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1. EpistemologyThe term sensualism (from Latin sensus, “sense,” and  sensualis, “sensory,” “sensitive”) was coined in the 19th century by Charles de Villers [7. 154]. Initially it denoted a position that was first developed in principle during the early modern period in the epistemology of the 17th century: the view that human knowledge and activity are determined exclusively by sense perceptions. This position was directed against the assumption of contents or structures within the human cognitive capacity that w…

1. DefinitionSince the 18th century, the term idealism has been used to characterize philosophical theories that champion the priority of a mental reality vis-à-vis the material external world. But the term has quite different connotations in different languages, which arise from differering understandings of the term idea. In the German-speaking world,  idea stands in the Platonic tradition (Platonism), usually in the sense of a general concept of something that exists outside the individual consciousness; in English and French philosophy, …

In the tradition of Aristotelian terminological analysis, necessity (Greek  anánke, Latin  necessitas) as a modal category was from Greco-Roman antiquity on the opposite of contingency [9]. Necessity, then, was understood as that which either ontologically (i.e. in respect of entities like gods or nature) or logically (i.e. in respect of statements) could neither be nor be thought otherwise. In the Middle Ages, God was seen as the ens necessarium (“necessary being”). In his creation, necessity and freedom pervaded one another (Necessitas).In the early modern period, howeve…

1. General The concern expressed programmatically during the Enlightenment under the heading popular philosophy to make philosophical issues accessible in layman’s terms has a history reaching back to antiquity. Some schools of classical philosophy – Platonism, for instance – made a distinction between esoteric and exoteric teaching. Exoteric teaching had the task of presenting the substance of esoteric teaching – which was accessible only to trained philosophers – in a form that was comprehensible to reade…

1. Concept The concept of a perfect, primal wisdom, a prisca philosophia (ancient philosophy) or  prisca sapientia (ancient wisdom), enjoyed by Adam in Paradise and not entirely lost even after the Fall, dominated the conception of history (History, conception of) developed in terms of the teleological Christian narrative of salvation [5. 646–701] (History, theology of).The belief in a prisca philosophia belonged to a tradition dating back to the apologetics of the Church Fathers of late antiquity (e.g. Augustine, De civitate Dei, 18), in which even pagan sources, s…

1. ConceptDialectics (from the Greek dialégesthai, “to converse,” via the substantive  dialektikḗ [téchnē]; Latin [ ars] dialectica) from Aristotle meant the method of rational argument, including merely probably arguments, in which latter point it differed from logic, which required proof. Still, dialectics can be regarded as a form of applied logic for the purposes of argumentation theory. It formed part of the so-called trivium within the medieval university curriculum of the seven artes liberales alongside grammar and rhetoric.Sicco Lehmann-Brauns2. Humani…

1. Definition Cartesianism is the term for the philosophical movements of the 17th and 18th centuries that ascribed to the philosophy of René Descartes (Latinized: Cartesius; 1596-1650) and, especially, who developed his method and physics further. Accordingly, Cartesianism is defined by three sets of topics: (1) by adoption of the Cartesian doctrine of method, which by means of methodological doubt explains the self-thinking ego (Lat. cogito) as the starting-point for a philosophy that operates strictly deductively; (2) by a dualism of substances, the “t…

1. ConceptKantianism is the name given to a philosophical tendency of the last two decades of the 18th century that drew on Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft ( Critique of Pure Reason, 1781/87) and contributed to the popularization of Kantian philosophy. Discussions of Kantianism may be regarded as the first reflection of the Copernican revolution in philosophy effected in Kant’s  Kritik. This revolution consisted in the assertion that the phenomenal world was dependent on the constitutional powers of the subject. Kant thus abolished subject…

Hegelianism is a collective term for a great variety of philosophical positions that developed in connection with the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, primarily in the German-speaking world, especially in Prussia in the runup to the March Revolution (Vormärz). In the 1830s, Hegel’s considerable influence continued to be felt through many of his students, who were supported by the academic hiring policy of the Prussian Ministry of Culture under K. vom Stein zum Altenstein. At this tim…

1. Philosophy 1.1. Concept and overviewThe term eclecticism (from Gk. eklégein, “select”) goes back to Diogenes Laertius's (3rd century CE) description of the ancient philosopher Potamon of Alexandria, who was not a member of any of the well-known schools of philosophers but rather in each case selected from them all that which seemed right to him.Since the Renaissance the term eclecticism has been used correspondingly in characterization of a method which, in accordance with Paul's dictum, “test everything; hold fast to what is good” (1 Thess. 5,21…

1. ConceptAs a scientific ideal of the 19th century, objectivity denotes the aim of achieving knowledge independent of the subject of the scientist. Given the emphatically normative sense appertaining to the claim of objectivity from the 19th century, it is astonishing to note that the specifically modern usage of the term dates only from the late 18th century [6].From the days of scholasticism to the verge of the 19th century, the Latin esse objective denoted the merely conceptual, the cognitively intended [3. 45]. The scholastic categories of the subjective and objective…

1. Physics 1.1. Concepts Physicists today define a force as a physical value that will change the motion of a body. Originally, among the ideas to become associated with the concept of force was that of muscular tension. The concept had a wide spectrum of meaning in early modern scholarly discourse. There was no clear distinction between force in its essential sense of the stimulus to a movement and force in the wider sense of the stimulus to general changes in an object [1]; [3]; [12]. Krünitz' Ökonomische Encyklopädie, for instance, sees the physical force behind movement as sim…

1. Knowledge in the 16th centuryThe questions of where the boundaries of knowledge lie and how far it can extend were amongst the most commonly debated in early modern philosophy. They arose in connection with the intellectual crises that were shaking Europe beginning in the 16th century.As a result of the discoveries of lands previously unknown, theological division, the proliferation of texts in print, and later the invention of the telescope and the microscope, the  Weltanschauung of the late Medieval Ages gradually eroded. Images of humanity (Humankind), the …

The term autonomy (from Greek autonomía, “self-determination, independence”) appeared for the first time in German (as Autonomie) in the context of the confessional and constitutional disputes following the Peace of Augsburg (1555) [3]. Its earliest use in English (with reference to states) dates from the 1620s. It arrived at its various semantic levels in the history of philosophy, law, and religion during the early modern period. As a legal term, it initially meant freedom from interference by the authority of the state, esp…