get things done. Surveys in the early twenty-first century reveal a growing disenchantment with civilian governments, with a surprisingly large minority of Latin Americans stating a preference for a dictatorial form of government over democracy. Such sentiments da…
The concept of diffusion was born to controversy. The initial debate over this issue took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. …
Discrimination should be understood as action and therefore distinguished from prejudice, which is a matter of thought, attitude, or belief. Racial discrimination then would consist of social action that produces unjust allocation of valued resources, based on racial categorizations of individuals or groups (Banton; Kairys, 1996). This is the standard definition and still serves in many cases: whe…
Diversity, as a word or concept, can apply to rocks, plants, animals, people, systems of law, and much else. In the United States, since the 1970s, its immediate reference, if the word is presented with nothing more to specify it, is to the diversity of races, ethnic groups, and language groups that make the United States possibly the most diverse country in the world. But its import extends far b…
It is midnight in the desert, and the full moon has just passed its apex. On the sandy ground, staff in hand, guitar and jug by his side, a dark-skinned man is nuzzled by a tawny-maned lion. Is the man dreaming? Are we? Or is this the dream of the artist, Henri Rousseau (1844–1910)? If, as some traditions have it, the Universe was dreamed into existence by its Creator, then it makes perfect…
Since the 1980s new generations of academics, collectors, curators, and enthusiasts have discovered the value of the study of dress as an analytical research tool through which to examine aspects of social and economic history, material culture, cultural and gender studies, art history, anthropology, and sociology. As a consequence, the study of the history of dress has been transformed from its m…
Dualism is a doctrine positing two equally powerful and antagonistic metaphysical principles, which are constitutive of the world and must explain our experience of the world. They are often conceived as dichotomies, such as good and evil, light and darkness, attraction and repulsion, or love and strife. Earlier forms of dualism can be traced in ancient Egyptian religion, with the contest between …
Dystopia is utopia's polarized mirror image. While utilizing many of the same concepts as utopia—for example, social stability created by authoritarian regimentation—dystopia reads these ideas pessimistically. Dystopia angrily challenges utopia's fundamental assumption of human perfectibility, arguing that humanity's inherent flaws negate the possibility of const…
If the locus classicus of eclecticism was Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, the locus modernus was the Introduction to Stoic Philosophy (1604) of Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), who argued that the method of critical choosing or "election" was superior to the dogmas of particular schools and represented the true road to truth. From the second quarter of …
Ecology is commonly seen as a lineal descendant of traditional natural history extending back to such classical figures as Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Pliny. Notable persons in this tradition include the Swedish botanist, Carl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus; 1707–1778), who coined the phrase "economy of nature" in 1749. Gilbert White (1720–1793), a British cleric, ma…
The term economics, from the Greek oikonomika, means a science or art of managing the household. In modern usage, it refers to the efficient allocation of scarce resources in the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services to satisfy various desires. As a branch of knowledge, economics or economic science is the study of how to efficiently use limited resources—natural r…
The word ecumenism itself became prevalent after the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. Delegates from missionary organizations met to address the incongruity—and scandal, no less—of historically divided and competing Christian denominations preaching a message of peace and harmony among non-Christian peoples. The World Council of Churches, the primary organizat…
A middle region, Southeast Asia, was influenced by Buddhism and Confucianism, resulting in a unique blended educational experience. From the eighteenth century on, as Western culture came into the region, Asia's educational practices in general underwent a sea change that resulted in a previously unknown level of uniformity. Regional diversity, however, remains visible, reflecting the diff…
The imperial state increased its expenditures on education during the Tang (618–906) and Song (960–1280) dynasties, when it created the first examination system for selecting officials. In addition, the rise of Buddhism in medieval China created charitable institutions for the common people, which included temple schools and monasteries, where many commoners—male and female&#x…
European pre-university education began its long odyssey with Homer. The social and literary values expressed in his poetry informed Greek education, which became the basis of Roman education. The Renaissance revived ancient literary texts and educational programs, which were modified and adapted in subsequent centuries. European humanities education still embraces in part ancient Greco-Roman educ…
Global education, or global studies, is an interdisciplinary approach to learning concepts and skills necessary to function in a world that is increasingly interconnected and multicultural. The curricula based on this approach are grounded in traditional academic disciplines but are taught in the context of project-and problem-based inquiries. The learner examines issues from the vantage point of …
The ideas produced, preserved, and transmitted through education in India have been as multifaceted as the many social groups who have lived in the South Asian subcontinent. Gender has been an important determinant for educational opportunities over time and across regions. When and where education was closely associated with making a living, parents assumed that women needed only domestic skills,…
A lifelong pursuit of learning is a characteristic ideal of Islamic piety. It underlies the concept of "Islamic" education. While the primary focus of this concept is the nurturing of religious belief in the individual, its scope broadened to incorporate various secular disciplines, literary and scientific, as it aimed at developing within the community fully integrated personalities…
The shoen system declined due to the failure of the court nobility in the capitol to retain strong ties with outlying estates, and led to bushi (warrior) rule. Primarily, the warrior and the monk supported medieval education (1192–1603). In 1177, the daigakuryo burned and was not rebuilt. Because the Kamakura regime (1192–1333) was established upon a warrior code, despite the relativ…
What distinguishes the development of education in North America has been its cautious, halting, but nevertheless relentless movement toward universality and inclusivity, an impulse that owes much to the progressive ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and to the consequent development of liberal democracy on the continent. In the early twenty-first-century Canada and in the United State…
Ideas about emotions and their function in human and animal life have been a major theme in philosophy—and more recently in psychology and the social sciences—since the time of the ancient Greeks. The history of ideas about emotion is an essential part of the history of ideas about human nature and about human continuity—and discontinuity—with other animals. Whether emo…
The ancient Roman conception of empire differed from the Greek. The term came from the Roman concept of imperium, meaning jurisdiction or lawful authority. A Roman official who ruled a subject population or who commanded troops possessed imperium, an authority symbolized by the fasces, which was borne as a sign of authority before the consuls who ruled Rome. The fasces, a band of rods bound around…
An empire presupposes an unequal relationship between an elite of an ethnicity, or polity and the peoples of a dependent and subservient ethnicity or polity, the periphery, on issues such as service or tribute and dominant language and culture, as shown by unequal material or service exchanges and the spread of art styles, architectural forms, and politico-religious practices. The Americas have a …
While this was going on, the rest of the Asian landmass to the Urals and the Caucasus was dominated by four other powerful and expanding empires: Mughal India in the south, Safavid Iran in the southwest, Ottoman Turkey and the Middle East in the west, and Romanov Russia in the central region and the north. The last was led by Russian-speaking Slavs from northeastern Europe, but the other three sha…
Few subjects have generated as much controversy as that of European imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because of the term's pejorative connotations, even attempting to define it causes difficulties. What, precisely, constitutes an empire? Is any relationship between two societies involving an imbalance of power in some way "imperial"? For many years, imper…
In the modern era, the Middle East, broadly defined to include North Africa, was the seat of a major empire, that of the Ottoman Turks. Ottoman rule at its height dominated Eastern Europe through Hungary and extended across the Middle East and North Africa to include Algeria, with Iran and Morocco excluded from Turkish authority. …
The question of whether the United States is an imperial power that, like other previous imperial powers, has been acquiring an empire of its own has been hotly contested in U.S. political history. On the one hand, the United States likes to think of itself as different from other powers in the past who have acquired empires, because its motives are supposedly superior (democracy, human rights, a…
Empiricism is a family of theories of knowledge (epistemology) claiming that all knowledge about the extant universe is based on experience, primarily on perception via the five senses. Some empiricists add introspection, a moral sense, or a special sensitivity to religious or aesthetic experience. Strong empiricists claim that all knowledge whatever derives from experience. They must show how emp…
Encyclopedism is not restricted to the history of encyclopedias as we now know them. Certainly, since the eighteenth century, this identification has been the dominant one; however, the term encyclopedism is best seen as a heuristic device that can legitimately be applied to other intellectual projects. Three main forms of encyclopedism can be discerned: first, the classical Greek and Roman notion…
In the years since the publication of the first Dictionary of the History of Ideas, the Enlightenment has become an increasingly fragmented and decreasingly coherent historical rubric. In fact that fragmentation began in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas itself, in an article titled "Counter-Enlightenment," written by Isaiah Berlin and categorized out of alphabetical order, appe…
The term environment became specialized beginning in about the 1960s to designate the context of human and animal groups, with a special emphasis on the natural world and its physical and vegetal components. Within this framework, the word took on an even more limited meaning and in the early twenty-first century refers primarily to the interaction between human and animal activity on the one hand…
Environmental ethics emerged as a subdiscipline of philosophical ethics in the early 1970s, following the first Earth Day in 1970 and a sharply increased awareness of environmental problems at that time. Courses began appearing in university curricula, and books, articles, and journals proliferated to meet the growing interest. To judge by student demand and university courses and programs, enviro…
Environmental history is the study of the changing affairs of humans within the natural world. This definition, in contrast to other useful phrasings, such as the study of "interactions between humans and nature" (Merchant, 2002, p. xv), embodies a fundamental, not merely semantic, point of emphasis. First, and obviously, humans are part of nature, biological organisms subject to the…
While Epicureanism is not strictly an ethical theory, it has been most influential in the field of ethics. Epicurus emphasized empiricism, and his theories were foundationalist in the sense that he believed all sense perceptions were true (Inwood and Gerson, A53.63). In keeping with this, he denied that a theory of meaning was possible. Rather, we come to a "basic grasp" (prolepsis)…
Many ancient cultures had sophisticated methods for organizing knowledge. However, systematic, self-conscious reflection on the nature of knowledge itself appears to have originated in Greek philosophy. …
Modern philosophy is generally thought to be distinguished by an "epistemological turn." Prior philosophical tradition accorded special status to metaphysics, or "first philosophy" (the general philosophical investigation into the nature of reality). The modern tradition, by contrast, holds that it is necessary to determine the nature and bounds of human knowledge befor…
The understanding of knowledge at work, implicitly or explicitly, in much of ancient and modern epistemology is that of knowledge as justified true belief. According to this traditional account (TAK), a subject, S, knows that p if and only if the following three conditions are met: (i) p is true; (ii) S believes that p; (iii) S is justified in, or has adequate evidence for, believing that p. While…
Though simple as a mathematical concept, equality is complex and contested as a political goal and philosophical concept. Many political struggles, both historical and ongoing, have engaged in the contests over the nature of equality. This contestation revolves around the basic question, What kinds of equality matter? The answer to this in part depends on whether the topic is approached from a pre…
The coupling of equality and gender may indicate a paradox, if not an oxymoron. If equality were to exist, would gender? Does the persistent salience of the idea of gender with regard to equality provide evidence of fundamental flaws or contradictions in theories and practices of equality? Can the pursuit of equality reproduce rather than undermine gender dominance? While these questions are centr…
Racial equality is the belief that individuals, regardless of their racial characteristics, are morally, politically, and legally equal and should be treated as such. Furthermore, it is the belief that different racial groups, as groups, are equal, with none being inherently superior or inferior in intelligence, virtue, or beauty. In the United States the term is commonly linked to the belief in e…
The concept of eschatology was created by the Lutheran theologian Abraham Calov (1612–1686) and became popular through the works of the Prussian Reformed theologian F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834). It is derived from a sentence in Jesus Sirach: "In whatever you do, remember your last days [Greek: ta eschata ], and you will never sin" (Sir. 7:36). Calov's conc…
Essentialism is a response to problems of recognition and meaning. Amid all the variety of empirical experience and the multiple forms that objects assume, how do we recognize many differently appearing things as instances of the same phenomenon? Where do the categories in and through which we organize empirical experience come from? As the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) and ot…
There is an abiding paradox in the concept of race. It is a biological fiction but a social reality. Biologically it is now established beyond doubt that there are no distinct races among human beings and that the genetic variation within particular groups of people is much higher than between groups. The view that people possess inherent personality characteristics attached to particular irreduc…
Ethnicity, as defined in the public domain, is "the cultural characteristics that connect a particular group or groups of people to each other" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnicity). Twenty-first-century anthropologists, however, are likely to complicate simple notions of ethnicity, or they might refuse to accept a general definition of the concept without first demanding accounts…
The Koran makes only passing reference to racial or ethnic categories. One verse refers to "the variety of your tongues and hues" as one of the many signs of God's divine power (30:22). Another proclaims the primacy of piety over racial or tribal distinction: "O mankind, we have created you male and female, and appointed you races and tribes, so that you may know one an…
Ethnocentrism is a notion not widely used in the early twenty-first century. Coined by William Graham Sumner in the early twentieth century, the term owes what conceptual life it has to the likes of anthropology and intercultural communication. Dominant strains of these disciplines, especially anthropology, have examined the lives and cultural expressions of ethnically defined or identified groups…
Ethnography, often paraphrased as "participant observation," is a mode of deriving knowledge about particular, local worlds through direct engagement with their peoples and ways of life. As a mode of inquiry, it is primarily associated with the discipline of anthropology, the comparative study of human societies and cultures that took definitive shape as a scholarly field in the earl…
Ethnohistory, first used in Vienna in the 1930s by ethnologist Fritz Roack and the Viennese Study Group for African Cultural History, and a subfield of anthropology, is the use of ethnological and historical methods and materials to gain knowledge of the nature and causes of change in a culture defined by ethnological concepts and categories. This definition, as the ethnohistorian Robert C. Euler …
Though the Middle Ages in Europe witnessed the harnessing of knights to a code of chivalry and the flourishing of a romance troubadour culture demanding particular rules of conduct, it was the Renaissance that brought social codes and conventions to new heights of importance. Courts now served elites and sycophants as thriving centers of power, requiring the ability to fashion one's identit…
The term eugenics, derived from the Greek eugenes, was first coined by the English mathematician and geographer Francis Galton (1822–1911) in his Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883) to refer to one born "good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities." As an intellectual and social movement in the early twentieth century, eugenics came to mean, in…
Eurocentrism refers to a discursive tendency to interpret the histories and cultures of non-European societies from a European (or Western) perspective. Common features of Eurocentric thought include: Although Eurocentrism has been common through the ages, it has not been constant, nor has it affected the way Europeans have viewed all non-European societies equally. Moreover, Europeans have not al…
In classical times Europe was above all a geographical and mythological notion, the word referring to one of the three known continents—Asia and Africa (or Libya) being the other two. In the famous story of "the rape of Europa," the daughter of Phoenix, king of Phoenicians, was kidnapped and abducted by the Greek god Zeus, who in the guise of a white bull brought her to the is…
When everyday life was first considered a proper subject for reflection it is obviously impossible to say, but an increasing interest in the subject can be traced over the last few centuries, at least in the West. Mystics have long regarded everyday things and everyday routines as a way to become closer to God. From the fifteenth century onward, painters in the Netherlands in particular paid more …
The descriptive-normative term evil is a significant anomaly in our relativistic and noncognitivist age. Otherwise careful thinkers deploy it as if its extension were obvious and indisputable. And yet it is used in widely differing ways even in our own time. A narrow meaning confines it to the deliberate infliction of harm. This corresponds to only part of the so-called problem of evil, and it is …
Although it can encompass cosmic and cultural change, evolution is a term usually associated with the modern scientific theory of species change and is most closely associated with the work of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and, to a lesser extent, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913). Darwin himself did not refer to his specific theory as "evolution" but instead used the phra…
Civil examinations in late imperial China (1400–1900) intersected with politics, society, economy, and Chinese intellectual life. Both local elites and the imperial court influenced the dynastic government to reexamine and adjust the classical curriculum and to entertain new ways to improve the system for selecting officials. As a result, civil examinations represented a test of educational…
Existentialism is a philosophical movement that became associated with the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (who rejected the name as too confining) and whose roots extend to the works of Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger. Sartre, like most of his existentialist colleagues, was too much the individualist to accept the idea of being part of a movement, no matter how exclusive. Both Heidegge…
This entry traces the life of experiment from its emergence in the early seventeenth century to its transformation to a collective activity after World War II. The topics discussed include the rise of experimental philosophy and its institutional expression in the new scientific societies of the seventeenth century; the spread and character of experimentation in the eighteenth century; the quest f…
Of all the "isms" in the early twentieth century, Expressionism is one of the most elusive and difficult to define. Whereas, on the one hand, Expressionism has been said to reveal its "universal character," abandoning all theories that imply a narrow, exclusive nationalistic attitude, on the other, it has been considered a "specific and familiar constant in Germa…
The term extirpation is most commonly associated with the Catholic Church's project to eradicate traditional religious practices in the Americas after the Spanish conquest. The Andean highlands, Mesoamerica, and other areas of high indigenous cultural development have rich religious traditions that predate the Spanish conquest by millennia. Ending these practices became an early and determi…
It is standard practice to distinguish formal and informal fallacies. Formal fallacies break one or more of the rules of a system of logic and can be seen when an argument is presented in either schematic form or in a natural language. Informal fallacies, by contrast, can often only be seen when the argument is presented in natural language, since they depend often on ambiguity or some other misus…
Karl Popper (1902–1994) made falsifiability the key to his philosophy of science. It became the most commonly invoked "criterion of demarcation" of science from nonscience. According to the simple, hypothetico-deductive (H-D) model of scientific inquiry, a law claim, theory, or hypothesis H is falsifiable when a potentially checkable prediction O can be logically deduced from …
In their efforts to bring some analytical rigor to the study of this confusing but important concept, anthropologists have come to speak not of "the family" but of "kinship," a larger, more inclusive category that can refer to any and all of the ways in which we find or forge relationships between ourselves and others, although it is usually confined to those relationsh…
Until the last decades of the twentieth century, anthropological definitions of the family were heavily influenced by largely unexamined Western cultural assumptions about biology and its relationship to kinship. Indeed, disentangling the history of family studies from kinship studies in anthropology is very difficult because, among researchers, kinship early on became the basis for understanding …
Family planning refers to the use of modern contraception and other methods of birth control to regulate the number, timing, and spacing of human births. It allows parents, particularly mothers, to plan their lives without being overly subject to sexual and social imperatives. However, family planning is not seen by all as a humane or necessary intervention. It is an arena of contestation within b…
For the purposes of this article, fascism will be treated as a politicized and revolutionary form of ultranationalism bent on mobilizing all remaining "healthy" social and political energies to resist the perceived onslaught of decadence so as to achieve the goal of a regenerated national community. It is a project that involves the rebirth (palingenesis) of both the political system…
Fatalism is the thesis that whatever happens must happen. This is not to be confused with the completely innocuous idea that whatever happens, happens. Nor is fatalism to be conflated with the proposition that, necessarily, whatever happens happens, where this assertion simply expresses the tautologous nature of the prior innocuous idea. Fatalism is a substantive thesis that claims that the occurr…
Feminism may broadly be defined as a movement seeking the reorganization of the world upon the basis of sex equality, rejecting all forms of differentiation among or discrimination against individuals upon grounds of sex. It urges a worldview that rejects male-created ideologies. At another level, it is also a mode of analysis and politics, committed to freeing all women of gender-based oppression…
Feminism is broadly defined as the struggle for the liberation of women, and encompasses epistemologies, methodologies, theories, and modes of activism that seek to bring an end to the oppression and subordination of women by men. An individual person espousing feminism is referred to as a feminist, while collective mobilizations of women against the oppression of women are referred to as feminist…
There are many definitions of feminism, and many scholars now assert that the word should be used in its plural form to encompass women's various social locations. As such, Chicana feminisms address the specific historical, economic, and social experiences of women of Mexican descent in the United States. The field of Chicana feminisms developed within the context of feminist movements in t…
The term Islamic feminism was first used in the 1990s. It is not certain who coined the term. Nor is it evident that those who first used it were aware of the explosive impact that the juxtaposition of these two words was to have. Rather than imagining and promoting a revolution in the heart of Islam, these women in Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and some Asian Muslim communities were merely describi…
Historically, women's participation in revolutionary struggles or mass sociopolitical movements has been linked with the development of a feminist consciousness. Studies of women involved in revolutionary movements, such as the Chinese, Cuban, Mexican, and Nicaraguan revolutions, document the origins of feminist movements within the context of male-dominated nationalist struggles. Women may…
Since the seventeenth century, thought about fetishism has been concerned with four overriding questions, all of them emerging in conflicts over representation that arose at the borders between cultural and historical worlds. These four questions concern the relationship between images and their referents in religious discourse; the attribution of causality and the nature of reason; the means for …
Fetishism is a term widely disseminated in literary and cultural studies. It carries a variety of generic meanings. Most of these derive to some degree from Marxist and psychoanalytic discourses, where the term fetishism has technical significance. …
In everyday speech, f eudal can mean "aristocratic" (in contrast to democratic), "sumptuous," "reactionary," "hierarchic" (as opposed to egalitarian), "primitive," "medieval," or simply "despotic" or "oppressive" when speaking about political, social, or economic regimes. Since the ninet…
In physics, the field concept describes the distribution and propagation of effects such as magnetism and gravity through space. Field theories have helped implement the program of unifying the "forces" of nature. …
The metaphysical notion of form (eidos, morphe, Gr.; idea, forma, species, Lat.), as it emerged in the works of Plato, must be carefully distinguished from the everyday notion from which it derived, namely, the shape or outer appearance of a thing as it presents itself to the eyes. The outer appearance of a mannequin, for instance, may be deceptively similar to that of a human being, yet, the form…
Formalism in literary studies was not merely about formal elements of literature, though it stressed the importance of studying form. In fact, it proclaimed the unity of form and content by emphasizing that in a literary work the former cannot properly be understood when separated from the latter and vice versa. At the same time, formalism stressed the need to view literature as an autonomous verb…
When reasons are beliefs, we have inferential justification: one belief is justified on the basis of another belief. How is the latter, supporting belief itself justified? Is another supporting belief always needed? According to foundationalism, another supporting belief is not always needed. …
The concept of "free will" developed slowly. Discussions of the "will" arose only when ancient philosophical descriptions of intentional action came into contact with religious concerns about human and divine freedom. The predominant contemporary understanding of freedom as a completely undetermined choice between any two alternatives was introduced at the end of the Mi…
The visibility of "friendship" in historical writings has fluctuated over time. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, friendship was the dominant paradigm. In medieval Europe, Christian teachings subordinated human friendship to spiritual friendship. In the modern period, with its focus on impartiality, friendship was relegated to the private sphere. Toward the end of the twentieth cent…
A term used loosely to describe a reaction of (neo)traditional religion against the pressures of modernity, fundamentalism became a widespread topic of interest in the media and the academy during the last quarter of the twentieth century. According to many observers, fundamentalism is a worldwide phenomenon, arising in various societies with differing cultural backgrounds and experiences of moder…
Futurology is the study of the future to obtain knowledge of it on the basis of present trends. Beginning in the 1960s, it is a relatively new field of study. The word futurology was first used in 1943 by Ossip Flechteim, a political scientist, to describe a new scientific field of human knowledge based on a critical, systematic, and normative analysis of questions related to future. However, fut…
