Game theory, the formal analysis of conflict and cooperation, has pervaded every area of economics and the study of business strategy in the past quarter-century and exerts increasing influence in evolutionary biology, international relations, and political science, where the rational-choice approach to politics has been highly controversial. In a strategic game, each player chooses a strategy (a …
The term garden, which is of Germanic origin, means "yard" or "enclosure" and denotes ways of organizing earth, water, plants and, sometimes, people, animals, and art (sculpture, architecture, theater, music, and poetry), the formal qualitities of which are determined as much by pleasure, artistry, or aesthetics as by convenience or necessity. This definition excludes a…
Gay studies in the early twenty-first century is a lively interdisciplinary field encompassing studies of literature, anthropology, sociology, psychology, the visual arts, indeed all fields in which nonheteronormative sexuality—and its institutionalized suppression—has become a point of politico-philosophical argument. It has two origins: a more recent starting point in twentieth-cen…
Gender is an old term in linguistic discourse used to designate whether nouns are masculine, feminine, or neuter. It was not normally used in the language of social or natural sciences or in sexology until 1955, when John Money adopted the term to serve as an umbrella concept to distinguish femininity, or womanliness, and masculinity, or manliness, from biological sex (male or female). Though the …
The term gender has no exact correlate in Middle Eastern sources, but instead is identified by scholars as a major analytical tool in the definition of differences between men and women. Many researchers in every discipline argue that gender has always been embedded in all societies, past and present. Scholars who study gender seek to question dominant, normative definitions of every society…
Gender, other than a biological or physical determination of the sexes, is a cultural and social classification of masculinity and femininity. Gender presentations in art are the outcome of the cultural process of defining sexual and social identity. Pictorial art and literature, as means of expression through transformation and stylization, are the predominant media reflecting this cultural proce…
Gender studies in anthropology has a relatively short history, dating to the latter half of the twentieth century, but its prehistory can be discerned in the discipline's early concern with kinship and social reproduction. At the turn of the twentieth century, anthropologists focused their attentions mainly on small-scale societies in which kinship appeared to provide the organizing structu…
General will (volonté générale) is inextricably associated with the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). While Rousseau appropriated the general will from the theological debates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, he made the concept his own with the political formulation he gave it in his Du contrat social (1762; On the social contract). Inte…
In its most widely accepted modern sense, a generation is comprised of a group of people born around the same time and sharing certain formative experiences. The concept of generations has been used by social scientists, historians, and anthropologists to explain social change over time and to identify differences within social groups. The term has also been applied loosely to describe literary gr…
Genetics as a discipline is young, but the concept that forms its subject—inheritance—stretches back in time. The word has been formed from the adjective genetic, found in the sciences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—for example, biogenetic law, genetic affinity, genetic psychology—and meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "pertaining to,…
One of the most startling and disturbing revelations from the Nuremburg Trials following World War II was the extent of the atrocities committed by the Nazi government in the name of genetics. Massive sterilizations and euthanasia programs for those deemed genetically unfit ("lives not worth living" in Nazi phraseology) had raised ethical issues about the use and abuse of science an…
The notion of genius as it is known in the early twenty-first century emerged most fully during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment period. Although the idea of genius was around before the time of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Kant most clearly defined it in the late eighteenth century in his third critique, The Critique of Judgment. In fact, Kant's discussion still influences contemp…
Mass slaughter of human beings by other human beings has been a recurrent phenomenon over the centuries, but until recently neither governments nor international legal specialists had sought to devise formal rules and institutions that could help prevent, or if necessary punish, the perpetrators of large-scale atrocities. Massacres that took place during and immediately after World War I, when Tur…
Genre is the division and grouping of texts on the basis of formal, thematic, or stylistic criteria. Texts may be produced, it can be argued, in compliance with or against the strictures of an established and identifiable genre, though it is equally feasible to impose a genre identity upon a work in retrospect, thus attributing to it further possibilities of meaning or, conversely, limiting its po…
Only relatively recently accepted as a subject of study by universities, geography has been characterized as a Cinderella among the disciplines. It was not one of the traditional liberal arts, and it appeared in its modern form in the curriculum of universities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it still remains a small component, and is sometimes not present at all, in institutions of hig…
While the origins of geometry are likely to remain a matter of pure speculation, the elaborate written cultures of ancient Egypt and Babylon provide a wealth of information about the uses of geometry. Area and volume measurements abound in work connected with taxation, the provision of cities, and large-scale building works. Sometimes the Babylonians' evidence (which survives because they w…
The concept of gesture suffers to some extent from insufficiently defined and imprecisely drawn outlines of what we understand by this term. The Oxford English Dictionary defines gesture as any "significant movement of limb or body"; Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines it as "any movement of the body, or part of the body, that expresses or emphasizes an idea…
Jewish family in Nazi ghetto, Lublin, Poland, c. 1941. Although the term ghetto has evolved to serve as a name for any poor urban neighborhood, it was originally used in the sixteenth century to denote an area in which Jews were forced to live. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS The name of a district in sixteenth-century Venice where Jews were required to live, ghetto came to be the name for any segrega…
Reflection on gifts and their paradoxes goes back to the Bible, where humans are reminded that everything they have is a gift from God, for which they must be grateful and which should inspire them to give to others. Yet the Scriptures also condemn gifts, as those to judges, which corrupt or harm. Greek literary texts describe a wide range of gift practices, from the honorable gifts among warriors…
Globalization represents a process of rapid intensification of broad economic, political, and cultural interconnectedness among the different actors in the global system. The process is qualitatively different from the global expansion of product markets that is inherent to the capitalist socioeconomic system and emerges during certain epochs of capitalism under conditions of political and economi…
Globalization is a far-ranging topic. It has as many perspectives as commentators. Western views of globalization often focus on economics and politics, while Eastern views often focus on philosophy and culture. Two Canadian scholars, Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, seem to bridge both East and West in their studies. …
Globalization is a complex and controversial concept. There is little agreement in the literature on what it is, whether it is or is not taking place, whether it is new or old, and if it is good or bad. In its narrower conception, globalization signifies a process of intensification of economic, political, and cultural interconnectedness among the various actors in the global system. In the econom…
The plurality of available sources, from the Nag Hammadi texts to the writings of those fathers of the church, the so-called heresiologists who fought against Gnosticism as a heresy, makes difficult a reconstruction both of its origins and its history. The use of the category "Gnosticism" has been criticized because it provides an overview that hides the complexity of ancient histori…
Philosophical accounts of "the good" are, broadly speaking, accounts of what it is to be an object of value—especially of moral value. A systematic study of these accounts is aided by such distinctions as the following. …
The activities characterized as Greek science cover a wide range of practices and theories that do not correspond to modern science in a simple or meaningful way. The boundaries between disciplines were fluid in the ancient period and the definition of subjects and methodologies were discussed vigorously. Hence, it is often futile to try to draw firm boundaries between subjects such as philosophy,…
Most contemporary understandings of happiness are hedonic: happiness is a state of feeling most precisely defined by the subject of the feeling. Happiness in this sense is subjective and can be of brief duration. Ancient discussions of happiness, however, revolve around the Greek term eudaimonia, and while this word is commonly translated as "happiness," it has a different meaning an…
Harmony is derived from the classical Greek harmonia (meaning a joint between the planks of a ship or a joining of those planks). From the beginning, the term was also used in its current metaphorical sense, that of a combination of parts or related things to form a consistent whole or an agreement. …
As a concept, hate has several interrelated dimensions. It attempts to provide historical, psychological, and sociocultural depth to the forms of hostility and animosity that the term hate ostensibly defines, and to make the idea clear in terms of its linguistic usages. As such, it faces obstacles that often appear insuperable. Nonetheless, "hate crimes"—criminal acts and beha…
Health and disease seem at first glance to be obvious and opposing concepts. We are either healthy or suffering from some disease. In practice, however, health and disease are neither clearly defined nor mutually exclusive. Asthmatics and diabetics have won Olympic gold medals, and amputees can live to a ripe old age. "Healthy" people in their eighties cannot do things they could eas…
Aspects of heaven and hell cross religious traditions. Paradise can be a city, a palace, a court, a garden, a vision of God, a mystical diagram, or an ineffable concept. Physical, indeed sexual, terms and images express the soul's union with God. In Hell, fires, dragons, serpents, stench, cacophony, torturers, and their paraphernalia abound. Christian, Islamic, Zoroastrian, and Japanese sou…
The ideas on heaven and hell are closely associated with human imagination about the afterlife in Asian civilizations. The images of heaven and hell, however, vary greatly in different regions such as in the southern, central, and eastern parts of the Asian continent, and they have changed significantly throughout history. There is no such thing as a unique Asian mind or a collective Asian concept…
Hedonism is a modern word derived from the Greek hedone, or "pleasure." As a philosophical position, moral hedonism justifies pleasure as a good, or even the good. Its history can be traced back to Hellenistic philosophy. Now, for Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, hedone is both the first and the worst candidate. Only the Epicureans, after the Cyrenaics, accept it fully as the condit…
Given the complexity of his thought, it is not surprising that Hegel's philosophy has been interpreted in a number of different and often opposed ways. As such, while many philosophical movements might be described as "Hegelian," there is no univocal sense of this term, nor any unanimity about what the proper interpretation of Hegel's idealism involves. Perhaps because …
Hegemony, from the Greek hegemón (guide, ruler, leader) and hegemonia (rule, leadership), denotes the preeminent influence a state, social class, group, or individual exercises over others. Today it is especially associated with the Italian Marxist and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), for whom it is the core and organizing concept of his social and political ideas. More recen…
Heresy is derived from a Greek word literally meaning "a choice." St. Irenaeus (c. 120 to 140–c. 200 to 203) defined heresy as deviation from the standard of sound doctrine. This definition provided a model for subsequent conceptions of heresy. Referring to the Greek word, St. Jerome (c. 347–419 or 420) wrote that each one chooses the rule that one judges to be the best…
Traditionally understood as the art of interpretation (ars hermeneutica) that provided rules for the interpretation of sacred texts, hermeneutics today serves to characterize a broad current in contemporary continental philosophy that deals with the issues of interpretation and stresses the historical and linguistic nature of our world-experience. Since this characterization is also valid for cont…
Hierarchy (Greek hierarchia; from hieros, sacred archein, rule) is a kind of order, supposing existence of higher (or more sacred) and lower (less sacred) levels of reality. Order, in its turn, is a linkage of fundamentally different elements by means of general laws, so that the whole is greater than a simple arithmetical sum of its parts. Since order presupposes difference, it often takes the fo…
Hinduism, the religion of nearly one billion people mostly of South Asian provenance or descent, is notoriously difficult to define or even to describe with accuracy and comprehensiveness. Like all complex and ancient religious traditions, it is problematic to speak about Hinduism as if it were one monolithic religion rather than merely a label for many different traditions. The conglomeration of…
Historical and dialectical materialism are doctrines in the philosophy of history and in metaphysics, respectively. They were developed within the Marxist tradition and refer to ideas found in the works of Karl Marx (1818–1883). However, neither term Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). Engels, a friend and collaborator of Karl Marx, believed that the concept of private property was to …
Historicism (German Historismus, French historisme, Italian storicismo) is a term of Romantic origins associated first with the German Historical Schools and then more generally with historical method as applied to all the arts and sciences and to human life. "Historicism" appeared first in a fragment of Novalis, who contrasted it with other methods (chemical, mathematical, artistic,…
Economic history emerged in the late nineteenth century as an academic field devoted to the study of past economic phenomena and processes. Since then it has undergone significant changes in terms of its thematic and theoretical concerns, analytical methodologies and language, and the spatial and temporal scales in which it is framed. Distinctive national and regional approaches and traditions can…
The key to the conceptualization of history is the effort to essentialize the past, first in a Herodotean or Thucydidean narrative, and then in more rational, conjectural, philosophical, and religious ways. The "past" became (in Arnold Toynbee's phrase) an "intelligible field of study," and anthropomorphism as well as religious beliefs and ethnic prejudices came …
Codes of honor are all-pervasive in human societies, but the modern study of honor as an academic formulation originated in the Mediterranean region, and especially in the work of anthropologists working in Spain and Greece. Julio Caro Baroja, J. G Peristiany, and Julian Pitt-Rivers wrote some of the seminal and most influential works on the concept of honor. They placed the honor complex in the M…
Ancient and modern Arabs, as well as other ethnic groups of Muslim and Mediterranean peoples, adopted ideas of honor that reinforce the ties of an individual to his or her tribal clan or extended family. One type of honor, sharaf, applies to men and is attained through maintenance of a family's reputation, hospitality, generosity, chivalry, bravery, piety, and, sometimes, nobility or politi…
Human capital refers to the knowledge, skills, and capabilities of individuals that generate economic output. Human capital averages about two-thirds of the total value of the capital of most economies, which includes land, machinery, and other physical assets as well as the skills and talents of people. The value of human capital is often apparent after physical destruction, as during World War I…
The idea of human rights posits that human beings, regardless of extrinsic differences in circumstance (nationality, class, religion) or physical condition (race, gender, age), possess a basic and absolute dignity that must be respected by governments and other people. Sometimes these rights claims have been grounded in systems of positive law, sometimes in conceptions of human nature or divine cr…
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations (U.N.) on 10 December 1948, provided the most detailed outline of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of individuals in the modern era. Furthermore, it was a milestone in that these rights and freedoms applied to every person around the world. The language of the document was, however, gender neu…
A common misconception of African humanism is that it is a set of values brought into, instead of emerging from, communities on the African continent. This prejudice is due primarily to the influence of modern European humanism, which is premised upon a secular naturalism as the only model of humanism. The modern European humanist tradition, which treats Christianity as the model of all religion,…
The dominant Chinese conception of humanism is the Confucian theory of ren. The term ren has been translated in various ways, including as "benevolence," "goodness," "virtue," "humanity," "humanness," and "being authoritative." These different translations indicate the complexity of this Confucian theory. Ren as th…
The introduction of the term humanism is commonly attributed to the German pedagogical theorist F. J. Niethammer's 1808 book, which promoted reading of the ancient classics among secondary students as a counterweight to scientific and technological training. The word soon enjoyed wide currency in many European languages, in part because the much earlier Italian term umanista was already use…
In the mid-twentieth century, Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–1999) established the understanding of Renaissance humanism accepted by all scholars in the field. Humanists or umanisti were practitioners of the studia humanitatis or liberal arts: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy. Their origins are traceable to the notaries who worked for courts and cities in medieval Italy…
The philosophy and ideology of secular humanism has its roots in Enlightenment thought and is based in large part on the Western tradition of liberalism and notions about the status and role of science in the modern world. At base it is a nontheistic belief system that upholds the prime importance of rationality, human autonomy, and democracy. The term secular humanism has come to be widely used i…
While reason tells us that it is obvious to anyone, irrespective of his or her background, that humans are bipedal, featherless creatures, other characteristics we attribute to humans are not always so obvious. Also, while we all appear to assume that humans are creatures who have minds, in contrast to other creatures, it is not quite obvious what is meant by "mind" or what happens a…
Confucius's study of ancient Chinese classics led him to believe that during the reigns of the "sage kings" Yao and Shun, China had been well governed and harmony had prevailed throughout their realms. This was accomplished not through harsh punishments or excessive regulations, but by the moral force of their personalities and their attention to social rituals. They are extol…
Studies of European views of man and of the dignity of man have been central to the history of ideas, and books continue to be published discussing Western or European views of man. Meanwhile, women, lower-class men, and people of color have delved into the scholarship to determine if a thinker's text intended man (homme in French) to be generic as in the Hebrew adam, Greek anthropos, or La…
The otherwise distinctive presentation of the male body with shortened extremities, diminutive hands, enlarged feet, elongated torso, protruding belly, and protracted phallus on the otherwise untitled Baluban sculpture Male Figure (probably nineteenth century), might at first glance appear as a "primitive" distortion of the human image. However, prolonged observation proffers the ind…
Humor is such an integral part of the human psyche that philosophers and other intellectuals have long been fascinated with its origins in and its effects on the human brain. Several early theorists have provided subject matter for continuing observation and debate. The Greek word chumoi means "juices," and the ancient Greeks used the word, from which we get the English humor (as wel…
Hygiene is defined in current English dictionaries as "the science of health." This definition, though formally correct, hides a long history of change in the word's use, from its holistic classical meaning of "individual regimens to preserve health" to its nineteenth-century connotations of "social medicine" (including lethal eugenics programs), to…
Iconography is the description, classification, and interpretation of the subject matter of a work of art. Derived from the Greek words eikon, meaning image or icon, and graphia, meaning description, writing, or sketch, the word iconography is one of the least understood, most abused, and most flexible terms in the English language. Its primary purpose is to understand and explicate the meaning be…
The term idealism in its broadest sense denotes the philosophical position that ideas (mental or spiritual entities) are primary and lie at the very foundation of reality, knowledge, and morality, while non-ideal entities (such as physical or material things) are secondary and perhaps even illusory. Strands of idealistic thought can be found in ancient and medieval philosophy, but modern idealism …
The "history of ideas," phrase and concept, goes back almost three centuries to the work of J. J. Brucker (1696–1770) and Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) in the early eighteenth century, followed in the nineteenth century by Victor Cousin (1792–1867) and his eclectic and "spiritualist" philosophy. The story begins with Brucker's Historia doctri…
General problems about identity had been discussed long before the early modern period, but the problem of personal identity in the form in which it is so widely discussed today has its origin in John Locke's (1632–1704) chapter "Of Identity and Diversity," which he added to the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694). Indeed, most early twenty…
Although identity has deeps roots in social psychology, sociology, bridges between them (e.g., symbolic interactionism), and related disciplines, the explicit distinction between personal and social identity, within social psychology at least, can be traced to J. C. Turner's seminal article "Towards a Cognitive Redefinition of the Group" (1982). This formed the basis for self-…
Within Western thought the subject—that is, the self as a thinking, feeling, psycho-physiological entity—has been traditionally defined as a centered consciousness, characterized and unified by one self-defining identity. Within this tradition, a centered subjectivity was long thought to exist and function independently of the social contexts surrounding it, without significant influ…
Although Filipinos lived in the United States in the sixteenth century, the first large Asian group in the modern era arrived in the United States in the nineteenth century. Since then two inclinations have simultaneously characterized how Asian-Americans' ethnic identity has been viewed. One tendency has been to look at their identity either in terms of a collective panethnic identity as &…
As a collective that has lived and created its history for the most part not merely in diaspora but among a vast array of "host" peoples, Jewry across the generations has been powerfully marked by the need to negotiate, on the one hand, elements of identity understood to be shared with all Jews at all times and places and, on the other hand, cultural motifs and practices shared with …
Placing the words images, icons, and idols together as the subject of an entry that seeks to articulate the perspective of world culture suggests their intimate relationship. Such a grouping also demands that an emphasis be placed on the particular role biblical religions have had in the development and use of the last two terms, the ideas of "icon" and "idol" that play…
The idea of imagination is sometimes thought of as a product of the Enlightenment. However, although it only came to full flower in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, its roots are much more ancient. …
Indeed, in the early twenty-first century, Nicholas Smith has argued that Plato's views in the Republic seem to be intended to provoke thought rather than to set forth consistent views. As such, we should not be surprised that in Plato's work another "view" of immortality can be found. Plato's Symposium offers this alternative view. Here Plato's Socrates r…
Impressionism was an artistic movement that originated in France in the 1860s and 1870s. In 1874, painters including Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Armand Guillaumin, and Paul Cézanne participated in the first of eight independent Impressionist exhibitions held until 1886. They were eventually joined by Gustave Caillebotte and the A…
The term indigenismo encompasses a diverse array of intellectual production concerning the indigenous peoples of Latin America. The twentieth century in particular witnessed an explosion of literary, critical, and visual work on the figure of the Indian. It should be made clear from the outset that the term, although most closely associated with Mexico and Guatemala and especially with the Andean …
Individualism endorses the principle that the ends or purposes of the human individual possess dignity and worth that take precedence over communal, metaphysical, cosmological, or religious priorities. While individualism may appeal to certain metaphysical or epistemological schools of thought such as nominalism or empiricism, it will be treated here as primarily a moral and/or political doctrine.…
An abundance of studies on the subject of intellectuals has focused on societal differences and disparate issues, and featured a wide array of eras, cultures, and practices. A comparison by Raymond Williams between the French tradition of the intellectual engaged in public issues and the more reserved role ascribed to his or her English counterpart attests to this difference among societies. It ha…
Intentionality is that feature of many mental states by which they are directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world. So, for example, if I have a belief, it must be a belief that such and such is the case. If I have a desire, it must be the desire that such and such should be the case. If I have an intention, it must be the intention that I do something. Intentionality is …
The notion of intercession (shafa'a) is present within Muslim religious tradition as well as Muslim and Middle Eastern social and political culture. Intercession implies a special intervention or act of patronage providing favors, power, victory, or, in the religious variety, redemption from the terrible fate of sinners. Although there have been some objections, historic and modern, to this…
The development of innovative and creative ideas in the academy is taking place in the early 2000s largely across departmental and disciplinary divides. Intradisciplinary practice tends to be microfocused and piecemeal. Innovation proceeds intradisciplinarily, where it proceeds at all, mostly in small if not minute increments. Departmental institutionalization itself has been transforming, prompte…
The term internal colonialism defines a condition of oppression or subordination, often of one ethnic group over another (as in the subordination of Mexicans in the United States at the conclusion of the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846–1848). Some view the term as a contraposition to the claim that all people in the United States "are immigrants." For example, immigrant does not desc…
The image of a peaceful, orderly world where men and nations resolve their differences without war, where the lion lies down with the lamb, has haunted humankind for millennia. Roman law expressed the gulf between the ideal and the reality concisely by contrasting the condition of man living under the ius naturale, the natural law, a world of peace and harmony, with the human condition as it actua…
The problem of interpretation is as old as the written record, even as old as the capacity for human beings to disagree fundamentally. It was raised by Plato. It marked many a conflict in early Christendom. From the Middle Ages to early modernity, cultural texts proliferated. Interpretation was the task of those who were in charge of biblical exegeses and of those who judged a text's origin…
After striking its roots in Egypt and in the far West, Islam was carried into the fringes of black Africa by indigenous tribesmen. Through the foundation of trading centers, the movement of populations, and the affiliation with local ruling elites, Muslim influence in the interior of the region was strongly felt. In their eleventh-century search for gold, Berber nomadic tribesmen reached the area …
A common misconception, based on the fact that Iran is today predominantly Shii, holds that Iran is the historic "homeland" of Shii Islam. However, the truth is that Medina and southern Iraq are the original centers of Shii Islam, which spread from there to other areas in the Muslim world. The heyday of the Shiis was in the tenth and eleventh centuries, when dynasties representing t…
The Muslim population of Southeast Asia is in excess of 250 million. It is the religion of the majority in Indonesia and Malaysia, with significant minorities in Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines. Islam has a five-hundred-year history in this region. Importantly, it was not imposed by conquest but freely adopted, initially by royal and upper classes and then percolating down to the masses. …
The term Sunni is an adjective formed from the noun sunna (plural sunan), an ancient Arabic word meaning "customary practice." Although in the pre-Islamic world of tribal Arabia the word sunna referred generally to the time-tested and widely accepted customs of a tribe, in the Islamic period the term came to refer specifically to the customary practices or "way" of the …
History of science in non-Western societies is often either disregarded—because it is not linked with that in Western societies—or disfigured into a member of a chain of transmission that links antiquity with Latin Christendom. Rather than attempt to fit Islamic science into the history or notions of Western science, this essay examines the relationships between various scientific di…
Famous for its promotion of nonviolence and often paired with Buddhism as one of ancient India's two greatest dissenting religions, Jainism is currently professed by roughly 0.4 percent of the population of India. Its adherents are prominent in business, and some of modern India's wealthiest and most powerful families are Jains. Jain communities are divided between a majority of lay …
From the short-term horizon of the Heisei era (the name Heisei, meaning "peace everywhere," was introduced in 1989 by the emperor Akihito after the death of his father, the emperor Showa [Hirohito]), the other is still the West and more precisely the West as an idealized United States. However, a strong conviction that it is time for Japan to establish a new order has surfaced in the…
Jihad, in Islam, is an idea of action. The Arabic word literally means "striving." When followed by the modifying phrase fisabil Allah, "in the path of God," or when this phrase is absent but assumed to be in force, jihad has the specific sense of fighting for the sake of God and religion. Other Arabic words are closely related in meaning and usage, including ribat, wh…
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's (1901–1981) use of the term jouissance, like most other Lacanian concepts, shifts over the years and can be difficult to pin down. Translating from the French, jouissance can be rendered literally as "enjoyment," "both in the sense of deriving pleasure from something, and in the legal sense of exercising property rights"…
As a religion developing over three millennia, Judaism changed, diversified, and acculturated to many cultural and spiritual environments, while maintaining at the same time some basic characteristics. In the following, an attempt is made to describe both the continuities and the variations characteristic of the various forms of Judaism up to 1800. Four main concepts organize the majority of the d…
Judaism has never been monolithically uniform. Made irreducibly complex by 3,500 years of turbulent history, it resists simplification. Its data refuse to be straitjacketed or handled dispassionately. Impartial attempts to understand it are easily spoiled by the partisan sympathies and deeply held antagonisms it activates in observers. Consider a mere sampling of the evidence. Its implications sta…
Virtually everyone becomes involved in disputes about justice at some point. Sometimes our involvement in such disputes is rooted in the fact that we believe ourselves to be victims of some form of injustice, such as job discrimination; sometimes our involvement is rooted in the fact that others believe us to be the perpetrators or at least the beneficiaries of some form of injustice affecting the…
Justice appears as a paradoxical concept in the history of the United States. On the one hand, it has been absent as a rallying cry in the major struggles that have shaped, and continue to shape, the plurality of identities of the American nation. The concept "justice" is not prominent in the Declaration of Independence or in the Constitution. It was not the cornerstone of the abolit…
In what follows, central themes and institutions related to justice that appeared within Confucian and Daoist teachings in preimperial China will be explained and evaluated, followed by brief comments about later developments. …
The philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) radically transformed the rationalism and empiricism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and has set many of the problems for epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of science, moral and political philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of history, and philosophy of religion ever since. Almost all philosophy after Kant could be divided into …
Kinship—which can be initially described as the study of the links between people established on the basis of descent, marriage, or adoption—has been a defining domain of anthropological investigation since the inception of this discipline in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. The detailed description of the complexities of kinship systems was for many decades considere…
Four words of ancient Greek are important to the first philosophical discussions of knowledge in the Western tradition. In a given context any of them might be translated with the word "knowledge": epistēmē, technē, mētis, and gnōsis. Epistēmē names the most philosophical idea of knowledge: contemplative, disinterested, logical knowledge of t…
The Oxford English Dictionary defines landscape as both a verb and a noun, signifying not simply its multiple references in vernacular and specialized parlance or its active and passive modes but more importantly the varying perceptions of landscape as an artistic, cultural, and religious entity. Among the definitions of landscape as a noun, the OED proffers first "A picture representing na…
Estimates of the number of languages spoken on earth at the turn of the twenty-first century range between four and six thousand. Considering that this number has been rapidly declining for the last couple of centuries, there must at one time have been many more languages, perhaps upwards of ten thousand. Of the languages spoken in the twenty-first century, a few have tens or hundreds of millions …
Language and writing are not the same (although people now confuse them), and the former is far older than the latter. Human spoken language developed late in the Paleolithic, probably 100,000–120,000 years ago, whereas true writing—the representation of language, element by element, in a permanent medium—was not invented until about 5,200 years ago. …
Only in recent times has philosophy of language been considered a distinct branch of philosophy. But ancient and medieval philosophers had different, sophisticated theories about the relation between language—both individual words and whole sentences—and reality, and the thirteenth century saw one of the most thorough attempts ever to give an abstract, analytical account of the gramm…
Although discussions of language in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophy foreshadowed many issues that came to full bloom in the twentieth century, before the twentieth century language was thought to have a secondary role in understanding the special place human beings have in the world. The fundamental concern was the problem of knowledge. How is it possible for human beings to have kno…
The development of law and jurisprudential ideas since the 1970s represents a significant change from the conventional models that had earlier dominated the province of legal theory in the history of ideas. This entry focuses on two salient theoretical emphases that have continued to influence developments of conventional legal theory and postmodern paradigms of legal thought: the analytical tradi…
Islam, like Judaism and unlike Christianity, is a nomocracy, a religion of the law as opposed to theology. It is evident from the Koranic text that sacred law is a crucial feature of the covenants that God establishes, through prophets, with the various nations of mankind. Prophets are united by their main directive, to worship God alone, by their moral exhortations, and by accompanying miracles p…
Although there are seemingly as many descriptions of leadership as there are men and women who fill leadership roles, most meaningful definitions echo the one commonly ascribed to former U.S. president Harry S. Truman: leadership is the ability to get others to willingly move in a new direction in which they are not naturally inclined to move on their own. While the related but distinct concept of…
People have long wondered how best to characterize learning and memory. Most people typically conceive of memory as a place in which information is stored. As Henry Roediger has noted, this spatial metaphor has dominated the study of memory: "We speak of storing memories, of searching for and locating them. We organize our thoughts; we look for memories that have been lost, and if we are fo…
Shang Yang aimed to turn Qin into a powerful state through two parallel and interconnected processes: encouraging agricultural production and strengthening military prowess. To achieve these goals he advocated a clear system of rewards and punishments, according to which aristocratic ranks would be granted for high grain yields and for military merits, while high taxation would be applied against …
It is widely agreed that fundamental to liberalism is a concern to protect and promote individual liberty. This means that individuals can decide for themselves what to do or believe with respect to particular areas of human activity such as religion or economics. The contrast is with a society in which the society decides what the individual is to do or believe. In those areas of a society in whi…
The broad definition of liberation theology stresses the interrelatedness of differing structures of oppression and domination. Liberation from oppressive structures necessarily involves political, economic, social, racial, ethnic, and sexual aspects. As a paradigm, liberation theology today places explicit emphasis on assessing different forms of human oppression and suffering, and liberation fro…
Liberty is an integral concept in Western political and social thought. Liberty as an inalienable social and political attribute of individuals emerged in the formation of the modern political discourse in the West. Since Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) the concept has often been categorized in a threefold manner: moral liberties (freedom of moral choice, such as freedom of consci…
Throughout recorded history human beings have recognized the qualitative difference between the living and non-living worlds, the animate and inanimate. Placing that recognition on solid, rational footing or giving it a quantitative basis has remained a major challenge, however. What exactly makes a living being so different from one that is nonliving? Living organisms carry out oxidation, for exa…
The Sphinx, according to an ancient Greek tale, was a monster with the face of a woman, the body of a lion, and gigantic wings. Sent by the goddess Hera to punish the city of Thebes, she sat on a hilltop and stopped passersby, posing them a riddle: "What has one voice, and is four-footed, two-footed, and three-footed?" Every time the Thebans gave a wrong answer, she devoured one of t…
Many social historians have argued that adolescence emerged as a distinct life stage only with the advent of industrialization. Using case studies from regions where the historical record is plentiful, such as France, England, and the United States, scholars contend that prior to the industrial revolution, the physical processes of maturity did not necessarily signal a change in life status for th…
The study of the human life cycle is primarily a study of the aging process. The question of why humans age has long intrigued social and biological scientists. While a fountain of youth has yet to be discovered, public health and hygiene interventions have lengthened the human life expectancy greatly over the course of the past hundred years. And yet life expectancy varies greatly within and betw…
"Where word breaks off no thing may be": this is the line from a poem by Stefan George repeatedly cited by Martin Heidegger to indicate his version of the linguistic turn, which affected many philosophers in the early twentieth century—literary scholars already having made the turn, whether consciously or not (Heidegger, p. 60). The phrase "linguistic turn" is ac…
When the definitive account of post-1960s intellectual technologies is written, the history of literary movements will constitute a key chapter. Perhaps paradigmatic of the closing decades of the twentieth century in its dramatic shifts and realignments, literary criticism at the opening of the twenty-first century shows all the earmarks of specialized knowledge, professionalization, and market ma…
History traces the passage of men and women through time. Literary history charts their developments and experiments in writing in the hope that global discourse will be stimulated and cultures come to understand one another. It relates, compares, and categorizes the poetry, prose, drama, and reportage of authors at various periods. The process started when the artistic deployment of language (poe…
Almost all senses of the English word literature and its cognates in other Indo-European languages can eventually be traced back to the act of scratching (on a piece of leather or on clay, stone, wood, wax, pottery, lead, or papyrus). But this primitive act very quickly became associated with superior development: civilization. …
African literature is best understood within the context of Ali Mazrui's categorization of African historical experience as a "triple heritage": Africa as a space produced by endogenous historical traditions, Arab/Islamic influences, and Western Judeo-Christian influences. This triple heritage has produced a literature characterized by a tripodal identity, based on its relatio…
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. A host of philosophical themes have clustered around this central concern: the nature of truth and validity, of possibility and necessity; the semantics of words, sentences, and arguments; and even questions about substances and accidents, free will and determinism. …
This article surveys many of the main positions that have been held in the logic and philosophy of mathematics from around 1800 up to recent times. Most attention is given to symbolic logics of some kind. No position has been definitive; indeed, especially over the last seventy years the variety has continually increased. To compensate for this article's lack of exhaustiveness, the bibliog…
In the West, probably more has been written about love than any other topic except the nature of God. There is, however, no consensus on what the word love or amor, agape, Liebe, eros, or hundreds of other terms signifies. It is clear, however, that it is more than a simple animal urge to procreate. Harry Harlow, for example, demonstrated that mother love was essential to the normal development of…
Loyalty is devotion to a cause and is marked by faithfulness, a sense of just purpose, and a willingness to serve in spite of any suffering that may result from service. Dual loyalty involves simultaneous obligations, express or implied, to two parties, with the second party typically constituting a state. Multiple loyalties can threaten the security and survival of a state. Nationality may affect…
Lysenkoism is a censorious name for a movement that demands either censure or faith in agrobiology, as Soviet agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898–1976) called his aggressive creation. He also named it Michurinism, in tribute to the plant breeder Ivan V. Michurin, who won fame with claims of improving fruit while scorning genetics. Obscurantist (mrakobes), the word a geneticist flung …
