Durkheim’s philosophy lectures: Notes from the Lycée de Sens Course, 1883–1884

Durkheim's Philosophy Lectures: Notes from the Lycee de Sens Course, 1883-1884

Volumn , Issue , 2004, Pages 1-339

  Gross, Neil ^a   Jones, Robert Alun ^b  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84926965670     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511499302     Document Type: Book

References (95)

1. Abelard, Peter (1079-1142). French philosopher, logician, and theologian. A student of the nominalist Roscelin, Abelard attacked a variety of realist theologies of the early twelfth century.
2. Alceste. A character in Moliere's play Le Misanthrope (1666) who has high ideals and rigid standards and is as blind to his own faults as he is acutely aware of those of others.
3. Anaxagoras (c. 500-428 b.c.e.). Pre-Socratic philosopher. He reacted sharply against the monism of Parmenides, insisted against Zeno of Elea that matter must be infinitely divisible, and argued that even the mind is corporeal.
4. Anselm, St. (1033-1109). Scholastic philosopher and one of the first medieval thinkers to apply Aristotelian logic (inherited from Boethius) to the solution of theological problems. In the Proslogion, he introduced what has since been known as the “ontological argument for the existence of God” (later embraced by Descartes and attacked by both Hume and Kant).
5. Aquinas, St. Thomas (c. 1224-74). The greatest Scholastic philosopher of the “High Middle Ages.” In the Summa Theologia, St. Thomas dismissed Anselm's ontological argument, embracing instead what have come to be known as “the five ways”-that is, various formulations of both the “cosmological” and “teleological” arguments.
6. Arcesilaus (c. 316-242 b.c.e.). As sixth head of the Academy of Athens, Arcesilaus introduced a skepticism (derived either from Socrates or from Pyrrho of Elis), refusing either to accept or to deny the possibility of certainty in knowledge.
7. Aristippus of Cyrene (early fourth century b.c.e.). Close friend and follower of Socrates and the traditional founder of the Cyrenaic school of hedonism. Like Socrates, Aristippus was interested almost exclusively in practical ethics, whose end he understood to be the enjoyment of present pleasure (leavened by a Socratic element of self-control).
8. Aristotle (384-22 b.c.e.). Greek philosopher, student of Plato, and teacher of Alexander the Great. His unparalleled significance in the history of Western thought is amply testified to throughout all of Durkheim's works. (See Douglas Challenger, Durkheim through the Lens of Aristotle, 1994).
9. Bacon, Francis (1561-1626). English statesman, philosopher of science, and first in the great line of British empiricists extending through Locke, Hume, and J. S. Mill. The works to which Durkheim elliptically refers include The Advancement of Learning (1605), the Novum Organum (1620), and the New Atlantis (1627).
10. Bain, Alexander (1818-1903). Scottish philosopher and psychologist. An associate of J. S. Mill who assisted with the editing of the latter's System of Logic (1842). Author of The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and The Emotions and the Will (1859) and founder of the journal Mind in 1876.
11. Bastiat, Claude Frederic (1801-50). French political economist, advocate of free trade, and editor of the journal Le Libre Echange (1846-8). His posthumously published Harmonies économiques (1850) argued-like Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776)-that the division of labor was important primarily because it transformed the pursuit of private interest into public goods. It was to displace this preoccupation with the purely economic benefits of the division of labor, of course, that Durkheim would later write De la division du travail social (1893).
12. Bayle, Pierre (1647-1706). French lexicographer, philosopher, and critic. Raised a Protestant, Bayle became a Catholic and then reverted to Protestantism before finally becoming a religious skeptic and fideist. His Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) ridiculed every rationalist effort to make sense of human experience.
13. Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832). English economist, political and moral philosopher, leader of the Philosophical Radicals, and the father of British utilitarianism. His Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) advanced the “hedonic calculus” as the standard by which to adjudicate alternative courses of action and policy.
14. Bernard, Claude (1813-78). French experimental physiologist and the author of Introduction a l'étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865). An absolute determinist, Bernard insisted that a set of conditions (a cause) will invariably produce the same phenomenon (an effect).
15. Bonald, Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de (1754-1840). French publicist, royalist, and philosopher. Against the eighteenth-century view that language was a human invention, Bonald revived Rousseau's notion that-since an invention requires thought and thought is internal speech-language could not have been invented but was placed in man's soul at the creation.
16. Bossuet, Jacques Benigne (1627-1704). French theologian and moralist. In his Traité de la connaissance de Dieu et de soi-même, Bossuet combined Thomistic theology with sympathy for the reassuringly authoritarian side of Cartesian philosophy, even as he denounced the dangers of individual reason and inquiry.
17. Bouillier, Francisque (1813-99). French philosopher. The author of the Histoire de la philosophie cartesienne (1854), Du plaisir et de la douleur (1865), and De la conscience en psychologie et en morale (1872).
18. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-88). French naturalist and the author of the monumental Histoire naturelle (44 volumes, 1749-1804). The first three volumes, which included his Theory of the Earth and History of Man (both published in 1749), contained views that ran counter to Genesis and thus incurred the wrath of the Sorbonne.
19. Caesar, Julius (1022-44 b.c.e.). Roman leader and statesman who conquered Gaul.
20. Cameades (c. 213-c. 128 b.c.e.). A leader of the Academic Skeptics who, as the head of Plato's Academy, developed its antidogmatism far beyond the point to which Arcesilaus had brought it.
21. Cato, Marcus Porcius (95-46 b.c.e.). Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher, the grandson of Cato “the Elder” (234-149 b.c.e).
22. Charles I (1600-49). King of England from 1625 to 1649. Charles I was at the helm when Cromwell rose to power.
23. Cheselden, William (1688-1752). British surgeon who developed improved procedures and instruments for the removal of cataracts. In 1728, in a case that is still famous, he gave sight to a boy aged thirteen or fourteen by removing his highly opaque congenital cataracts.
24. Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106-43 b.c.e.). Roman orator and statesman. During periods offorced retirement from public life, Cicero wrote a number of philosophical treatises-for example, the Tusculan Disputations, On Duties, On the Nature of the Gods, etc.-reflecting the influence of various schools at the time, including the Stoics, Peripatetics, and Academics.
25. Clarke, Samuel (1675-1729). English theologian, philosopher, friend and disciple of Newton. Against Hobbes and Spinoza, Clarke's two sets of Boyle lectures-“A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God” (1704) and “A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion” (1705)-attempted to prove the existence of God by largely mathematical means.
26. Publius, Clodius Pulcher, (93-52 b.c.e.). Roman politician and enemy of Cicero.
27. Comte, Auguste (1798-1857). French positivist philosopher, whose six-volume Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42) traced the development of human thought and society from its theological and metaphysical stages to its positive stage-the last characterized by the systematic collection and correlation of observed facts for the purpose of establishing scientific laws.
28. Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de (1715-80). French philosopher who, though an ordained priest, associated himself with the secular and rationalist tendencies of the Encyclopedists. An admirer of Locke, his Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines (1746) and Traité des sensations (1754) traced all human faculties back to their origins in sensation.
29. Corneille, Pierre (1606-84). French dramatist. His play Le Cid (1637) marks the beginning of classical tragedy in France.
30. Cousin, Victor (1792-1867). French eclectic philosopher who, as minister of public instruction, established the institution of the cours de philosophie-of which Durkheim's Sens lectures afford a later example.
31. Cudworth, Ralph (1617-88). English scholar and a leading member of the Cambridge Platonists. His True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) and the posthumously published Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731) reflect the group's concern to establish a reasonable philosophical justification for Christian theology.
32. Darwin, Charles (1809-82). British biologist. In The Origin of Species (1859), he advanced a theory of evolution by natural selection that revolutionized Western science, and The Descent of Man (1871), which extended that theory to the evolution of the human species, similarly revolutionized the social sciences.
33. Democritus of Abdera (c. 460-c. 370 b.c.e.). Greekpre-Socratic philosopher. A younger contemporary of Leucippus, Democritus was a materialist and atomist who advanced the first rigorously naturalistic system of ethics.
34. Descartes, Rene (1596-1650). French philosopher and mathematician. He withheld his Le Monde (1632) from publication after learning of Galileo's condemnation by the Inquisition, but by 1637 he was ready to publish a selection of his scientific views-the Dioptric, Meteors, and Geometry. To this he added a philosophical introduction titled Discours sur la Méthode, which became his best known work and established the foundations of French rationalism.
35. Epicurus (341-270 b.c.e.). Greek atomistic philosopher, a disciple of Democritus to whose materialistic philosophy he added the famous “swerve of atoms” to explain their combination and interaction. Extending his metaphysical views to ethics, Epicurus proposed a hedonistic system in which all moral judgments are derived from the human experience of pleasure and pain.
36. Espinas, Alfred (1844-1922). French sociologist and philosopher. Influenced by his early reading of German social science and its emphasis on the group rather than the individual, Espinas' Les sociétés animales (1877) argued that all the really essential attributes of human society-solidarity, dominance of the social bond over individual will, the social basis of individual reactions to the natural world, etc.-are to be found in the social organizations of animals.
37. Euler, Leonhard (1707-83). Swiss mathematician and physicist, one of the founders of pure mathematics. His interests were broad, and his Lettres à une princesse d'Allemagne (1768-72) provided an admirably clear exposition of the basic principles of mechanics, optics, acoustics, and physical astronomy.
38. Faust (sixteenth century). German astrologer memorialized in works by Marlowe and Goethe, among others. The fictionalized Faust sold his soul to the devil.
39. Fechner, Gustav Theodor (1801-87). German physicist and philosopher who was a key figure in the founding of psychophysics. In his Elements of Psychophysics (1860), he suggested that mind and body, though appearing to be separate entities, are actually different sides of one reality. He developed experimental procedures, still useful in experimental psychology, for measuring sensations in relation to the physical magnitude of stimuli, and he devised an equation to express the theory of the just-noticeable difference (advanced earlier by Ernst Heinrich Weber).
40. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762-1814). German philosopher. Strongly influenced by Kant, Fichte's Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (1792) described religion as the belief in the divinity of moral law. But his later Wissenschaftslehre departed from Kant, anticipating Hegel's absolute idealism as well as some aspects of existentialism.
41. Flaubert, Gustave (1821-80). French novelist, author of Madame Bovary (1857). Flaubert aimed at a strictly objective and impersonal work of art, presented in the most perfect form. Because of his meticulously accurate documentation, he was hailed as a realist and even naturalist, but he detested such labels and explained his painstaking detail as the means to an end rather than the end in itself.
42. Flourens, Marie Jean Pierre (1794-1867). French physiologist who was the first to demonstrate the general functions of the major portions of the vertebrate brain. A disciple of Georges Cuvier, Flourens conducted experiments that led him to conclude that the cerebral hemispheres are responsible for higher psychic and intellectual abilities, that the cerebellum regulates all movements, and that the medulla controls vital functions, especially respiration.
43. Foucher, Simon (1644-96). French philosopher and one of the foremost critics of Malebranche and Descartes. A skeptic and antirationalist, Foucher insisted that we can't have knowledge of the external world if it doesn't come to us through our senses.
44. Galileo, Galilei (1564-1642). Italian mathematician, astronomer, and physicist who founded modern experimentalism and mechanics and defended the Copernican, heliocentric theory of the universe in his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (1632)-for which he was subjected to the Inquisition and placed under house arrest.
45. Garnier, Adolphe (1801-64). French philosopher, author of De lapeine de mort (1827), La Psychologie et la phrénologie comparées (1839), Critique de la philosophie de Thomas Reid (1840), and the Traite des facultés de l'ame (1865). In the early nineteenth century, Garnier was among several French philosophers-including Royer-Collard, Cousin, and Jouffroy-to be influenced by Scottish philosophy.
46. Girardin, Francois Saint-Marc (1801-73). French literary critic and professor of poetry at the Sorbonne. An antiromantic, Girardin's writings include Essais de littérature et de morale (1845), Souvenirs de voyages et d'etudes (1852-3), and his collected lectures on the treatment of the passions in dramatic literature, published as Cours de littérature dramatique (5 vols., 1843-68).
47. Hamilton, Sir William (1788-1856). Scottish philosopher. In his main work, published as Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (1859-60), he argued that perception gives us direct (rather than representative) knowledge of objects, while still maintaining that this knowledge is relative rather than absolute. The critique of this position in Mill's Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865) effectively marked the end of the distinctively Scottish school of philosophy that had begun with Hume and Reid.
48. Hartmann, Eduard von (1842-1906). German philosopher whose Die Philosophie des Unbewusstsein (1869), a philosophical investigation of the unconscious mind, brought him early and widespread scholarly recognition. The work was particularly noteworthy for its third volume, which contained a justification for philosophical pessimism based, not on Schopenhauer but on Kant.
49. Hector. Known as the bravest of the Trojans, Hector, a figure in Greek mythology, was depicted by Homer in the Iliad as a paragon of virtue, strength, and courage. He came to symbolize such qualities in Renaissance art and literature and remained an icon through the nineteenth century. Hector was killed by Achilles, and all of Troy mourned his death.
50. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831). A key philosopher in the German idealist movement, alongside his predecessors Fichte and Schelling. Opposing Kant's efforts to ground all knowledge in human reason, Hegel proposed an organicist conception of reason as coextensive with reality and saw the goal of human beings and their institutions as being to contribute to reason's unfolding.
51. Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679). A towering intellectual figure in seventeenth-century Britain whose major contribution to political theory was the argument that the right of a soveriegn to act as he will is based on a transfer of power from the people, who wish to escape the brutality of the state of nature. An adviser to the British aristocracy, Hobbes's most famous tract, Leviathan (1651), gave ideological support to monarchism.
52. Horace (65-8 b.c.e.). Roman poet whose satires treated the full range of human experience and who was known for his perfection of lyrical form.
53. Hutcheson, Francis (1694-1746). Spearhead of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, Hutcheson argued against the view that humans always act out of self-interest. In A System of Moral Philosophy, published posthumously in 1755, he not only insisted on the reality of benevolence but held that humans have a God-given natural capacity to distinguish right from wrong. Hutcheson's views influenced Bentham, Kant, and Smith.
54. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1743-1819). German critic and novelist whose interpretation of Kant and sympathy for the ideas of Reid may have influenced Cousin, who studied with him briefly. Against what he saw as the dominant strain in German philosophy, Jacobi sought to defend an expansive conception of reason compatible with the demands of God and individual conscience.
55. Jouffroy, Theodore Simon (1796-1842). A student of Royer-Collard and Cousin, Jouffroy sought to develop a philosophical psychology around the Scottish commonsense philosophy of Reid and Stewart, whose works he translated for a French audience.
56. Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804). Author of such enormously influential works as the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Critique of Judgment (1790), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kant expounded a philosophy of critical idealism, which had at its center a critical analysis of human reason and which aimed to reconcile Newtonian scientific determinism with the autonomy of morality.
57. Kepler, Johann (1571-1630). A pioneering figure in the history of astronomy, Kepler brought together the careful empirical observations of Tycho Brahe with a Copernican cosmology to introduce three laws of planetary motion. These laws, which explained elliptical planetary orbits as a function of physical forces, represented an enormous advance over medieval astronomy, which was for all intents and purposes a branch of theology.
58. La Bruyère, Jean de (1645-96). French writer and moralist whose 1688 book, Les caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle, was a catalogue of the human condition as it existed during the ancien régime, containing detailed observations about the psychology, manners, and morals of people from all walks of life.
59. Laplace, Pierre Simon de (1749-1827). An astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher, Laplace was a supporter of the French revolution and held one of the first posts at the École Polytechnique. A great believer in Newtonian mechanics, Laplace devoted much of his career to resolving some of the anomalies in Newton's theory and to working out the details and identifying the practical implications of an early version of probability theory.
60. La Rochefoucauld, Duc Francois de (1613-80). La Rochefoucauld was a fixture of the seventeenth-century Parisian salons. His 1665 book, Maximes, argued that self-interest is at the base of most human action and that passions and bodily urges often get the better of us.
61. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716). A German philosopher with wide-ranging interests whose metaphysical views intrigued the early Durkheim. Leibniz accepted a mechanistic view of the phenomenal world as a site of cause-and-effect relationships but held that beneath this world lies another, in which reality is composed of simple mindlike entities called monads. According to Leibniz, the monads composing the mind and body are constituted by God so as to always act spontaneously in “preestablished harmony” with one another.
62. Lelut, Louis Francois (1804-77). French physician who argued, most famously in Du démon de Socrate (1836), that many of the giants of intellectual and religious history suffered from hallucinations.
63. Lemoine, Albert (1824-74). Philosopher and psychiatrist, author of Du sommeil du point de vue physiologique et psychologique (1855), Lemoineheld that consciousness does not vanish during sleep but merely diminishes in intensity.
64. Lewes, George Henry (1817-78). A writer and philosopher, Lewes helped popularize the positivist philosophy of Comte in England. A committed naturalist, Lewes urged that traditional metaphysics be scrapped and replaced by a science centered on the empirical verification of hypotheses.
65. Littre, Maximilien Paul Emile (1801-81). Founder of the journal La philosophie positive and author of Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive (1863), Littre was one of Comtean positivism's most ardent French champions, seeking-after a dispute with the master in 1852-to save it even from itself, that is, from what he saw as the errors to which Comte, late in his intellectual career, had been prone.
66. Locke, John (1632-1704). A key figure in the tradition of British empiricism, Locke denied that any ideas are innate and identified experience as their true source. His political theory, worked out in Two Treatises of Government (1689), departed from that of Hobbes insofar as it founded the state on a transfer of the natural rights of individuals, broadly conceived thus limiting its power.
67. Louis XIV (1638-1715). King of France from 1643 to 1715, he ruled with an iron fist but presided over a great cultural efflorescence.
68. Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 94-c. 55 b.c.e.). Roman poet in the Epicurean tradition who held, in line with the general Epicurean insistence that a mechanistic metaphysics is the key to a simple and secure life, that there is nothing to fear in death, for the soul does not pass over into a mysterious world of gods.
69. Marie Francois Pierre Gonthier de Biran (1766-1824). French philosopher who criticized the empiricist tradition for its failure to properly grasp the nature of the will. An influence on Cousin, Maine de Biran suggested that the will could best be understood through introspection.
70. Malebranche, Nicolas (1638-1715). French philosopher who drew out the theoretical implications of Cartesianism. Malebranche reconciled the problem of evil versus God's benevolence by asserting that God's perfection consists in using the simplest means possible to obtain the universe such as it is, which may sometimes lead to imperfect results. He also explained knowledge as a function of God's will.
71. Malthus, Thomas Robert (1776-1834). A British economist and philosopher, Malthus argued, against various utopian visionaries, that increasing misery rather than progress is society's fate over the long run because human population growth always tends to outstrip gains in the size of the resource base.
72. Mansel, Henry Longueville (1820-71). A British philosopher influenced by Cousin who held that empirical knowledge is dependent on psychological knowledge of the self, which, by its very nature, always remains somewhat elusive.
73. Mill, John Stuart (1806-73). Writing in opposition to both Scottish commonsense philosophy and to German idealism, Mill pushed the bounds of empiricism by arguing that all knowledge, including knowledge of logic and mathematics, is known inductively through experience, but that this need not be seen as undermining its certainty. A utilitarian when it came to ethics and a fervent supporter of individual rights and champion of liberalism in his political philosophy, Mill also believed, following Comte, that a society's institutions generally correspond with its overall level of philosophical development.
74. Milo, Titus Annius (d. 48 b.c.e.). Roman politician accused of murdering his rival Clodius. Milo had been responsible for bringing Cicero back from exile, and Cicero unsuccessfully came to Milo's defense at trial in his Pro Milone.
75. Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533-92). Most famous as the author of the Essais (1580), Montaigne helped revive the skepticism of the ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho. Montaigne held that human knowledge is fundamentally faulty, that most philosophy is based on error, and that only by restricting ourselves to that which is certain can we be assured of following in the path of God.
76. Muller, Friedrich Max (1823-1900). A pioneering figure in the field of comparative philology, Mirller, a German, emigrated to Britain in 1846, where he was given a professorship at Oxford. Mu ller specialized in the study of Sanskrit and advanced the hypothesis that the growth of language is a function of natural laws.
77. Newton, Isaac (1642-1727). Revolutionary figure in the history of modern science, Newton-for many years a professor of mathematics at Cambridge and then member and president of the Royal Society-was the first to formulate the theory of universal gravity and is credited, along with Leibniz, with having discovered the infinitesimal calculus.
78. Parmenides (early to mid fifth century b.c.e.). Teacher of Zeno, Parmenides is one of the earliest known Greek philosophers. The only work of his that survives, an approximately 150-line fragment from a philosophical poem, asserts that there exists no such thing as not-being and that the world is, despite appearances, actually continuous, homogeneous, and unchanging.
79. Pascal, Blaise (1623-62). A French philosopher and scientist, Pascal is remembered today not simply for his contributions to theology, where he argued that there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by believing in God, but also for his work on vacuums and for the experimental procedures on which this work was based. Against the Aristotelian view that nature abhors a vacuum, Pascal showed that the level of mercury in a barometric tube is a function of air pressure.
80. Peisse, Jean Louis Hippolyte (1803-80). According to Francisque Bouillier, writing in Le principe vital et ¡'cime pensante (1873), Peisse offered in Rapports du physique et du moral (1848)-also the title of a work by Cabinis-an underappreciated vitalist critique of Jouffroy's attempt to distinguish between physiology and psychology.
81. Plato (427-347 b.c.e.). Student of Socrates and recorder and champion of his views, Plato argued for the benefits of a life lived according to the teachings of philosophy. A realist, Plato held that philosophy should aim to elucidate the real timeless essence of things, which he termed their Forms. As philosophers alone are in a position to understand the Forms of Beauty, Truth, and the Good, Plato urged in The Republic (c. 380-67 b.c.e.) that philosophers should be society's rulers.
82. Reid, Thomas (1710-96). Scottish philosopher and formulator of the philosophy of common sense, Reid rejected the view, associated with Hume, that all objects of thought are represented by the mind in the form of ideas. According to Reid, this view-like many other philosophical theories-displays an obvious sign of its weakness: that it finds no support in common sense, that is, in that body of judgment that is part of the very nature with which God has endowed us.
83. Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712-78). One of the central figures in the French Enlightenment, Rousseau held that society is a corrupting influence on human morality. Although Rousseau admitted that exiting the state of nature by forming a social contract may be in our best interests because it helps overcome the limitations of individual self-sufficiency, he insisted that a just state would be one whose powers are limited, that is governed by the general will of the people, and in which invidious political and economic differences would be minimized.
84. Royer-Collard, Pierre Paul (1763-1845). French statesman and, for a short time, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. Royer-Collard helped popularize in France the commonsense philosophy of Reid. Only fragments of his work survive.
85. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860). An influential German philosopher, Schopenhauer advanced the metaphysical claim that the world is will, a mystical life force, and that this force powerfully shapes human life, despite the fact that we are unconscious of it. Schopenhauer's ideas are often said to have formed part of the backdrop to Freud's development of psychoanalysis.
86. Smith, Adam (1723-90). Deeply influenced by the thought of Hume, Smith put at the center of his philosophical program the notion of imagination, by means of which the mind searches for order amid the chaos of physical reality and, in its dealings with other humans, allows their thoughts and actions to be sympathetically understood. In his contributions to political economy, Smith held that a commercial economy offers more liberty to the laborer than does feudalism, for in it particularistic relationships of dependence are replaced by relationships based on universalistic market principles.
87. Socrates (469-399 b.c.e.). Athenian philosopher famously tried and executed for his impious views about the Greek gods. A champion of reason and virtue, Socrates engaged in extended public dialogue with the prominent men of his day on matters of ethics, questioning them until the logical flaws in their positions came into view. Socrates argued, subtlely, for the unity of the virtues and for the position that genuine knowledge of what is good or right necessarily entails virtuous action.
88. Spencer, Herbert (1820-1903). British writer and philosopher who sought to apply Lamarckian evolutionary theory to, among other things, psychology, biology, and sociology. Noting the tendency of all things to evolve, through adaptation, from the homogeneous and undefined to the heterogeneous and well defined, Spencer asserted that intelligence is the outcome of human evolutionary adaptation and not innate.
89. Spinoza, Baruch (1632-77). A Dutch philosopher who made his living as a lens grinder, Spinoza believed that all things in the universe have a causal origin that can be understood by human beings, that these causes are logical and natural rather than final, that mathematics is the key to understanding them, and that God and nature are one and the same. Forced out of his synagogue early in his life, Spinoza advanced ideas so heretical that many had to be published posthumously.
90. Stahl, Georg Ernst (1660-1734). A German physician, Stahl is remembered today for his theory of phlogiston, which posited the existence of a new chemical principle responsible for combustion, and for his argument that organisms are made animate by soul.
91. Stewart, Dugald (1753-1828). Stewart, a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh, extended the commonsense philosophy of Reid and developed ideas that would be enormously influential in nineteenth-century French and American academic philosophy. Stewart argued that Reid's philosophy, while important, was apt to be misunderstood. The fact that common sense-understood to mean the views of the common man-might disagree with a philosophical position has no bearing on its validity, Stewart asserted. What does matter is whether the position violates basic laws of human reason to which all men are, in principle, subject.
92. Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe (1828-93). Taine's urge was to reconstruct philosophy in accordance with the findings of empirical science. Author of scores of popular essays and books, including one about the eclectic spiritualists, Taine took comfort in Spinoza's naturalism and sought to produce a philosophical vision of the world in which contingency would be “banished.”
93. Tiberius, Caeser Augustus (42 b.c.e.-37 c.e.). Second emporer of Rome.
94. Weber, Ernst Heinrich (1795-1878). Pioneering German experimental physiologist who sought to derive a formula that would precisely state the relationship between a stimulus and least perceptible differences in sensation.
95. Zeno of Elea (c. 450 b.c.e.). In support of his friend Parmenides' claim that the world is homogeneous and unchanging, Zeno, whose ideas are recorded in the work of Plato and Aristotle, sought to show the paradoxes inherent in any effort to understand plurality and motion.