People, places and customs encountered in the works.
1952 entries
‘A terror to evil doers’ echoes Romans 13:3–4, where Paul writes that rulers ‘are not a terror to good works, but to the evil’, that the ruler ‘is the minister of God to thee for good’, and that ‘he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil’. The passage was the chief New Testament text in early modern debates about obedience to civil power.
The words ‘giveth us richly all things to enjoy’ come from 1 Timothy 6:17, where the apostle charges the rich of this world not to be high-minded nor trust in uncertain riches, ‘but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy’.
‘In him we live, and move, and have our being’ is from Paul’s speech at Athens in Acts 17:28, which continues, ‘as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring’.
John 4:24 reads: ‘God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.’
‘The earth hath he given to the children of men’ is from Psalm 115:16, which reads in the King James Version, ‘The heaven, even the heavens, are the Lord’s: but the earth hath he given to the children of men’.
‘The elder shall serve the younger’ is the oracle given to Rebekah before the birth of Esau and Jacob in Genesis 25:23: ‘Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger’.
‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time’ opens Macbeth’s speech on hearing that the Queen is dead, in Act 5, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Acts 10:38 says of Jesus of Nazareth that God anointed him with the Holy Ghost and with power, and that he ‘went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil’.
‘Words, words, words’ is Hamlet’s reply when Polonius asks what he is reading, in Act 2, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
In the Book of Isaiah the nations before God are as a drop of a bucket and are counted as the small dust of the balance; all nations before him are as nothing. The image makes the greatest earthly powers negligible beside God.
Sirach 6:14–16 praises a faithful friend as a strong defence and a treasure that no weight of gold and silver can outweigh. In the Douay-Rheims translation, verse 16 reads ‘A faithful friend is the medicine of life and immortality’.
An a priori demonstration, in the causal sense used in early modern natural philosophy, explains effects by starting from their causes.
An argument is a priori when it proceeds from the character of a thing to its implications, from conditions to consequences or from causes to effects. It is a posteriori when it proceeds from consequences to conditions or from effects to causes. Spinoza gives the greatest weight to the a priori proof of God’s existence, because God, as cause of himself, makes himself known through himself.
A priori justification rests on grounds independent of experience beyond what is needed to acquire the relevant concepts. A posteriori justification depends on experience.
Aaron is the brother of Moses, of the tribe of Levi and born in Egypt, whom Moses anointed as Israel’s first high priest; in Israelite tradition he is the ancestor of the priests.
Abaris was a legendary priest and prophet of Apollo from the Hyperboreans or Scythians. Stories credited him with healing the sick and foretelling the future, and described him travelling with a miraculous golden arrow given by the god.
Abel is the brother of Cain in Genesis 4, a shepherd, whom Cain, the first son of Adam and Eve and a tiller of the soil, kills.
Abraham is the oldest of the biblical patriarchs; his story is told in Genesis 12–25. At God's command he migrated with his family from Ur in Mesopotamia to Canaan, where he lived as a prosperous herder; he was married to Sarah and was the father of Isaac and Ishmael.
Abraham Ibn Ezra was a medieval Jewish biblical commentator and poet who also wrote on grammar, mathematics, astronomy and astrology.
Absalom is a figure of the Hebrew Bible, the third son of King David. He proclaimed himself king at Hebron, drove David into flight and entered Jerusalem; David’s commander Joab killed him in the ensuing fighting.
Medieval theologians distinguished God's absolute power (Latin potentia absoluta), unrestricted power by which God could create a vast variety of possible worlds, from his ordained or ordered power (potentia ordinata), what God can do as the command of his just will executes it. The distinction goes back to early medieval thought and was much used in later medieval philosophy. Spinoza keeps the terms but explains them through God's decrees: God's power is absolute when his omnipotence is considered without regard to his decrees, and ordained when it is considered with regard to them.
Spinoza calls a dominion absolute insofar as its governing body can act through its own united power. He presents a large ruling council as nearer to this condition than one ruler, and democracy as perfectly absolute; this sense differs from unchecked personal rule.
Problema II of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling asks whether there is an absolute duty to God. If the ethical is the universal, every duty is a duty to God only in the sense that it is referred to God, and in the duty itself one stands in a relation to one's neighbour, not to God. An absolute duty to God would mean instead that the single individual determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, which reduces the ethical to the relative; Johannes de silentio calls this the paradox of faith.
Cleansing or scouring; as a noun, a substance used to remove impurities, such as soap.
Berkeley rejected the claim that the mind can form a general idea by stripping particularizing qualities from an idea of an individual thing. His criticism also challenges attempts to conceive extension apart from determinate sensible qualities.
An academic disputation was a university exercise in which stated theses were defended by some participants and attacked by others. Such exercises were held in Latin and trained both language and quick, subtle argument.
Academic skepticism developed within Plato’s Academy and challenged claims to a secure criterion of truth. Its practitioners used critical examination of an interlocutor’s beliefs, and considered how action could be guided without dogmatic certainty.
The Academy was an Athenian garden and exercise ground sacred to the hero Akademos. Plato established his philosophical school there in the fourth century BCE, giving the site’s name to the school.
Acastus is an early figure in Athenian constitutional tradition associated with one account of the origin of the archonship. The nine archons' oath referred to the days of Acastus; the Athenian Constitution interprets this as suggesting that Codrus' descendants exchanged kingship for the archon's privileges in his time.
In Aristotelian and scholastic terminology, accidents are properties that a thing can gain or lose over time without ceasing to be what it is, as distinct from its essential properties.
Accomplishments can mean learned skills and qualities that equip a person for social life.
An accoucheur is a man who assists a woman in childbirth, as a midwife or obstetrician.
Achilles was a Greek hero of the Trojan War, the son of the goddess Thetis and the mortal Peleus. His anger is central to Homer’s Iliad; after Hector kills his companion Patroclus, Achilles returns to battle and kills Hector.
An acropolis is the elevated, often fortified part of an ancient Greek city. The Athenian Acropolis is the rocky height above Athens that became a major sanctuary of Athena. Its surviving monuments include the Parthenon, the Erechtheion, the temple of Athena Nike, and the monumental entrance known as the Propylaea.
Actuality is the realization or exercise of a capacity, as walking realizes the capacity to walk. Older English translations can call actuality energy and being active energizing. Aristotle distinguishes a capacity that is being exercised from one that could be exercised under appropriate conditions.
In early musical terminology, acute means high in pitch and grave means low.
Ad infinitum is a Latin phrase meaning “to infinity”, used for something continuing without end or limit.
Adamant is a stone formerly believed to be impenetrably hard, or an exceptionally hard substance.
For Spinoza, an adequate cause is one through which its effect can be clearly and distinctly understood; a partial cause does not suffice by itself. We act when what happens can be understood through our nature alone, and are passive when we are only a partial cause.
An adequate idea, in Spinoza’s definition, has all the intrinsic marks of a true idea when considered in itself, without relation to its object. Inadequate ideas are fragmentary or confused; their lack of knowledge is what falsity consists in.
Adresseavisen was a Danish advertising newspaper published in Copenhagen from 1759 to 1909, six days a week from 1800; until 1854 its name was Kiøbenhavns Kgl. allene privilegerede Adresse Contoirs Efterretninger. It carried little ordinary news, but its many small advertisements for lodgings, work and goods made it an important institution in the city’s daily life.
Adriaan Heereboord (died 1661) was a Leiden logician and philosopher, a neo-scholastic sympathetic to Descartes, who held a chair at Leiden and is credited with introducing Descartes' writings into the university in 1644. His textbook Meletemata philosophica (1654) was one of the main sources for Spinoza's metaphysical appendix to his exposition of Descartes, in which Spinoza refutes Heereboord's account of free will.
Adrien Auzout (1622–1691) was a French astronomer and mathematician of the Parisian circle around Mersenne and a fierce opponent of Hevelius. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1666 and was known for his instrumental skill and telescopic observations.
To adumbrate is to indicate in outline or disclose only partially.
In Descartes’ classification of ideas, adventitious ideas are those that appear to come from things existing outside the mind, such as sensory ideas of the sun or of heat.
Aegisthus is a figure of Greek myth, son of Thyestes and cousin of Agamemnon. While Agamemnon was at Troy, Aegisthus seduced his wife Clytemnestra; together they murdered Agamemnon on his return, and Agamemnon’s son Orestes later killed Aegisthus.
Aeneas was a Trojan prince and warrior in classical mythology, the son of the goddess Aphrodite, called Venus by the Romans. He appears among the defenders of Troy in Homer’s Iliad and later becomes the central figure of Virgil’s Aeneid.
The Aeneid is Virgil’s Latin epic about Aeneas leading Trojan survivors to Italy after the fall of Troy and establishing a new realm that precedes Rome.
An aeolipile is a metal vessel that produces a blowing current as water heated inside it evaporates.
Aeolus is the ruler of the winds in Homer and is portrayed by later writers as their king and god.
Ærtekjelling is an older Danish term of abuse for an effeminate, weak and yielding man.
Aeschylus was an Athenian tragic poet who lived approximately from 525 to 456 BCE. Ancient tradition credits him with adding a second actor and expanding dramatic dialogue. His surviving works include Persians and the Oresteia trilogy; the authorship of Prometheus Bound, transmitted under his name, is disputed.
Aesop was a Greek writer of fables of the sixth century BCE who, according to tradition, lived as a Phrygian slave on Samos. The fables under his name survive in later verse retellings by Babrius and Phaedrus, which contain more than 300 fables.
Aexone, also spelled Aixone, was a coastal deme of ancient Attica at modern Glyfada. Its inhabitants had a proverbial reputation for abusive speech.
An affirmation asserts something, while its corresponding negation denies it, as with someone sitting and not sitting. In Aristotle’s logical classification, opposition between these assertions is distinguished from opposition between the things or conditions they concern.
Agamemnon is a king in Greek legend who ruled at Mycenae, the brother of Menelaus and, with Clytemnestra, the father of Orestes, Iphigenia and Electra. He led the Greek chieftains against Troy, and when the fleet gathered at Aulis was held back by a calm because he had offended Artemis, he promised to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess. Euripides’ tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis dramatises the story.
In older philosophical usage an agent is whatever acts and a patient whatever is passively affected by the action, its passive recipient.
Agnete and the Merman is a Danish medieval ballad in which a merman rises from the sea and asks Agnete to be his beloved, and she agrees if he will take her to the bottom of the sea. The motif was retold by Jens Baggesen in 1808 and by Hans Christian Andersen, whose dramatic version of 1834 was performed only twice at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, in April and May 1843. Kierkegaard's Johannes de silentio reworks the legend in Fear and Trembling as a sketch of the demonic, of sin and of repentance.
An agora was the public square of an ancient Greek city, bringing commerce and civic life together. It served as a marketplace and a gathering place for political and everyday encounters.
Ahaz was king of Judah from about 735 to 727 BCE and the son of Jotham. Threatened by his neighbours, he asked the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III for help and ended as his vassal, paying tribute to Assyria; he was succeeded by his son Hezekiah.
Ahithophel is the biblical counsellor who served David and then joined Absalom’s revolt; Second Samuel describes his advice as highly esteemed by both. His plan to pursue David immediately was set aside in favour of Hushai’s counsel, which the narrative presents as the defeat of his good advice.
The aissieu de la vision in Descartes’ optics is the straight line through the centres of the crystalline humour and the pupil, along which vision is said principally to occur.
Ajax, son of Telamon of Salamis, is a legendary Greek hero of the Trojan War. In the story retold by Sophocles, he kills himself after Achilles’ weapons are awarded to Odysseus.
Aladdin is the hero of the tale of the wonderful lamp in the Thousand and One Nights, in which the spirit of a ring appears when Aladdin rubs it and stands ready to obey his commands. Adam Oehlenschläger based his comedy Aladdin, eller Den forunderlige Lampe (1805) on the tale; in it the sorcerer Noureddin puts the ring on Aladdin’s finger, and the ring’s spirit declares that it must obey whoever holds it.
Albert Coenraedsz Burgh (1648/50–1708) died in Rome. He was a friend and declared disciple of Spinoza until 1673, and his conversion to Roman Catholicism is the subject of the exchange of Letters 67 and 76.
Alchemy is the name for the chemistry practised from ancient Alexandria until the eighteenth century; its practitioners were called alchemists. Building on Aristotle's doctrine that all substances consist of four elements that can pass into one another, they sought to turn cheaper metals into gold, to prepare the philosopher's stone, which was important for making gold, and an elixir of everlasting life, and they kept their procedures secret.
Alcibiades was an Athenian politician and commander of the fifth century BCE, brought up in Pericles’s household and associated with Socrates. He promoted Athens’s expedition to Sicily in 415 BCE. After being recalled to face religious accusations, he went into exile, successively working with Sparta and Persian officials before returning to Athenian command.
Alcoran is an older English name for the Qur'an, keeping the Arabic definite article al-. The Qur'an is the Arabic text that Islam regards as the collected revelations sent from God to the prophet Muhammad; its name means recitation or reading.
Alcyone and Ceyx are a married couple in Greek myth whose devotion survives a shipwreck. After Ceyx drowns, Alcyone throws herself into the sea, and the gods transform the pair into kingfishers. Different accounts vary in how the loss and transformation occur.
An alembic is a distilling apparatus in which liquid is heated and the resulting vapour is led away to condense.
Alexander of Abonuteichos was a second-century prophet of Glycon known especially through Lucian’s hostile account.
Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was an English poet known especially for moral and satirical verse. His works include An Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock.
Alexander the Great was king of ancient Macedonia from 336 to 323 BCE. His campaigns greatly expanded his kingdom southward and eastward, including the conquest of the Persian Empire.
Algiers, on the coast of North Africa, was founded by Arabs in 935 on the site of the Roman Icosium. From the sixteenth century until 1830, when the French conquest of the city began the subjugation of Algeria, it was an important base for pirates.
To alien, a rare verb, is to alienate: to transfer property, ownership or a right to another.
An aliquot part fits into a whole an exact number of times, leaving no remainder. In chemistry, an aliquot can also be a known fraction of a substance taken as a sample.
Alternate proportion is the inference from A:B = C:D to A:C = B:D, comparing the two antecedents and the two consequents. In Euclid’s theory, all four magnitudes must be of the same kind so that the alternate ratios are admissible.
Amadís de Gaula is a Spanish chivalric romance by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, written in 1508. It tells of the adventures of the noble knight Amadís and of his faithful love for the princess Oriana. Translated into many languages and much imitated, the genre it founded was ridiculed by Cervantes in Don Quixote.
Amasis, also called Ahmose II, was a king of Egypt’s Twenty-sixth Dynasty who ruled from about 570 to 526 BCE. His reign was a period of considerable prosperity. He supported the Greek trading settlement of Naukratis and carried out building work at Egyptian sanctuaries, including the temple of Neith at Sais.
Greek myths describe the Amazons as a people of women warriors. Accounts of their homes and social customs vary.
Ambergris is a substance of the consistency of wax found floating in the Indian Ocean and other tropical seas; it originates as a secretion in the intestines of sperm whales. It is highly valued in perfumery.
Spinoza calls the striving to act or refrain solely to please other people ambition, especially when eagerness for approval harms oneself or others.
Ambrose was bishop of Milan from 374 and is known for asserting ecclesiastical authority against imperial power, including requiring Theodosius to perform public penance in 390.
The noun American was originally applied to the Indigenous inhabitants of America and only later to the descendants of Europeans born there, especially citizens of the United States.
Ammon is the Greek form of the Egyptian god Amon, worshipped by Greeks as Zeus Ammon. His oracle at the oasis of Siwa in the Libyan Desert was a place where visitors sought divine answers. In Egyptian religion Amon was associated with the sun god Ra and had a major sanctuary at Karnak.
The Ammonias was an Athenian state vessel named alongside the Paralus in ancient testimony. It had its own treasurer, elected by open vote.
The Ammonites were an ancient people of the highlands east of the Jordan, called the children of Ammon in the Hebrew Bible.
“Amor sceleratus habendi”, “the accursed love of possessing”, comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, book I, line 131, in the description of the age of iron. In that age, Ovid says, shame, truth and faith fled, and fraud, deceit, treachery, violence and the wicked love of possessing took their place.
The Amphictyonic Registrar, or hieromnemon, was an Athenian representative on the Amphictyonic council at Delphi. Hieromnemones protected and administered the sanctuary's property and participated in the council's decisions.
Amuse formerly meant to occupy or engage the attention of, to absorb, distract or bewilder, and also to keep in expectation, beguile or delude. The sense of pleasant entertainment is the usual one today.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is John Locke's principal philosophical work, first published in 1689. Its four books consider the sources and nature of human knowledge: the first argues that there is no innate knowledge, the second that ideas are the materials of knowledge, the third treats language, and the fourth explains the nature and limits of knowledge and probability and the relation of reason and faith. Locke revised it through several editions; while preparing the fourth he began a chapter called Of the Conduct of the Understanding, which was printed separately after his death, in 1706.
Anacharsis is a Scythian sage of Greek literary tradition, portrayed as a wise outsider and sometimes counted among the Seven Sages. His historical existence is uncertain; the surviving Greek accounts reveal more about Greek literary traditions than about Scythian history.
An anaclastic is a refracting curve that brings parallel light rays together at one point. Finding it requires knowledge of refraction as well as mathematics.
Anacreon (about 570–495 BCE) was a Greek lyric poet from Teos who lived at the courts of tyrants on Samos and in Athens. He wrote poems of love and wine into old age, and his songs have been admired and imitated ever since.
Analysis, in Descartes’s usage, is the method of discovery that he called the best and truest method of instruction, as in the analytic style of the Meditations, which allows assumptions not yet examined that are refuted later. Synthesis is the geometrical way of presenting results, a chain of definitions, axioms and theorems from which any denied conclusion is shown to follow from the premises.
Kant distinguishes analytic judgments, whose truth depends only on the relation between the concepts used in them, from synthetic judgments, whose truth requires more than those concepts. He held that some knowledge is a priori and yet synthetic, not known simply by analysing concepts. In the Groundwork the imperatives of skill are analytic, since whoever wills an end wills the indispensable means, while the categorical imperative is an a priori synthetic practical proposition.
Aristotle’s analytical inquiry studies premises and the arguments made from them. The Prior Analytics defines the syllogism as an argument in which a conclusion follows necessarily from stated premises, and examines which arrangements of terms yield such a conclusion.
Anaxagoras was a fifth-century BCE Greek philosopher from Clazomenae who worked in Athens. He explained celestial phenomena through physical processes and assigned a cosmic ordering role to nous, or mind. His writings survive in fragments and later reports.
The quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns was a learned controversy, chiefly in France, that spanned about seven decades from the 1650s. The Ancients regarded antiquity as a golden age after which the arts and morals could only decline; the Moderns, among them Charles Perrault with his Parallel of the Ancients and the Moderns (1688–97), saw new inventions and discoveries as signs of progress.
André Tacquet (1612–1660) was a Flemish Jesuit mathematician whose Elementa geometriae of 1654, built largely from Euclid’s Elements, was a widely reprinted teaching work.
Anfægtelse is a Danish word for a feeling of deep doubt that seizes a person whose experiences overturn their outlook on life or their faith; it is therefore often religious in character. In Christian understanding it arises from incomprehensible conduct on God’s part, so that one feels forsaken by God or that God is hidden, angry or dead; it is a central theological concept in Martin Luther and Søren Kierkegaard. Fristelse, temptation, is another word for it, and Abraham in Genesis 22 is a biblical example of an anfægtelse that only faith can overcome.
An angle in the Cartesian account of particles is the part of a body projecting beyond its spherical form.
Anile describes mental confusion or infirmity associated with old age.
An animadversion is a critical, usually censuring remark. The word comes from the Latin animadvertere, “to turn the mind to” something, the same root that gives advert and adverse, so that noticing a fault shades into condemning it.
An animadversion can be a considered observation or remark.
Animal spirits were a fluid formerly supposed to circulate through the nerves as the agent of sensation and motion, also called the nervous fluid or nervous principle. Early modern physicians used them to account for life and animation in the body. The phrase now usually means physical energy and high spirits.
In Descartes’ physiology, animal spirits are a very fine, fast-moving matter, likened to a wind or a pure flame, that fills the cavities of the brain and the hollow nerves. Their flow through the nerves to the muscles moves the body, and their patterns in the brain figure in his account of perception.
An animalcule is a minute or microscopic organism traditionally regarded as an animal.
The Annual Commissioners were a separate board of ten Athenian religious officials chosen by lot by the Assembly. The Athenian Constitution assigns them certain sacrifices and the administration of festivals held every four years, except the Panathenaea.
Anon can mean at another time or later.
Anthropomorphism attributes human form, feelings or other characteristics to nonhuman beings or things, including deities.
Antimony is a chemical element (symbol Sb) that in pure form is a silvery, brittle metal. It conducts electricity and heat poorly and has a low melting point, and its compounds, like those of arsenic, are poisonous.
Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694) was a French theologian and philosopher and a leading defender of Jansenism associated with Port-Royal.
Antonio Pérez (c. 1540–1611) was a Spanish statesman and secretary to Philip II. Facing prosecution, he fled to Aragon in 1590 and later escaped to France.
Anytus was an Athenian associated with the restored democracy after the overthrow of the Thirty. He joined Meletus and Lycon in prosecuting Socrates in 399 BCE.
The Apaturia was an autumn festival celebrated by the phratries, or brotherhoods, of Athens and other Ionian communities. Its gatherings included contests, storytelling, songs and shared meals. An important part of the festival was the examination and admission of new members to the phratry. In Athens it received public funding, although the individual phratries organized their own gatherings.
Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty and fertility, identified by the Romans with Venus. Her epithet Cypris links her with Cyprus, an important centre of her worship. Traditions give differing accounts of her birth, including emergence from the sea.
Apodictic, also spelled apodeictic, describes a proof or proposition that is demonstrably beyond dispute or logically certain.
An apodyterion was an undressing room used by athletes at a Greek gymnasium or palaestra. Athletes removed their clothes there before exercising.
Apollo is a Greek god associated with prophecy, music, archery, purification and healing. Myth identifies him as the son of Zeus and Leto and twin brother of Artemis. His major sanctuaries included Delphi, where the Pythia delivered his oracles, and Delos. He is often represented with a lyre or bow.
An ancient Greek mathematician known for his work on conic sections. His Conics introduced the terms parabola, ellipse and hyperbola.
An apologue is a fable or allegorical story that conveys a moral lesson.
An appanage was originally the land a sovereign prince assigned for the support of his younger sons. More generally it is something that belongs to one by custom or right, a natural adjunct or accompaniment.
Appeal to heaven is Locke’s phrase for the recourse left to people wronged by a power without right who have no judge on earth to appeal to: they may judge for themselves whether to resist by force, leaving the outcome to God. He takes the expression from Jephthah, who in the Book of Judges calls on the Lord as judge to decide between the Israelites and the Ammonites.
Appetite under the aspect of the good (Latin appetitus sub ratione boni) is a scholastic definition of the will as a desire for something insofar as it is apprehended as good. Thomas Aquinas held that by its very nature the will can desire only what is presented to it as a good, so that human beings necessarily desire happiness, which is good in every respect.
In older geometry, an applicate is an ordinate of a conic section, drawn at right angles to the section’s axis.
Ararat is Turkey’s highest mountain massif, near the borders with Iran, Azerbaijan and Armenia, with two volcanic peaks, Great Ararat (5137 metres) and Little Ararat (3896 metres). In Genesis 8:4 Noah’s ark comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat after the flood.
Arcadia can mean an imagined region of rural simplicity and contentment, taking its name from the ancient Greek region proverbially associated with pastoral life.
Arcana imperii, the secrets of rule or of state, is a Latin phrase from Tacitus: when Asinius Gallus proposed in the senate that magistrates be designated five years ahead, Tiberius replied that the motion went deeper than it seemed and that the secrets of power were being tampered with (‘arcana imperii temptari’, Annals 2.36).
Archilochus was a seventh-century BCE Greek poet from Paros. His poetry ranged from personal attack to love and reflection on hardship; his iambic verse became a model for later satire. His works survive in fragments, including material recovered from inscriptions and papyri.
Archimedes (about 287–212 BCE) was a Greek mathematician of Syracuse in Sicily who was killed when the Romans took the city. He determined the areas and volumes of many figures and solids, notably the relation of the sphere to the cylinder, established the law of buoyancy, and used mechanical methods to discover results that he then proved geometrically.
Archinus was an Athenian politician who resisted the Thirty and helped shape the reconciliation of 403 BCE. His policy opposed wider admission to citizenship. The Athenian Constitution also credits him with shortening the registration period for departure to Eleusis and securing execution without trial for a man accused of violating the amnesty.
Archytas of Tarentum was a mathematician, philosopher and elected political leader active in southern Italy during the first half of the fourth century BCE. Associated with the Pythagorean tradition, he worked on geometry, musical ratios and proportion. Ancient accounts connect him with Plato, but their philosophical relationship is contested; most writings transmitted under Archytas’s name are later works.
The Areopagus Council was an Athenian body whose members, former archons, served for life. Named after its meeting place on the Areopagus hill, it exercised extensive political and judicial authority. Fifth-century reforms reduced its political powers, leaving important responsibilities in homicide and religious cases.
Ares is the Greek god of war and fierce battle, conventionally the son of Zeus and Hera. He is associated with Aphrodite and with the personified terrors of combat. In the Iliad he supports the Trojans and is opposed by Athena. Romans identified him with Mars.
An argument from design infers an intelligent designer from order, purpose or the adaptation of means to ends in nature. Its analogical form compares natural things with artifacts produced by human intelligence.
An argumentum ad hominem, Latin for ‘argument to the man’, is an argument aimed at the opponent's person rather than at the matter under discussion.
In mythology Argus was a fabulous being said to have had a hundred eyes, set by Juno to guard Io; his eyes were afterwards transferred to the peacock’s tail.
Arion was a Greek lyric poet associated with Methymna on Lesbos and the court of Periander at Corinth. His choral poetry has not survived. In the celebrated legend, sailors threaten his life for his wealth, but a dolphin carries him to safety, drawn by his music.
Aristander of Telmessus was a seer associated with Alexander the Great, whom ancient accounts portray interpreting sacrifices, birds, dreams and other signs.
Aristides was an Athenian statesman and commander remembered for his fairness. He opposed Themistocles’ naval policy and was ostracized, but returned during the Persian invasion and commanded the Athenians at Plataea in 479 BCE. He subsequently helped establish the Delian League.
Aristogeiton was an Athenian and the lover of Harmodius, with whom he killed Hipparchus in 514 BCE. Unlike Harmodius, who died at the scene, Aristogeiton was captured and died after torture. The pair later received public honours as the tyrannicides, although their attack had not ended Hippias' rule.
Aristophanes was an Athenian comic playwright active in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE. His comedy Clouds caricatured Socrates as a teacher of natural speculation and unscrupulous argument.
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was a Greek philosopher whose writings examine logic, nature, biology, ethics and metaphysics. He studied at Plato’s Academy and later founded his own school, the Lyceum, in Athens.
Arminians, also called Remonstrants, are Protestants who follow the Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius, who taught at Leiden from 1603 to 1609 and held that God's election is conditioned by each person's faith rather than fixed by unconditional predestination. Their Remonstrance of 1610, signed by forty-five ministers, was condemned by the Synod of Dort in 1618–19, and the Dutch Remonstrants were persecuted for a time before being legally tolerated by about 1630.
Arnold Geulincx (1625–1669) was a Flemish philosopher who mostly followed Descartes but denied that soul and body act causally on each other. In his occasionalism God is the only true cause, and a person’s willing is merely the occasion on which God moves the body.
Artemis is a Greek goddess of hunting and wild animals, daughter of Zeus and Leto and twin sister of Apollo. She is commonly represented with a bow and accompanied by nymphs. A virgin goddess, she is also associated with childbirth and the protection of the young.
Arterial vein renders the Latin vena arteriosa, “artery-like vein”, the older anatomical name of the vessel now called the pulmonary artery, which carries blood from the right ventricle of the heart to the lungs. Ancient anatomists counted the vessels opening into the right ventricle as veins, but this one has the thick wall of an artery, hence the name.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was a German philosopher whose main work is The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1819). He held that a will underlies everything, and his view of life was deeply pessimistic. In his account art leads to resignation and the abandonment of all willing. Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche were both strongly influenced by him.
Artless can mean sincere, natural and free from deception or pretence.
Psalm 42 opens, in the King James Version, As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God, and continues that the soul thirsts for the living God.
The ascetic ideal is Nietzsche’s name, in the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, for valuations that honour self-denial, such as poverty, humility and chastity, and treat this life as a bridge to another existence. Nietzsche argues that it interprets suffering as punishment and so gives suffering a meaning, for a long time the only meaning on offer. Its deepest lesson, he holds, is that the human will would rather will nothingness than not will at all.
In Nietzsche’s Genealogy, the ascetic priest is the figure who embodies the ascetic ideal and rules over the suffering as their physician and herdsman. He redirects the sufferer’s resentment by teaching that the sufferer himself is to blame for his suffering. Nietzsche argues that his remedies relieve and deaden suffering without curing its cause.
Asclepius was the god of healing in Greek and Roman religion, associated with the practice of medicine. His sanctuaries received people seeking cures, often through dreams experienced while sleeping there. Epidaurus was a major centre of his cult. His familiar attribute is a staff entwined by a snake.
Aspasia was a woman from Miletus who became a prominent figure in fifth-century BCE Athens and the partner of Pericles. Ancient accounts associate her with intellectual conversation and rhetoric. Those accounts are shaped by literary portraits and controversy, so claims about her influence require care.
An assertoric proposition states that something is or is not the case without qualifying it as necessary or possible. In Owen’s translation, de inesse and de non inesse label unqualified belonging and non-belonging in assertoric syllogistic. Absolute can also label this unmodalized form.
To asseverate is to state something emphatically or with solemn conviction.
Assistenshuset was a Copenhagen institution that lent money against pledged goods; founded privately in 1688, it was taken over by the state in 1753 and closed in 1975. As the public loan office it made loans to the poor against pledges and interest, under a manager.
The association of ideas is a connection in the mind, owing wholly to chance or custom, by which ideas not of kin come to be so united that the one no sooner appears in the understanding than its associate appears with it. Locke named it in a chapter, Of the Association of Ideas, added to the fourth edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where he distinguished it from the natural correspondence and connection of ideas that reason traces and attributed to it much unreasonableness, even a degree of madness. Associationism took hold after Locke's Essay, and Hume gave the first serious attempt to develop association into a theory of learning.
Astrological can mean astronomical: concerning the study of celestial phenomena. In Aristotle’s account of scientific inquiry, observations supply the starting points for astronomical demonstrations.
Ataraxia, or ataraxy, is perfect peace of mind, or calmness.
Athaliah was ruler of the kingdom of Judah about 841–835 BCE, perhaps a daughter of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel of the northern kingdom. According to 2 Kings 11 she destroyed the royal family after her son's death and reigned six years while the child Joash was hidden in the temple; in her seventh year she was killed.
Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) was a Jesuit who from 1638 taught physics, mathematics and oriental languages in Rome. He issued about forty works on subjects ranging from volcanoes, in his Mundus subterraneus, to magnetism and Egyptology.
Athena, also called Pallas, is a Greek goddess associated with wisdom, warfare, and crafts. In her birth story, she emerges fully armed from the head of Zeus.
The Athenian archons were senior civic magistrates whose powers and recruitment changed over time. The classical board comprised the eponymous archon, king archon, polemarch and six thesmothetae. In the annual system, former archons entered the Areopagus Council for life after completing their office.
The Athenian assembly, or ekklesia, was the gathering of adult male citizens to debate and decide public affairs. Its responsibilities included decisions about war, peace, alliances, laws, and public officials. Meetings commonly took place on the Pnyx, a hill in Athens, where citizens could address the gathering and vote on proposals.
Athenian company captains were subordinate infantry commanders appointed by the taxiarchs. The Athenian Constitution distinguishes their appointment from the election of the tribal commanders who chose them.
The Athenian Council of Five Hundred was a civic body that prepared business for the assembly and handled administrative duties. In the democratic constitution described in the Athenian Constitution, its members were selected by lot, fifty from each of the ten tribes. The same account describes the Thirty appointing a Council of Five Hundred instead.
Athenian ephebic training prepared young citizens for military service. The Athenian Constitution describes two years of training beginning at eighteen, under tribal guardians, with weapons instruction, garrison duty and patrols.
Athenian generals were elected military commanders. The Athenian Constitution describes ten, assigned duties including infantry command, territorial and harbour defence. Their performance was submitted for confirmation each prytany; rejection could lead to trial, with an acquitted commander resuming office.
Hipparchs were Athenian cavalry commanders. The Athenian Constitution describes two elected commanders, each responsible for five tribes, whose appointments were subject to confirmation. It also records a separate hipparch commanding cavalry on Lemnos.
Phylarchs commanded the cavalry of individual Athenian tribes. The Athenian Constitution describes ten elected officers, one from each tribe, distinguishing them from the hipparchs who commanded cavalry across several tribes.
The polemarch was an Athenian magistrate whose title means war leader. Originally associated with military command, the office later became primarily judicial and administrative as elected generals took over military leadership.
Athens honoured citizens killed in war with a public funeral paid for by the state. Thucydides describes a procession and burial, followed by a speech delivered by a citizen chosen for his ability and reputation. This funeral oration combined remembrance of the fallen with praise of the city.
The Athenian reading clerk read documents aloud to the Assembly and Council. The Athenian Constitution describes this clerk as elected by the Assembly through an open vote, with no duty other than reading aloud.
Tribe-kings were Athenian tribal officials distinct from the king archon. The Athenian Constitution names four in its account of Solon's constitution and assigns tribe-kings a joint role with the King in hearing cases concerning animals and inanimate objects.
Atlantis is the island civilization described in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, the earliest surviving sources for its story. The account presents a wealthy power whose moral decline ends in catastrophe. Its apparent historical detail belongs to the literary narrative; no scientific evidence establishes that Atlantis existed.
An atom is an indivisible portion of matter; Cartesian physics rejects such particles because every extension can be divided.
The older French word atomes can denote the tiny visible specks suspended in air that appear in a beam of sunlight.
Atreus and Thyestes are feuding brothers in Greek mythology, sons of Pelops associated with the kingship of Mycenae. Atreus, father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, killed Thyestes’s children and served them to their father in revenge for the seduction of his wife. Their quarrel was also linked to a reversal of the sun’s course, with different accounts of the occasion.
Attainder was the loss of civil rights following a sentence of death or outlawry for treason or felony. In an obsolete, looser sense, it meant dishonour.
Attestats is an older Danish term for the degree examination for office, especially in theology, and to go ‘reject’ to it meant to fail it.
In Descartes’ terminology an attribute is any quality assigned to a thing by nature, whether a changeable mode or the thing’s unchangeable essence. In the strict sense a substance is understood through its principal attribute, thought for a mind and extension for a body, which differs from the substance only in reason.
In Spinoza’s metaphysics an attribute is what the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance. God consists of infinitely many attributes, each expressing eternal and infinite essence; human beings know thought and extension.
Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was a theologian, philosopher and saint, counted the greatest teacher of the Western church. He laid the foundations of both theology and philosophy in the Middle Ages and was of decisive importance for the Reformation. His Confessions is regarded in literary history as the first psychological autobiography.
Aulis was in antiquity a harbour town in Boeotia, Greece, today the village of Vathy Avlidos six kilometres south of Chalcis. There the Greeks gathered for the expedition against Troy but were held back by a calm, because Agamemnon had offended Artemis.
In heart terminology, an auricle is an ear-shaped appendage of an atrium; the word has also been used for the atrium itself.
An auto-da-fé (Portuguese for “act of faith”) was the public proclamation of a sentence of the Inquisition in a case of heresy. The name was also used for the solemn public execution of such sentences, especially the burning of heretics, in Portugal, Spain and Italy from the late fifteenth century.
An autograph is a manuscript in its author’s own handwriting, rather than merely a collected signature.
An automaton is a machine that moves by its own mechanism, a self-moving device made by human skill.
In Kant’s ethics, autonomy is the property of a will that is a law to itself: it gives itself the moral law instead of receiving it from an object of desire or an interest. Kant makes autonomy the supreme principle of morality: a rational being is to choose only maxims that can hold as universal laws of its own legislation.
Aversion, in Spinoza’s Short Treatise, is disturbance towards a thing believed to contain an infirmity or injury by nature, rather than towards an intentional wrongdoer.
An avocation is, in its older sense, a calling away, a diversion, or that which calls one away from one's regular employment; in the plural it came to mean one's usual pursuits.
Awanting means lacking, missing or absent.
Axel og Valborg (1810) is a tragedy by the Danish poet Adam Oehlenschläger, set in medieval Norway. The lovers are close kin and baptismal siblings, and although Axel obtains the pope's blessing, the king's scheming counsellor has the Church part them for ever in Nidaros Cathedral.
An axiom is an indemonstrable starting principle that Aristotle says a learner must possess, distinguished from the theses adopted for a particular science. Examples include non-contradiction and the rule that subtracting equals from equals leaves equal remainders.
The Bactrians were the Iranian inhabitants of ancient Bactria, a region between the upper Oxus and the Hindu Kush in what is now northern Afghanistan.
In Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, bad conscience is the painful sense of guilt and indebtedness whose origin the Second Essay sets out to trace. His hypothesis is that when human beings were enclosed within society and peace, instincts that could no longer be discharged outward, cruelty above all, turned inward against the self. Moralized as guilt before God, it can become a desire for self-punishment that no penalty can satisfy.
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was a philosopher born in Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish community, which issued its harshest writ of excommunication against him in 1656. His Ethics, published by his friends after his death, contains the phrase ‘God, or Nature’ (Deus, sive Natura).
Basso-relievo is Italian for “low relief”: sculpture whose figures rise only slightly from the background.
To bate something is to lessen or diminish it.
To bate, in an obsolete sense, is to leave out or except, so that ‘bating’ means ‘except for’; the verb more commonly meant to lessen, abate or deduct.
Bath is a city in Somerset in south-west England, on the River Avon. It grew up around Britain’s only natural hot spring, where the Romans built baths and a town called Aquae Sulis. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was the leading spa and resort town of the English upper class.
Bating means leaving out or excepting: bating one objection, all the rest are answered. It is the participle of the verb bate in its obsolete sense, to leave out or except.
The battle of Delium in 424 BCE ended in an Athenian defeat against Boeotian forces. Socrates served in the Athenian army; ancient accounts praise his conduct during the retreat.
The battle of Plataea in 479 BCE was a Greek victory over the Persian invasion force. The participating Greek cities commemorated their victory with a dedication at Delphi, a golden tripod supported by a bronze column of intertwined serpents.
The beatific vision is, in Christian theology, the immediate knowledge of God that the angels and the souls of the just enjoy in heaven. It is called a vision to distinguish it from the mediate knowledge of God attainable in this life, and beatific because in beholding God face to face the created intelligence finds perfect happiness.
Begging the question, traditionally called petitio principii, attempts to prove a claim by assuming the very point that needs proof. Aristotle distinguishes this failure from starting with principles that are evident through themselves.
Behavioural surplus is Zuboff’s name for behavioural data extracted beyond what is required to improve a service, then used to produce predictions about people’s future conduct.
Behoof means advantage, profit, benefit, interest or use.
A being of reason (ens rationis) is something thought or spoken about that has no corresponding real being, such as a negation, privation or abstract classification. Spinoza treats beings of reason as modes of thought used to retain, explain and imagine things, and rejects treating them as a second class of real beings.
Syllogistic belonging and non-belonging can express relations other than saying that one thing is another, including something being of or with something else. Terms are named in their basic noun forms, while propositions preserve the grammatical cases expressing their relations.
The bema was the speaker’s platform in an ancient Greek assembly. At the Pnyx in Athens it was the place from which an orator addressed the assembled citizens. It formed part of the meeting space, rather than being the name of the assembly itself.
Bendis was a Thracian goddess whom Greeks associated with Artemis. She was worshipped at Piraeus, where her festival included a torch race. A surviving votive relief shows her receiving a team of athletes, wearing a pointed cap, short tunic and boots.
Benevolence is the disposition to do good, a love of others accompanied by a desire to promote their happiness. Eighteenth-century British moralists treated it as a principle of human nature, and Joseph Butler counted it among such principles alongside particular desires, self-love and conscience. Against moralists who saw self-love and benevolence in tension, Butler argued that when properly understood they support each other, and in one sermon he claimed that benevolence is the whole of virtue, a claim he later qualified.
Beyond Good and Evil is Nietzsche’s book of 1886; with On the Genealogy of Morality of 1887 it forms a sharp reckoning with Christianity and traditional morality. Its section 260 sets noble morality against slave morality.
A blain is a swelling or sore on the skin, such as a blister or blotch.
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a French philosopher, mathematician and natural scientist associated with Port-Royal and Jansenism.
A blazing star was an old name for a comet, and figuratively a brilliant centre of attraction.
Bluebeard is a figure of folk tales, a charming but cruel husband who kills his wives because, against his prohibition, they enter a secret chamber. Charles Perrault's version of 1697 is the best-known literary treatment, and Blaubart is his German name.
Spinoza calls human inability to moderate and restrain the emotions bondage. A person subject to the emotions depends on fortune and may follow what is worse despite recognizing what is better.
Bonum vacans denotes a vacant good, that is, property without an owner: in Latin legal usage vacans describes possessions that are unoccupied or ownerless. In English law such ownerless property, bona vacantia, passes to the Crown.
The Book of Daniel belongs to the Hebrew Bible. In its sixth chapter, Darius cannot undo a royal decree because the story treats the law of the Medes and Persians as unalterable.
The Book of Revelation is the last book of the New Testament and its only apocalypse, a series of revelations about the heavenly world and God’s plan for the end of this world and the creation of a new one. It names as its recipient a John, though which John is unclear, who received the visions on the island of Patmos. The book has a strong anti-Roman tendency.
The Book of Tobit is an ancient Jewish writing counted among the Old Testament Apocrypha. Tobit's son Tobias travels to Media with the archangel Raphael in disguise, and with the heart and liver of a fish he frees Sarah, a young woman of Tobit's family, from the demon Asmodeus before they marry. Older Danish Bibles, following the Latin Vulgate, call it the Book of Tobias and use the name Tobias for both father and son.
A biblical book also known as the Wisdom of Solomon. Wisdom 13:8–9 reproaches people who can investigate the world but fail to recognize its Lord.
As a verb, to bottom something on or upon a support is to found or build it upon that support, and used intransitively, to bottom on something is to rest on it as an ultimate support, to be based or grounded on it.
Bracton is the customary name of a thirteenth-century treatise, On the Laws and Customs of England (De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae), that attempts to describe the whole of English law rationally; Maitland called it the crown and flower of English jurisprudence. It has long been attributed to the judge Henry of Bratton (about 1210–1268), but the bulk of it was written in the 1220s and 1230s by others and the attribution is now doubted.
Brahma is the creator god of Hinduism. In the trimurti, ‘three forms’, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva form a triad that creates, maintains and destroys.
In Hindu thought brahman is the unified reality behind the diversity of the world, often rendered as world-ground or ultimate reality. It is present in each person as atman, the immortal self, and Shankara’s advaita teaches that brahman and atman are identical.
A Brahmin is a member of the traditionally highest, priestly class in the Hindu caste system.
The Brauronia was a festival associated with the worship of Artemis at Brauron, involving dances performed by young Athenian girls. The Athenian Constitution lists it among festivals celebrated every four years and administered by the Annual Commissioners.
Brazen describes an object made of brass. This material sense is distinct from the figurative sense of shameless boldness.
Breton is a Celtic language spoken in Brittany in France.
The Breviarium de temporibus attributed to Philo Judaeus is a forged chronological work by Annius of Viterbo, published in Rome in 1498. It is one of the sources cited under Philo’s name in the Theological-Political Treatise.
To be brought to bed is to be delivered of a child, often with ‘of’, as in ‘brought to bed of a son’.
In Descartes’ meteorology, bruine denotes white frost formed from moisture freezing as it reaches the ground.
The bruised reed comes from Isaiah 42:3 in the King James Bible: “A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.”
Bryson was an ancient Greek mathematician associated with attempts to square the circle. Aristotle criticized his reasoning for relying on general principles rather than principles proper to the geometrical problem. His biographical identity and the exact reconstruction of his method remain uncertain.
Bucephalus was Alexander the Great’s warhorse. In the Short Treatise, Spinoza reports and rejects an argument that God’s providence concerns the kind Horse rather than this individual horse.
A buckler is a small round shield carried in the hand or worn on the arm.
Buddha, ‘the awakened one’, is the title given to Siddhartha Gautama, the Indian prince, thinker and ascetic who founded Buddhism. At about thirty he left his family to become a wandering ascetic, and after his awakening he taught across northern India. Scholars broadly place his life around 400 BCE; the traditional dates, 566–486 BCE, are probably too early.
Buridan’s ass is the example of a donkey that starves because it has no reason to choose between two equally tempting piles of hay at equal distances. It bears the name of the fourteenth-century philosopher John Buridan, although it is absent from his writings; versions predate him, and its association with him is plausibly a later parody of his account of choice.
A buskin is a laced boot reaching halfway or more to the knee. Because actors in ancient Greek tragedy wore a thick-soled buskin, the word also came to stand for tragedy itself, as opposed to the comic sock.
A cadence is a pattern that brings a musical phrase or piece to a point of rest. Descartes describes cadences as orders of tones ending in a highly satisfying consonance, while also discussing the effect of delaying such a close.
A cadet, in its older sense, is the younger of two brothers, a younger brother or son, or the youngest son.
Cadmus is a legendary founder associated with Thebes, son of the Phoenician king Agenor and brother of Europa. In Greek myth he reached Boeotia while searching for Europa, fought a dragon and sowed its teeth, from which armed men sprang. He founded the citadel called Cadmeia and married Harmonia.
Cæteris paribus is a Latin qualifier meaning “other things being equal”: a comparison assumes that the remaining relevant conditions are the same.
Cain is, according to Genesis 4, the first son of Adam and Eve, who killed his brother Abel; Cain was a tiller of the soil and Abel a herdsman. He was reckoned the ancestor of the Kenites.
A caitiff is a contemptible or cowardly person.
Calchas is the seer of Agamemnon's army in the Trojan War. At Aulis he interpreted Artemis's demand that Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia as atonement for the killing of the goddess's sacred hind, and he was to preside over the sacrifice on Agamemnon's behalf.
Caligula was Roman emperor from 37 to 41 CE. Ancient writers portrayed him as cruel and irrational, but those hostile accounts require critical assessment.
Callicles is portrayed as an Athenian aristocrat with political ambitions and ties to Gorgias. He argues that superior individuals should rule and possess more than others, challenging conventional justice and restraint. No independent historical record securely identifies him; his characterization is known through Plato’s dialogue.
Calorific means producing heat. It describes the heating capacity of fire in the distinction between rational and irrational capacities.
Calx is the substance that remains when a metal or mineral has been calcined or burnt, usually reducible to a fine powder; metallic calxes are now called oxides. Older usage also applied the word to quicklime.
A camera obscura is a dark enclosure in which light from outside passes through an opening, usually fitted with a lens, to project an image of external objects onto the opposite surface.
To say that one cannot away with something is to say that one cannot tolerate or endure it.
As a verb, to canton is to divide into small parts or districts, or to mark off a distinct portion or division. As a noun a canton is a small portion, division or compartment, and especially one of the states of the Swiss confederation.
Captious describes someone prone to petty fault-finding, or an argument or question designed to trap or perplex an opponent.
The Capuchins are a Catholic mendicant order that developed from the Franciscan tradition in the sixteenth century. Their early rule emphasized poverty, and the order became known for popular preaching.
Caput inter nubila, ‘its head among the clouds’, comes from Virgil’s description of Fama, Rumour, in Aeneid 4.177: she walks on the ground and hides her head among the clouds (‘ingrediturque solo et caput inter nubila condit’), a monster that grows in strength as it goes.
Jean-François Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz (1613–1679), was a French churchman, politician and memoir writer. He took part in the Fronde and became Archbishop of Paris in 1654.
Carding separates and loosens fibres with a pair of cards or a carding machine, arranging them as nearly parallel as possible and removing plant debris before they are spun into yarn.
In the sense used of motion, a career is a swift course or a movement at full speed.
Carolina was the North American colony of a group of English Lords Proprietors, among them Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the first Earl of Shaftesbury, who pursued it as one of his commercial projects. John Locke served as secretary to the Lords Proprietors and was involved in writing the colony's fundamental constitution, though the extent of his role is disputed.
Cases of a noun are inflected forms, illustrated by Philōnos (Φίλωνος), meaning of Philo, and Philōni (φίλωνι), meaning to Philo. Aristotle distinguishes these forms from the noun used as a subject: adding is to of Philo does not by itself produce a complete assertion.
Cases of a verb are the past and future forms in Aristotle’s technical terminology. They indicate time outside the present, whereas the verb proper indicates the present. The expression concerns tense rather than the inflected noun forms also called cases.
To cashier someone is to dismiss them from service, especially in disgrace. This military use is distinct from the noun for a person handling payments.
Castrametation is the art of planning and laying out an encampment.
A catamite is a boy or youth in a sexual relationship with a man.
In Kant’s ethics, the categorical imperative is the fundamental principle of morality: a command that applies to every rational will unconditionally, without reference to any end the agent may or may not have. It is an imperative because it is a command addressed to agents who could follow it but might not. Kant’s first formulation tells one to act only on a maxim through which one can at the same time will that it become a universal law; he also gives formulations in terms of humanity, autonomy and a kingdom of ends.
Marcus Porcius Cato the Elder (234–149 BCE) was a Roman officer, statesman and author. He held the censorship in 184 BCE and became a prominent advocate of traditional Roman values.
Marcus Porcius Cato the Younger (95–46 BCE) was a Roman senator and defender of the Republic who opposed Julius Caesar. His Stoic convictions and defence of republican freedom helped make him an emblem of resistance to one-man rule.
For Spinoza, God causes things not only to come into existence but also to continue existing; their essences do not themselves entail existence or duration.
Something is cause of itself (causa sui), in Spinoza’s definition, when its essence involves existence, so its nature can be conceived only as existing. Such a thing is understood through its essence rather than through an external cause.
Cebes was a Theban associate of Socrates who also heard the Pythagorean thinker Philolaus; the extent of his commitment to Pythagorean teaching is uncertain. Plato portrays him in the Phaedo accepting the soul’s existence before birth while questioning whether its survival after death has been proved.
Cedon is remembered in the Athenian Constitution as an early opponent who attacked the Athenian tyrants and was honoured in a drinking song. The account supplies little further biographical information.
In classical mythology a centaur is a fabulous being represented as half man and half horse.
Cerberus is the monstrous dog that guards the entrance to the Greek underworld. He is usually represented with three heads and snakes in his hair. Bringing him up from Hades is the last and most difficult of Heracles’s twelve labours.
Spinoza interprets the Mosaic ceremonial laws as observances adapted to preserving the Hebrew state and its temporal welfare, rather than as requirements of the universal natural law that leads to blessedness.
Certain Physiological Essays (1661) is a collection by Robert Boyle examining experimental method and mechanical explanations of natural phenomena, including experiments on saltpetre.
The Ceryces were a religious group connected with Eleusis. The Athenian Constitution assigns them joint supervision of the temple there with the Eumolpidae and describes one member of the elected board of Superintendents of Mysteries as chosen from their group.
Chancery is a court with jurisdiction in equity, and also the proceedings and practice of such a court.
Charles Darwin was a British naturalist, born in 1809, who is regarded as the founder of modern evolutionary biology. In On the Origin of Species he argued that all life on earth is related and has evolved over many millions of years, and proposed natural selection as the mechanism of evolutionary change.
Charles V (1500–1558) was a Habsburg ruler who became king of Spain in 1516 and was elected Holy Roman emperor in 1519. After relinquishing his principal crowns, he retired to a residence beside the monastery of Yuste in Spain.
In seventeenth-century medicine the chemists or chymists were physicians of the Paracelsian or chymical tradition, which developed in contrast to the Galenic medicine of the four elements, qualities and humours. Following Paracelsus (about 1493–1541), who advocated chemical and mineral remedies, they replaced scholastic matter and form with fermentation as their explanatory principle; Jan Baptist van Helmont explained disease through ferments acting on the matter of the body.
Cherubim are winged composite beings in ancient Near Eastern and biblical imagery, where they can guard sacred places and form part of the divine throne.
A chiliarch was a military commander of a thousand men in ancient Greece.
A polygon with one thousand sides.
The Chimera is a fire-breathing monster whose body combines different animals: a lion, a goat and a snake. Ancient descriptions vary in the arrangement of its parts and heads. The hero Bellerophon kills it. Its composite form makes it an example of several natures joined in one creature.
Besides the mythical monster, a chimera is a vain, foolish or incongruous fancy, a creature of the imagination.
In Spinoza’s philosophical vocabulary a chimera is a supposed being whose nature entails a contradiction, such as a square circle. It can be named in words but cannot be conceived as a coherent thing.
The chous was an ancient Greek liquid measure, commonly equated with the Roman congius and reckoned as six sextarii. The name also referred to a drinking vessel; some ancient accounts assigned it a smaller capacity.
Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) was a Dutch mathematician, physicist and astronomer. He was born and died in The Hague. He invented the pendulum clock in 1656, discovered Saturn’s moon Titan and established that the ring around Saturn floats free. In 1666 he took up a post at the newly founded academy of sciences in Paris, where he lived until 1681.
Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was a philosopher, mathematician and scientist, widely regarded as the most important and influential German philosopher between Leibniz and Kant. Perfection is the central concept of his moral philosophy, and his habilitation thesis Philosophia practica universalis (1703) began a lasting interest in a universal practical philosophy. Kant saw in Wolff’s universal practical philosophy an analogue of his own metaphysics of morals, but faulted it for failing to focus on the pure will and the properly moral concept of obligation.
Christians of St. John is the name that Portuguese and Carmelite missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave to the Mandaeans, adherents of an ancient Middle Eastern religion that survives in southern Iraq and south-western Iran and is the only Gnostic religion to continue from late antiquity to the present. The Mandaeans revere John the Baptist and practise repeated baptism, while regarding Jesus as a false messiah; the missionaries at first took their John for the Evangelist and themselves for Christians.
Christoph Bernhard von Galen (1606–1678) was Prince-bishop of Münster. He declared war on the Dutch on 14 September 1665 and invaded the Dutch province of Friesland.
Christopher Clavius (1538–1612) was a German Jesuit mathematician and astronomer who in 1574 produced a version of Euclid’s Elements with his own additions and who helped Pope Gregory XIII introduce the Gregorian calendar.
Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) was an Italian voyager who crossed the Atlantic under Spanish royal sponsorship and reached the Caribbean in 1492. His voyages began a sustained European expansion and colonization of the Americas.
Chrysippus of Soli was a Stoic philosopher who led the school from about 230 to 206 BCE and became its foremost theorist and systematizer.
The Church Fathers are influential Christian theologians, especially bishops, of antiquity and late antiquity, whose writings came to be regarded as sources of correct Christian doctrine. Among the best known are Augustine, Ambrose of Milan, Basil of Caesarea and John Chrysostom. In Orthodox and Catholic theology they represent the church’s tradition, on which doctrine rests together with the Bible and the decisions of councils.
Chyle is a milky digestive fluid containing lymph and dispersed fats, formed in the small intestine.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) was a prominent Roman statesman and orator in the tumultuous last period of the Roman Republic. He also wrote voluminously; around a dozen of his philosophical works survive, most of them composed in a burst of activity in 45 and 44 BCE, together with speeches, works on rhetoric and a large collection of letters.
Cimon was an Athenian general and politician, the son of Miltiades. He strengthened Athens' naval power and the Delian League through victories over Persia, while pursuing a conservative policy and friendly relations with Sparta. His political influence declined after Ephialtes' reforms, and he was ostracized in 461 BCE.
City Commissioners were Athenian officials responsible for aspects of public order in Athens and Piraeus. The Athenian Constitution assigns them regulation of musicians' hiring, street obstructions and sewage disposal, and removal of bodies from the streets.
Athenian civic allotment selected officials or jurors by drawing lots. In the procedures described by the Athenian Constitution, it operated alongside election by vote, which was retained for military commands and certain financial offices.
In Ethics IV, Spinoza treats justice and injustice as notions that arise in a social state, where common consent determines what belongs to each person. He calls these extrinsic ideas rather than attributes displaying the nature of the mind.
For Spinoza, private civil right is the individual’s liberty to preserve existence as limited by sovereign laws and protected by public authority; civil wrong arises between subjects when those laws are violated.
The civil state is Spinoza’s term for life under a dominion with common laws. Individuals retain their natural power to act and judge, while the commonwealth provides a shared ground of security and determines what they may lawfully do.
In Spinoza’s proposed monarchy, citizens are organized into clans distinguished by names and badges. The clans supply militia units and counsellors, and take turns presiding at council meetings.
Clarissa is a novel in letters by the English writer and printer Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), published in seven volumes in 1748. Its heroine has to resist a family that tries to dictate whom she will marry, and a false charmer, Robert Lovelace, who does not shrink from rape. The novel is often regarded today as Richardson’s masterpiece.
Claudius Ptolemy was a Greek astronomer, mathematician and geographer active in Alexandria in the second century CE. His astronomical system placed Earth at the centre.
For Descartes, a perception is clear when it is present and accessible to the attentive mind, and distinct when it is so sharply separated from all others that it contains only what is clear. He adopted as a general rule that whatever is perceived very clearly and distinctly is true, a rule whose certainty he grounded in God.
Cleisthenes was an Athenian statesman whose reforms of 508–507 BCE grouped Attica's demes into ten tribes, combining communities from the city, coast and interior. These tribes organized participation in Athens' political, religious and military institutions.
Cleisthenic trittyes were groups of Attic demes used to organize Athens' ten tribes. The Athenian Constitution describes thirty groups, drawn from the city, coast and interior, with one group from each area assigned to every tribe. They were distinct from the trittyes of the four older tribes.
Cleon was an Athenian statesman and wealthy tanner who became a leader of the radical democrats after Pericles' death in 429 BCE. He advocated vigorous warfare against Sparta. As a general he led an expedition to Thrace and was killed fighting Spartans at Amphipolis in 422 BCE.
Cleon is a speaker in Curtius Rufus’s account of Alexander who is represented as urging the Macedonians to accord their king divine honours.
Cleopatra VII (69–30 BCE) was the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt. She formed alliances with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.
A clepsydra is a water clock: the flow of water from a vessel measures a limited interval of time. In ancient Athenian courts, such vessels regulated the time allowed to speakers. Their capacity and the occasion determined the interval; the name does not denote one fixed duration.
The clerk of the laws was an Athenian official responsible for checking transcripts of laws. The Athenian Constitution describes this clerk as chosen by lot and attending Council meetings, separately from the clerk of the prytany.
The clerk of the prytany was an Athenian public-document officer. The Athenian Constitution describes him as chosen by lot, keeping Assembly resolutions, checking transcripts of other official papers and attending Council meetings. It reports that the office had formerly been filled by open vote.
A clew is a ball of thread, yarn or cord, or the thread itself, and by extension whatever guides one through something doubtful or intricate, like the thread that leads a way through a maze. It is the same word as clue, which was one of its older spellings.
Cliffs is an older form of clefs: signs that establish pitch positions on a musical staff. Clefs allow musicians to relate written notes to the ranges of different musical parts.
Clytemnestra is a figure of Greek legend, the wife of Agamemnon and mother of Orestes, Iphigenia and Electra. To obtain the wind needed to reach Troy, Agamemnon tricked her into bringing their daughter Iphigenia to the harbour of Aulis so that he could sacrifice her, and on his return from the war she and Aegisthus killed him in revenge.
A coadjutor is a coworker or assistant; in church usage the word can also denote an assisting bishop.
Codrus is a legendary king of Athens whose deliberate self-sacrifice was said to save the city from a Dorian invasion. His descendants also feature in the Athenian Constitution's account of traditions connecting kingship with the origins of the archonship.
The cogito, from the Latin cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), is Descartes’ first certainty: one cannot doubt one’s own existence while thinking, since the very attempt to think away one’s thinking defeats itself. Descartes said that this is recognised by a simple intuition of the mind rather than deduced by a syllogism, and interpreters still debate whether it involves an inference.
A collateral relative shares an ancestor with another person but belongs to a different line of descent.
In jewellery, a collet is the rim or band that surrounds a stone and holds it in its setting.
Magnitudes of the same kind are commensurable when a common measure fits a whole number of times into each; they are incommensurable when no such measure exists. The side and diagonal of a square are incommensurable in length, although the squares constructed on them have commensurable areas.
The Commissioners for Public Contracts were Athenian public-finance officials. In the later constitution described by the Athenian Constitution, ten officials, one chosen by lot from each tribe, managed leases of public mines and taxes, sold confiscated property and recorded payments due under public contracts.
The Commissioners for Repairs of Temples were Athenian officials responsible for necessary temple repairs. The Athenian Constitution describes ten chosen by lot, using funds supplied by the Receivers-General.
The Commissioners for Sacrifices were Athenian religious officials. The Athenian Constitution describes them as selected by lot by the Assembly to offer sacrifices prescribed by an oracle and to take auspices with the seers when required.
The Commissioners of Enrolment compiled Athenian cavalry rolls. The Athenian Constitution describes ten officials elected by the Assembly who passed their lists to the cavalry commanders for scrutiny by the Council.
The Commissioners of Games were the Athenian board responsible for the Panathenaic procession and musical, athletic and equestrian contests. The Athenian Constitution describes ten chosen by lot, one from each tribe, serving four years after examination. They provided Athena's robe and, with the Council, the prize vessels, and distributed oil prizes to victorious competitors.
Commissioners of Weights and Measures were Athenian officials who checked that sellers used fair weights and measures. The Athenian Constitution describes their selection by lot, with five commissioners for the city and five for Piraeus.
Common notions, or axioms, are general first principles evident in themselves, such as that things equal to the same thing are equal to one another. Euclid placed them with definitions and postulates at the foundation of geometry, a model that inspired Descartes’ plan for metaphysical knowledge.
Spinoza’s common notions are adequate ideas of properties shared by bodies and present equally in their parts and wholes. They provide a basis for rational thinking.
The common sense (Latin sensus communis) is not practical good judgement but a general faculty of sense: in Aristotelian and medieval accounts of the soul it was one of the internal senses, alongside imagination and memory, distinct from the five external senses. Descartes kept the name for the general faculty of sense, which he placed in a small gland in the middle of the brain.
Besides a person without noble rank, a commoner is one who has a joint right in common ground.
Locke uses commonwealth for any independent community, the Latin civitas, whatever its form of government, and not for a democracy in particular; he takes the sense from King James I. In this usage a commonwealth is the political society itself, distinct from a city or from a subordinate community within a government.
For Spinoza, a commonwealth is the entire body subject to a dominion. Its members are citizens insofar as they enjoy its advantages under civil law, and subjects insofar as they must obey its laws.
Communicable divine attributes are perfections that creatures can possess to a limited degree, such as knowledge, wisdom and love. Incommunicable attributes are those reserved to God, such as self-existence, immutability and infinity.
Compact means convention in the account of language: a sound functions as a name through its established symbolic use. Aristotle distinguishes this conventional significance from the meaningful but inarticulate sounds of animals.
Spinoza treats a political compact as effective through its utility: people keep it while the expected benefit or avoided harm gives them a reason to do so.
For Spinoza, a composite individual is a union of bodies held in contact or maintaining a fixed relation among their movements. It can retain its nature when constituent bodies are replaced by others of the same nature or when their motions change without disrupting their mutual relations.
Conatus, Latin for striving or endeavour, is the effort by which a thing persists in its own being. In Cartesian physics it names a body’s tendency to motion; Spinoza’s Ethics identifies a finite thing’s striving to persevere with its essence.
Concatenation is the linking of things into a chain or connected series.
Problema III of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling asks whether Abraham was ethically justified in concealing his purpose from Sarah, Eliezer and Isaac. Johannes de silentio treats the ethical as the sphere of disclosure, which demands that the individual leave his hiddenness, whereas the aesthetic demands and rewards concealment. Abraham's silence fits neither, because he cannot speak in a way that would make him understood.
Concernment can mean an affair or interest in which someone is involved, or the importance or consequence of a matter.
Concinnity is a harmonious arrangement or fitting together of the parts of a work.
In a legal sense, to conclude is to shut off, restrain, limit, estop or bar, generally in the passive: ‘the defendant is concluded by his own plea’.
Concupiscence means strong desire or craving, often for bodily pleasure. In older philosophical accounts, it can name the appetite for something perceived as pleasant.
Concupiscent means eagerly desirous, especially lustful or sensual.
Condensation in Cartesian physics is the mutual approach of a body's parts, rather than a reduction of the extension belonging to those parts themselves.
Condescension can mean voluntarily setting aside the dignity of one’s social rank when dealing with someone considered an inferior.
Conditio sine qua non, Latin for ‘a condition without which not’, is an indispensable or necessary condition.
As a noun, confident is an older spelling of confidant. A confidant is a person to whom secrets, especially secrets of love, are entrusted: a confidential or bosom friend.
Confirmation bias is a tendency to seek or interpret evidence in ways that favour existing beliefs, expectations or a hypothesis.
A logical consequence is a statement that follows from another statement or from given premises. When two statements follow from one another, the implication is reciprocal. This concerns a relation between claims, rather than one event physically causing another.
A conserve is anything preserved, especially a sweetmeat prepared with sugar. In older medicine it also meant a medicinal confection of freshly gathered plant substances mixed with finely powdered refined sugar.
For Descartes, musical consonances are agreeable relations between sounds heard together, explained through simple numerical proportions. Descartes treats their degrees of perfection within his own historical theory of hearing and musical composition.
In Spinoza’s proposed aristocracy, the consuls are senators selected for two or three months to act between senate meetings. They summon the senate, prepare its business and execute its orders.
Consumption is an older name for a progressive wasting of body tissue, and especially for pulmonary tuberculosis; the name is no longer in scientific use. A consumptive person or disorder is one afflicted with or relating to consumption.
To contemn is to despise someone or something, or regard it with scorn.
Contextual integrity is Helen Nissenbaum’s account of privacy in terms of appropriate information flows within social contexts. It asks whether gathering and distribution respect the relevant contextual norms, including for information that is already publicly visible.
A contradiction pairs an affirmation with the denial of that same claim, about the same subject and in the same sense. Contrary statements have a different relation: every person is white and no person is white cannot both be true, but can both be false. The denial of every person is white is not every person is white.
Contumacy is stubborn, deliberate resistance or disobedience to authority.
A conventicle is an assembly or meeting, from the Latin word for assembly. Historically the word denoted an unlawful or irregular gathering, especially a secret meeting for religious worship not sanctioned by law, and it could also name the meetinghouse itself.
A copula links a subject and what is said of it, as is links man and just in an assertion. The connecting expression does not independently assert the existence of its subject. Aristotle distinguishes the connection expressed by is from the terms it connects.
Coquet is an obsolete noun for a male flirt.
Cordelia is the youngest daughter of King Lear in Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear. After Lear rejects her for refusing to flatter him, she returns to help him.
Corn Commissioners supervised grain prices and the sale of barley meal and bread at Athens. The Athenian Constitution assigns them oversight of reasonable grain prices, proportionate meal and bread prices, and the standard weight of loaves. It contrasts an earlier board of ten chosen by lot with twenty commissioners for the city and fifteen for Piraeus.
The Corybantes were attendants of Rhea or Cybele in Greek mythology. The name also came to designate priests associated with her cult, whose ecstatic dances were accompanied by loud music. References to Corybantian dancing evoke religious excitement and possession rather than an ordinary musical performance.
A cosmogony is an account or theory of the origin and development of the universe.
Couching was the old operation for cataract, in which the opaque lens of the eye was pushed down or displaced with a needle.
Council auditors were ten Athenian councillors selected by lot from the Council's own members to audit magistrates' accounts during each prytany.
The Count of Holland ruled a county in what is now the western Netherlands. In the later Middle Ages the title passed to the Burgundian and then the Habsburg rulers.
The Counter-Remonstrants were the strict Calvinist faction of the Dutch Reformed Church opposing the Remonstrants in the early seventeenth century.
The Court of Delphinium was an Athenian homicide court. The Athenian Constitution assigns it cases in which the killing is admitted but legal justification is pleaded, giving examples involving an adulterer caught in the act, a mistaken killing in battle, or a killing in an athletic contest.
The Court of Palladium was an Athenian homicide court. The Athenian Constitution assigns it cases of unintentional homicide, intent to kill, and the killing of a slave, resident alien or foreigner.
A coxcomb is a foolish, self-conceited person.
In the Short Treatise to create is to give a thing both essence and existence at once, whereas in generation a thing receives existence only. Spinoza concludes that there is now no creation in Nature but only generation, and that what is called creation can really not be said ever to have taken place. Wolf notes that the Cogitata Metaphysica draws a similar line, calling an object created when it presupposes nothing except God and treating modes and accidents as generated rather than created.
In the philosophy of religion, creation is the action by which God brings a thing into existence, and conservation the action by which God keeps it in existence over time. On the predominant traditional view, held by Suárez, Descartes and others, conservation is continuous creation: keeping a thing in existence is the same act as creating it, distinguished only conceptually. Creation in the strict sense is ex nihilo, a calling of beings into existence from nothing.
The Critique of Pure Reason is Kant’s work first published in 1781, with a substantially revised second edition in 1787. Its project is to examine whether, how and to what extent human reason is capable of a priori knowledge, knowledge whose justification does not depend on experience.
The Crommyonian sow was a dangerous wild pig killed by Theseus in Greek legend. Plutarch calls it Phaea and also records a different version in which Phaea was a violent woman nicknamed the Sow.
Cronos is the Titan who ruled the gods before Zeus in Greek mythology. In Hesiod’s genealogy he is a son of Uranus and Gaia. He swallowed his children to prevent them from displacing him; Zeus escaped and eventually overthrew him. Accounts of the ages of humankind associate his reign with a golden age. The Romans identified him with Saturn.
In older medical writing, crudity could mean indigestion; crudities could also be undigested matter.
The Crypteia was a Spartan practice involving selected young men living in the countryside under demanding conditions. Ancient accounts differ: Plato emphasizes endurance and going without supplies, while an account attributed to Aristotle describes concealment and the killing of helots. How these activities were related, and how the practice developed, remain disputed.
In Descartes’ description of the eye, the crystalline humour is the middle of three transparent substances filling the eye, and is said to refract light approximately as glass or crystal does.
The crystalline lens is a transparent, lens-shaped body inside the eye. Humeur cristalline is an older French name for it.
A cubit is a historical unit of length based on the forearm, measured from the elbow to the fingertips. Its standardized length varied between places and periods, so the word alone does not specify a single modern measurement.
Culpable humility is Spinoza’s name in the Short Treatise for sincerely attributing an imperfection to oneself that one does not possess. It differs from the hypocritical pretence of humility and from accurate recognition of one’s limitations.
Cupid and Psyche is a tale told by the Roman writer Apuleius in his satirical novel Metamorphoses, published around 175 AD. Cupid, the god of love, falls in love with the princess Psyche, visits her only at night and forbids her to try to see who he is; when she breaks the prohibition he leaves her, and after trials set by Venus they are reunited and married. In Apuleius, Cupid tells Psyche that the child she carries will be immortal if she keeps their secret and mortal if she betrays it.
Cupidity is excessive desire, especially for wealth.
A curate is a cleric, especially one serving a parish or assisting a rector or vicar.
Curious, in an older sense, describes what exhibits care or nicety and is artfully constructed, elaborate, wrought with elegance or skill; an obsolete sense is careful, scrupulous or exact.
Hume calls custom or habit the propensity produced by repetition to repeat an act or mental operation without a process of reasoning. He appeals to it to explain why repeated experience leads us to expect one event after another.
The Cynics were ancient philosophers who held that virtue is a life lived in accord with nature, marked by reason, self-sufficiency and freedom. They rejected social convention and treated wealth and fame as false goods.
Daedalus was a legendary Greek craftsman and inventor, credited with extraordinary buildings, ingenious devices, and statues said to move by themselves. He was associated especially with Crete, where he built the Labyrinth for King Minos. To escape the island with his son Icarus, he made wings from feathers and wax; Icarus fell when the sun melted the wax.
To damnify is to cause loss or damage to someone, to injure or impair.
Damon was a fifth-century BCE Athenian music theorist and an adviser and teacher of Pericles. He investigated the effects of music on behaviour and political life, influencing later Greek discussions of music and education.
Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet from Florence whose Divine Comedy is among the most important single works of world literature. The poem follows Dante on a journey through the afterlife, guided by Virgil through Hell and Purgatory and by Beatrice into Paradise. He worked on it from about 1308 until shortly before his death in 1321.
Dårekiste (older spelling Daarekiste) was, until the middle of the nineteenth century, the most common Danish word for a cell in which mentally ill people were confined. Despite the name these were not chests but rooms built entirely of wood or lined with planks, and the word was also used for a madhouse as such.
Darius III was the last Achaemenid king of Persia, reigning from 336 to 330 BCE and defeated by Alexander the Great.
‘Darkness visible’ comes from Book 1 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which describes hell as a dungeon flaming like a great furnace, ‘yet from those flames / No light, but rather darkness visible / Serv’d onely to discover sights of woe’.
Datatilsynet is Norway’s independent public data protection authority. It supervises compliance with data protection legislation through guidance, complaints handling and inspections.
From 1349 until the French Revolution, Dauphin was the title of the heir to the French throne. It came from his fief, the Dauphiné.
David was king of ancient Israel about three thousand years ago, the successor of Saul, the first king; he was made king at Hebron, later ruled the rest of the land, made Jerusalem his capital and was the father of Solomon. Scholars broadly agree that a united kingdom was formed under Saul, David and Solomon, although they dispute how powerful it was.
David Hume (1711–1776) was a Scottish philosopher and historian. His History of England appeared between 1754 and 1762.
Daybreak is Nietzsche’s book of 1881, which collected critical observations on morality and its underlying psychology. Its subtitle is Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality.
Cicero’s De Finibus, or On Ends, examines the highest good and the conditions of a happy human life. It presents and critically discusses Epicurean, Stoic and Old Academic ethical theories in dialogue form.
The Decalogue is the Ten Commandments, the biblical collection of divine commands found in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5.
A supposition in Descartes’ methodical doubt that tests whether even elementary reasoning might be mistaken if an all-powerful creator allowed systematic deception. He considers the objection from divine goodness while using the supposition to question the certainty of former beliefs.
The decemviri, the ten men, were the Roman board chosen in 451 BCE to write laws. A second board of ten was chosen for 450 and stayed in office unlawfully into 449, when, reportedly because of the arrogance of Appius Claudius, it was overthrown; the decemvirs produced the Twelve Tables, the basis of later Roman law.
The Decii were a Roman family whose members became examples of self-sacrifice in battle. Livy’s tradition pairs Publius Decius Mus at Veseris in 340 BCE with his son of the same name at Sentinum in 295 BCE; a similar story about the grandson is considered doubtful.
Cartesian deduction is a necessary inference from truths already known with certainty. A chain of deduction proceeds through successive steps, each clearly grasped, and can depend on memory rather than an immediate view of the whole.
A definition gives an account of what something is, or of what its name signifies. As a scientific starting point, it specifies what something is without thereby asserting that it exists. Aristotle also distinguishes definitions that express the cause of a thing or the conclusion of a demonstration of what it is.
Descartes’ musical degrees are small intervals used to move a voice between consonances. He distinguishes major and minor tones and semitones, and uses these steps to describe melodic ascent and descent.
Deism was a religious current of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western Europe that grounded belief in God in reason. Most deists rejected divine revelation as the basis of religion.
Delos is a small island in the Cyclades that was an important sanctuary of Apollo. Athens sent a sacred ship there each year; during its outward and return voyage, the city suspended public executions to preserve ritual purity.
Delphi was a sanctuary of Apollo on the slopes of Mount Parnassus in central Greece. Its oracle drew individuals and representatives of Greek cities seeking divine guidance, delivered through a priestess known as the Pythia.
The Delphic maxims were brief moral sayings inscribed at the temple of Apollo at Delphi. They included exhortations to know oneself and avoid excess, traditionally associated with the Seven Sages of Greece.
A demarch was the official who headed an Athenian deme and presided over its meetings on local affairs.
A deme was a local civic district in ancient Greece, especially associated with Athens and its surrounding territory, Attica. Athenian demes maintained citizen registers, held meetings on local affairs, and supplied representatives to the city's council. They were grouped into ten tribes under Cleisthenes' reforms of 508–507 BCE, connecting local communities to the wider government.
Demeter is the Greek goddess of agriculture and the growth of crops, and the mother of Persephone. After Hades carries her daughter to the underworld, her grief and anger stop the earth from yielding its produce until an arrangement allows their reunion. Eleusis was a major centre of her worship, and Triptolemus was said to spread grain cultivation at her command.
A demisemiquaver is a musical note lasting half as long as a semiquaver. In North American terminology it is a thirty-second note.
Spinoza describes democracy as a society exercising power collectively, in which individuals transfer their natural right to the majority while retaining a voice as members.
Democritus was an ancient Greek philosopher associated with Abdera and one of the founders of atomism, which explained nature through indivisible bodies moving in a void. He was known as the “laughing philosopher”, a name linked to his emphasis on cheerfulness.
In Locke's theory of knowledge, demonstration is the knowledge obtained when the mind cannot compare two ideas directly and perceives their agreement or disagreement through other, intervening ideas, which he calls proofs. It is certain, because each connection between the intermediate ideas must be seen intuitively, but it is not so easy and ready as intuitive knowledge and requires attention and pains.
Demosthenes (384–322 BCE) was an Athenian politician and orator who opposed Philip of Macedon.
A denizen is a person allowed to reside in a country that is not their own, and more loosely any inhabitant of a place or creature belonging to a region. The word came through Anglo-French from a Late Latin word meaning “within”, so a denizen is literally one who is inside.
To desiderate is to wish to have something or wish for it to happen.
To design, in an older sense, is to mark out and exhibit, to designate, indicate, point out or appoint.
Desire, in Spinoza’s Short Treatise, is the soul’s inclination to obtain or do something because of the good or evil it perceives in it, distinguished from affirmation or denial. Its particular acts depend on particular ideas, while desire in the abstract is not an independently existing cause.
In Spinoza’s Ethics, appetite is the striving to preserve one’s being considered through mind and body together. He introduces desire as conscious appetite, but his fuller definition covers endeavours, impulses, appetites and volitions as one’s essence is determined to a particular activity by a given modification. He holds that we call a thing good because we strive for or desire it, rather than striving for it because we first judge it good.
Desultory describes something that moves from one subject or activity to another without a connected sequence.
Determination in Cartesian mechanics is the direction in which a body's motion is directed, distinct from its quantity of motion. The force of determination can differ for a direct and an oblique impact even when the quantity of motion is the same.
Determinate or determined idea is the expression Locke put, in the fourth edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in most places where he had written clear and distinct idea, as less liable to be misunderstood. A simple idea is determinate when it is the very appearance that the mind has in view; a complex idea is determined when it consists of a definite number of simpler ideas in a fixed proportion and arrangement. In either case the idea should be annexed without variation to one name, which is steadily its sign; words used for indetermined ideas, Locke held, cause most disputes.
In Greek mythology Deucalion, a son of Prometheus, and his wife Pyrrha alone escaped the flood that Zeus sent to punish mankind. Told to throw stones behind them, they repeopled the earth: the stones Deucalion threw became men and those Pyrrha threw became women.
A deus ex machina is a god introduced onto the stage by machinery to resolve a dramatic conflict. Figuratively, it is an outside person or intervention that unexpectedly solves a difficult situation.
A dialectical question offers a respondent a choice between an assertion and its denial. Its form must allow an answer that selects one side of that contradiction. An unrestricted request to explain what something is does not offer this kind of alternative.
Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in 1632, compares the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems and favors the Copernican account.
Diana is a Roman goddess of hunting and the moon. She became identified with the Greek goddess Artemis.
Diana of the Ephesians is the Artemis worshipped at Ephesus, whose great temple drew pilgrims from all Asia. In the Acts of the Apostles a silversmith named Demetrius, who made silver shrines of the goddess, roused his fellow craftsmen against Paul's preaching, and the crowd cried “Great is Diana of the Ephesians” for two hours until the town clerk calmed them.
Diapason is an older musical name for the octave, also called an eighth. Notes an octave apart have frequencies in a ratio of two to one.
Dicasts were citizens chosen to serve in the law courts of ancient Athens, combining roles comparable to those of judge and juror. Six thousand were selected each year.
A dictum, plural dicta, is an authoritative statement or maxim.
A differentia is a distinguishing feature used to specify kinds within a genus, such as having feet in a division of animals. In Aristotle’s logical classification, differentiae belong in definitions of species and are distinguished from qualities that exist in a subject.
For Ola O. Hårstad, the digital dimension is the technologically mediated setting in which actions acquire connections, possibilities and consequences through digital systems. It belongs to ordinary human life rather than a separate unreal world.
For Kant, dignity is an unconditional and incomparable worth that admits no equivalent, unlike price, which belongs to whatever can be exchanged for something of equal value. He ascribes dignity to persons, as rational beings who are ends in themselves and capable of giving the moral law.
Diminution divides a longer note into several shorter notes. Descartes describes it as placing two, four, or more notes in one part against a single note in another, and discusses when the intermediate notes may be dissonant.
Diogenes Laertius was the ancient author of a history of philosophy in ten books recording the lives, opinions and sayings of famous philosophers. Its eighth book reports that Pythagoras, fleeing from his enemies, stopped at a field of beans, saying it was better to be killed than to speak, and was killed there.
Diogenes of Sinope (about 404–323 BCE) was the most celebrated of the Cynic philosophers, for whom the life he lived, with its asceticism, was as much his philosophy as any writing. Ancient stories describe him taking a tub, or pithos, as his home in Athens.
Dion was a fourth-century BCE Syracusan statesman connected by marriage to the ruling family of Dionysius I. An admirer of Plato, he advised Dionysius II before being exiled. He returned with an army, displaced the younger Dionysius and became Syracuse’s ruler, but was assassinated in 354 BCE.
Dionysius I, called the Elder, ruled Syracuse from about 405 to 367 BCE. He built his authority on military command, fought Carthage and extended Syracusan power across parts of Sicily and southern Italy. He was the father of Dionysius II, who succeeded him.
Dionysius II, called the Younger, succeeded his father Dionysius I as ruler of Syracuse in 367 BCE. His rule was interrupted by Dion’s seizure of power; he later returned before surrendering to Timoleon and going into exile. He is the Syracusan ruler central to the disputed Seventh Letter’s account of Plato’s political involvement.
Dionysus is the Greek god associated with wine, ecstatic celebration and theatre, also known as Bacchus. Myths commonly make him the son of Zeus and Semele and surround him with satyrs and maenads. His festivals could temporarily suspend ordinary social conventions; dramatic performances at Athens formed part of his worship.
Diophantus was a Greek mathematician associated with Alexandria whose dates are uncertain. His Arithmetica studies the solution of algebraic equations and problems about numbers.
The Dioptrics is Descartes’ essay on optics, published in French in 1637 together with the Discourse on the Method. It presents his work on the law of refraction and the mathematically formulated shapes of lenses.
The Dioscuri are Castor and Pollux, mythical twin brothers worshipped as protectors of sailors.
Diotima of Mantineia is the teacher of love whose instruction Socrates recounts in Plato’s Symposium. Her account connects desire with what one lacks, the wish to possess the good enduringly, and an ascent from particular beautiful bodies to beauty itself. She is presented through Socrates’s reported conversation, rather than as a guest at the banquet.
Dira necessitas, Latin for ‘cruel necessity’, is a quotation from Horace, Odes 3.24.6, where it refers to the merciless decisions of the goddesses of fate.
In Aristotle’s syllogistic, an ostensive or direct proof proceeds from accepted premises to the conclusion through term conversion and first-figure inference.
The Discourses on Livy is Machiavelli’s work on political history and government, drawing on Livy’s history of Rome. The opening chapter of Book III argues that a commonwealth must repeatedly return to its beginnings if it is to endure.
To disseize is to deprive someone wrongfully of the possession of land they hold; a person so dispossessed is said to be disseized of it.
A distinguo is a subtle distinction drawn in an argument, sometimes a quibble. Its scholastic Latin form means “I distinguish”.
A dithyramb was a Greek choral song in honour of Dionysus, often accompanied by music and dance. Aristotle connected it with the origins of tragedy; in later usage the word can denote an impassioned song of celebration.
Ditone is an older name for a major third. In Descartes’ division of musical intervals, it comprises a major tone and a minor tone.
In scholastic logic a modal proposition was said to be taken in sensu diviso or in sensu composito according as its qualifying word, such as “accidental”, was referred to the copula or to one of the terms. Spinoza uses the distinction to ask whether it is the existence of the cause, or its being a cause, that would be accidental.
A divine is a scholar of theology or a member of the clergy.
Spinoza distinguishes God’s inward aid, arising through human nature’s own powers, from external aid received through outward causes; both belong to the fixed order of nature.
In classical theism the divine attributes are the perfections ascribed to God, such as omnipotence, omniscience, immutability and simplicity. On the doctrine of divine simplicity there is no real distinction between God and his attributes, so that each attribute is in some sense identical with God and with every other attribute.
In Descartes’ metaphysics only God can exist on his own; created minds and bodies continue to exist only through God’s ongoing act of preservation or conservation, which Descartes called God’s concurrence. He held that God maintains the world by the same action, and with the same laws, by which he created it.
Divine providence is God’s guidance and government of creation in traditional theism.
The divine right of kings is the doctrine that monarchs hold their authority from God, so that subjects owe them obedience and may never resist. In seventeenth-century England the Anglican church taught that subjects’ political duties were exhaustively determined by their earthly superiors and that resistance was never permitted; Sir Robert Filmer gave the doctrine its patriarchal form by deriving royal power from the fatherly authority of Adam, and Locke chose him as its most relevant and extreme defender.
Divine simplicity is the doctrine of classical theism that God has no parts or composition of any kind: no composition of matter and form, of potency and act, or of essence and existence. It was held by Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas and appears also in Jewish, Greek and Islamic thought, for example in Maimonides.
A divining rod is a forked twig of hazel or another wood, or of metal, held with one hand on each branch in a tense position, so that small unconscious movements make it bend. An old belief holds that its movements can reveal hidden things such as ore deposits underground, and it is still used to search for water. Controlled trials have not increased confidence in its reliability.
Doctor of the Church, in Latin doctor ecclesiae (“teacher of the church”), is an honorary title in the Catholic Church. It was first used by Pope Boniface VIII in 1298 for four Church Fathers: Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, Jerome and Gregory the Great. Later popes have extended it to other theologians and to persons known for holy lives.
Dodona was an ancient sanctuary and settlement in Epirus, celebrated for an oracle of Zeus. A sacred oak was central to the oracle: priests interpreted signs associated with the tree and its surroundings as expressions of the god’s will. Excavated metal tablets preserve questions put to the oracle by its visitors.
The Dog Star is Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky and in the constellation Canis Major, the Great Dog.
A doge was the head of the republic of Venice or Genoa.
The Dogmatists were physicians of ancient Greek and Roman medicine who held that treatment should be guided by reasoning and conjecture about the hidden causes of disease. The name was given chiefly by their opponents, so they were less a self-identified school than a group professing a foundation in medical theory. Their rivals the Empiricists held such theories in abeyance and relied on the case before them and the physician's experience, and the Methodists stood somewhere between the two.
In Spinoza’s political vocabulary, dominion is the right determined by the power of a multitude. Its holder directs affairs of state, including laws, defence, war and peace.
A dominion within a dominion is Spinoza’s image for the view that human beings form an independent realm within nature, with minds exempt from natural causation. He rejects that view and treats human actions as subject to nature’s laws.
Don Quixote, the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, is the hero of Cervantes’ novel El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615; his squire is Sancho Panza.
The double portion is the inheritance right of the firstborn son under the law of Moses: Deuteronomy 21:17 requires a father to acknowledge the firstborn ‘by giving him a double portion of all that he hath’, for ‘the right of the firstborn is his’.
The geometric problem of constructing a cube with twice the volume of a given cube. Its edge must be the original edge multiplied by the cube root of two: simply doubling the edge makes the volume eight times as large. Greek mathematicians developed solutions using methods beyond ordinary ruler-and-compass construction.
Real doubt, for Spinoza, is the mind’s suspension concerning an affirmation or negation. It arises through another idea that is not clear and distinct enough to settle the matter, and is removed by clear knowledge and due order in inquiry.
The drachma was an ancient Greek monetary unit, commonly minted in silver and divided into six obols. In conventional Greek monetary reckoning, one hundred drachmas made a mina. Coin weights varied by place and period, so the unit has no fixed equivalent in modern money.
Draco was a seventh-century BCE Athenian lawgiver remembered for severe laws, particularly concerning criminal justice. Whether his work also included constitutional reform is disputed.
A draught, often spelt draft, can be a sketch, outline or representation, whether written, designed or drawn; to draught is to draw in outline.
To draw cuts is to decide something by lot, using pieces of straw, paper or similar material.
A Drawcansir is a blustering, bullying braggart. The word comes from the name of a bullying character in The Rehearsal, a play by George Villiers.
Dropsical means affected by, or relating to, dropsy.
The drum ecclesiastic is the pulpit beaten by a preacher’s fist to rouse people to civil war, an image from the opening lines of Samuel Butler’s satirical poem Hudibras: when the ‘Gospel-Trumpeter’ sounded to battle, ‘pulpit, drum ecclesiastick, was beat with fist, instead of a stick’.
A duad is the number two in Aristotle’s arithmetic examples. In Posterior Analytics I.1, knowing that every duad is even is distinguished from recognizing a particular duad.
“Dum se putant vincere, vicere”, “while they think they are winning, they won”, is a sentence of Livy's history of Rome (II.64). In a battle against the Volsci the Romans were about to give ground when the consul shouted, with a salutary lie, that the enemy was fleeing on the other wing; they charged and, believing themselves victorious, won.
Duration, in Spinoza’s definition, is the indefinite continuance of existing. He contrasts the continuance of finite modes, which can be conceived as greater or less and divided into parts, with the eternity through which substance’s existence is understood.
The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, was a privileged trading company established in 1602 for trade in South and East Asia.
The Dutch Republic was formed by seven northern provinces of the Netherlands during their revolt against Spain. It was replaced by the Batavian Republic in 1795.
Kant defines duty as the necessity of acting from respect for the law. Beings whose desires can operate independently of moral demands, as human desires can, experience the moral law as a constraint, and so as duty; a holy will would fulfil it without being constrained. For Kant an action has genuine moral worth only when it is done from duty, not when it merely conforms to duty out of inclination or self-interest.
An eau-de-vie is an alcoholic liquor obtained by distilling fermented material.
Ebullition is boiling or the agitated rising of liquid.
Ecclesiastes, or Qohelet, is a biblical book whose speaker, Qohelet, a persona through whom the author speaks, reflects on toil, pleasure and the weariness and pain of mortal life.
An ecclesiastical benefice is a church office endowed with assets that provide an income, or the income from those assets.
Ectypal means copied or derived from an original. Archetypal can mean serving as the original model or pattern.
Edmund Burke (1730–1797) was an Irish-born political writer and member of the British House of Commons. His works include Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
The Edomites were the people of Edom, the mountain and desert region south of the kingdom of Judah, Moab and the Dead Sea. They were regarded as descendants of Esau and as kin of the Israelites, with whom they were often at war; in the Hellenistic period the region was called Idumea.
To educe is to draw out or bring forth something.
Edward Young (1683–1765) was an English writer best known for Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, a poem published in 1742–1745.
In Descartes’ account of bodily motion, a void can mean a space filled only with matter incapable of resisting other bodies or producing any appreciable effect.
An efficient cause is the agent or force that produces a change or result. It is one of the four kinds of cause distinguished in Aristotelian philosophy.
Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (1651–1708) was a German mathematician, physicist, physician and philosopher, and a friend and correspondent of Spinoza. He studied at the University of Leiden from 1668, and in 1674 his school friend Pieter van Gent introduced him to Spinoza. In mathematics he worked on the solution of equations and the study of curves; he is best known for a transformation that removes the term of degree n − 1 from an equation of degree n.
Seventeenth-century logic textbooks in the Aristotelian tradition, Burgersdijck’s among them, classified the efficient cause in an eightfold division. An emanative cause produces its effect by its mere existence, while an active cause produces it through some activity it exercises. A free cause in that scheme acts from deliberate choice and a natural cause from necessity, whereas Spinoza calls a cause free when it acts without any external compulsion. A principal cause produces its effect by its own powers alone, while a subsidiary cause is only a necessary but inadequate condition, whether instrumental, provoking or predisposing. In chapter III of the Short Treatise Spinoza takes the eight pairs in the same order to say in what sense God is the cause of all things.
Eileithyia is a Greek goddess of childbirth and labour pains, sometimes represented as several divine helpers rather than one. Her name is attested in Bronze Age Cretan records. In a story about Heracles’s birth, Hera delays her arrival so that Eurystheus is born first and gains precedence over him.
In older usage an ejaculation is a short, sudden exclamation or prayer, or the uttering of one.
Elea was a Greek city on the coast of southern Italy, later known as Velia. Settlers from Phocaea founded it in the sixth century BCE. It became a trading centre and is especially associated with the philosophers Parmenides and Zeno. The adjective Eleatic can refer to the city or to the philosophical tradition connected with them.
Descartes’ three elements are forms of matter distinguished by the size, shape and motion of their parts. The first has rapidly moving parts without fixed size or shape; the second has approximately round parts; the third consists of larger masses whose parts move little or not at all relative to one another. The names fire, air and earth do not identify them with ordinary flame, the air we breathe or the ground we walk on.
An elenchus is a refutation that derives a contradiction of a position from premises conceded by its defender. In Aristotle’s account, a syllogism can yield such a refutation, but not every syllogism is an elenchus.
An elephant passing through the eye of a needle is an image of the impossible in the Babylonian Talmud. Berakhot 55b uses it as an example of what is not seen in dreams; Bava Metzia 38b uses it to mock specious reasoning.
The Eleusinia was a festival listed by the Athenian Constitution among celebrations held every four years and administered by Athens' Annual Commissioners.
The Eleusinian Mysteries were initiation rites centred on Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, west of Athens. Their sacred story connected Persephone’s descent and return with growth, death and hopes for the afterlife. Initiates kept the central ceremonies secret, so their precise content remains uncertain.
Eliezer of Damascus is named in Genesis 15:2 as the steward of Abraham's house, who would have become his heir while Abraham remained childless.
Elizabeth I (1533–1603) was Queen of England from 1558 to 1603 and the last Tudor monarch.
An ellipse is a curve for which the sum of the distances from any point on it to two fixed points, called foci, is constant.
Emery is a very hard mineral material used in powdered form to polish metals, gemstones and other materials.
The Emims and the Horims are peoples named in Deuteronomy as former inhabitants of lands east of the Jordan. The Emims, a great and tall people reckoned among the giants, held the country later taken by Moab; the Horims lived in Seir until the descendants of Esau destroyed them and settled in their place, as Israel did in its own land.
A cause contains a perfection eminently when it possesses something superior capable of producing that perfection, rather than possessing the same property in the same form. Descartes contrasts this with containing a perfection formally, or actually in its own form.
An emolument is payment or compensation received for holding an office or employment.
Spinoza defines an emotion through bodily modifications that increase or diminish the body’s active power, together with the ideas of those modifications. An emotion is active when we are its adequate cause, and otherwise passive.
Empedocles was a fifth-century BCE philosopher and poet from Acragas in Sicily. He explained natural change through the mixing and separation of four enduring roots—earth, air, fire and water—under the powers of Love and Strife. His surviving work is fragmentary, and the interpretation of his cosmic cycle remains debated.
An empiric is a person guided by practical experience rather than theory. The word can also refer disparagingly to an unqualified or dishonest practitioner.
An encomium is a formal expression of praise. The Greek encomion was a song honouring victors at the games or distinguished dead people, and the term also came to denote a prose speech of praise.
Kant calls rational beings ends in themselves: their existence has an absolute worth, so that they may never be used merely as means. His formula of humanity commands that humanity, in oneself and in others, be treated always as an end and never merely as a means.
Engine, before its modern mechanical sense, meant anything used to effect a purpose, a device, contrivance or machine, or an instrument by which an effect is produced; an obsolete sense was natural capacity or skill.
The English Interregnum was the period from 1649 to 1660 between Charles I’s execution and the restoration of Charles II, including Oliver Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector from 1653 to 1658.
To engross, in an older sense, is to take or assume in undue quantity, proportion or degree, or to buy up the whole or large quantities of a commodity so as to raise its price: to monopolize.
In older English an enthusiast is one who imagines himself divinely inspired or possessed of some special revelation. Webster’s dictionary of 1913 also glosses the word, in this sense, as a religious madman or a fanatic.
An enthymeme is a rhetorical deduction using probabilities or signs. Aristotle also discusses leaving a premise unstated when the audience already knows it; this abbreviated presentation is not the whole meaning of the term.
In Descartes’ method, enumeration is a review of every part or condition of a question complete enough to ensure that nothing has been omitted.
An enunciation is an assertion capable of being true or false. A simple enunciation affirms or denies something of a subject and includes a verb or its tense form. Several assertions can also be joined into a composite enunciation.
Enyalius is a Greek war divinity whose name also appears as an epithet of Ares in literary tradition. Evidence of worship distinct from Ares shows that the two were not universally identical.
The Ephetae were Athenian adjudicators in homicide proceedings. The Athenian Constitution assigns the cases described for Palladium, Delphinium and Phreatto to those Ephetae on whom the lot falls, distinguishing their role from that of the Areopagus Council.
Ephialtes was an Athenian democratic politician associated with Pericles. His reform of 462 BCE removed the Areopagus Council's supervision of the constitution and legislation. He was murdered shortly afterwards.
The ephors were a board of five officials elected annually in ancient Sparta. They acquired extensive authority over public administration, finances, foreign affairs and the supervision of citizens’ conduct. Their office exercised power alongside the kings, council and assembly; tension between ephors and kings was a recurring feature of Spartan political life.
Epictetus was a Greek Stoic philosopher of the first and early second centuries CE. His ethical teaching emphasizes self-management, personal freedom and the correct use of impressions.
Epicurus (about 341–270 BCE) was a Greek philosopher who founded a school in Athens. He used atomistic explanations of nature to combat superstition and fear of the gods, and treated freedom from distress as central to happiness.
An epikleros was an Athenian daughter left without a living father or brother, through whom a paternal estate could pass to male offspring. Often translated as heiress, the term does not imply straightforward direct inheritance. Her status and related family or estate claims came under scrutiny of the archon and, when contested, the courts.
Epimenides was a legendary Cretan religious figure credited with prophecy and consulted by Greek communities, including Athens. Stories about him include an extraordinarily long sleep and a life lasting hundreds of years. These traditions make his biography and chronology uncertain; they present a figure of religious authority rather than a securely documented life.
Epimetheus is the brother of Prometheus in Greek mythology. His name signifies afterthought, contrasting with the forethought associated with Prometheus. He accepts Pandora, linking him to the story of the troubles that subsequently afflict humanity.
Epistemic dependence is reliance on other people’s knowledge or inquiry when one does not possess, or cannot independently assess, the evidence oneself. John Hardwig argues that such reliance can be rational when there are good reasons to trust the other person’s inquiry.
The Epistle to the Hebrews is a writing of the New Testament whose author and original addressees are unknown. It is thought to have been written after 60 and before 95 CE. It was eventually attributed to Paul, an attribution later abandoned. It interprets Old Testament institutions as imperfect images of what later came about through Christ, and is an important source for understanding Jesus’s death as a sacrifice.
The eponymous archon was the magistrate whose name identified a year in Athenian records. He was distinct from the king archon, polemarch and six thesmothetae within the board of nine archons.
Eretria was an ancient Greek city on the island of Evvia, southeast of Chalcis. Herodotus records five Eretrian triremes accompanying Athenians and other allies in an expedition against Sardis.
Eristic is the art of contentious debate, especially argument conducted through disputable reasoning or rhetorical tricks. The term comes from the Greek word for strife.
Ernest Renan (1823–1892) was a French orientalist and historian of religion, the leading figure of rationalist biblical criticism in France. His Histoire des origines du christianisme, whose first volume is La Vie de Jésus (1863), studied the origins of Christianity by historical methods and gave the miracles natural explanations.
In the Fourth Meditation Descartes holds that error is avoidable: it comes not from the way God made us but from our misuse of a faculty God gave us, and to avoid it we must refrain from affirming what we do not perceive clearly and distinctly. Spinoza’s 1663 exposition of Descartes calls error a privation in human beings, because it lacks a perfection suited to human nature, but a mere negation in relation to God.
Esau is the son of Isaac and Rebekah in Genesis and the elder twin brother of Jacob, who dishonestly secured both the birthright and their father's blessing. He is portrayed as a hunter and the ancestor of the Edomites, whose land south of the Dead Sea is also called Seir in several biblical texts.
Esprit de corps is a French phrase for the common spirit that pervades the members of a body or association, implying devotion and a jealous regard for the honour of the group as a whole.
A thing’s essence is what makes it the kind of thing it is: the properties it must have and keeps for as long as it exists, as distinct from accidental properties that it can gain or lose.
The distinction between essence and existence separates what a thing is, its definable nature, from the fact that it exists. Aquinas distinguishes them in finite things, since understanding a nature does not establish that it exists, while God is not composed of essence and existence.
Estivation is a state of dormancy or torpor during a hot, dry period.
Spinoza calls a truth eternal when, if affirmative, it cannot become negative. He gives God’s existence as an example, contrasting it with a particular person’s thinking.
Eternity, in Spinoza’s definition, is existence itself insofar as it follows necessarily from the definition of an eternal thing. Such existence is conceived as an eternal truth and cannot be explained by time or duration, even a duration without beginning or end.
Etesian winds are recurring summer winds blowing from the north or north-east across the eastern Mediterranean.
The Ethics is Spinoza’s philosophical work arranged in five parts and demonstrated in geometrical order through definitions, axioms and propositions. It examines God, the human mind, the emotions and the life of reason.
Euclid of Alexandria (about 325–about 265 BCE) was a Greek mathematician best known for the Elements, a treatise in thirteen books that influenced the development of Western mathematics for more than two thousand years; books one to six deal with plane geometry and books seven to nine with the theory of numbers. Little is known of his life except that he taught at Alexandria in Egypt. He is distinct from Euclid of Megara, a philosopher of about a century earlier.
Euclid of Megara was a Greek philosopher associated with Socrates and traditionally regarded as the founder of the Megarian philosophical tradition. He wrote Socratic dialogues. He is distinct from Euclid of Alexandria, the later mathematician associated with the Elements. The relationship between the Megarian tradition and later groups called dialecticians is not straightforward.
Eugen Dühring (1833–1921) was a German writer on philosophy, economics and natural science who lost his right to teach at the University of Berlin in 1874 after attacking colleagues. Friedrich Engels attacked his views in Anti-Dühring. He was a fierce antisemite and is often regarded as a forerunner of National Socialism.
The Eumolpidae were a religious group connected with Eleusis. The Athenian Constitution assigns them joint supervision of the temple there with the Ceryces and describes one member of the elected board of Superintendents of Mysteries as chosen from their group.
Euripides was an Athenian tragic poet who lived in the fifth century BCE and died in 406 BCE. His surviving plays include Medea, Hippolytus, The Trojan Women and The Bacchae, as well as the satyr play Cyclops. He reshaped traditional myths through dramatic conflict and debate, often exploring intense emotions and tensions around religious or political authority.
The Euripus is the narrow strait at Chalcis between the island of Euboea and mainland Greece. Its strong currents repeatedly reverse direction as water levels differ on either side of the narrows. This conspicuous change of flow made it a familiar ancient comparison for instability.
Evangelist means one who brings good news. The word is used especially of the authors of the four Gospels of the New Testament, and also of teachers and preachers in early Christianity and of lay preachers.
Evenus of Paros was a Greek poet and teacher associated with instruction in human and civic excellence. Ancient testimony also credits him with contributions to rhetoric.
To evince is to show clearly, to prove beyond reasonable doubt, to make evident; an obsolete sense is to conquer or subdue.
Ex cathedra is Latin for “from the chair”. In general use, it means speaking with the authority of one’s office or position.
Ex nihilo nihil fit is a Latin maxim meaning that nothing is created from nothing.
An Examiner of Accounts was an Athenian official who received complaints against magistrates after their accounts had passed examination before a court. Under the recorded procedure, complaints had to be submitted within three days. The examiner referred substantiated private charges to local justices and public charges to the Thesmothetae for possible court proceedings.
To excogitate is to think something out carefully and thoroughly.
In Locke's political philosophy everyone in the state of nature may punish violations of the natural law, and this power to punish is the foundation of the right of governments to use coercive force. Locke calls it the executive power of the law of nature; each person gives it up to the public on entering political society.
In Descartes’ meteorology, exhalations are airborne particles distinguished from water vapour by their more irregular shapes; he also includes finer spirituous particles that readily catch fire.
An exordium is the introductory section of a speech, treatise or other discourse.
Expectoration properly means coughing up, bringing up from the chest (Latin pectus); figuratively it means pouring out one’s heart and speaking one’s mind. English accounts of Fear and Trembling call the section headed Foreløbig Expectoration the ‘Preliminary Outpouring from the Heart’.
As an obsolete transitive verb, experiment could mean to know or perceive something through experience.
Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours is a work by Robert Boyle published in 1664.
In older usage, to explode an argument or opinion is to reject or discredit it.
Exposition (ecthesis), as a syllogistic proof method, selects an instance covered by the premises to establish a particular conclusion. Given an S, if every S is both P and R, that instance shows that some R is P.
In Descartes’ metaphysics extension, extendedness in length, breadth and depth, is the essence of matter and the principal attribute of bodies; a body’s shape is a mode of extension. Descartes held that extended things cannot think.
Extension is an attribute of God in Spinoza’s metaphysics; particular bodies are modes of it. Its parts are distinguished modally, rather than as really separate substances.
An exterior angle is the angle between a polygon’s side and the continuation of a neighbouring side past their shared vertex. For a convex polygon, one exterior angle at each vertex adds up to four right angles.
An Extra-Skriver was a clerk employed on a temporary basis in the administration to make fair copies of documents and other official papers when the workload exceeded the usual, a humble and subordinate position.
An extrinsic denomination is a name or description applied to a thing because of its relation to something outside itself, rather than because of an intrinsic property.
1 Corinthians 2:9 reads, in the King James Version, ‘Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.’
Ezra is a biblical priest and scribe associated with teaching the Mosaic law and reforming the Jewish community in Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile.
Fabius Maximus was a Roman dictator who prevailed against Hannibal's troops in 217 BC by a delaying strategy, which earned him the surname Cunctator, ‘the Delayer’.
In older usage a fact is a deed: an effect produced or achieved, anything done, an act, as in Evelyn's ‘devilish fact’. The ordinary modern sense is a reality or truth.
In Descartes’ classification of ideas, factitious ideas are those the mind constructs from the contents of other ideas, as the idea of Pegasus is formed from those of a horse and a bird.
Fain can mean gladly or willingly, as in “I would fain go”. As an adjective it can mean glad, eager or willing, and in archaic use compelled or obliged.
Faith is the central issue of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which explores it through Abraham, its biblical exemplar and ‘father of faith’. There faith means believing that for God everything is possible: Abraham believes that God will give him back Isaac, the son he gives up at God’s command. Faith is a ‘double movement’: it presupposes infinite resignation, the renunciation of a finite good, and then receives that good back, trusting that God’s promises hold for this life and not only for an afterlife. Such faith places the single individual above the ethical and thereby outside the shared language of others; in Johannes de silentio’s words, faith begins where thinking stops.
A fakir is a Muslim religious mendicant, or a Hindu ascetic or religious mendicant, especially one who performs feats of magic or endurance.
Ottoman forces under Sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, on 29 May 1453. The conquest ended the Byzantine Empire; scholars who fled to Italy helped spread ancient Greek learning in Western Europe.
The Fall is the Christian interpretation of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Genesis story as the end of humanity’s original ideal condition. It is associated with the doctrine of original sin.
Falmouth is a port town in Cornwall, England, on a peninsula by the English Channel, about 70 kilometres southwest of Plymouth. At the entrance to its harbour stands Pendennis, a sixteenth-century fortress built under Henry VIII.
A false idea differs from a fiction by involving mental assent. Spinoza locates falsity in affirming of a thing something not contained in its conception, a defect of knowledge rather than something positive in the idea.
Family resemblance describes how cases can belong together through overlapping similarities without sharing one essential feature. Wittgenstein uses the idea to challenge the assumption that a concept must have an exact common core.
Fantasy (Latin phantasia) is an older name for the imagination, which medieval accounts of the soul counted among the internal senses. In Descartes’ physiology it is the faculty that alters the ideas received from the senses and composes new ones from them.
A farthing was a quarter of a penny, a small copper coin of Great Britain; the word comes from an Old English word for a fourth part.
Fasces were bundles of rods carried by Roman lictors before senior magistrates as symbols of their power to punish. An axe could be bound into the bundle as a sign of the power to execute.
The Fates, or Moirai, are the Greek goddesses Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. They govern mortal destiny through the image of a thread of life, which they spin, measure and cut.
In Luke’s account of the crucifixion Jesus says: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Faust is a figure of German legend from the Reformation era; a historical Faust, described as a learned charlatan who claimed skill in magic, is attested in several German towns between 1505 and 1525. The legend that he had sold himself to the devil was first collected in 1587 and was later treated by Christopher Marlowe, Lessing and, most famously, Goethe, whose Faust appeared in two parts in 1808 and 1832. In Goethe's drama the devil Mephistopheles accompanies Faust, who falls in love with Margarete (Gretchen).
Faute de mieux is French for ‘for lack of something better’.
Fealty is fidelity to one’s lord: the feudal obligation binding a tenant or vassal to be faithful to his lord, the oath by which it was assumed, and more generally loyalty to a superior power or government.
‘Fear and trembling’ is a phrase from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, which urges believers to ‘work out your own salvation with fear and trembling’ (Philippians 2:12). Its Danish form, Frygt og Bæven, is the title of the book Kierkegaard published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio.
‘Featherless biped’ is the definition of the human being as ‘an animal, biped and featherless’ traditionally ascribed to Plato. Diogenes Laertius reports that Diogenes the Cynic answered it by bringing a plucked fowl into the lecture room with the words ‘Here is Plato's man’, after which ‘having broad nails’ was added to the definition. In Plato's Statesman the Stranger divides bipeds into feathered and featherless while looking for the art of managing human beings.
Federative power is Locke’s name for a commonwealth’s power over war and peace, leagues, alliances and all dealings with persons and communities outside it. He calls it natural, because it answers to the power each person had before entering society, and observes that it is almost always joined with the executive power though distinct from it.
Fee simple is the broadest inheritable ownership interest in land, with rights to use and transfer the property.
To fend and prove is to argue a case and defend a position.
Ferdinand II was a Catholic ruler crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 1619. The war over his authority formed part of the early Thirty Years’ War.
Ferdinand II of Aragon (1452–1516), called the Catholic, was king of Aragon and the husband of Isabella of Castile. Their marriage brought the two crowns into a personal union.
Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba (1507–1582), was a Spanish general who served Charles V and Philip II. As governor of the Netherlands from 1567 to 1573 he tried to suppress the movement for freedom with cruel severity, and he is said to have had 18,000 people executed by a special court. His harshness only turned the revolt into open war in 1572, and he was recalled.
A ferule is a flat piece of wood, such as a ruler, used to punish children by striking their hands.
A fiat is a command issued as a decree.
A fiction, or feigned idea, in Spinoza’s account is a supposition or combination of confused ideas without mental assent to its truth. It concerns what is taken to be possible, rather than what is known to be necessary or impossible, and the capacity to form it diminishes as understanding grows.
An ens fictum, or fictitious being, is a combination of terms deliberately made by the will without a rational connection between them. This Cartesian account distinguishes it from a being of reason, a mode of thought used to retain, explain or imagine things.
Fiduciary means held or founded in trust, or involving confidence and trust; a fiduciary is a trustee, one who holds a thing in trust for another.
A Catholic church council whose eighth session, on 19 December 1513 under Leo X, rejected claims that the intellectual soul is mortal or shared as one soul by all humans. Its decree required philosophy teachers to defend Christian doctrine and refute opposing arguments.
Hoplomachia was the Greek practice of fighting with the weapons of a heavily armed infantryman. Private instruction in this skill was available in Athens by the later fifth century BCE, including demonstrations by professional teachers.
A final cause explains something by the end or purpose for whose sake it exists or occurs. It differs from an efficient cause, which explains where a change or action comes from.
Final causes explain things in terms of ends or purposes. Descartes rejects using presumed divine ends to explain natural things, because a finite human mind cannot confidently discover God’s purposes.
Final-account auditors were Athenian officials who examined officeholders' accounts and brought them before the courts. The recorded procedure assigns this work to ten auditors chosen by lot, assisted by ten others. The jury imposed penalties following convictions for theft, bribery or unfair dealing.
For Spinoza, a thing is finite after its kind when another thing of the same nature can limit it: a body is limited by another body, not by thought. What is infinite only after its kind can still lack infinitely many attributes; what is absolutely infinite includes whatever expresses reality and involves no negation.
In Cartesian cosmology, the firmament is a surface without thickness that separates neighbouring heavens revolving around different stars.
The First Epistle of John is an anonymous writing of the New Testament, one of three Johannine letters that old church tradition ascribed to the apostle John, as it did the Gospel of John; very few scholars support that attribution today. It continues the language and ideas of the Gospel of John, and its fourth chapter presents God as love and the source of all human love.
The First Epistle to the Corinthians is one of two letters of the New Testament written by Paul to the congregation in Corinth, which he had founded. It was probably written in Ephesus about 55 CE. Its fifteenth chapter deals with belief in the resurrection of the dead and is one of the most important biblical texts on that subject.
The Five Thousand were a restricted Athenian citizen body. The Athenian Constitution distinguishes their nominal selection under the Four Hundred from their later government, when participation was restricted to citizens possessing military equipment.
Fixed and eternal things are the unchanging things from which Spinoza proposes to understand mutable particulars and the laws governing them. Although particular themselves, they serve as universals and proximate causes in this account; the unfinished treatise does not fully explain their identity.
Flagitious describes a person or deed marked by scandalous crime or vice. It is a learned Latinate adjective, from flagitium, a shameful act, common in seventeenth-century moral and political writing.
A flamen was a priest serving a deity in ancient Roman religion.
Flavius Josephus was a Jewish priest and historian whose works include The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities.
Flea glass is a historical name for a magnifying optical instrument used to examine minute objects such as fleas. A form consisting of one glass lens is a simple microscope.
In Cartesian physics a fluid consists of minute particles moving in all directions with equal velocity, whereas hardness is attributed to particles remaining near one another at rest.
In Cartesian terminology a perfection is contained formally when it is present as conceived, and eminently when something greater can supply it without possessing it in that same form. A cause contains its effect’s perfection eminently when it contains that perfection more completely than the effect itself.
Formal essence (essentia formalis) is what a thing is in itself, contrasted with its objective essence as represented in an idea. An idea has its own formal essence and can itself become the object of another idea; Elwes calls this its “actual essence”.
In Descartes’ metaphysics, formal reality is the reality a thing has by actually existing, distinguished from the objective reality an idea has through representing something. An idea has formal reality as an actual mode of thought, even when its represented object does not exist.
Forsooth is an archaic adverb meaning indeed or truly, now often used to express irony or disbelief.
Fortuitous means occurring by chance. Casual can carry the same sense in older English philosophical prose, where it describes events that may turn out differently rather than something informal or relaxed.
Fortunatus is the hero of a popular European chapbook whose earliest known edition was printed at Augsburg in 1509. The goddess of Fortune gives him a purse that is replenished as often as he draws from it, and he later obtains a hat that carries its wearer wherever he wishes; his sons squander both through recklessness and folly. The tale was dramatized by Hans Sachs in 1553 and by Thomas Dekker as Old Fortunatus in 1600.
Fortune can mean the course of chance or luck in human affairs. Capitalized, it may personify the power thought to bring unpredictable good or bad events.
The Four Hundred were an Athenian oligarchic council during the Peloponnesian War. The Athenian Constitution describes forty recruits per tribe governing while the Five Thousand remained only nominally constituted. This council was distinct from the earlier body attributed to Solon.
Francesco Lana Terzi (1631–1687), an assistant of Athanasius Kircher, was professor of physics and mathematics at Brescia, where he performed many physical, optical and alchemical experiments. In the 1680s he began a twelve-part encyclopedia of science, Magisterium artis et naturae, of which only three volumes appeared.
Francesco Maurolico (1494–1575), also published as Maurolycus, was a Sicilian mathematician who worked on optics, including the rainbow and lenses.
Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was an English philosopher and statesman. He became lord chancellor in January 1618 and was created Baron Verulam in July of that year and Viscount St Alban in January 1621, shortly before Parliament impeached him for taking bribes. His Novum Organum, published in 1620 within his unfinished Instauratio magna, rejected the leap of syllogistic logic from particulars to the most general axioms in favour of an induction rising step by step.
Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) was an Irish-born philosopher who was educated at, and completed his career at, the University of Glasgow. He held that a moral sense, one of the mind’s internal senses, lets us perceive virtue and vice in ourselves and in others.
Francis Linus was a Jesuit who criticised Robert Boyle’s New Experiments Physico-Mechanical on the spring of the air; Boyle replied to him at length.
François de La Rochefoucauld was a French duke, officer and writer who in his youth took part in the Fronde, the nobility’s revolt against absolute monarchy. His Maxims (1665, final form 1678) is a collection of aphorisms on human nature holding that virtue is usually vice in disguise and that the real motives are ambition and self-interest.
François de Pâris was a French deacon who died in 1727; his tomb at Saint-Médard in Paris became a gathering place for Jansenists and reports of miraculous cures.
Frederiksberg is a district of Copenhagen that forms an independent municipality. Until the demarcation line was moved in 1852 it was an idyllic, rural area with scattered buildings, and Frederiksberg Gardens with the restaurants around them was a favourite place for outings; the spelling Fresberg reproduces the Copenhagen pronunciation.
The free spirit is Nietzsche’s name for a thinker who is free of faiths and values imposed from outside and gives himself his own laws. In the Genealogy he argues that the self-styled free spirits of his time are not yet free, because they still believe in truth.
Spinoza calls a thing free when it exists from the necessity of its own nature and is determined to act by itself alone. By contrast, constraint is determination by something external to a fixed way of existing or acting.
Kant distinguishes a negative concept of freedom, the will’s independence from determination by causes outside itself, from a positive concept, autonomy: the will’s being a law to itself. Freedom cannot be proved from experience; it is an Idea of reason, and every rational agent must act under the idea of its own freedom.
The French National Assembly was formed in June 1789 when deputies of the Third Estate declared themselves representatives of the nation. As the National Constituent Assembly, it undertook to give France a constitution and adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in August 1789.
A friable material readily breaks apart or crumbles into powder.
Frippery once meant cast-off clothes, a place where old clothes were sold, or the trade in them, and later secondhand finery, cheap and tawdry decoration or affected elegance. It comes from French friperie.
‘To run from Herod to Pilate’ is a Danish saying for difficult or wholly futile efforts to get something done. It goes back to Luke 23, where Jesus is taken to Pilate, then to Herod and back to Pilate, and neither finds himself able to judge him.
Fulling is the treatment of woollen cloth while wet so that its fibres mat together. The cloth shrinks and becomes denser.
Function creep is a gradual, contestable extension of a system or practice beyond its original purposes. The term draws attention to changes that appear incremental but can alter what the system does.
A future contingent is an event that may occur or fail to occur. Aristotle’s sea-battle argument distinguishes the necessity that one of two alternatives will occur from the necessity of either particular alternative. Scholars disagree about the resulting account of truth and falsity in statements about the future.
Gabriel is an angelic messenger in Jewish and Christian traditions. In Luke’s Gospel he brings the announcement of Jesus’s birth to Mary.
To gainsay is to deny, dispute or contradict a statement.
Galen was a Roman physician of Greek origin and a prolific ancient medical writer. His anatomical, physiological and medical writings remained influential into the seventeenth century.
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) adopted the heliocentric Copernican model of the world and was condemned by the Church in 1633.
Gangkone is an older Danish word for a cleaning woman or a woman who runs errands in town.
To garble, in its older sense, is to pick out such parts of a text as may serve a purpose, and so to mutilate or pervert a quotation or an account; originally it meant to sift spices and separate the valuable from the worthless.
Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), called el Inca, was a Peruvian historian born in Cuzco, the son of a noble Inca woman and a Spanish conquistador. His principal work, Comentarios reales que tratan del origen de los Incas (1609–1617), gives a lively account of Peru's history before and after the arrival of the Spaniards and remains an important ethnohistorical source despite weak method.
Garrulous means excessively talkative, often about trivial matters.
The gates of horn and ivory are two routes by which dreams reach human beings in Homer’s Odyssey. Penelope describes dreams passing through ivory as deceptive, while those passing through horn come true.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets rules for processing information about identified or identifiable individuals. Its scope includes organisations established in the European Economic Area and certain activities of organisations elsewhere that target or monitor people there.
Generation and corruption, in Aristotle’s account of natural change, mean coming-to-be and passing-away. They are distinguished from alteration, in which an identifiable subject persists while its properties change. Generation and corruption concern the coming-to-be of one substance and the passing-away of another.
For Descartes, generosity is justified self-esteem grounded in recognizing the free disposition of one’s will and maintaining a firm resolution to use it well. It involves undertaking what one judges best and distinguishes this basis of esteem from wealth, honours or other external advantages.
Genesis 1:28 is the verse in which God blesses the newly created human beings and says to them, in the King James Version, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it’, giving them dominion over the fish, the fowl and every living thing that moves on the earth. It follows God’s declared intention in verse 26 to make man in his image and let them have dominion, and precedes the gift of every seed-bearing herb and tree for food in verse 29.
Genesis 3:16 records God’s words to the woman after the disobedience in Eden; in the King James Version, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee’. Verse 19 pronounces the sentence on the man, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground’.
Genesis 9:1–3 is God’s blessing of Noah and his sons after the flood: in the King James Version he bids them ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth’, declares that the fear and dread of them shall be upon every beast, fowl and fish, ‘into your hand are they delivered’, and grants that ‘every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you’.
A genus is a broader kind under which species fall; a species is a more specific kind. In Aristotle’s logical classification, animal is the genus of man, while an individual person belongs to the species man. The relation can have several levels, and Aristotle calls the species closer to an individual more informative than its genus.
Ancient geometrical analysis begins by supposing the desired result already obtained and works back to something already known. Synthesis reverses the route, proceeding from that known starting point to establish or construct the result.
Georg Hermann Schuller (1650/51–1679) was born in Wesel and died in Amsterdam. He was a friend and correspondent of Spinoza and a correspondent of Tschirnhaus.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was the most prominent German philosopher of the nineteenth century, whose thought both continued and criticized Kant’s. His works include the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and he taught at the University of Berlin from 1818 until his death.
George Berkeley (1685–1753) was an Irish philosopher and Bishop of Cloyne.
George Buchanan (1506–1582) was a Scottish humanist and reformer who studied and taught at Bordeaux, where Montaigne was his pupil. He returned to Scotland in 1561, was a tutor to Mary, Queen of Scots, whom he later opposed, served as Lord Privy Seal from 1570 to 1578, and published many Latin works, among them the dialogue De iure regni apud Scotos (1579).
George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) was a German-born Baroque composer who worked in England. His music includes operas, oratorios such as Messiah, and orchestral works such as Water Music.
Gersonides, also called Levi ben Gerson, was a medieval Jewish philosopher and biblical commentator whose works include The Wars of the Lord.
Gideon is a tribal chieftain of ancient Israel described in Judges 6–8 as a skilled warrior and a champion of the religion of Yahweh; he bore the byname Jerubbaal, ‘he who fights against Baal’. His son Abimelech was made king by the men of Shechem (Judges 9).
The Gigantomachy is the battle in Greek mythology between the Olympian gods, led by Zeus, and the Giants, powerful offspring of Gaia and Uranus. The gods prevail in this struggle over cosmic rule. The battle became a major subject of Greek art, notably the large sculpted frieze of the Hellenistic altar at Pergamon.
Gilles van der Heck may be identified with Gilles van der Heck the elder (fl. 1643–83), an agent and intelligencer in The Hague for the Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg-Calenberg. He may also be his son of the same name (fl. 1650–1727), who worked as an agent for Strasbourg, the Elector of Brandenburg and other princes.
Gioseffo Zarlino was a sixteenth-century Italian music theorist and composer who directed the music at St Mark’s in Venice. His Istitutioni armoniche, first published in 1558, treats musical proportions, counterpoint, and modes.
Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679) was an Italian mathematician and physiologist who lectured in mathematics at Messina and later held the chair of mathematics at Pisa. His Euclides restitutus, published in 1658, sought to present Euclid’s Elements more clearly.
A girding is a jeering or sarcastic remark.
Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), Latin Hieronymus Cardanus, was an Italian physician and mathematician. He is famed for his Ars Magna, the first Latin treatise devoted solely to algebra, and he also wrote an autobiography.
Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676) became professor of theology and oriental languages at Utrecht in 1634. An orthodox Calvinist who adhered to Aristotelian philosophy, he opposed Cartesianism, and in 1642 came into serious conflict with Descartes in the so-called Utrecht crisis, which led to a ban on Cartesian philosophy.
Glaucus is a Greek sea god associated with fishermen, sailors and prophecy. In one tradition he begins as a fisherman and becomes immortal after eating a magical herb and entering the sea. His transformed body is described with human and fishlike features, seaweed and other marine growths.
A glavind is a pole weapon with a knife-like point, used for both cutting and thrusting; in more poetic language the word also means a sword.
Glory and shame, in Spinoza’s Short Treatise, are respectively joy at others’ praise of one’s conduct and sorrow at their contempt, apart from further benefits or injuries. Although criticized as passions, they may be used to help others, as when appropriate clothing makes useful counsel more acceptable.
In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the blinded Gloucester compares human beings to flies killed for sport by boys, imagining the gods as similarly cruel.
Gloze is an archaic word for explaining away or minimizing something, and for using flattery. As a noun it can denote flattering or deceptive talk; it also has an older sense of explanatory commentary.
Gnav is an old Danish game played with cards or pieces bearing figures such as the cuckoo, the dragoon, the cat, the horse and the house, together with numbers. Players draw pieces in turn, which can beat one another by fixed rules, and the aim is to avoid ending with the lowest piece.
In Euclidean geometry, a gnomon is the figure formed by removing a smaller parallelogram from a larger one with the same shape, parallel corresponding sides and a shared corner. In the case of squares it is an L-shaped border, illustrating how a square can increase in size while retaining its shape.
A sundial’s gnomon is its fixed projecting arm that casts a shadow.
In Genesis 22 God tests Abraham by commanding him to offer his son Isaac as a burnt offering on a mountain in the land of Moriah. On the way Isaac asks where the lamb for the burnt offering is, and Abraham answers, ‘My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.’
In Genesis, after the Flood, God promises that while the earth remains seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease, and establishes a covenant with Noah and his descendants that the earth will never again be destroyed by a flood, setting the rainbow as its sign.
Genesis 4:7 contains God’s words to Cain before the murder of Abel; in the King James Version, ‘If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.’ Interpreters disagree whether ‘his desire’ and ‘rule over him’ refer to sin or to Abel.
‘Going further’ (Danish at gaae videre) is the phrase with which Fear and Trembling mocks an age that does not stop at doubting everything, or at faith, but claims to go further. Descartes had held that one should doubt everything in order to secure knowledge, and the jibe is aimed especially at the Danish Hegelians H.L. Martensen and J.L. Heiberg, who, in keeping with Hegel’s own aim of going beyond his predecessors, wished to go further than Hegel himself. The book’s epilogue insists that in love and faith no generation can build on what the previous one achieved, so that one can never ‘go further’.
In ancient poetry, the Golden Age is the first and happiest age of humankind, imagined as a time of carefree life, goodness and justice.
In Part IV of the Ethics, Spinoza treats good and bad as comparisons rather than positive qualities belonging to things in themselves. He nevertheless retains these terms in relation to a model of human nature: good helps us approach that model, and bad hinders us. His definitions call good what we certainly know to be useful to us, and evil what we certainly know hinders the attainment of a good.
For Descartes, good sense, which he equates with reason, is the power of judging well and distinguishing truth from error, which he held to be equal in all people. Having this power is distinguished from applying it well.
In Kant’s ethics, a good will is the only thing that is good without qualification. Talents of the mind, qualities of temperament and gifts of fortune can all become bad when the will that uses them is not good, whereas a good will keeps its whole value even if it accomplishes nothing, shining like a jewel by its own light. It is a will committed above all to doing what the moral law requires; in human beings, whose desires can pull against that law, it shows itself as acting from duty.
Gorgias of Leontini was a Greek teacher of rhetoric known for persuasive speeches and arguments about language, knowledge, and being.
In Genesis, Goshen is the part of Egypt where Pharaoh permits Jacob’s family, who are shepherds, to settle. Exodus describes Goshen as spared the plagues of flies and hail, and says that the Israelites had light in their homes during three days of darkness.
The Gospel of John is one of the four Gospels of the New Testament that tell of the life of Jesus. It was written in koine Greek, probably about 90–95 CE. Its author is unknown; from the late second century Christian tradition attributed it to the apostle John, one of Jesus’s twelve disciples. It opens with a prologue that presents Jesus as the Son of God.
Gothic could mean pertaining to the Goths and, by extension, rude or barbarous. It also names the style of architecture with pointed arches and steep roofs that prevailed in Western Europe from about 1200 to 1475.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was a German philosopher and mathematician. He argued that a perfectly good and powerful God chose the best of all possible worlds.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) was a German writer, literary critic and librarian, the foremost representative of the German Enlightenment and one of the most important German dramatists. His critical works include Laokoon (1766) and the Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–1769), written while he was dramaturge of the German National Theatre in Hamburg.
The Graces, called Charites in Greek, are goddesses associated with beauty, charm and joy. Later tradition commonly names three: Euphrosyne, Thalia and Aglaia. Greek and Roman art often represents them as a linked group of young women.
The grand climacteric is the sixty-third year of life, once regarded as a critical period of changes in health or fortune.
Grand Seignior, also spelled signior or seignor, was a title of the sultan of Turkey, the Ottoman ruler.
In older medical usage, gravel means small stones formed in the kidneys or bladder, or the disease they cause.
The great artery is the aorta, the main arterial vessel carrying blood from the heart’s left ventricle to the body, apart from the lungs.
Great King was a royal title used by the rulers of ancient Persia. Achaemenid royal inscriptions present the king as ruling many peoples and receiving his authority from Ahuramazda.
Greek choral performance joined the activity of a group with song, dance and musical accompaniment. Choruses took part in religious festivals, weddings and other communal occasions as well as drama. Their composition and movement varied with the occasion, and a leader helped direct the group. A chorus could consist of boys, girls, men, women or a mixed ensemble.
A chorus was a group of performers who sang and danced as part of Greek drama, interacting with actors and commenting on events. In Classical Athens, festival choruses were trained and equipped at the expense of a wealthy sponsor, the choregos, while the city paid the actors separately.
Greek guest-friendship, or xenia, was a reciprocal relationship between people from different communities, reinforced by hospitality, gifts and obligations that could extend to their descendants. Zeus Xenios was invoked as its divine protector. Such a bond could support political cooperation without implying intimate friendship or agreement in philosophy.
A libation is a liquid offering poured out in a religious rite. In ancient Greek drinking gatherings, wine was offered to the gods from a shallow bowl called a phiale before the company drank from a newly filled mixing bowl. The third libation at a banquet could be dedicated to Zeus Soter, Zeus the Saviour.
Ancient Greek musical modes were ways of organising pitches, associated in philosophical discussions with different emotions and kinds of character. Plato and Aristotle treated music as an influence on moral education. Greek mode names were later reused for church scales, but those later scales are not identical to the ancient ones.
A seer, or mantis, was a specialist in divination in ancient Greek society. Seers interpreted signs and advised people about divine intentions; their work included consultations in daily life and accompanying armies on campaign.
A symposium was a drinking gathering of elite men in ancient Greece, combining conversation with poetry, music and other entertainment. Guests reclined on couches. A presiding symposiarch regulated the wine mixed with water in a central vessel, while enslaved attendants served the drink. The occasion had its own conventions of participation and sociability.
Gregory of Rimini (c. 1300–1358) was an Augustinian friar and scholastic theologian who studied and lectured at Paris and in 1357 was elected prior general of his order. He was nicknamed the ‘torturer of infants’ (tortor infantium) because he held that unbaptized children go to hell rather than to a painless outer region of it.
A griffin is a fabulous monster, half lion and half eagle, often represented in Greek and Roman art.
A gymnasiarch was an official concerned with athletic training and its provision in a Greek city. Duties varied by period and place: classical Athenian gymnasiarchs financed and organised tribal torch races, while later civic gymnasiarchs commonly administered gymnasia and supervised the young men who used them.
Gymnosophists were Indian ascetics in antiquity, described as living nearly naked and contemplating nature.
A habit, as a kind of quality in Aristotle’s classification, is relatively stable and difficult to change, as with knowledge or virtue. A disposition is more readily altered, such as an unstable condition of heat or cold. A disposition can become a habit when it becomes firmly established.
Habitude can mean a habitual disposition or an established way of behaving: a habit or custom.
In an older sense, habitude means a relation: the condition of something with regard to something else.
A hackney coach was a carriage kept for hire. As an adjective, hackney meant let out for hire or devoted to common use.
Hades is the ruler of the dead in Greek mythology, brother of Zeus and Poseidon and husband of Persephone. He became associated with Pluto, the giver of wealth from beneath the earth. The name Hades can also denote the underworld itself, rather than its ruler.
Hafez (about 1320–1390) was a Persian lyric poet of Shiraz, the most celebrated in the Persian language. His divan of almost 500 ghazals joins mystical and moral themes with wine and the worship of beauty. Goethe admired him.
Hagar is, in the Hebrew Bible, an Egyptian slave woman who becomes the mother of Abraham’s son Ishmael. Because Sarah and Abraham were old and childless, Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham so that he might have a son by her; when Sarah herself bore a son, Hagar was driven away with Ishmael (Genesis 16 and 21).
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet accuses women of changing the face God gave them and adopting affected movement and speech, including lisping and nicknaming God’s creatures.
The Hand is a traditional scheme for organizing pitches and the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, and la used in singing. Descartes converts its arrangement into a circular diagram related to his divisions of the octave.
Manum de tabula is a Latin expression meaning that enough has been done and it is time to stop; its image is taking one’s hand away from a picture.
Hannibal was a Carthaginian commander who invaded Italy across the Alps and fought Rome in the Second Punic War. His forces included troops supplied by the Gauls of northern Italy.
Haply is an archaic adverb meaning perhaps or by chance.
Harmodius was an Athenian who, together with his lover Aristogeiton, killed Hipparchus during the Panathenaic festival in 514 BCE. Guards killed Harmodius at the scene. Although Hippias remained in power, the pair were later celebrated in Athens as the tyrannicides.
Harmonia is a figure in Greek mythology, daughter of Ares and Aphrodite and wife of Cadmus. Their children include Ino and Semele. Stories of her wedding tell of a necklace made by Hephaestus that later brought disaster to its possessors.
Harmonics studies musical relations mathematically. Aristotle distinguishes musical relations observed by hearing from their explanations through arithmetic, including the numerical relations between higher and lower pitches.
In Greek mythology a harpy is a fabulous winged monster, ravenous and filthy, with the face of a woman and the body of a vulture with long claws.
Hasdai Crescas (about 1340–1410/11) was a rabbi, born in Barcelona, who headed the Jewish community of Aragon. His philosophical work Or Hashem argues against Maimonides’ proofs of the existence of God and holds that God’s existence can be proved only through the need for a first cause.
In Luke 14:26 Jesus tells the crowds that whoever comes to him and does not hate father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters and even his own life cannot be his disciple. The following verses compare discipleship with building a tower: one must first count the cost or be mocked for failing to finish. C.G. Bretschneider's New Testament lexicon (1829) explained the verb ‘hate’ in this verse as weakened in meaning, ‘to love less’.
Spinoza’s Short Treatise calls hatred a disturbance directed against someone believed to have knowingly and willingly harmed us. It distinguishes this from aversion towards a thing thought harmful by nature.
Hautboy is an English name for the oboe, a wind instrument with a double reed. The name comes from French hautbois, formed from words meaning “high” and “wood”.
Masoretic vowel points, or nikkud, are marks added to Hebrew consonantal writing to guide pronunciation; related accent signs indicate the rhythm and melody of recitation.
Hecatombaeon was the first month of the Athenian lunar calendar, falling approximately in July. The Panathenaic festival was celebrated during this month. Its correspondence with a modern calendar month is approximate.
The hectemori were dependent cultivators in Attica before Solon's reforms. Their name refers to a sixth share of produce, but their obligations remain disputed: interpretations differ over whether they paid or retained that share, and whether the obligation represented rent or another form of dependence.
A hectic fever is a fever of irritation and debility that occurs at an advanced stage of an exhausting disease, especially pulmonary consumption. In this older sense the adjective hectic means habitual or constitutional, pertaining especially to the slow wasting of the body in consumption.
Hecuba is the wife of Priam, king of Troy, in Greek legend, and the mother of Hector and Paris. Accounts of Troy’s fall portray her enslavement and suffering; another tradition tells of her transformation into a dog. Her fate became a subject of Greek tragedy.
Helen was an ancient name for a solitary light seen on ships and regarded as ominous; paired lights were attributed to Castor and Pollux and taken as favourable signs.
Hellebore names plants of the genus Helleborus in the buttercup family, most of them poisonous. Helleborus niger has been used medicinally since antiquity, with recorded uses including purging and treatment of mental illness.
The Hellenic Treasurers, or hellenotamiai, were Athenian officials responsible for collecting tribute from Athens' allies. The Athenian tribute list of 454/3 BCE records their declaration to auditors of the first-fruits dedicated to Athena from that tribute.
The helots were an unfree population under Spartan control. They lived in their own communities, cultivated citizens’ land and surrendered part of its produce, while also serving in the army. They greatly outnumbered full Spartan citizens and were subjected to harsh repression. Their dependent status differed from that of slaves bought and sold as individual property.
Henricus Regius (1598–1679), also known as Henry le Roy, was a physician and professor of medicine at Utrecht who taught natural philosophy as a follower of Descartes. Descartes later fell out with him after Regius published a broadsheet that departed from Descartes’ account of the human mind, and replied to it in 1648.
Henry Ainsworth (1569–1622) was teacher and leader of the English separatist congregation in Amsterdam known as the Ancient Church. His Annotations on the Pentateuch, published between 1616 and 1619, were widely respected for their oriental scholarship, their close adherence to the literal sense and their use of Jewish and rabbinic sources.
Henry Oldenburg managed correspondence as an early secretary of the Royal Society. He established its journal Philosophical Transactions in 1665.
Henry Thomas Buckle was a British historian with a particular interest in the philosophy of history. He published the first two volumes of his History of Civilization in England in 1857–1861 and died in Damascus, while travelling, before the work was finished.
The Hephaestia was a festival which the Athenian Constitution reports as added, during Cephisophon's archonship, to its list of festivals celebrated every four years.
Hephaestus is the Greek god of fire, metalworking and craftsmanship, maker of remarkable objects for the gods. Myths differ over whether Hera or Zeus cast him from Olympus. In the Odyssey’s account, he traps his wife Aphrodite and her lover Ares in a net he has fashioned.
Hera is the queen of the gods and protector of marriage in Greek religion. In the familiar epic genealogy she is both the sister and wife of Zeus. Stories often portray conflict between them. Major centres of her worship included Argos and Samos; older English translations sometimes spell her name Here.
The Heracleia was a festival listed by the Athenian Constitution among celebrations held every four years and administered by Athens' Annual Commissioners.
Heracles was a hero of Greek mythology, the son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene. He was celebrated for the twelve labours he performed for King Eurystheus. The Romans called him Hercules.
Heraclitus was a Greek thinker from Ephesus, active around 500 BCE. His work survives in fragments quoted by later writers, often in compressed and enigmatic language. He is associated with change, the relation of opposites and the role of fire in the cosmos, but the precise interpretation of these ideas remains disputed.
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was an English philosopher who held that society follows the same laws of development as nature. He first used the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’.
The Hermaea were festivals honouring Hermes, the patron of gymnasia and wrestling schools. At Athens, boys celebrated with sacrifices and games in athletic facilities.
Hermes is a Greek god, son of Zeus and Maia, who carries messages between gods and mortals and guides the dead to the underworld. He protects travellers, heralds, merchants and thieves, and is associated with eloquence, ingenuity and the gymnasium. The Romans identified him with Mercury.
Hernando de Soto (about 1496–1542) was a Spanish explorer and conqueror. He joined Francisco Pizarro and had a central role in the conquest of the Inca empire in 1533; in 1539 he led an expedition through the southern parts of the present United States, exploring Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and probably Arkansas, and died on the west bank of the Mississippi in 1542.
Herodotus was a Greek historian of the fifth century BCE whose Histories recount the conflict between the Greek world and the Persian Empire.
Herostratus was an otherwise unknown Greek who set fire to the temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 BC in order to become famous. His countrymen decreed that his name must never be spoken, but the attempt failed, and ‘Herostratic fame’ has come to mean fame won by a bad deed.
Hesiod was a Greek poet associated with Boeotia who lived around 700 BCE. His Theogony recounts the origins and relationships of the gods, while Works and Days combines advice on work with reflections on justice.
Hestia is the Greek goddess of the hearth and sacrificial fire, associated with the household and family. The public hearth of a city was also sacred to her; colonists carried its fire to a new settlement to preserve a symbolic link with their mother city. Her Roman counterpart is Vesta.
Hesychasm, from the Greek for inner stillness, is a tradition of contemplative inner prayer in the Eastern Orthodox Church that reached its full form among the monks of Mount Athos in the fourteenth century. Its practitioners used the Jesus Prayer with set postures and breathing to reach a stillness that would lead to an experience of God.
Heteronomy, in Kant’s ethics, is the condition of a will that takes its law from something outside itself, such as an object of inclination or an interest, instead of giving the law to itself. Kant holds that such principles yield only conditional, hypothetical imperatives and so cannot ground a universally binding morality.
Hezekiah was king of Judah from about 725 to 697 BCE, the son of King Ahaz. Judah was then a vassal of Assyria, and for the first two decades of his reign he is said to have paid tribute; the Second Book of Kings says that he rebelled against the king of Assyria and served him not, and when Sennacherib campaigned against Judah in 701 BCE Jerusalem was besieged but spared, though Hezekiah still had to pay tribute.
Hiero I was a fifth-century BCE tyrant of Syracuse in Sicily and a patron of poets.
Hippias of Elis was a Greek sophist whose teaching ranged across mathematics, astronomy, poetry, and practical or moral subjects.
Hippias was a son of Pisistratus and a tyrant of Athens who governed after his father's death alongside his brother Hipparchus. The Athenian Constitution describes Hippias as the effective head of their government.
Hippocrates (about 460–377 BCE) was a Greek physician who practised and taught medicine on the island of Kos in the fifth century BCE. His name came to designate a collection of texts, the Hippocratic Corpus, more than a well-documented historical person. That tradition stressed sober observation at the sickbed, diet and strict ethical standards for physicians, and explained disease by the balance of the bodily fluids.
A fabulous winged animal combining a horse with a griffin.
Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) was a French critic, historian and philosopher, the leading nineteenth-century figure in applying the methods of natural science to the humanities. He explained a writer’s or artist’s dominant faculty by race, milieu and historical moment.
History, in Aristotle’s scientific vocabulary, means factual inquiry: establishing the attributes that actually belong to the things studied. Such inquiry supplies facts for subsequent demonstration and causal explanation.
Spinoza’s history of Scripture is an inquiry into biblical language, the arrangement and comparison of passages, the authors’ circumstances, and the transmission and reception of the books, used to establish their meaning.
Hoary describes hair that has turned grey or white with age, or a person with such hair.
Hollow vein translates Latin vena cava. In modern anatomy, the two venae cavae return blood from the upper and lower body to the heart’s right atrium.
To take orders, or take holy orders, is to enter a grade of the Christian ministry, such as deacon, priest or bishop, by ordination.
In Kant’s ethics, a holy will is one that necessarily acts in accordance with the moral law without being constrained to do so. Obligation and duty therefore do not apply to it; they hold only for wills, like the human will, that may have to overcome contrary desires.
Homer is the traditional name of the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the great ancient Greek epics of the Trojan War and Odysseus’ homecoming. His identity and whether the two poems had the same author remain uncertain.
Homines bonae voluntatis, ‘men of good will’, echoes the Latin Vulgate of Luke 2:14, the song of the heavenly host: ‘Gloria in altissimis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis’. The King James Version renders the verse ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’
In Hannah Arendt’s account, homo faber is the human maker who builds a durable world of things. This activity of work differs from the labour that continually sustains biological life.
Ola O. Hårstad uses homo faber for the human being who extends immediate capacities through technology and thereby shapes the conditions of future life. This broadens Arendt’s account of the maker of durable things into an account of how technological creation forms the setting for later action.
In Aristotle’s classification, homonymous things share a name but have different definitions corresponding to that name. A living person and a painted likeness can both be called an animal, although what it means to be an animal differs in the two cases.
Honoré Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau was a French writer and politician. Rejected by the nobility as a candidate for the Estates-General, he was elected by the Third Estate, and his bold stance in June 1789 helped turn the Estates-General into the National Assembly at the opening of the French Revolution.
In Part IV of the Ethics, Spinoza calls the rational desire to associate others with oneself in friendship honour (honestas). He calls honourable what people living according to reason praise, and base what obstructs the gaining of friendship.
The First Letter of Peter tells Christians to submit to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, to the king as supreme and to governors sent by him, and closes the exhortation: Fear God. Honour the king.
In Spinoza’s Short Treatise, hope is joy mixed with sorrow concerning a future good considered possible, while confidence is joy without sorrow when that good is considered certain.
In Spinoza’s Ethics, hope and fear are respectively inconstant pleasure and pain associated with a past or future event whose outcome is not known. When doubt disappears, he calls the resulting emotions confidence and despair.
A hoplite was a heavily armed infantry soldier in ancient Greece. His equipment included a large shield, spear and protective armour. Hoplites fought in close ranks called a phalanx, with neighbouring shields helping to protect the line.
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65–8 BCE) was a Roman poet, born at Venusia in Apulia, the son of a freedman. Introduced to Maecenas in 38 BCE, he belonged to the literary circle of the Augustan age. His works comprise two books of Satires, the Epodes, the Odes, and two books of verse Epistles, the later of which include the Ars poetica on the art of poetry.
A horn angle is the geometric configuration formed by two curves that start from the same point in a common direction.
Horror religiosus is Latin for holy dread.
Hospitalslem is an older Danish word for a resident of a charitable foundation for the poor.
Hoti is Greek for “that”. In philosophical usage it can refer to the fact that something happens, distinguished from an explanation of why it happens.
Hubris is overbearing pride or presumption: arrogance. The Greek word meant excessive pride or wanton violence.
Hugo Danielsz Boxel (about 1607–1680) was born and died in Gorinchem. He was a correspondent of Spinoza.
Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) was a Dutch jurist, philosopher and statesman, born in Delft, who served as attorney general of Holland, was imprisoned after the coup of 1618, escaped to Paris and later served as Swedish ambassador to France. His De iure belli ac pacis, published in Paris in 1625, grounded natural law in human nature and treated a right as a moral quality of a person, a shift often credited with founding modern natural-law and rights theory.
Huguenots are the Protestant adherents of the Reformed teaching in France, following the doctrine of John Calvin (1509–1564). The Edict of Nantes of 1598 secured them rights of worship, access to public office and fortified places, but Louis XIV revoked it in 1685, and several hundred thousand Huguenots emigrated because of the persecutions, especially to Switzerland, England, the Netherlands and North America.
Spinoza’s Short Treatise defines human freedom as the firm reality acquired by the understanding through direct union with God, enabling ideas and effects in harmony with its nature. It contrasts freedom from external causes with servitude to them.
Human, All Too Human is Nietzsche’s book of short numbered sections and aphorisms, first published in 1878, with a second volume in 1879–80. It grew out of a naturalistic critique of morality, encouraged by his friend Paul Rée, and sending it to the Wagners effectively ended his friendship with them.
A humour, in medical and physiological usage, is a fluid or semifluid of the body.
A hvid was a silver coin worth four pennies, struck in Lübeck from about 1365 and soon common in Denmark, where the last hvid was minted in Copenhagen in 1686. Worth a third of a skilling, it came to stand for a trifling sum.
In classical mythology the Hydra was a many-headed serpent or monster in the marsh of Lerna in the Peloponnese: when one head was cut off, two others grew in its place unless the wound was cauterized. It was slain by Hercules, and its name came to mean any terrible monster.
Hymen is the Latin name of Hymenaios, the Greek god of weddings.
Hymeneal means relating to marriage; as a noun, it is an old word for a wedding song.
Hymns in Prose for Children is Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s collection of rhythmic devotional prose for children, first published in 1781. It uses the natural world to encourage religious feeling and was intended for memorizing and recitation rather than singing.
A hyperbola is a conic curve for which the difference of the distances from a point on it to two fixed points is constant.
Hypostatical, in older usage, means relating to substance and hence constitutive or elementary; Boyle wrote of the chemists’ doctrine of their three hypostatical principles.
As a scientific starting point, a hypothesis is a thesis asserting one side of a contradiction, such as that something is or is not. Aristotle also uses hypothesis relative to a learner for a demonstrable claim assumed without proof that the learner finds probable.
A hypothesis in Cartesian natural philosophy is a proposed way of generating natural forms from which their observed properties can be deduced. Its explanatory use need not assert that nature actually arose in the proposed way.
In Kant’s ethics, a hypothetical imperative commands an action as a means to an end that one wills, and so applies only on the condition that one has that end. Kant calls such imperatives problematic when the end is merely possible, as with rules of skill, and assertoric when the end is happiness, which human beings will by natural necessity. Because happiness is an indeterminate end, the imperatives of prudence are better called counsels than commands in the strict sense.
In Kant’s technical vocabulary an Idea is a concept of reason to which no object of possible experience corresponds. Freedom is such an Idea: its reality cannot be shown in experience, yet reason must presuppose it in a being conscious of a will.
An ideatum is the object represented by an idea. Elwes also calls it the idea’s “correlate”, distinguishing the idea of a circle from the circle itself.
Ignis fatuus is a name for a light seen over marshy ground, also called a will-o’-the-wisp. Figuratively, it means a deceptive hope or goal.
The Iliad is an ancient Greek epic traditionally attributed to Homer, telling part of the legendary Trojan War in 24 books. Its action centers on Achilles’ anger and withdrawal from battle, and his return after the death of Patroclus.
Illation is the drawing of an inference, or the conclusion reached by doing so.
Imaginary space is a supposed spatial receptacle distinct from the bodies occupying it. Cartesian critics rejected conceiving space as a separate entity independent of matter.
For Spinoza, imagination represents external bodies through the ways the body is affected; an image in this terminology is a bodily modification. In relation to imagination the mind is passive, unlike its activity in understanding.
Roman imagines were ancestral likenesses kept in family homes and displayed at funerals. Polybius describes masks representing deceased relatives, worn at family funerals by men resembling those relatives.
Imbros is the Greek name of Gökçeada, an island in the northern Aegean Sea, northwest of the entrance to the Dardanelles.
According to Spinoza, imagining a being like oneself affected by an emotion can produce a similar emotion in oneself, where no prior emotion toward that being is assumed. He calls this imitation of emotions compassion when it concerns pain, and emulation when it gives rise to a desire for something others are imagined to desire.
An immanent, or inner, cause is one whose effects remain within itself, in contrast to a transeunt, or transitive, cause that acts on things outside itself. Spinoza calls God an immanent cause of all things because everything God produces is within him and there is nothing outside him. He illustrates the idea with the understanding, which is the cause of its ideas and at the same time consists of them. The Short Treatise argues that such an effect cannot perish while its cause endures.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a German philosopher, born and died in Königsberg in Prussia. His Critique of Pure Reason (1781) examines the limits of reason, and his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) develops his moral philosophy. In his aesthetics the beautiful arouses a disinterested satisfaction.
Immanuel Tremellius was an Italian Hebraist whose work included a Latin translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Syriac.
An immediate proposition has no intervening middle term through which it is demonstrated. In Aristotle’s account of science, immediate propositions serve as starting principles of demonstration.
Impertinent originally meant not pertinent: not pertaining to the matter in hand, having no bearing on the subject, irrelevant. The word also has the now familiar sense of offending against propriety or good breeding, rude or presumptuous.
In scholastic theology, implicit faith (fides implicita) is a willingness to believe scriptural revelation as the Church interprets it, without understanding each article explicitly. More generally, the phrase can mean unquestioning or unreserved trust.
Hume divides perceptions of the mind into impressions and ideas. Impressions include sensations and emotions experienced with greater force or vivacity; ideas are their less lively counterparts in thought, memory and imagination.
An imprimatur is official approval or authorization to publish, especially from an ecclesiastical authority; the word can also mean official sanction more generally.
In sooth is an archaic phrase meaning in truth, truly; sooth means truth or reality.
Inanition is exhaustion from a lack of nourishment or vitality.
The Incarnation is the Christian doctrine that the Son of God assumed human nature, so that Jesus Christ is held to be both true God and true man.
Descartes calls extension and the divisibility of matter indefinite when no limit can be conceived, distinguishing this from infinity, whose properties exceed a finite intellect.
An indefinite noun or verb is a negative expression such as not-man or is not-well. Aristotle treats these as a special class of expressions; an indefinite noun alone is not a complete denial. Anonymous can denote such an expression in older English terminology.
An indefinite proposition affirms or denies something of a subject without a universal or particular sign specifying the extent of the claim. Examples include the claim that there is the same science of contraries and the claim that pleasure is not good.
Spinoza calls a person independent insofar as that person can repel violence and live according to their own judgment. Dependence can be imposed through confinement, disarmament, fear or favours; the mind is independent insofar as it uses reason.
In older English, Indian as a noun means one of the Indigenous inhabitants of America, so called from the supposed identity of America with India. The word also names a native or inhabitant of India.
Indifference of the will is its lack of determination toward one alternative rather than another. Descartes distinguished the power to affirm or deny from indifference arising from a lack of reasons, which he called the lowest degree of liberty.
Indifferency is an older form of indifference. It can mean impartiality or an absence of interest or concern.
Indifferent can mean impartial: not inclined to one side or party more than another, neutral, free from bias or prejudice. An indifferent judge is an unbiased one, not an uninterested one.
In an older sense, indolency means freedom from pain or trouble. It is a form of indolence, which can also mean laziness.
Induction is reasoning from particular cases toward a universal claim. In Aristotle’s account of scientific knowledge, a process moving from particulars to generalizations helps explain how the indemonstrable first principles of a science become known.
An inference about personal data is a conclusion about someone derived from other information rather than directly supplied by that person. For example, known characteristics can allow an attribute to be deduced from a wider dataset.
Spinoza calls infinite modes those features of the universe that follow necessarily from the absolute nature of one of God’s attributes; they are universal and eternal and do not come into or go out of being. They include the most general principles of the universe: from extension follow the truths of geometry and the laws of the motion and rest of bodies, and from thought follow laws of thought. Particular things, by contrast, are finite modes.
Infinite resignation is the renunciation of important goods or commitments in favour of what is considered higher, such as a beloved or a child given up for the sake of the eternal; it is the first move in the ‘double movement’ of faith. Painful as it is, it brings a certain ‘peace and rest and consolation’, and a person can achieve it through their own will. Johannes de silentio calls it the last stage before faith: whoever has not made this movement does not have faith.
Ingenerated means brought into being or developed. Applied to knowledge, it describes states coming to be in a knower, distinguished from the innate capacity for sense-perception.
Ingenuity, besides its surviving sense of inventiveness and cleverness in design, had an obsolete sense of openness of heart, ingenuousness, which seventeenth-century writers often intended.
Ingenuous now usually means candid, artless or naive, but an obsolete sense is honourable or noble. It comes from Latin ingenuus, native or freeborn, honourable, and of studies or occupations befitting a freeborn person, that is, liberal.
Being in a subject, in Aristotle’s logical classification, means existing in something without being one of its parts and being unable to exist separately from it. It is distinguished from being said of a subject: a particular instance of colour is in a body, whereas man is said of an individual man.
For Descartes, innate ideas are ideas whose content comes from the mind’s own nature, its faculty of thinking, rather than from the senses or from combining other ideas. He explained that they are innate as a faculty or tendency is, so that they need not be actually present to the mind from birth.
The Inns of Court are the four legal societies of London, among them Lincoln's Inn, the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple, that have long housed and educated students and practitioners of the law. Their foundation is dated to the early fifteenth century, the records of Lincoln's Inn beginning in 1422, and their students, the apprentices of law, learned largely by attending the courts and sharing education and lodging during the legal terms.
Insensible can mean incapable of being perceived by the senses, imperceptible, or progressing by imperceptible degrees, slow and gradual. It also means destitute of feeling or perception, unconscious, and unconcerned or apathetic.
Ola O. Hårstad uses institutionalised trust for independent oversight that continues when individuals are not examining their own person-flow. Institutions share investigative burdens that individuals cannot reasonably carry alone, while people retain their values, judgment and rights to question and act.
Instrumentarian power is Shoshana Zuboff’s term for power exercised through digital systems that monitor and shape people’s conduct remotely.
In Aristotle’s account of scientific knowledge, intellect (nous) grasps the indemonstrable first principles from which demonstrations proceed. It supplies the starting points of science rather than demonstrating those starting points.
In Spinoza’s account the intellect, or understanding, forms true and adequate ideas through its own power. It is distinguished from imagination, in relation to which the mind is passive.
For Spinoza, intellect in function is an actual mode of thinking, finite or infinite, rather than the absolute attribute of thought. Using this phrase does not by itself admit a corresponding intellect in potentiality.
In the Ethics, intellectual love of God arises from intuitive knowledge of things through God as eternal cause, rather than imagining God as present. Spinoza calls this love eternal and describes the human mind’s love as part of God’s infinite intellectual love of himself. Although he explains it through pleasure, eternal blessedness consists in perfection itself rather than a transition to greater perfection. He identifies blessedness with this active love and with virtue itself, rather than a reward earned by restraining desire.
Intellectual privacy protects the activities through which people explore and develop ideas, including thinking, reading and communicating. Neil Richards argues that freedom from surveillance in these activities supports intellectual freedom.
Kant contrasts the world of sense, nature as it appears and is governed by causal laws, with the intelligible world or world of understanding, which reason must think as the ground of appearances but cannot know. A rational being who regards itself as free and as giving the moral law takes the standpoint of a member of this intelligible world.
In scholastic accounts of perception and thought, species were the forms or likenesses by which an object is perceived and understood: the sensible species was what in an object is discerned through an organ of perception, and the same species as grasped by the understanding was called an intelligible species. On the influential view of Thomas Aquinas, the intellect thinks of an object by taking on its form; Peter Olivi and later William of Ockham argued that species were an unnecessary third thing between the mind and its object.
In an obsolete sense, intermission means intervention or interposition: the action of something that comes between other things.
In these syllogistic passages, intervals are the relations between terms expressed by propositions. A simple syllogism has three terms and two premise intervals; in the chain discussed here, inserting another term adds another proposition.
Introducers of Cases were Athenian officials who brought a specified class of 'monthly' cases before the law-courts. The Athenian Constitution describes five chosen by lot, one for each pair of tribes. Their docket included specified dowry, interest and business-capital claims, slander, friendly loans and partnerships, and matters involving slaves, cattle, the trierarch's office and banks.
For Descartes, intuition is the mind’s immediate, clear and doubt-free grasp of a simple truth. It is an intellectual act, distinct from sensory testimony or an imaginative guess.
In Kant’s philosophy an intuition is a representation that refers directly to a single object. Human intuition is sensible: objects are given to the mind through sensibility, and the understanding brings them under concepts.
Locke calls knowledge intuitive when the mind perceives the agreement or disagreement of two ideas immediately, by themselves, without the intervention of any other idea, as it perceives that white is not black or that three are more than two. He held it to be the clearest and most certain knowledge, on which the certainty of all other knowledge depends.
Intuitive knowledge is Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge in the Ethics: it proceeds from an adequate idea of the essence of certain attributes of God to adequate knowledge of the essence of things. It grasps in a single act what reason knows through inference.
Iolaus is a hero in Greek mythology, the nephew and faithful companion of Heracles. Traditions connect him with Heracles’s children after the hero’s death and with Sardinia and Sicily, where the two heroes were worshipped together.
Ion is the legendary ancestor of the Ionians in Greek mythology. Athenian tradition associated him with early military leadership and the division of the people into four tribes.
Iphigenia is, in Greek mythology, the daughter of King Agamemnon of Mycenae and Clytemnestra. She was sacrificed by her father to Artemis at Aulis, a harbour in Boeotia, so that the Greek fleet could sail to Troy; her mother was lured into bringing her there by the pretence that she was to marry Achilles. The sources disagree about what happened at Aulis: in some, Artemis replaced her with a deer and carried her to Tauris, while in others she was sacrificed.
Ipso facto, Latin, means by the fact itself, by that very fact.
In scholastic accounts, the irascible appetite responds to good or evil that is difficult to attain or avoid. Its passions include hope, fear, daring and anger; it is distinguished from the concupiscible appetite for good or evil considered simply as pleasant or harmful.
Irrefragable means impossible to refute or dispute; irrefragably is its corresponding adverb.
Isaac is the son of Abraham and father of Jacob, one of the three patriarchs of Israel, and the husband of Rebekah. Genesis tells how God tests Abraham by asking him to sacrifice Isaac, who is spared at the last moment, and how Jacob later obtains Isaac’s blessing by deception.
Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was an English mathematician and natural philosopher who formulated the theory of universal gravity in his Principia, the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, published in London in 1687. He became Lucasian professor at Cambridge in 1669, Master of the Mint at the end of 1699 and President of the Royal Society in 1703, and was knighted in 1705.
Isaac Vossius (1618–1689), born in Leiden, was a Dutch scholar who became personal librarian to Queen Christina of Sweden in 1648 and lived in London from 1670 until his death. His interests ranged from biblical chronology and geography to the theory of light and microscopes.
Ishmael is Abraham’s son by the slave woman Hagar, and the eponymous ancestor of the Ishmaelites and so, by tradition, of the Arabs.
Isis is an Egyptian goddess associated with magic, protection and the restoration of life. In the Osiris myth she is his sister and wife, recovers his scattered body, and protects their son Horus. Her worship later spread widely through the Greek and Roman worlds, where she acquired additional associations and was identified with other goddesses.
Isocrates (436–338 BCE) was an Athenian speechwriter and teacher. His school, founded around 390 BCE, offered an education through discourse; his writings also urged Greek cooperation against Persia. His polished prose influenced later rhetorical education.
An isosceles triangle has at least two equal sides. Euclid’s Definition I.20 uses the narrower sense of exactly two equal sides, separating it from an equilateral triangle.
The Isthmus of Corinth is the narrow strip of land joining the Peloponnese to mainland Greece, between the Corinthian and Saronic gulfs. Its position channelled overland travel, while a paved portage road called the Diolkos enabled ships to be hauled across it. The sanctuary of Poseidon there hosted the Isthmian Games, an athletic festival held every two years.
To skill, used impersonally, is to make a difference, to signify or matter, so that ‘it skills not’ means ‘it makes no difference’.
Italian bookkeeping (det italienske Bogholderi), also called double-entry bookkeeping, is the system in which every change in assets is entered twice, as a debit and as a credit, so that the accounts can be checked against each other.
Ixion is a figure of Greek myth who desired Hera, the wife of Zeus. In Pindar’s telling he lay instead with a cloud shaped like the goddess, and he spins round and round on a winged wheel.
Jack Cade styled himself captain of the rebels of Kent in the rising of 1450 against Henry VI’s government. A proclamation in his name, preserved among John Stowe’s historical memoranda, lists the grievances of ‘the King’s liege men of Kent’.
Jacob is counted with his father Isaac and his grandfather Abraham among the three patriarchs of Israel. The youngest son of Isaac and Rebekah and the twin of Esau, he and his mother tricked his father into giving him the rights and the blessing meant for Esau; he was also named Israel, and his twelve sons became the forefathers of the tribes of Israel.
Jacob de Groot (1628–1694), recorded under the alias Grotius, came from The Hague, studied philosophy at Leiden and was the permanent representative of the Elector Palatine in The Hague.
Jacob Ostens (1630–1678) was born in Utrecht and died in Rotterdam. Lambert van Velthuysen’s letter of 3 February 1671 (Ep. 42) and Spinoza’s reply (Ep. 43) were both addressed to him.
Jam tua res agitur is Latin for ‘now your own affair is at stake’, that is, now it concerns you too. It adapts Horace, Epistles 1.18.84, where the phrase is linked with the words ‘when your neighbour’s wall is burning’; Horace has nam, ‘for’, in place of jam, ‘now’.
James I reigned in England from 1603 to 1625, having been king of Scotland for thirty-six years when he succeeded Elizabeth I. He believed that kings took their authority from God but accepted that his actions were subject to the law, and he was often in dispute with his Parliaments.
James Thomson (1700–1748) was a Scottish poet. His poems Winter, Summer, Spring and Autumn were collected as The Seasons in 1730.
Jan Rieuwertsz the Elder (1617–1687) was born and died in Amsterdam. He was a friend and correspondent of Spinoza.
Jansenism was a theological and religious movement named after Cornelius Jansen, drawing on Augustine’s accounts of grace, the human will and predestination. It provoked major controversies in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, with Port-Royal an important centre.
Jarig Jelles (about 1620–1683), who died in Amsterdam, was a friend and correspondent of Spinoza.
Jean Bodin (1529/30–1596) was a French lawyer, historian and political theorist whose Six livres de la République (1576) defined sovereignty as the most high, absolute and perpetual power over the citizens and subjects of a commonwealth. He held the sovereign free from civil law yet always bound by natural and divine law.
Jean de La Bruyère (1645–1696) was a French writer and moralist. His Les Caractères portrays the manners and pretensions of his contemporaries with sharp irony.
Jean Racine (1639–1699) was a French writer known for tragedies such as Phèdre, educated by the Jansenists at Port-Royal.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) was born in Reims and died in Paris. He was controller-general of finances under Louis XIV from 1665 to 1683. He supported the arts and sciences, granted pensions to scientists such as Christiaan Huygens, and founded the Paris Observatory and the Académie Royale des Sciences.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was a Genevan philosopher and writer. His works include The Social Contract and Émile, both published in 1762.
Jehovah is a form of YHWH, the Hebrew name of God, which is also called the tetragrammaton, ‘the four letters’. Because readers had long said Adonai, ‘Lord’, instead of the name, the vowels of Adonai were marked in the Hebrew text, and from this the pronunciation Jehovah arose among Christian theologians of the Middle Ages; scholars now write Yahweh.
Jejune can describe something insubstantial, dull or lacking nourishment. It can also mean naive or immature.
Jens Baggesen (1764–1826) was a Danish poet, among the most significant at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his poem ‘Kirkegaarden i Sobradise’ (1791) he says of the town's leading poet Killevalle that if he becomes immortal, so shall we all.
Jephthah is a judge of Israel in the Book of Judges. A Gileadite born outside marriage and driven away by his half-brothers, he was recalled to lead Israel against the Ammonites; before the battle he called on the Lord as judge to decide between the Israelites and the Ammonites, and vowed to offer whoever first came out of his house to meet him on his return, which proved to be his daughter, his only child.
Jeroboam I was the first king of the northern kingdom of Israel, about 930–908 BCE, whose deeds are told in the First Book of Kings. The biblical texts present him as an apostate who had two golden calves set up at Dan and Bethel and appointed his own priests.
The Jesuit College of La Flèche was a school in France, newly founded when Descartes entered it in 1606 or 1607 and studied there until 1614 or 1615. Its course combined Latin and Greek grammar and classical authors with a philosophy curriculum that followed Aristotle, and it also taught mathematics.
Jesus is regarded as the origin of Christianity and is the central figure of that religion. He came from Nazareth in Galilee; he was a Jew and understood himself within the Jewish tradition. After his crucifixion his followers continued to spread his teaching.
Jeu de paume is a predecessor of modern tennis. In its racket form, players return a ball to one another after a bounce.
Johann Georg Graevius (1632–1703) was born in Naumburg and died in Utrecht. He was a friend and correspondent of Spinoza.
Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) was a German philosopher who wrote a series of difficult, polemical essays. He regarded the all-embracing, contradiction-free system sought by Enlightenment philosophy as an illusion and demanded an individual, existential appropriation of the Creator’s address to each person, a demand in which he anticipated Kierkegaard. He tells the story of Tarquinius Superbus and the poppies in a letter of 29 March 1763 to J.G. Lindner.
Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–1779) was a philosopher, theorist of art and mathematician, born in Winterthur in the canton of Zurich, who died in Berlin. In 1747 he was called to Berlin as professor of mathematics at the Joachimsthal Gymnasium, and from 1750 he was a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. His main work on aesthetics is the Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (General Theory of the Fine Arts, 1771–74).
Johann Ludwig Fabritius lived from 1632 to 1696. Karl Ludwig, Elector Palatine, charged him with approaching Spinoza about a university chair in Heidelberg.
Johann Weyer, in Latin Wierus (1515/16–1588), was a physician to the dukes of Jülich and an opponent of the persecution of witches. In his book De praestigiis daemonum (On the Illusions of Demons), first published at Basel in 1563, he argued that witchcraft and sorcery were impossible, since neither human beings nor demons can change the laws of nature.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was a German writer, often counted the greatest in German-language literature. From 1775 he lived in Weimar, where he held government posts and was central to the city’s cultural life. His works include The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Faust, on which he worked until his death.
Johannes Bouwmeester (1630–1680) of Amsterdam was a friend and correspondent of Spinoza.
Johannes Casearius was a young student from Leiden who lived for a time at Rijnsburg and was taught parts of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy by Spinoza in early 1663. Those private lessons were the starting point of Spinoza’s geometrical presentation of Descartes’s philosophy.
Johannes de silentio is the pseudonym under which Søren Kierkegaard published Fear and Trembling (Frygt og Bæven) in 1843. The Latin de silentio means ‘from silence’ or ‘about silence’, and the name underlines that Abraham’s action cannot be put into words. Johannes presents himself as an outsider to faith who repeatedly says he cannot understand Abraham, so his views should not simply be taken as Kierkegaard’s own.
Johannes Fredericus Schweitzer (about 1629/30–1709) was an anti-Cartesian physician and alchemist who practised in The Hague from 1662 and later wrote against Descartes and Spinoza. Around 1667 it was rumoured that he had transmuted lead into gold; Isaac Vossius judged the story a deception.
Johannes Hevelius (1611–1687) was a councillor and mayor of Gdańsk and an astronomer, regarded as the founder of lunar topography. He observed sunspots, discovered comets and published a Cometographia in 1668.
Johannes Hudde (1628–1704) of Amsterdam was a mathematician, a burgomaster of the city between 1672 and 1703 and a governor of the Dutch East India Company. He took a keen interest in theoretical and practical optics, and in the mid-1660s collaborated with Spinoza in building a hand-held refracting telescope.
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was a German mathematician and astronomer. He formulated three laws of planetary motion, including elliptical orbits, and also made important contributions to optics and geometry.
Johannes van Diemerbroeck (1646–1681) took a doctorate in law at Utrecht in 1668 and worked as an advocate. He corresponded with Leibniz and served as an intermediary in the correspondence between Leibniz and Spinoza.
The Johari window maps interpersonal awareness using two questions: what is known to oneself, and what is known to others. Their combinations yield four areas: open, blind, hidden and unknown.
John Calvin (Jean Calvin) was a French theologian and reformer who, with Ulrich Zwingli, founded the Reformed church. He lived and worked for many years in Geneva.
John Locke (1632–1704) was a British philosopher and medical researcher. His Some Thoughts Concerning Education, first published in 1693, grew from advice to Edward Clarke on educating his children.
John Milton (1608–1674) was an English poet and prose writer. His epic Paradise Lost, published in 1667, tells of Satan’s rebellion, the Fall and the promise of salvation.
John Selden (1584–1654) was an English lawyer and historical and linguistic scholar, born in Sussex, who wrote Mare Clausum, a treatise on the law of the sea first drafted for James I. As a member of Parliament in the 1620s he led resistance to the growing power of the crown, was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1629–31 and released in 1634.
John Tillotson (1630–1694) was a preacher and Archbishop of Canterbury, appointed to that office in 1691.
John Wycliffe was a fourteenth-century English theologian, philosopher and critic of the Church. He challenged papal and ecclesiastical authority and is often regarded as a precursor of the Reformation.
Jonathan ben Uzziel is a rabbinic figure traditionally credited with an Aramaic translation of the Prophets, although his authorship of the surviving text is doubtful.
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was an Irish writer and satirist, best known for Gulliver’s Travels. He became dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin in 1713.
José de Acosta (1539–1600) was a Spanish Jesuit, a missionary in Peru from 1571 to 1587 and from 1598 rector of the university of Salamanca. His Historia natural y moral de las Indias treats the geography of Mexico and Peru.
Joseph Addison (1672–1719) was a British essayist and journalist. He and Richard Steele published The Spectator in 1711–1712, and Addison wrote about half its daily essays.
Joseph ibn Shem-Tov was a fifteenth-century Jewish writer in Spain whose Kebod Elohim compares Greek ethical teaching with Jewish teaching about the highest good.
Josiah was a descendant of the house of David whose birth, according to the First Book of Kings, a man of God from Judah foretold at the altar Jeroboam had set up at Bethel, prophesying that men's bones would be burnt upon it. The Second Book of Kings relates that Josiah broke down that altar and burned upon it bones taken from the nearby sepulchres, according to the word of the man of God.
Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540) was a Spanish humanist and educational theorist. His De anima et vita (On the Soul and Life, 1538) studies the soul and its relation to the body, with its final book devoted to the emotions.
In Leviticus, the jubilee is the fiftieth year, when slaves are to be freed and acquired land returned to its original owners.
Judah is the son of Jacob and Leah and the forefather of the tribe of Judah, which lived in southern Palestine between Hebron and Jerusalem and in King David’s time became the state of Judah.
Judah Alfakar was a medieval Jewish scholar associated with Toledo who opposed Maimonides’ attempt to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with Judaism.
Judas Iscariot was one of Jesus’ twelve disciples and, according to the gospels, the one who betrayed Jesus with a kiss. When the early Christians sought to explain Jesus’ death, Judas became the traitor who had let himself be bribed with thirty pieces of silver.
Judge Jeffreys was the English judge who tried the prisoners of the Monmouth rebellion of 1685 at the Western Circuit assizes known as the ‘Bloody Assizes’; the gaol book naming those prisoners survives in the National Archives.
The judges of the Book of Judges were charismatic religious, political and military leaders who saw themselves as chosen by God to lead the people in a troubled time, roughly 1200–1000 BCE, before the introduction of kingship. The title is somewhat misleading, since they also, but not only, acted as judges.
In Descartes’ account, judgment is an act of the will, which affirms or denies the content that the intellect presents. Perceiving something therefore does not by itself require assenting to it.
Gaius Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE) was a Roman statesman, military commander and author. He became dictator for life and was assassinated in 44 BCE.
Juno is the Roman goddess associated with marriage, women and childbirth, identified with the Greek Hera. A myth explains the Milky Way as milk scattered from her breast when she rejected the infant Hercules.
Jupiter was the chief god of Roman religion, associated with the heavens, thunder and the protection of the state. He was identified with the Greek god Zeus.
Jure divino is Latin for by divine right: the claim that a ruler's authority comes from God. The patriarchal version of the doctrine of the divine right of kings, stated most fully in Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, is what Locke's First Treatise was written to refute.
The Justicia was a judicial institution in the Kingdom of Aragon that interpreted and protected its fueros, or traditional laws and privileges. It mediated disputes between the king and nobles and protected subjects against arbitrary detention or proceedings contrary to law.
Justin Martyr (about 100–165) was an early Christian writer and apologist. Born of pagan parents in Flavia Neapolis in Palestine, he first turned to the schools of philosophy and was for a time a Platonist before he became a Christian. In Rome in the 150s he wrote a defence of Christianity addressed to the emperor and the senate; his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew also survives. He died a martyr in Rome.
Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis, about 67 to after 127 CE) was a Roman satirist. He wrote sixteen satires in five books, strongly rhetorical and full of pointed, memorable lines; written under Trajan and Hadrian, they are mostly set in the reigns of Nero and Domitian.
Kabbalah is an esoteric and mystical tradition within Judaism that seeks hidden knowledge of God and the universe through interpretation of sacred texts.
Karl (Carl) Daub (1765–1836) was a German Protestant theologian who became professor of theology at Heidelberg in 1795. With Philipp Marheineke he was the leading representative of so-called speculative theology: after early influence from Kant and Schelling, he saw in Hegel’s philosophy a means of restoring orthodox dogma and reconciling philosophy and theology. Karl Rosenkranz’s memoir of him (1837) records Daub’s remark that a sentry alone at night by a powder magazine has thoughts that are otherwise quite impossible.
Karl Ludwig (1619–1680), Elector Palatine, was the second son of the Elector Palatine Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart, and a brother of Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, Descartes’ correspondent on the passions. He recovered his father’s possessions in the Lower Rhenish Palatinate at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and took up residence in Heidelberg. Through Fabritius he offered Spinoza a university chair in Heidelberg with the freedom to philosophize, provided that the public state religion was respected.
In the Masoretic tradition, ketiv denotes the written biblical text and qere the prescribed reading, with differences marked in the margin.
“Hottentots” is an offensive colonial name applied to Khoikhoi herding communities of southern Africa.
To kick against the pricks is to resist facts or authority in vain, using the image of kicking against a goad. The expression occurs in Paul’s account of his conversion in Acts 26:14.
In the dated figurative expression “of that kidney”, kidney means disposition or type of person.
The king archon, or archon basileus, was an annually appointed Athenian magistrate with religious and legal duties. His responsibilities included important civic sacrifices, the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Lenaia festival. He worked from the Royal Stoa in the Agora; the title of king belonged to this public office, rather than making its holder a monarch.
“The king of terrors” comes from Job 18:14 in the King James Bible: “His confidence shall be rooted out of his tabernacle, and it shall bring him to the king of terrors.”
Spinoza’s proposed monarchy gives the king a large council of citizens representing the clans. It protects the fundamental laws, advises on government and conveys petitions; the king must hear it before deciding.
Aragon was a historical kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula. Its regional laws and privileges were protected by the office of the Justicia.
The kingdom of ends is Kant’s idea of a systematic union of rational beings under common laws, in which every member, as an end in itself, is also a giver of those laws. One formulation of the categorical imperative bids us act as a legislating member of such a merely possible kingdom.
The knight of faith is Johannes de silentio’s name for the person who, like Abraham, makes the double movement of faith: he resigns everything infinitely and then, by virtue of the absurd, grasps it all again. He recognises his dependence on a divine power and trusts God’s promises in a way that appears ‘absurd’ to an outsider, and he is able to take genuine joy in the finite world he receives back. Outwardly he cannot be told apart from an ordinary citizen: Johannes imagines him looking like a tax collector, and like a shopkeeper on a Sunday outing.
The knight of infinite resignation is the figure who makes the movement of infinite resignation: he renounces the finite good that is the whole content of his life and finds peace in the pain of that renunciation. Johannes de silentio illustrates him with a young man in love with an unattainable princess, who gives her up yet keeps his love young in its eternal form. Unlike the knight of faith he is open and comprehensible to Johannes, but he cannot fully value the finite good in the way the knight of faith does.
Knossos is an ancient city on Crete, near modern Heraklion. Its great Bronze Age palace was a major centre of the civilization now called Minoan. Greek myth associates the place with King Minos and the labyrinth. The archaeological remains and those later stories provide different kinds of evidence about its past.
The Koran, or Quran, is the foremost source of Islam. It is divided into 114 suras, or chapters, of unequal length, each made up of shorter verses.
Kuno Fischer (1824–1907) was a German philosopher known chiefly as a historian of philosophy. His ten-volume Geschichte der neueren Philosophie (1852–1877) was shaped by Hegel’s view of philosophy’s development, and his book on Kant (1860) helped prepare the rise of neo-Kantianism.
Laban is a figure in Genesis, the brother of Rebekah, the father of Leah and Rachel and the father-in-law of the patriarch Jacob. He tricked Jacob into marrying Leah although Jacob loved the younger and more beautiful Rachel, for whom he had worked seven years.
Lambert van Velthuysen (1621/22–1685) was born and died in Utrecht. An anti-clerical, liberal physician, he introduced Hobbesian thought into Dutch political discourse. He nevertheless denounced Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise as the work of a dangerous atheist.
The land of Nod, east of Eden, is where Cain dwelt after he went out from the presence of the Lord, according to Genesis 4:16.
Largess means generosity in giving, or the gifts or money generously given.
The last practical judgment is the understanding’s concluding assessment of what is to be chosen or avoided. Whether this judgment determines the will is a question about the relation of thinking to choosing, rather than a guarantee that the judgment is correct. For Aquinas, willing depends on an apprehended good, but the will can direct what the intellect considers.
Laurence Sterne (1713–1768) was an Irish-born British writer and clergyman. His novels include Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.
In Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, law can mean a fixed manner of acting that follows from natural necessity, or an ordinance laid down by people to guide a way of life.
The law of non-contradiction states that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same thing in the same respect. Aristotle called it the firmest of all principles.
In Christian practice, laying on of hands is a gesture used in blessing, ordination and rites of healing: hands are placed on the person receiving the rite.
Lazarus of Bethany was a friend of Jesus and the brother of Martha and Mary. According to chapter 11 of the Gospel of John, Jesus raised him from the dead.
A legate is an official emissary or representative, a term also used for representatives of the pope.
Legion can mean a great number or multitude. In Mark 5:9, when Jesus asks a name, the answer is ‘My name is Legion: for we are many’ (King James Version).
Legislative means making, or having the power to make, laws, as distinguished from executive. Locke also uses it as a noun: the legislative is the law-making power of a commonwealth, or the body that holds it, ‘the legislative, or magistrates appointed by it’.
Lemnos is a Greek island in the northern Aegean Sea.
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian writer, one of Russia’s greatest novelists and the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. After a spiritual crisis he developed a rationalist Christianity that rejected church dogma and kept the simple moral commands of the Gospels.
Giovanni de’ Medici, pope from 1513 to 1521. The Fifth Lateran Council issued its decree concerning the immortality of the soul during his pontificate.
Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) was a German historian, professor in Berlin from 1825 to 1871, often called the founder of modern historical scholarship. He held that objective history must rest on the critical use of authentic sources.
The Letter of James is a writing of the New Testament whose author presents himself as James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ; the early identification with James, the brother of Jesus, is now disputed. It is concerned more with ethics than with doctrine, and holds that faith without works is dead, in evident polemic against slogans from the Pauline tradition.
Letters can mean literary knowledge or learning, as in the expression a man of letters.
Leviathan is Thomas Hobbes’s masterwork of political philosophy, published in English in 1651 and revised in Latin in 1668; roughly half of it treats Christian religion. Hobbes there derives the authority of the sovereign from a covenant by which people escape the miseries of the state of nature.
For Hume, liberty is the power to act or refrain according to one’s will, and is compatible with causal determination. His account of necessity appeals to regularities among events and the customary inferences they produce in the mind.
Lickerish means eager or greedy, urged by desire and eager to taste or enjoy; it can also mean tempting the appetite, or lecherous.
A lictor was, in ancient Rome, an attendant who accompanied the highest Roman magistrates, walking before them to clear a way through the crowd and protecting them. On the magistrate’s orders lictors could make arrests and, in some circumstances, carry out executions; they carried the fasces, bundles of rods bound round an axe that symbolised the power to punish by flogging and by death.
A medical ligature is a tie or band used to bind part of the body, as in tying an arm before a vein is opened.
Lipsydrium was a fortified post in Attica above Mount Parnes where, according to the Athenian Constitution, exiles and their supporters resisted the Pisistratid tyrants. Their defeat was commemorated in a drinking song.
Lisbon (Portuguese Lisboa) is the capital and largest city of Portugal. It is built on hills and terraces beside the river Tagus, which widens there into a basin forming a natural harbour, and it is the country’s largest port. The earthquake of 1 November 1755, with the tsunami and fires that followed, made two thirds of the city uninhabitable.
The Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755, All Saints’ Day, was probably one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history, estimated at about 8.7 to 9.0 on the Richter scale. Its epicentre was probably in the sea off Portugal, and it set off a tsunami that flooded the city; fires then destroyed a third of Lisbon within six days. Around 10,000 people died, two thirds of the city’s houses became uninhabitable, and most of its churches and two thirds of its convents were destroyed.
Livor is a Latin word for a bluish or leaden discoloration, such as a bruise. Figuratively it can mean envy, spite or ill will.
Titus Livius, known as Livy, was a Roman historian whose major work, Ab urbe condita, narrates Roman history from the city’s foundation.
A lodestone is a naturally magnetic piece of magnetite, an iron ore, with magnetic polarity and the power to attract magnetically.
Lodewijk Meyer (Ludwig Meyer in older English) was the editor who prepared Spinoza’s 1663 Principles of Cartesian Philosophy for the press and wrote its preface. Working under Spinoza’s direction he also added the cross references and captions.
Longus was a Greek writer, probably from Lesbos and probably of the second century AD, who wrote the pastoral romance Daphnis and Chloe about a pair of lovers. The romance was very popular from the Renaissance on and shaped later pastoral literature; its preface says that no one has escaped Love, or will, as long as there is beauty and eyes to see.
Lord Byron (1788–1824) was a British Romantic poet, best known for Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the satirical verse epic Don Juan. He left England in 1816 and died in Greece, where he supported the struggle for independence.
Lord George Gordon was a British member of Parliament and leader of the Protestant Association who opposed Catholic relief. His supporters’ march to Parliament in June 1780 triggered the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London.
Lot is a biblical figure, Abraham's nephew, who appears in Genesis 11–14 and 18–19. When their herdsmen quarrelled, he and Abraham separated: Lot chose the plain of Jordan and settled towards Sodom, and he and his family alone escaped the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Genesis makes him the ancestor of the Ammonites and Moabites.
The Lotus-eaters are the people in the Odyssey who offer Odysseus’s companions a sweet lotus to eat. Those who taste it forget their wish to return home, and Odysseus has to force them back to the ships. The episode makes forgetful enjoyment an obstacle to completing the journey.
Louis XIV (1638–1715) was king of France from 1643 to 1715. He married Maria Theresa, daughter of Philip IV of Spain; her dynastic claims were invoked in the War of Devolution.
For Spinoza, love is pleasure accompanied by an idea of an external cause, while hate is pain accompanied by that kind of idea.
In Book 8 of Milton’s Paradise Lost the angel Raphael tells Adam that true love ‘refines / The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat / In Reason, and is judicious, is the scale / By which to heav’nly Love thou maist ascend’. He sets this love against passion and carnal pleasure.
‘Love your enemies’ is Jesus’ command in Matthew 5:44, set against the saying ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy’ (Matthew 5:43, King James Version).
Lucian of Samosata was a Greek-language satirist of the second century CE. His surviving writings often use dialogue to ridicule pretension, false prophets and superstition.
Lucius Junius Brutus is the legendary figure regarded as Rome’s liberator from kingship and founder of the Roman Republic; his story is told by Livy, but how far it is historical is disputed. He led the revolt that drove out King Tarquinius Superbus and became consul in the Republic’s first year, 509 BCE. As consul he had to have his own sons executed for taking part in a conspiracy to bring back the expelled king.
Lucius Licinius Lucullus was a Roman commander and consul who fought Mithridates and Tigranes in the first century BCE. His wealth and luxurious private life became proverbial.
Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet whose surviving work, De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), presents Epicurean philosophy in verse.
A lucubration is writing produced by laborious study, especially when regarded as pedantic.
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) was a German philosopher of the left-Hegelian wing who helped move German philosophy from idealism toward materialism. In The Essence of Christianity (1841) he argued that God is a human creation, an expression of humanity’s worship of its own nature. He later wrote that ‘man is what he eats’.
Ludwig Lavater (1527–1586) was a Zurich clergyman who served for thirty-five years as archdeacon of the Grossmünster and became head (Antistes) of the Zurich church shortly before his death. His popular book on ghosts, De spectris, lemuribus et insolitis fragoribus, appeared at Zurich in 1570 and was translated into French and Italian.
The Lullian art is the combinatorial method of the medieval philosopher Ramon Llull (1232–1316), set out in his Ars magna, for investigating questions by combining principles and rules. It uses an alphabet of letters and figures to organise these combinations.
Lumber can mean old or refuse household stuff: things cumbrous, bulky and useless, or of small value, rather than sawn timber. It probably comes from Lombard, the Lombards having been the money lenders and pawnbrokers of the Middle Ages.
Lunes are crescent-shaped geometric figures bounded by arcs of circles. Squaring a lune means constructing a square with the same area as that lune.
The Lyceum, or Lykeion, was a sanctuary of Apollo with athletic facilities outside the eastern walls of ancient Athens. Aristotle established his philosophical school there in 335 BCE. The name consequently denotes both this Athenian site and the school associated with his teaching.
Lycon was one of the three prosecutors of Socrates in Athens in 399 BCE, alongside Meletus and Anytus.
Lycurgus is the legendary lawgiver to whom ancient writers attributed Sparta’s constitution and social discipline. Accounts disagree about his date, reforms and even whether he was a historical person. Institutions associated with him include communal meals and the upbringing of citizens; traditions also differ over whether the ephors belonged to his original settlement.
Lysander was a Spartan commander who became leader of Sparta’s fleet in 407 BCE. He defeated the Athenians at Aegospotami in 405 BCE and took Athens in 404 BCE.
Lysias was a Greek orator and writer of courtroom speeches for others. After losing his brother and property under the Thirty Tyrants at Athens in 404 BCE, he supported himself through speechwriting. His surviving speeches show skill in adapting an argument to a speaker’s character.
Besides a periodical, a magazine is a storehouse: a receptacle or building in which anything is stored, especially military supplies such as arms and ammunition. The word came into English through French, Italian or Spanish from Arabic makhzan, storehouse.
The Magi were religious specialists in ancient Iranian societies, including priests who served the Achaemenid kings. They performed sacrifices and other rites and also had administrative responsibilities. Their early relationship with Zoroastrian teaching is debated, though the term later designated Zoroastrian priests. Greek usage could also turn the name into a label for practitioners of magic, so its meaning depends on context.
Magna Carta is an English charter first issued in June 1215 at Runnymede. It placed legal limits on royal power and was designed to protect the barons’ rights rather than establish rights for everyone.
To make a leg was to bow, probably so called from drawing the leg backward in bowing; the expression is obsolete.
A powerful deceiver deliberately imagined by Descartes to sustain methodical doubt and resist assent to former beliefs. The hypothesis supposes a deceiver capable of misleading the senses and reasoning.
Manichaeism is a religion founded by Mani in the third century. Its dualistic account of the world opposes enduring principles of light and darkness, identified with good and evil.
In natural history, manna is a sweet plant exudate, traditionally gathered on the leaves of certain trees and herbs.
To call the multitude a many-headed beast is to liken the common people to a monster with many heads. Horace addresses the Roman people so in his first Epistle (belua multorum es capitum), explaining with the fable of the cautious fox and the sick lion why he will not follow what they love or hate.
Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE) was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 and a follower of Stoic philosophy.
The Mariana Islands are an island group in the western Pacific north of the Caroline Islands, administratively divided between Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands; most of their inhabitants are Micronesian Chamorros. Ferdinand Magellan reached them in 1521 and called them the Ladrones, the Thieves' Islands, and Spain occupied them in 1668 and named them the Marianas.
Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) was a French Minim friar and scholar. His interests ranged from mathematics and music theory to philosophy, experimental physics and optics, and his wide network of correspondents and his Paris circle included many well-known scientific figures.
The mark of the beast comes from the Book of Revelation, where a beast causes all people to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads, so that no one may buy or sell except those who have the mark or the name of the beast.
Market Commissioners were Athenian officials responsible for checking that goods offered for sale were pure and unadulterated. The Athenian Constitution describes ten chosen by lot, five serving Piraeus and five the city.
A marqueur was a person who kept the score at billiards, often also a waiter in the restaurant or club where the game was played; the word also covered the banker at games of chance in gaming houses.
Marsyas is a mythical musician of Asia Minor, represented by the Greeks as a satyr. One tradition makes him the inventor of the flute, another its finder after Athena discarded it. He challenged Apollo’s lyre with his own playing; after Apollo won, the god flayed him.
Martin Luther (1483–1546) was a German theologian who played a central role in the Reformation. In 1517 he published 95 theses against the sale of indulgences, and in 1521 he refused before the imperial diet at Worms to recant. He translated the Bible into German and in 1525 married the former nun Katharina von Bora.
Mary I reigned over England from 1553 to 1558 and was its first queen regnant. Her marriage in 1554 to Philip of Spain was unpopular and childless; she restored papal supremacy and revived the heresy laws, under which about three hundred Protestants were burnt.
Mary is the mother of Jesus in the Christian Gospels. In Luke's account the angel Gabriel is sent to her, a virgin betrothed to Joseph in Nazareth, greets her as highly favoured and blessed among women, and announces that she will bear a son; she answers, ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord.’
Masaniello (Tommaso Aniello, 1620–1647) was a Neapolitan fisherman who led the revolt of 1647 in Naples against Spanish rule after the viceroy raised the tax on food. The rebels held power only for a short time, quarrelled among themselves, and Masaniello was murdered.
The Masoretes were Jewish scholars who developed systems for preserving the written form and pronunciation of the Hebrew biblical text.
Master morality, or noble morality, is Nietzsche’s name for the valuation of the strong and self-confident, who call themselves and their own qualities good and those beneath them bad. In Nietzsche’s history its contrast of good and bad came first and was later displaced by the good and evil of slave morality. This pattern of valuation was dominant in ancient Mediterranean culture, from the Homeric world to Greek and Roman society.
The mater, or mother, is the body of an astrolabe into which its plates fit. The rete, or net, represents stars above those plates.
In Descartes’ account, material falsity is associated with an obscure idea that represents what is nothing as something. He contrasts it with falsity properly belonging to judgments, using confused ideas of heat and cold as examples.
A matras is a long-necked glass vessel used in chemical work.
To maunder is to talk in a rambling or incoherent way.
In Kant’s ethics, a maxim is the subjective principle on which an agent acts, a personal policy of doing a certain kind of act in certain circumstances for a certain end. It contrasts with a practical law, the objective principle valid for every rational being. Kant’s moral test asks whether one could will one’s maxim to become a universal law.
Meat, in older and biblical English, means food in general, anything eaten for nourishment by man or beast, as in Genesis 1:29, ‘to you it shall be for meat’.
In older usage a mechanic was an artisan or artificer: anyone who practised a mechanical art, shaping and joining materials such as wood or metal with tools.
Mediation (Danish Mediation, German Vermittlung) is the Hegelian term for the overcoming of opposites, the unification of two mutually contradictory categories. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de silentio denies that faith can be mediated, since all mediation takes place by virtue of the universal, whereas Abraham stands in a direct, unmediated relation to God.
Mediocrity is Owen’s word for a mean between opposed extremes. Aristotle’s example places this mean between excess and deficiency, with indigence representing deficiency. Here it denotes an intermediate state, rather than inferior achievement.
Meditations on First Philosophy is Descartes’ work on metaphysics, published in Latin in 1641 with Objections and Replies, which proceeds from doubt to the certainty of the thinking self and argues for God’s existence and the distinction of mind and matter.
Medon is a legendary Athenian succession figure identified as a son of Codrus. Traditions differ over whether he succeeded as king or became a lifelong archon after the abolition of monarchy. The Athenian Constitution reports that most authorities placed the origin of the archonship in his time.
The medulla of the spine is the spinal marrow or spinal cord.
Megara was a Greek city-state west of Athens, near Corinth. It founded colonies including Byzantium and joined the Peloponnesian alliance in the fifth century BCE.
Megrim is an older word for migraine, and can also mean vertigo or dizziness.
Melchizedek, king of Salem, is the priest of the most high God who in Genesis 14 brings bread and wine to Abram after his victory, blesses him and receives tithes of all.
Meletus was an Athenian poet who brought the formal accusation against Socrates in 399 BCE, supported by Anytus and Lycon. The charges concerned corrupting the young, failing to acknowledge the city's gods, and introducing new divinities. He is chiefly remembered for his role in the prosecution that led to Socrates' conviction and execution.
Meliboeus is a shepherd in Virgil's first Eclogue. Driven from his land and goats in the confiscations that followed the Roman civil wars, he converses with Tityrus, whose farm has been spared by a god-like benefactor at Rome. The name became a stock pastoral name for a countryman.
For Spinoza, memory associates ideas involving external things according to the order in which the body has been affected. This bodily association differs from the intellectual order through which things are understood by their primary causes.
The Mennonites are a Protestant church community that grew out of the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century. It was founded by the Dutch (Frisian) priest Menno Simons (1496–1561). Mennonites reserve baptism for adults and are pacifists; in 1626 they obtained freedom of religion in Holland.
Meno is a dialogue by Plato about the nature of virtue and whether it can be taught. It raises the learning paradox: inquiry seems unnecessary when one already knows the answer and impossible when one does not know what to look for. Socrates responds with an account of learning as recollection, illustrated through questioning an enslaved person about geometry.
In Exodus, the mercy seat is the gold cover placed over the ark, between whose two cherubim God is said to speak to Moses.
Mester Jakel is the Danish version of the hand-puppet figure known in France as Polichinelle, in England as Punch and in Germany as Kasperl. Cheeky and anarchic, he first appeared at Dyrehavsbakken near Copenhagen in the 1790s and delighted audiences above all in beating scenes.
In Kant’s usage, a metaphysic of morals is the pure part of moral philosophy: a system of a priori moral principles, cleared of everything empirical, that apply to human persons in all times and cultures. Kant distinguishes it from practical anthropology, the empirical part of ethics. He later published a work with the title The Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
Metaphysical Thoughts (Latin Cogitata Metaphysica) is the appendix that Spinoza added to his 1663 exposition of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy. In it he set out his own neo-scholastic metaphysics of being and of the nature of God, subjects that Descartes had left aside.
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that searches for the basic principles of everything there is. Descartes’ metaphysics argues for the existence of God and concerns the essences of mind and matter.
The Meteorics, or Meteorology, is Descartes’ essay on atmospheric phenomena, published in 1637 together with the Discourse on the Method. It gives accounts of vapours, winds, clouds, snow, rain, hail, lightning and the rainbow.
Methinks is an archaic expression meaning it seems to me.
The method of division seeks a definition by successively dividing a genus according to distinguishing features and locating the kind to be defined within the resulting divisions. Aristotle uses division to arrange the essential predicates of a definition in order and check that none is omitted. Division does not by itself prove the definition, because selecting a branch assumes rather than demonstrates that the thing belongs there.
Descartes’ method of doubt treats every opinion for which some reason for doubt can be found as if it were false, to discover whether anything entirely certain remains. Its constructive aim is to set aside preconceived opinions and find secure foundations for knowledge. Descartes did not extend this hyperbolic doubt to the conduct of life.
The Methodists were a sect of ancient medicine that stood between the Dogmatists and the Empiricists. They attended to the disease itself rather than to the situation of the individual patient and reduced the body's morbid states to a few general conditions: dryness, fluidity, or a mixture of the two.
A metic was a free resident of an ancient Greek state who lacked citizenship, especially in Athens. Athenian metics paid special taxes and performed military service; they often worked in crafts and trade and remained outside political life.
To mew, or mew up, is to shut up or confine, as in a cage. A mew was a cage for hawks while they moulted, and hence any enclosure or place of confinement.
In 1 Kings 22 the prophet Micaiah tells King Ahab that he saw the LORD sitting on his throne with all the host of heaven standing on his right hand and on his left, and that the LORD asked who would persuade Ahab to go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead; a spirit answered that it would be a lying spirit in the mouth of all Ahab’s prophets.
A microcosm is a little world that reflects a larger one, especially the human being considered as a miniature of the universe.
Micrographia is a book by Robert Hooke, published in 1665, that brought him worldwide scientific fame. It contained pictures of objects he had studied through a microscope he had made himself, together with a number of fundamental biological discoveries.
Military evolutions are prescribed troop movements or drill exercises performed according to a plan.
Miltiades (c. 550–489 BCE) was a Greek general of a distinguished Athenian family. As general he organised the Athenian resistance to the Persians at Marathon in 490 BCE; a failed attack on Paros soon afterwards led to a charge of treason, and he died in prison. Plutarch relates that after Marathon the young Themistocles lay awake whole nights and said that the trophy of Miltiades would not let him sleep.
The mina was an ancient unit of weight and money whose value varied between regions and periods. In conventional Greek monetary reckoning, it represented one hundred drachmas, and sixty minas made a talent. As money it was a unit of account rather than a circulating coin; its physical weight depended on the standard used.
Spinoza treats a mode of extension and its idea as one and the same thing expressed through different attributes. The human mind is the idea whose object is the actually existing human body.
Descartes’ substance dualism holds that mind and body are distinct substances: the essence of mind is thought, and a thinking thing is unextended, while the essence of matter is extension in length, breadth and depth. An argument from being able to doubt the existence of body but not of one’s thinking has been criticised for failing to show that a thinker is not material; in the Meditations Descartes based the distinction on clear and distinct perception of the two essences. Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, among others, asked how an unextended mind and an extended body could interact.
Minerva is an old Italian and Roman goddess who protected crafts and the arts. She was later identified with the Greek goddess Athena.
A minion can be a favourite: someone highly regarded or favoured.
Minos was a legendary king of Crete, the son of Zeus and Europa. Greek tradition also placed him among the judges of the dead in the underworld, alongside his brother Rhadamanthus.
The Minotaur, ‘Minos’ bull’, is a creature of Greek myth, half man and half bull. King Minos of Crete had Daedalus build a labyrinth to hide him, and Theseus killed him with the help of Ariadne’s thread.
Spinoza calls a miracle an event whose natural cause cannot be explained by its narrator or observer from familiar workings of nature; he denies that any event can violate nature’s universal laws.
In the Aristotelian physics textbooks of the early seventeenth century, mixed bodies were the bodies composed from the four elements, earth, air, fire and water, including the various kinds of minerals. Descartes instead treated the four elements as only some among many kinds of matter, distinguished by the sizes, shapes, positions and motions of their parts.
Mizmaze means a confused maze or labyrinth, and can also mean bewilderment or confusion.
In Descartes’ metaphysics a mode is a way of being a substance, such as a particular shape of a body or a particular idea in a mind. A mode depends on its substance and cannot be clearly understood without it, although the substance can be understood without that mode.
A mode, in Spinoza’s account, is a modification of an attribute, such as a particular body under extension or a soul under thought. A finite mode can change or perish while its attribute remains unchanged.
In Descartes’ music theory, modes organize a tune’s pitch range and the pattern of tones and semitones within an octave. Descartes recognizes twelve modes and connects their different arrangements with the effects music can have on the mind.
Spinoza distinguishes four modes of perception: hearsay or arbitrary signs; experience not ordered by the intellect; inadequate inference from one thing to another; and knowledge through a thing’s essence or proximate cause. Only the fourth apprehends its adequate essence without danger of error.
Molinism is the teaching on grace associated with the Jesuit Luis de Molina, seeking to reconcile divine foreknowledge with human free will. It was opposed by Thomists and Jansenists.
Momus is the god of blame and ridicule in Greek mythology.
A monad is a unit, or one, in ancient arithmetic. Euclid defines a number as a collection of units and generally treats the unit itself separately from numbers such as two and three.
Moors was a European designation for Muslim populations of North Africa and medieval Iberia, rather than the name of one ethnic people.
In Hårstad’s proposed distinction, moral anonymity would mean that information no longer bears a normative connection to the people it concerns or affects. He distinguishes this proposed moral criterion from technical removal of identifiers and legal tests of identifiability.
For Ola O. Hårstad, moral authenticity is a reasonable ability to recognise, examine and take responsibility for moral values as one’s own. It permits values formed through social influence, provided the person can meaningfully engage with and appropriate that influence.
Moral certainty is assurance strong enough to justify action, even though it is based on probability. Descartes distinguished the absolute certainty required of metaphysical first principles from the lesser certainty sufficient for practical knowledge.
For Ola O. Hårstad, moral integrity is the quality of a sincere and reasonable attempt to bring authentic values, an understanding of the situation and action into alignment. It is distinct from whether the intended result succeeds and from whether the surrounding conditions make relevant connections understandable.
For Ola O. Hårstad, moral intention is the willingness to let a moral value actually influence one’s choices. A value must sometimes constrain convenience or advantage, although this does not require heroic sacrifice in every situation.
Moral luck is the philosophical problem of moral judgment depending on outcomes or circumstances beyond a person’s control. It creates a tension with the idea that people should be morally assessed only for what they control.
For Ola O. Hårstad, moral orientation is the reasonable effort to understand what one’s values require in a concrete situation. It complements moral intention: willingness to follow a value needs an informed attempt to find how to act on it.
The moral sense, in the theory of the British moralist Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), is a sense by which we perceive virtue or vice in ourselves and others. Through it we take pleasure in contemplating virtuous actions, and Hutcheson’s view is a form of moral sentimentalism.
Morbidezza, Italian for softness or delicacy, is a term of the fine arts for delicacy or softness in the representation of flesh.
Moriah is the land to which God sends Abraham in Genesis 22, telling him to offer his son Isaac there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains. The Second Book of Chronicles names Mount Moriah in Jerusalem as the place where Solomon began to build the house of the Lord.
Moses is a biblical prophet and religious leader whom scriptural tradition portrays as leading the Israelites out of Egypt and receiving the Ten Commandments. The Pentateuch was traditionally attributed to him, though modern biblical scholarship generally rejects his authorship.
Moses Maimonides was a medieval Jewish philosopher, legal scholar and physician whose Guide for the Perplexed sought to reconcile Jewish teaching with Aristotelian philosophy.
The mote and the beam come from the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus asks why one beholds the mote, a speck, in a brother's eye but does not consider the beam in one's own, and tells the hypocrite to cast the beam out of his own eye first.
In the Hebrew Bible, Sinai is the mountain where the law, the Torah, was revealed to Moses; it is also called Horeb. The mountain described in the Bible cannot be identified geographically with certainty.
An older French adjective meaning blunt: neither pointed nor sharp-edged. It can describe a tool's cutting edge and is opposed to aigu, sharp.
A mufti is an Islamic jurist qualified to assess a question of religious law and to issue a fatwa, a non-binding opinion on how the law applies. In the Ottoman Empire the mufti of Constantinople, the şeyhülislam, ranked as the empire's foremost legal authority, presiding in principle over the whole judicial and theological hierarchy; the office was abolished in 1924.
Muhammad (about 570–632 CE) was the religious leader and prophet who founded Islam. Muslims regard him as the last of the prophets and the recipient of the revelations recorded in the Quran.
A mulct is a fine or monetary penalty. As a verb, to mulct someone can mean to impose a fine; it also has a separate sense involving fraud.
In Spinoza’s political philosophy the multitude is the collective body whose combined power determines political right. Government loses power and right when its actions lead many people to unite against it.
Munichia was an area of Piraeus comprising a natural harbour on the eastern side of the peninsula and the hill overlooking it. The harbour served as a naval base.
Municipal law, in older legal usage, is the law of a particular state, kingdom or nation, not only the law of a city; Blackstone defined it as a rule of civil conduct prescribed by the supreme power in a state.
A murrain is a pestilence or plague, especially one that strikes domestic animals such as cattle. The word survived in English chiefly for epidemics of livestock disease and in the biblical plagues of Egypt.
Musaeus is a legendary Greek singer associated with sacred poetry, Orpheus and the traditions of Eleusis. Accounts of his parentage and relationship to Orpheus vary. Poems and religious teachings circulated under his name; he is distinct from the much later poet who wrote Hero and Leander.
The Muses are Greek goddesses associated with poetry, song, music and learning. The familiar group of nine are daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. Poets invoke them as sources of inspiration, and later tradition assigns them distinct artistic or intellectual domains.
The music of the spheres is the idea that the heavenly spheres produce harmonious tones as they turn, normally unheard by human ears.
In the Gospel of John, when Pilate asks Jesus whether he is the King of the Jews, Jesus answers: ‘My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight’ (John 18:33–36).
A polygon with ten thousand sides.
Napoleon Bonaparte was a French political and military leader and emperor of France from 1804 to 1814. After a rapid military rise during the French Revolution he seized power in a coup in 1799, had the Code Napoléon drawn up, and around 1810 controlled large parts of Europe.
Natura naturans, or naturing Nature, is Spinoza’s name for God and his attributes as the active source from which everything else follows. Natura naturata, or natured Nature, comprises the modes that follow from the necessity of God’s nature and can neither exist nor be conceived without God.
As a noun, natural formerly denoted a person born without the usual powers of reason or understanding, whom older dictionaries also called an idiot.
For Spinoza, natural divine law is the way of life directed toward the highest good, knowledge and love of God; its reward is that knowledge and love themselves, rather than an external payment.
In early modern learning a natural history was an account of natural things and their qualities gathered from observation, rather than a narrative of past events. Earlier natural histories had been dominated by description, classification and the preservation of traditional knowledge; Francis Bacon gave detailed instructions for compiling new ones as the raw material of true induction and of a new natural philosophy. In the same spirit Locke, writing on medicine in 1668, held that a physician's judgement came only from the history and diligent observation of diseases, their beginning, progress and cure.
The natural light, or light of nature, is Descartes’ name for the mind’s own power of recognising truth by reason, without relying on revelation or received authority. He held that what it reveals cannot be doubted, unlike what a spontaneous natural impulse leads one to believe; interpreters disagree whether it differs from clear and distinct perception.
For Spinoza, the light of reason is ordinary knowledge grounded in the natural faculties shared by human beings, which he treats as divine because it follows from God’s nature and laws.
Natural philosophy is the older name for the philosophical and scientific study of nature; in English-speaking countries it long served for what is now called physics or natural science. Its early modern form was transformed into modern physical science, above all through Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy of 1687.
For Spinoza, natural right extends as far as the power to exist and act. It includes actions arising from desire as well as reason, and persists in the civil state.
Natural theology investigates religious questions through reason and ordinary human experience rather than appeals to special revelation or sacred authority.
In Descartes’ mechanical physics, nature is matter considered with its assigned qualities, under the condition that God continues to preserve it as he created it. The laws of nature are the rules governing changes in its parts.
Naucraries were subdivisions of early Athenian tribes in the Athenian Constitution's account. Their officials, called naucrari, supervised receipts and expenditure and administered a naucraric fund.
Naval impressment was the compulsory recruitment of men for service in the navy, commonly called pressing or the press gang.
Naval symmories were groups of Athenians organized to share the financial obligations of trierarchy, the public service associated with equipping and maintaining warships. They were distinct from the groups organized for the property tax known as eisphora.
Naxos is the largest island of the Cyclades, an island group in the Aegean Sea. Its mountainous landscape includes fertile agricultural land. In antiquity it was known for wine, the worship of Dionysus, and fine marble; a local school of sculpture developed around 600 BCE using the island's white stone.
A Nazirite is a person consecrated to God by a vow described in Numbers 6, involving abstinence from grape products, uncut hair and avoidance of dead bodies.
Neatherd is an obsolete word for a cowherd, a person who tends cattle.
Hume traces the idea of necessary connexion to the mind’s customary expectation after repeated observations of events occurring together. This account concerns the origin of the idea; interpreters disagree about whether Hume also denies objective necessary connections.
Spinoza calls a thing necessary or impossible either in respect of its essence or in respect of its cause: its existence follows necessarily from its essence or from a given efficient cause, and it is impossible when its essence involves a contradiction or no external cause is determined to produce it. He holds that nothing in nature is contingent, and that a thing is called contingent only because of the imperfection of our knowledge. In the Ethics, particular things are called contingent when their essence alone neither asserts nor excludes their existence, and possible when we do not know whether the causes that must produce them are determined to do so.
Neith was an Egyptian goddess especially associated with the city of Sais in the Nile Delta. Her worship extended across Egyptian history and became particularly prominent when Sais was the capital of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. She could be represented wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt and was also regarded as a creator goddess.
In Matthew 22:23–30 the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, ask Jesus whose wife a woman who had married seven brothers in turn will be in the resurrection. He answers that ‘in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.’
The Nemean games were a Panhellenic religious and athletic festival associated with Nemea, honouring Zeus and Heracles. Competitions included running, combat sports, horse racing and chariot racing.
Nemesis is the Greek goddess of retribution, associated with punishment for wrongdoing and excessive pride or good fortune. She was worshipped at Rhamnus in Attica, beside a sanctuary of Themis. Invoking her can express caution against claiming more wisdom, success or happiness than is warranted.
A neologian is an innovator in language or thought; the term was also applied to rationalist interpreters of Scripture.
Neoterics are modern authors or people, as opposed to the ancients.
Neptune is a Roman god of waters and the sea, identified with the Greek Poseidon. His usual attribute is a trident.
Nero was Roman emperor from 54 to 68 CE and the last ruler of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
Nerves can be an older name for the strings of a musical instrument. Latin nervus has this musical sense; Brouncker’s 1653 translation of Descartes uses “Nerves of a Lute” for strings.
Nestor is the legendary king of Pylos, son of Neleus, remembered in the Trojan War tradition as an elderly and wise adviser. In the Odyssey, Telemachus visits him while seeking news of Odysseus. His name consequently became a model for the respected elder whose experience lends weight to his counsel.
New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold, or an Experimental History of Cold, Begun, is a work by Robert Boyle published in 1665.
New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects (1660) is Robert Boyle’s book reporting trials made with the air pump he devised with Robert Hooke’s assistance; it showed that a vacuum could be produced.
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was a Florentine diplomat and political writer. His works include The Prince and the Discourses on Livy.
Nice could mean overscrupulous or exacting, hard to please or satisfy, fastidious in small matters.
Nicias (c. 470–413 BCE) was an Athenian statesman and general who opposed aggressive policies during the Peloponnesian War. He helped secure the Peace of Nicias in 421 BCE. He opposed the expedition to Sicily but was appointed one of its commanders, later leading the unsuccessful siege of Syracuse and being executed after the Athenian defeat.
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) was a French poet and literary critic. His didactic poem L’Art poétique (1674), modelled on Horace, summed up the literary principles of French classicism and gave rules for versification, style and composition. Its first canto ends with the line ‘un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l’admire’: a fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.
Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) was a French Cartesian philosopher and priest. He combined ideas from Augustine and Descartes, teaching that bodies are known through ideas in God and that God is the only real cause.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) was a Polish astronomer and churchman who proposed a system in which Earth orbits the Sun and rotates on its own axis.
Niels Stensen (1638–1686), latinized as Nicolaus Steno, was a Danish anatomist and geologist, born in Copenhagen and died in Schwerin. Spinoza attended his anatomical dissections at Leiden in 1662. Stensen converted to Roman Catholicism in 1667, was ordained, and as a titular bishop became one of the leaders of the Counter-Reformation in northern Europe. In 1675 he reproached Spinoza for his heterodox views, and in 1677 he denounced Spinoza’s philosophy to the Roman Holy Office of the Inquisition.
Niggardly means meanly covetous or stingy in dealing with others.
Nihilism, for Nietzsche, is the crisis in which the highest values devalue themselves. He linked it with the collapse of traditional religious belief, which he called the death of God. Against it he set the task of affirming life.
Nimrod is described in Genesis 10 as a mighty hunter and the founder of the Babylonian kingdom, whose beginning was Babel in the land of Shinar. He is also said to have founded Nineveh and other Assyrian cities.
In Buddhism, nirvana is the final cessation of suffering and liberation from ignorance and further rebirth, the goal of salvation. In the West the word has often been used to mean emptiness or “the great nothing”, senses that do not match its Buddhist meaning.
Nisus means a striving or effort.
Nitimur in vetitum semper cupimusque negata means “we always strive for what is forbidden and desire what is denied”. In Ovid’s Amores 3.4.17, the speaker argues that restriction can intensify desire.
Nitre, in its saltpetre sense, is potassium nitrate.
Noah is the main figure of the flood story in Genesis 6–9, who is told to build an ark and survives the great flood with his family; according to the text he lived 950 years and had three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. After the flood God blesses Noah and his sons and makes a covenant with them and all their descendants.
Nonage is the time of life before a person comes legally of age: legal minority. Minority, in the same sense, is the state of being a minor or under age, not a smaller number or group.
In Mark 10:17–18 a man kneels to Jesus and calls him ‘Good Master’; Jesus answers, ‘Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God’ (King James Version).
Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto, I am a man and count nothing human alien to me, is a line spoken by the character Chremes in Terence’s comedy Heauton Timorumenos.
A noun, in Aristotle’s account of language, is a meaningful sound established by convention that does not itself indicate time. Its parts do not signify independently as parts of that noun. A noun can signify something without making an assertion that is true or false.
The Novum Organum, or New Organon, is Francis Bacon's treatise on the method of interpreting nature, published in 1620 as part of his unfinished Instauratio magna. Its title answers Aristotle's logical works, the Organon, which it sought to replace. Bacon held that such a method could not advance the sciences without natural history, the collected observations that are the raw material of true induction.
Nugatory can mean futile or ineffectual.
Objective essence (essentia objectiva) is a thing’s essence as represented in an idea, contrasted with its formal essence, what the thing is in itself. Elwes renders the former as “subjective essence”.
In Descartes’ terminology the objective reality of an idea is the reality it has by representing something, as distinct from the formal reality it has as an actually existing mode of thought. Ideas of substances contain more objective reality than ideas of modes, and the idea of God, representing an infinite substance, contains the most.
The obol was an ancient Greek monetary denomination: six obols made a drachma in conventional reckoning. Physical coinage standards varied by place and period.
Observations concerning the Originall of Government, upon Mr Hobs Leviathan, Mr Milton against Salmasius, H. Grotius De Jure Belli is a fifty-page pamphlet printed anonymously in London for R. Royston in 1652 and attributed to Sir Robert Filmer. A collected edition of 1696, Observations concerning the Original and Various Forms of Government, reprinted it together with his Observations upon Aristotle’s Politiques, his answer to Hunton’s Treatise of Monarchy and The Power of Kings. Locke cites these pieces as ‘Observations’ or ‘O.’ with a page number.
Occasionalism holds that God is the only genuine cause in a given domain, while created things are at most occasions of divine action. Its global form, defended by Malebranche, denies genuine causal powers to all created things.
Occult qualities are hidden powers invoked to explain observed effects whose underlying causes are unknown. In early modern philosophy the label could challenge whether an alleged power genuinely explained its effects.
Odysseus, also called Ulysses, is the legendary king of Ithaca and the central figure of Homer’s Odyssey. In the poem he has his companions tie him to the mast so that he can hear the Sirens while the ship passes them.
Oeconomy is economy spelled after its Latin source, oeconomia, which goes back to the Greek word for the manager of a household. It means careful, thrifty management of resources such as money or materials.
Oedipus is the legendary king of Thebes who unknowingly killed his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta. His discovery of those relationships and the disasters of his family became major subjects of Greek tragedy. Different ancient accounts give different versions of his later suffering and death.
Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is Richard Hooker's principal work, in eight books. It is regarded as the foundational theological work of Anglicanism.
Oil of vitriol is an old name for strong sulphuric acid, so called from its oily consistency; vitriol itself was first made by distilling green vitriol.
Old Style and New Style are two ways of reckoning dates. Old Style follows the Julian calendar, in which every fourth year has 366 days; New Style follows the calendar reform of Pope Gregory XIII, which in October 1582 dropped ten days to bring the spring equinox back into place and omits the leap day in century years not divisible by 400.
Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) was the parliamentary general whose cavalry won the decisive battle of Naseby in 1645 during the English Civil War and who had Charles I executed on 30 January 1649. As Lord Protector from 1653 to 1658 he governed England with the support of the army.
Olympia was a sacred site in Elis in the northwestern Peloponnese, where the ancient Olympic games were held. Its central sanctuary was dedicated to Zeus. The site contained temples, places for athletic activity and buildings serving participants, priests and representatives of the Greek states.
To hold something on sufferance is to hold it through others’ toleration or tacit permission.
On the Nature of the Gods (De natura deorum) is a philosophical dialogue written by Cicero (106–43 BCE) in the last years of his life, about 45–44 BCE. In it Velleius expounds Epicurean theology and Balbus that of the Stoics, while Cotta criticizes them from the standpoint of the sceptical Academy. Its first section asks what could be more rash and unworthy of a wise man's seriousness and constancy than to hold a false opinion or to defend without hesitation what has not been sufficiently explored and understood.
On the Soul is Aristotle’s inquiry into soul as the principle of living things. It examines capacities such as nutrition, perception, movement and thought, distinguishing the forms of life that possess them.
Descartes’ ontological argument infers God’s existence directly from the clear and distinct idea of a supremely perfect being, to which necessary existence belongs, just as having angles equal to two right angles belongs to the idea of a triangle. Its main statement is in the Fifth Meditation. Gassendi objected that existence is not a perfection, and Kant later made famous the objection that existence is not a property or predicate.
Ola O. Hårstad calls a digital system relatively closed when a user can reasonably understand where an action ends, its purpose and its context. It becomes open as the action continues into morally relevant purposes, actors or uses that were not apparent in the original situation.
Ophthalmia means inflammation of the eye, particularly its membranes or outer structures.
In the Short Treatise Spinoza distinguishes opinion, which rests on hearsay or experience and is subject to error, true belief, which rests on reasons, and clear knowledge, which comes from feeling and enjoying the thing itself. True belief convinces by reasons that a thing is so, but it only teaches what the thing ought to be, not what it is. Each kind has its own effects: from opinion come the passions opposed to good reason, from belief the good desires, and from clear knowledge true love. Wolf notes that the first kind is called belief in one chapter and opinion in others, and that Spinoza later replaced “belief” by Reason. Wolf compares the distinction between opinion and true belief with a Platonic, or even pre-Platonic, distinction.
Opisthotonus is a sustained muscular spasm in which the body bends backwards.
Aristotle distinguishes four forms of opposition: relatives, such as double and half; contraries, such as good and bad; privation and possession, such as blindness and sight; and affirmation and negation, such as sitting and not sitting. These forms have different conditions and are not interchangeable.
Orestes is the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra in Greek legend. He avenges his father’s murder by killing his mother and her lover Aegisthus. Greek tragedies explore the resulting blood guilt, his pursuit by the Furies, and his eventual release with the aid of Apollo and Athena.
In the early modern physiology of Henricus Regius, organic meant dependent on the body, in contrast with inorganic; mental activity called organic requires suitably functioning bodily organs.
In Plato’s Critias, orichalcum is a metal said to have been mined in Atlantis and valued next to gold. The dialogue describes it as otherwise known only by name; its material identity is uncertain.
Orlando is the Italian form of the legendary Roland, a character from tales of Charlemagne’s time who appears in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.
Ornithian winds are spring winds named in ancient accounts for the seasonal arrival of birds.
Orpheus was a musician and seer in Greek mythology whose song and lyre could enchant living creatures and even the natural world. He was famed for descending to the underworld in an attempt to recover his dead wife Eurydice.
Orsines is a Persian noble in Curtius Rufus’s account of Alexander’s conquests. Curtius relates that his refusal to honour Alexander’s favourite Bagoas led to accusations and execution, and attributes to him a final remark about a eunuch ruling.
Oscitancy means yawning, or a drowsy, lazy or inattentive condition.
Østerport was a gate in Copenhagen’s ramparts; the gate built in 1708 stood roughly where Østerport Station is now and was demolished in 1857. It was the first gate one reached on a walk back to the city from the Deer Park north of Copenhagen.
Ostracism was an Athenian procedure in which citizens voted on potsherds to send a person into exile for ten years, normally preserving property and citizenship. Intended to protect against tyranny, it also served political rivalries.
Otho was Roman emperor from January to April AD 69, taking power after Galba’s murder. Tacitus describes two soldiers recruited into the plot as having brought about the transfer of imperial power.
The Ottoman Empire developed from a principality in Anatolia in the late thirteenth century and expanded across southeastern Europe, western Asia and North Africa. Its sultanate was abolished in 1922. Dynastic succession conflicts included the practice of killing rival brothers.
Übermensch, translated as overman or superman, is Nietzsche’s name for an ideal higher type of human being. The term appears mainly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and works directly related to it. Its weight in his thought is disputed among scholars.
Ovid was a Roman poet whose works include the love elegies Amores and the mythological epic Metamorphoses.
A packet was originally a vessel employed by government to carry dispatches or mail. The word came to mean any vessel that carried mail, passengers and goods on fixed sailing days, also called a packet boat.
A paction is an agreement, compact or bargain; the word is rare.
A paean was an ancient Greek hymn of thanksgiving or invocation, especially addressed to Apollo. In English the word also denotes a song or enthusiastic expression of praise.
A paidagogos was an attendant responsible for supervising a boy in an ancient Greek household, often an enslaved man. He accompanied the child to school and watched over his conduct and safety; teaching particular subjects was normally the work of separate teachers.
A palaestra was a place for athletic training in ancient Greece, particularly wrestling and boxing. The term could refer to a school for boys and young men or to a training area within a gymnasium.
Palæstric means relating to wrestling or to a palaestra, a place used for athletic training.
Palamedes is a clever Greek hero of the Trojan War tradition, credited with inventions including number and counting. He exposes Odysseus’s attempt to avoid the expedition by feigning madness. In a later episode, Odysseus frames him for treason with a forged letter and hidden gold, and the Greek army puts him to death.
A palinode is a poem that withdraws a statement made in an earlier poem, or more generally a formal retraction.
Palmary means outstanding or worthy of praise, as if deserving the palm of victory.
Pan is a Greek god associated with wild landscapes, flocks, hunting and music. Often represented with goat’s legs and horns, he accompanies nymphs with his pipe and is described as a son of Hermes. Traditions connect a sudden overwhelming fright with disturbing his midday rest. His presence in pastoral settings joins fertility and protection with the unsettling power of the wild.
The Panathenaea was Athens' civic festival in honour of Athena, the city's patron goddess. A procession travelled through the Agora to the Acropolis, followed by sacrifices and the distribution of meat. Every four years, the larger Great Panathenaea added major athletic and musical competitions; the festival also included the offering of a decorated robe to Athena.
A panegyric is a speech or piece of writing offering elaborate praise.
Pankration was an ancient Greek combat sport combining wrestling and boxing. Most holds, blows and kicks were allowed. It became an Olympic event in 648 BCE.
A fabric made like velvet, with a longer and less densely packed pile. It can be made from silk, wool, or cotton.
A Greek mathematician of late antiquity whose Mathematical Collection preserves and develops Greek geometrical methods.
Par excellence, French for ‘by pre-eminence’, means being the best or truest of a kind.
In Book II of Milton’s Paradise Lost, fallen angels debate providence, fate and freedom, finding temporary relief from pain in philosophical argument.
The Paradise of Fools is a place in Book III of John Milton’s Paradise Lost: a large and broad limbo beyond the back of the created world, which Satan finds as he passes. To it fly all things transitory and vain, and all who built their hopes of glory, lasting fame or happiness on vain things.
A parallelepiped is a solid with six faces, each a parallelogram.
A paralogism is an invalid argument or the conclusion drawn from it, especially when the error in reasoning is unintentional.
The Paralus was an Athenian sacred trireme belonging to a group of vessels retained for necessary public tasks. The Athenian Constitution records a separately elected treasurer for it.
A paraselene is a luminous appearance associated with a lunar halo.
A parhelion is a bright, often coloured region of a solar halo appearing at the same height as the sun.
Parmenides was a Greek philosopher from Elea in southern Italy, active in the early fifth century BCE. His poem, preserved only in quotations and reports by later writers, investigates what is and also presents an account of the cosmos. How its metaphysical argument relates to its cosmology remains disputed. Plato’s portrayal of him belongs to a philosophical drama and cannot simply be read as a record of his own teaching.
Paronymous things receive an appellation derived from another word with a changed ending, as a grammarian takes a name from grammar. Aristotle also considers how names for qualified things derive from names of qualities, while noting exceptions.
Parricide is the killing of one’s parent or another close relative; it can also mean the person who commits that killing.
Parsifal is Richard Wagner’s last opera, completed in 1882. Its title figure is a hero of the legends of King Arthur, called Perceval in French and Parzival in German.
In Descartes’ body mechanics, a part is whatever is joined together and is not tending to separate. It can itself be divisible: a grain of sand, a rock or the whole Earth can count as one part when considered as sharing one simple motion.
Partage is an obsolete word for division, the act of dividing or sharing, or for a part or share.
A parterre is a decorative area of a garden divided into regular compartments and beds. A parterre de broderie uses planting laid out in ornamental patterns.
In older English a person's parts are the constituents of character and capacity, their qualities, faculties and talents, usually in the plural with a collective sense, as in men of considerable parts or great quickness of parts.
A passion, in Aristotle’s classification of quality, is an affection that passes or is readily removed, such as a temporary blush caused by shame. These passing affections are contrasted with lasting conditions by which a person is characterized.
Passion, as a category in Aristotle’s logical classification, means being acted upon or affected, paired with action. Being cut or burned illustrates it, in contrast to cutting or burning.
The Passions of the Soul (Les Passions de l’âme, 1649) is Descartes’s work on the emotions, their bodily causes and functions, and the extent to which they can be regulated.
Mental affections are the experiences or contents of thought that spoken sounds symbolize in Aristotle’s account of language. They can include a simple conception without truth or falsity, as well as thought that combines or separates things in a judgement.
Pate is an old word for the head of a person, or the top or crown of the head; it is now generally used in contempt or ridicule.
In Roman law the paterfamilias is the head of a family; in a large sense, the proprietor of an estate, one who is his own master.
In present-day English pathological usually concerns disease. Kant uses the word for what arises from feeling and sensible inclination rather than from reason: he calls love that rests on inclination pathological and love seated in the will practical, and he distinguishes a pathological interest in the object of an action from a practical interest in the action itself.
The pathos of distance is Nietzsche’s phrase for the felt superiority of a high-ranking, ruling class over those beneath it. He presents it as the source of the aristocratic judgement of good and bad and of the right to create and name values.
Patriarcha is Sir Robert Filmer’s defence of absolute monarchy, written for his cousins and neighbours probably before 1642 and published posthumously in 1680, when royalists took it up during the Exclusion Crisis. It argues that men are not naturally free but born into subjection, that the first king was a father, and that all kings hold Adam’s fatherly power by inheritance, so that any response to the sovereign other than passive obedience is vicious and absurd. Locke’s First Treatise of Government is a point-by-point refutation of it, and his page references in that work are to the 1680 edition.
The patriarchs are the forefathers of Israel in Genesis, above all Abraham, his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob, who are counted as the three patriarchs. Jacob, also named Israel, became the forefather of the twelve tribes through his twelve sons.
In Spinoza’s proposed aristocracy, patricians are the people expressly elected to share sovereign power. Their entitlement to govern derives from election, rather than an inherited right.
The pattern in the mount is the model of the tabernacle shown to Moses on Mount Sinai: Exodus 25:40 bids him make all things ‘after their pattern, which was shewed thee in the mount’, and Hebrews 8:5 recalls that Moses was admonished to ‘make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount’. The phrase came to stand for a perfect, divinely given model.
Paul was one of the most important leaders of the early Christian church. A Jew who was among the first Jews to believe in Jesus, he preached the Christian message and founded many congregations in the eastern Mediterranean; letters he wrote are preserved in the New Testament. The Protestant Reformation followed from a reinterpretation of Paul in which Luther’s idea of justification by faith was central.
Paul Deussen (1845–1919) was a German philosopher and philologist, from 1899 professor of philosophy at Kiel. He is regarded as the first Western philosopher to bring Eastern thought in a scholarly way into the general history of philosophy, notably in Das System des Vedânta (1883).
Paul Rée (1849–1902) was a philosopher and a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1876–77 he was with Nietzsche in Sorrento, working on his book on the origin of the moral sensations. Both men became attached to the Russian student Lou Salomé in 1882, and Rée left with her for Berlin.
Paulun is an older Danish word for a tent or hut, and by extension a cosy, quiet dwelling.
Pausanias was a Spartan king who intervened in the Athenian civil war in 403 BCE and helped bring about reconciliation between the city and the exiles in Piraeus. Ancient accounts connect his intervention with an effort to restrain Lysander's power. He was distinct from the earlier Spartan regent of the same name.
Pausanias was a Spartan commander who served as regent for the young king Pleistarchus. He led the Greeks to victory over Persia at Plataea in 479 BCE and subsequently acquired a reputation for arrogance toward other Greeks at Byzantium.
Spinoza treats peace as a positive union of minds, rather than mere absence of war. A population restrained only by terror may be free from war without enjoying peace; peace and security of life are the end of the civil state.
Pecksniffian means hypocritically benevolent or sanctimonious. The word comes from Seth Pecksniff, a character in Charles Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewit.
In older usage peculiar means one's own: belonging solely or especially to an individual and not possessed by others, as in the biblical ‘peculiar people’. It can also mean particular or special, suited to a specific purpose or case; the sense of strange or odd is a further one.
Peculiar passions here are the attributes belonging to the kind under scientific investigation. The passage directs the investigator to establish definitions and identify the genus, then investigate these attributes through common first principles.
In these examples, pedestrian means going on foot or having feet, and describes animals. The examples treat human beings as belonging to a broader class of pedestrian animals.
Pelf means money or riches.
A pellicle is a thin skin, membrane or film.
Peltasts were soldiers named for the light shield, or pelte, they carried. In Classical Greek warfare they generally fought with javelins and were useful for skirmishing, scouting ahead and occupying strategic ground. The name originally referred to Thracian troops and later had a broader use; in later armies it could also designate more heavily equipped soldiers.
In an archaic sense, a pencil is an artist’s fine paintbrush.
Penelope is Odysseus’s wife in the Odyssey. During his long absence, suitors press her to remarry. She delays them by weaving and undoing a burial shroud for his father, Laertes, keeping the promised work unfinished. The ruse is one of the poem’s central examples of her resourcefulness.
The Pentateuch is the collection of five books traditionally associated with Moses, forming the Torah in the Hebrew Bible and the opening part of the Christian Old Testament.
Per saltus is Latin for by leaps. In music, it describes a voice moving across an interval directly rather than proceeding through the smaller successive steps called degrees.
In Cartesian metaphysics a thing exists per se, by itself, when it exists as a substance rather than as a mode of something else. For a created substance this independence is relative, since Descartes held that nothing could exist without God.
Per se means in virtue of the thing itself; per accidens means incidentally. Predicates can belong to one subject incidentally without forming a single account of what it is. Being musical and being white, for example, can coincide in a person without forming one essential predicate.
To perdure is to continue to exist or endure.
Kant distinguishes perfect duties, which admit no exception in favour of inclination, from imperfect duties, which require pursuing a policy that can admit of exceptions. Combined with the division into duties to oneself and to others, this gives four kinds of duty, which the Groundwork illustrates with suicide, false promising, neglecting one’s talents and declining to help others.
A perfect syllogism needs nothing beyond its assumed premises to make the necessary consequence apparent; an imperfect syllogism requires further propositions warranted by the assumed terms to make that consequence apparent. An imperfect syllogism still has a necessary consequence.
Perforce means necessarily or because circumstances compel it.
Pericles was an Athenian statesman and general whose influence shaped the city’s democracy and maritime empire in the fifth century BCE. He supported payments for jury service and major building projects on the Acropolis. He led Athens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War and died during the epidemic of 429 BCE.
A period, in rhetoric and grammar, is a complete sentence from one full stop to another, especially a well-proportioned, harmonious sentence.
The Peripatetics were the pupils and followers of Aristotle; his school was called Peripatetic because he taught in the colonnade (peripatos) of the Lyceum, a sports ground outside Athens. Its best-known members were Theophrastus, Eudemus and Aristoxenus, and the school still existed in the third century CE.
In Aristotle's Poetics, peripeteia is a sudden reversal of the action into its opposite and anagnorisis a recognition, a change from ignorance to knowledge of persons or circumstances; chapter 11 names them as two parts of the plot. For Aristotle a recognition succeeds best when it coincides with a reversal, as in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, where Oedipus realizes that he has killed his father and married his mother.
Persephone is queen of the underworld in Greek mythology, daughter of Zeus and Demeter and wife of Hades. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells of her abduction and her return to the world above for part of each year. She was worshipped with Demeter, notably at Eleusis and in Sicily.
Perseus is a Greek legendary hero, son of Zeus and Danaë, who kills Medusa with help from the gods.
The Persian Wars were conflicts between the Persian empire and Greek states in the first half of the fifth century BCE. Their background included Persian expansion into Greek Asia Minor and the Ionian revolt, which received Athenian support.
Person-flow is Ola O. Hårstad’s term for the continuing life of information from, about or connected to persons as it is produced, linked, interpreted and used. It can arise from someone’s actions, other people’s disclosures or system-generated inferences, and is not inherently beneficial or harmful.
Perspectivism is Nietzsche’s view that all seeing and knowing is from a perspective, so that there is no knowing by a pure, will-less subject outside every standpoint. He holds that objectivity is approached not by switching off the affects but by bringing more of them, and more eyes, to bear on the same thing. He criticizes dogmatic philosophers for ignoring the perspectival limits of their own theorizing.
For Descartes, perspicacity is the ability to see individual objects distinctly, while sagacity is skill in inferring certain facts from others. Descartes associates their cultivation with intuition and deduction respectively.
Peter IV (c. 1319–1387), called the Ceremonious, ruled Aragon from 1336 to 1387. In 1348 he defeated rebellious nobles and withdrew their charter of privileges.
Petrus Serrarius (1600–1669) was a Dutch millenarian theologian who was a merchant by profession. He was a close associate and protector of Spinoza.
Phaethon is the son of the sun god Helios in Greek mythology. Allowed to drive his father’s chariot, he could not control its horses and veered from the sun’s usual course, threatening the world with fire. Zeus struck him down with a thunderbolt. The story became a frequent subject of poetry and art.
The Pharisees were a Jewish religious movement around the beginning of the Common Era, known for interpreting Torah and earlier traditions and regarded as predecessors of rabbinic Judaism.
Phidias was an Athenian sculptor of the fifth century BCE who directed the sculptural decoration of the Parthenon. His great cult images of Athena at Athens and Zeus at Olympia used gold for clothing and ivory for exposed flesh over a wooden core. Neither colossal statue survives; smaller copies and ancient representations help document them.
Philip Hunton was an English writer of the Civil War period whose Treatise of Monarchy set out the parliamentary doctrine of a limited or mixed monarchy. Sir Robert Filmer attacked it in The Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy.
Philip II (1527–1598) was king of Spain from 1556 to 1598 and also ruled the Netherlands. His conflict over Antonio Pérez in Aragon culminated in the execution of the Justicia Juan de Lanuza in 1591.
Philip IV (1605–1665) was king of Spain from 1621 to 1665. His daughter Maria Theresa married Louis XIV in 1660 following the Treaty of the Pyrenees, which reconciled France and Spain.
Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) was a German professor at the University of Wittenberg and a close collaborator of Martin Luther who played a central role in carrying through and spreading the Lutheran Reformation. Trained as a humanist, he left his mark on theology, education, grammar, law and the writing of history.
Philolaus was a Greek philosopher of the Pythagorean tradition, active in the fifth century BCE and associated with southern Italy. His surviving account explains the cosmos through limiting and unlimited things joined by harmony. His astronomical system placed a central fire, rather than the earth or sun, at the centre. Some writings later circulated under his name are spurious.
The philosopher's stone was the imaginary stone or substance that alchemists sought as the means of converting base metals into gold.
Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 1821) uses his dialectical method to show that abstract principles of right are incomplete, and that morality too is incomplete, leading to what Hegel calls ethical community (Sittlichkeit). The work traces the way from the family through civil society to the state. In its section on the good and conscience (§§ 129–141) Hegel discusses the moral forms of evil as rising degrees of subjectivity, ending with irony as the highest form of subjectivity and evil.
Phlegm can mean calm self-possession or evenness of temper.
Phlogiston was a hypothetical substance thought to be present in combustible matter and released as flame when it burned.
The phoenix is a mythological bird, said to be the only one of its kind, which burns itself and rises anew from its ashes.
Phosphorus is the Greek personification of the morning star, imagined as a young man appearing before Eos, the dawn. His Latin counterpart is Lucifer, meaning light-bringer. This classical figure is distinct from the later Christian use of Lucifer as a name for Satan.
A phratry was a membership group found in several Greek states, often organized locally and inherited through the family. Its members were called phrateres, or brothers, without necessarily being literal siblings. The place of phratries within civic organization varied between communities; they should not be assumed to have had identical rules everywhere.
Phreatto was an Athenian court for a particular class of homicide proceedings. In the Athenian Constitution's account, a person already banished for a homicide that permits reconciliation faces a further charge of killing or wounding there, making his defence from a boat moored near the shore.
Phthia is the homeland of Achilles and his father Peleus in Greek epic. In the Iliad, Achilles imagines sailing home from Troy and reaching Phthia on the third day if the voyage is favourable.
Phyle was a fortified site in Attica, situated on a steep hill in the southern foothills of Mount Parnes.
Physic is an older name for the practice of medicine; it can also mean a medicinal drug, especially one used as a purgative.
In older usage, physiology could mean the study of how the works of nature are constituted.
Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) was a French Protestant philosopher and critic, known for his Historical and Critical Dictionary and his searching criticisms of philosophical and religious systems.
Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) was a French philosopher, observer and experimentalist who sought to communicate anew the ideas of Epicurus and developed an atomist theory of matter. He is best known in the history of philosophy for his disputes with Descartes, and unlike Descartes he allowed spaces totally devoid of matter.
Pierre Nicole (1625–1695) was a French theologian, philosopher and educator associated with Port-Royal. He collaborated with Antoine Arnauld on the Port-Royal Logic.
Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721) was a French scholar and churchman who became bishop of Avranches and criticized Cartesian philosophy.
Pieter Balling was a friend and correspondent of Spinoza who died in Amsterdam in December 1664.
Pieter de la Court (1618–1685) was a Dutch republican writer. His Interest of Holland first appeared in 1662. Elwes identifies Spinoza’s “V. H.” with De la Court, explaining the initials as Van den Hove.
Pieter van Gent (1640–1693) was born in Nijmegen and died in Amsterdam. He was a friend and correspondent of Spinoza and of Tschirnhaus. A manuscript copy of the Ethics that belonged to him is kept in the Vatican Library (Vat. lat. 12838).
Piety, from Latin pietas, means not only reverence for God but duty, dutifulness: filial reverence and devotion, the affectionate respect and service owed to parents, relatives, benefactors and country.
Piety in Spinoza’s Ethics includes reason-guided conduct aimed at pleasing and helping others. He contrasts the rational desire that others live according to reason with passive ambition, in which a person wants others to live after their own fashion without such guidance.
The Pillars of Heracles were the headlands on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar. Greek legend connected them with the hero’s journey west to obtain Geryon’s cattle. They marked a traditional limit of the navigable sea, separating the Mediterranean world from the ocean beyond.
An analogy comparing the relation of mind and body to that of a pilot and vessel. Descartes holds that pain, hunger and thirst indicate an intimate unity of mind and body, beyond an observer’s awareness of bodily damage.
Pindar was a Greek poet from near Thebes, active in the fifth century BCE. His surviving victory odes celebrate winners at the major Greek athletic festivals, combining praise with myth and reflections on human life. These poems were composed for choral performance.
The pineal gland is a small gland in the brain. Descartes regarded it as the principal seat of the soul and assigned it a central role in perception and the interaction of mind and body through animal spirits. His account rests on historical anatomical assumptions, including a mistaken position and suspension of the gland in the brain’s cavities.
A small upright sighting plate on an instrument. Two plates pierced with aligned holes can establish a line of sight or the direction of a light ray.
Piraeus was Athens’s port on the coast southwest of the city. Developed under Themistocles in the early fifth century BCE, it became a major centre of Greek maritime activity. The Long Walls connected the port to Athens, protecting the route between them.
Pisistratus, also called Peisistratos, was a sixth-century BCE Athenian tyrant who secured power after repeated setbacks. His government supported small farmers and retained Solon's laws. After his death, the tyranny continued under his sons.
Pittacus of Mytilene is traditionally counted among the Seven Sages of ancient Greece, figures celebrated for practical wisdom. Brief sayings were attributed to these sages, although their attribution varies across traditions.
Pituite is an older French term for the mucus secreted by the nose or bronchi.
Plato was a Greek philosopher whose dialogues develop influential theories of the good, the soul, reason and knowledge. A follower of Socrates, he founded his school, the Academy, in Athens in about 386 BCE.
In Plato’s theory, Forms or Ideas are universal, unchanging objects of understanding that exist separately from particular things.
For Spinoza, pleasure is a transition from less to greater perfection, while pain is a transition from greater to less perfection. His account includes passive pleasure and pain, and also active emotions of pleasure and desire. Elwes distinguishes stimulation and suffering, where one part is more affected than the rest, from merriment and melancholy, where all parts are affected alike.
A plenum is space filled with bodies, as Cartesian physics requires in its denial of a vacuum.
Pliny the Younger (Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, 61–about 112 CE) was a Roman writer and official, a nephew of Pliny the Elder. His letters survive in ten books, nine of which he published himself; the tenth contains his correspondence with the emperor Trajan.
Plotinus was a third-century CE philosopher generally regarded as the founder of Neoplatonism. His pupil Porphyry arranged his writings into the Enneads, six groups of nine treatises.
Plutarch was a Greek biographer and philosophical writer who lived in the first and second centuries CE.
Plutus is the Greek personification of wealth, traditionally a son of Demeter and Iasion. A story represented in Aristophanes’s comedy makes him blind: Zeus prevents him from giving wealth only to the deserving, so his gifts reach people without regard to merit. He is often represented as a child carrying a horn of plenty.
Poesy is an older word for poetry and the art of composing poems.
In Descartes’ conic optics, points bruslans are the fixed points used in constructing ellipses and hyperbolas. Their designation as interior or exterior is relative to the chosen half of an ellipse; in his optical constructions they can mark where rays converge or the point from which rays appear to diverge.
The polecat is a small European carnivore of the weasel family, named, it is thought, from French poule, hen, because it preys on poultry; its scent glands give off a very unpleasant odour.
The Political Treatise (Tractatus Politicus) is the second political treatise that Spinoza began after publishing the Theological-Political Treatise in 1670, composed in the aftermath of the events of 1672. Written for philosophers rather than theologians, it is concerned with the general organization of the state. It treats the metaphysical basis of the state and the natural limits of state power, the general aims of the state, and institutional recommendations for monarchy, aristocracy and democracy.
Polybius was a Greek officer and historian from Arcadia who lived in the second century BCE. His Histories examined Rome’s rise to dominance in the Mediterranean world.
Polyphemus is a one-eyed giant, a Cyclops, in Greek mythology, a son of Poseidon. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and his men are shut in his cave and several of them are devoured before Odysseus blinds the giant with a glowing stake and escapes with the survivors.
Polypus is an older word for a polyp. In medicine it named a tumour, usually with a narrow base, growing from an enlarged part of a mucous lining, as in the nose.
Pomatum is a perfumed ointment or pomade, particularly a preparation used to dress the hair.
Pontiff is a title used for the pope, and can also mean a bishop.
Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor (prefect) of the province of Judaea from 26 to 36 CE, the period in which Jesus was crucified. According to all four Gospels, it was Pilate who passed the death sentence on Jesus.
The phrase comes from the first of the beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 5:3).
Innocent III was pope from 1198 to 1216 and the most important pope of the Middle Ages. No pope went further in asserting the power of the papacy, both within the church and over secular rulers.
The Royal Stoa, or Stoa Basileios, was a public colonnade at the northwestern edge of the Athenian Agora. It housed the king archon, an annually appointed magistrate responsible for religious and legal matters. The city's ancestral laws were displayed there, and incoming magistrates swore their oath of office on a large stone at its entrance.
Porphyry’s tree is the hierarchy of genera and species descending from substance through body, living body and animal to rational animal, man and individual people, as set out in Porphyry’s Introduction in the third century CE. It later appeared with illustrations in medieval discussions of Aristotle.
Port-Royal was a Cistercian convent near Versailles and Paris that became a centre of Jansenism and education in the seventeenth century.
The Port-Royal Logic, or Logic, or the Art of Thinking, is a work by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole first published in 1662. It treats principles of careful thinking as well as formal logic.
Poseideon was a winter month of the Athenian lunar calendar, falling approximately in December. An additional Poseideon could be inserted to help keep the lunar calendar aligned with the seasons.
Posekigger, literally ‘bag-peeper’, was a disparaging name for a public customs officer whose task was to inspect incoming dutiable goods, for example at a city gate.
The posse comitatus, Latin for “the power of the county”, was the body of citizens whom an English sheriff could summon to help the authorities suppress a riot or carry out a legal order that was forcibly resisted; posse alone was often used in the same sense.
A posset is a hot milk drink curdled with wine or ale. Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Republic also uses the word for a Homeric mixture of Pramnian wine, barley-meal and grated cheese.
Modal expressions qualify a claim as possible, impossible or necessary. The position of a negation matters: being able not to act differs from not being able to act. Aristotle also distinguishes possibility allowing either outcome from a broader sense in which what is necessary is possible.
A postulate is a demonstrable claim assumed and used without proof when the learner has no opinion about it or holds a contrary opinion, in contrast to a learner-relative hypothesis that the learner finds probable.
An older name for several workshop preparations, including very fine tin oxide used in polishing. The word alone does not specify a single recipe.
A potentate is a ruler or monarch, or someone who dominates a group.
Potidaea was a Greek city on the isthmus of the Pallene peninsula, now called Kassandra, in Chalcidice. Founded by Corinth around 600 BCE, it occupied the site where Cassander later established the city of Cassandreia.
In Romans 9:20–21, the potter’s ability to make vessels for different purposes from the same clay illustrates God’s authority over human beings.
For Kant, practical reason is reason as it determines the will; he identifies the will of a rational being with practical reason, because deriving actions from principles requires reason. He holds that practical and speculative reason are ultimately one and the same reason, distinguished only in their application. The moral law, on his view, is a product of reason as such and not of anything peculiar to human nature; it takes the form of a categorical imperative for human beings because their will is also influenced by needs and inclinations.
Practical wisdom is Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of reasoning well about what to do in particular circumstances. It works with ethical character and attention to the situation, rather than supplying a complete set of mechanical decision rules.
A praetor was an elected Roman magistrate whose principal responsibilities concerned justice. Spinoza also uses the title for a wartime commander in his proposed aristocracy.
Pravity is an archaic word for moral corruption or wickedness; it could also denote physical corruption. It comes from the Latin pravitas, crookedness or depravity, from pravus, crooked or wrong, the root that also gives depravity.
Praxiteles was a Greek sculptor whose nude Aphrodite of Cnidus became celebrated in the fourth century BCE. The statue is known through later copies. It provided an influential representation of the goddess and a subject for literary responses to sculptural beauty.
Pre-established harmony (Latin harmonia praestabilita) is a philosophical term coined by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. According to the doctrine, God, in creating the monads or simple substances, placed in them the whole course of the world, so that when two minds seem to communicate there is no mutual influence: God has arranged in advance that their inner states correspond.
Precipitancy, or precipitance, is headlong hurry: excessive or rash haste in resolving, forming an opinion or carrying out a purpose, as in precipitance of judgment.
A precisian insists on exact compliance with rules or standards, especially in religious observance or moral conduct. The word can also designate a Puritan.
Predication is saying something of a subject. In Aristotle’s logical classification, what is said of another as its subject can also be predicated of that subject’s instances: animal is said of man and consequently of an individual man. Saying something of a subject is distinguished from its being present in a subject.
Prediction products are forecasts of people’s likely future conduct made from behavioural data and offered to business customers. They are a central commodity in Zuboff’s account of surveillance capitalism.
Preferment is advancement or promotion in dignity or office, and also a position or office of honour or profit, as in the preferments of the church.
Prentice is an old shortened form of apprentice.
In older usage preoccupation meant the act of taking possession of something beforehand, and hence prepossession: the occupation of the mind by an opinion or impression already formed, a preconceived opinion or bias. The word comes from Latin praeoccupatio.
Prepense means considered or planned in advance: premeditated, as in the expression malice prepense.
Prerogative, in Locke’s account, is the power left to the executive to act at discretion for the public good where the law is silent and sometimes even against its letter; he calls it the power of doing public good without a rule. The word came into general use in the conflicts between the Crown and the Parliaments of Great Britain, especially under the Stuarts.
In law, prescription is the claim of title to a thing by virtue of immemorial use and enjoyment, or the right or title acquired by possession held for the time and in the manner fixed by law.
Prescription can mean a claim founded on long-established custom or a right acquired through continued possession or use.
Prima facie means at first sight or before a closer examination: judging by an initial appearance.
In Locke’s account, primary qualities are properties bodies possess independently of perceivers, such as solidity, extension and motion. Secondary qualities are powers of bodies to produce experiences such as colours, tastes and smells in perceivers.
In Euclid’s arithmetic, a prime number is measured only by the unit: its only proper divisor is one. A composite number can be measured by another number; examples include four, six and nine. The unit itself is treated separately from these numbers.
Prime matter (Latin materia prima) is, in Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy, matter thought of as wholly devoid of form: the ultimate subject of form, pure potency, neither a substance nor anything in another category. Aquinas held that when a substance is destroyed, prime matter, which lacks all form, is all that endures through the change.
Primogeniture is seniority by birth among children of the same parents and, in English law, the exclusive right of inheritance belonging to the eldest son: in England the father’s estate descended to the eldest son, and the eldest son of the sovereign is entitled to the throne by primogeniture.
Principles of Cartesian Philosophy is Spinoza’s 1663 exposition of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy in geometrical order, the only work he published under his own name in his lifetime. It sets out Parts I and II of Descartes’s book with a fragment of Part III, and was printed with the Metaphysical Thoughts as an appendix and with a preface by Lodewijk Meyer. That preface warns that the book reports Descartes’s opinions and not necessarily Spinoza’s own.
Principles of Philosophy is Descartes’ exposition of his metaphysics and much of his natural philosophy, published in Latin in 1644.
Privacy self-management is the approach of enabling people to decide how their personal information is used through notice, access and consent. Daniel Solove argues that its effectiveness is limited by cognitive burdens and by the scale and unpredictability of data processing.
Privation can mean the absence or lack of a quality, as when cold is considered an absence of heat. This sense need not imply that the missing quality is one the thing ought to possess.
Privation is the absence of a capacity in a thing naturally suited to possess it, at the time it should have it, as blindness contrasts with sight. Habit in this sense means possession of the capacity. This sense concerns having or lacking something, rather than a habitual routine or a stable acquired quality.
A sovereign’s privy purse consists of funds for personal expenses. Spinoza distinguishes it from the state treasury when specifying how ambassadors should be paid.
Pro aris et focis is Latin for “for altars and hearths”, evoking the defence of home and sacred things. Cicero uses it in a debate about the gods, alongside references to temples and city walls.
Pro tempore, Latin for ‘for the time’, means for the time being, temporarily.
A pro-syllogism is a preliminary deduction whose conclusion supplies a premise for another syllogism.
For Locke, probability is the appearance of agreement or disagreement between ideas by the intervention of proofs whose connection is not constant and immutable, but which is enough to induce the mind to judge a proposition true or false. Its grounds are the conformity of a proposition with one's own knowledge, observation and experience, and the testimony of others, and the assent it warrants admits of degrees from near certainty down to conjecture and doubt.
A probationer is a person undergoing probation or on trial; a novice. Webster’s dictionary of 1913 illustrates the word with Dryden’s lines ‘While yet a young probationer, And candidate of heaven.’
The problem of evil asks how suffering and wrongdoing bear on belief in a powerful, knowledgeable and perfectly good God. Some arguments claim a logical incompatibility; others argue that the world’s evils make such a God’s existence less likely.
The problem of induction asks what grounds inferences from observed events to unobserved ones. Hume argues that appealing to experience to justify the assumption that the future will resemble the past already presupposes that assumption.
The problem of many hands arises when many people’s contributions and decisions make responsibility for an outcome difficult to trace. Helen Nissenbaum argues that this difficulty can obscure accountability without showing that nobody is answerable.
In older usage, to procreate can mean to generate or bring something into being, as well as to beget offspring.
Procrustes, ‘the stretcher’, is the nickname of the robber Polypemon or Damastes in Greek legend, who tormented travellers to death by fitting them to a bed, stretching the short and cutting off the limbs of the tall; Theseus killed him.
Prodicus of Ceos was a Greek sophist particularly associated with precise language and distinctions between words of similar meaning.
The proedri were nine meeting officers drawn by lot from tribes outside the serving prytany. In the Athenian Constitution's account, they maintained order, presented business, determined voting results and could dismiss the meeting.
A proem is the opening introduction or preface to a work.
A programme, from the Latin programma, could mean a printed public notice: a broadsheet setting out propositions or announcements to be posted where anyone might read them.
Prolixity is tedious wordiness or excessive length in speech or writing.
Prometheus is a Titan in Greek mythology, often portrayed as a friend of humanity and a rebel against divine authority. In a familiar story he steals fire from the gods for human use. Zeus punishes him by chaining him to a rock, where an eagle repeatedly eats his regenerating liver.
Promiscuous can describe things mixed together without order, or choices made without careful discrimination. Promiscuously can accordingly mean indiscriminately.
Proof through the impossible assumes the contradictory of a proposed conclusion and derives a result incompatible with an accepted premise, thereby establishing the conclusion. Aristotle treats this as one kind of argument by hypothesis.
A propaedeutic is preparatory instruction; as an adjective, propaedeutic means providing introductory instruction. The word comes from the Greek propaideuein, to teach beforehand.
Propension is an older English word for propensity, the quality or state of being inclined toward something.
Property, for Locke, includes life and liberty as well as estate: he speaks of a man's property, ‘that is, his life, liberty and estate’. Property in things begins with labour, which a person mixes with what nature provided, under two limits: one may appropriate only as much as one can use before it spoils, and must leave enough and as good for others.
Spinoza defines prophecy as sure knowledge revealed by God, and distinguishes the prophet’s imaginative reception of revelation from the ordinary knowledge available through natural reason.
Propria (singular proprium) are properties that follow from the attributes constituting a thing and do not themselves constitute it. In the Short Treatise Spinoza gives the name to God’s further properties, among them his causality, providence and predestination. Such properties as being self-subsisting, eternal and immutable belong to God alone, he says, but do not tell what God is.
Propriety, in older English, could mean ownership: the individual, legal right to hold possessions, that is, property. The word also had the obsolete sense of a peculiar inherent quality, and its surviving sense of fitness or conformity to accepted standards.
Proprio motu et propriis auspiciis is Latin for ‘of one’s own accord and on one’s own behalf’.
Protagoras of Abdera was a Greek philosopher and a prominent sophist of the fifth century BCE. He taught for payment and is associated with the claim that the human being is the measure of all things. The meaning and scope of that claim remain matters of interpretation.
Proteus was a prophetic sea god in Greek mythology, associated with the Egyptian island of Pharos and the tending of seals. He could take many forms, including animals and water, to escape anyone demanding his knowledge. A person who held him firmly through these transformations could compel him to reveal what he knew about the future.
“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” is Paul's precept to the Thessalonians in the King James Version of the Bible (1 Thessalonians 5:21), urging that everything be tested and only what is good retained.
In the Short Treatise providence is the striving found in the whole of Nature and in each thing to maintain and preserve its own existence. Spinoza divides it into general providence, by which all things are produced and sustained as parts of Nature, and special providence, the striving of each thing considered as a whole in itself. Wolf notes that the Theological-Political Treatise later calls this striving the highest law of Nature and identifies providence with the order of Nature.
Descartes’ provisional moral code (morale par provision) is the set of rules for conduct he adopted while treating all his opinions as open to re-examination, an imperfect ethics to follow until a better one is known. Its maxims are to obey the laws and customs of one’s country, keeping one’s childhood religion and the most moderate opinions; to act resolutely on the most probable opinions when the truest cannot be discerned; and, close to Stoic teaching, to master oneself rather than fortune. Descartes later restated these maxims, with an adjusted first rule, as no longer merely provisional.
Proxeny was a relationship in which a Greek city granted an honour to a citizen of another community who helped its people in his own city. A proxenos could offer hospitality, introduce visitors to officials, and assist with trade or legal affairs. The relationship connected communities through a local representative and differed from private guest-friendship.
In Descartes’ causal vocabulary, a proximate or primary cause is the one without which an effect could not exist and which itself produces it, while a remote or accidental cause only gives the primary cause occasion to produce its effect at one time rather than another.
A proximate cause is a direct or immediate cause. Spinoza holds that a thing dependent on a cause for its existence must be understood through its proximate cause, which its definition must include.
The prytanes were the fifty councillors from one Athenian tribe serving in rotation as the council’s presiding committee. They convened the council and assembly and ate at public expense in the Tholos; the presidency rotated among the ten tribes through the year.
A prytaneum was a civic building in an ancient Greek city, used for official hospitality. Athens granted meals at public expense there to Olympic victors and other people it wished to honour; such maintenance was a distinction bestowed by the city.
A prytany was the period during which the fifty councillors from one Athenian tribe served as the presiding committee. The ten tribes took turns through the year.
Psalm 8 praises the excellence of God’s name and asks ‘What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?’; in the King James Version it continues, ‘For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet’, naming sheep, oxen, beasts of the field, fowl and fish.
Athenian public arbitrators were citizens serving in their sixtieth year, with individual cases assigned by lot. They sought agreement between litigants and gave a decision if reconciliation failed. Either party could appeal to a citizen court, which considered only the evidence, pleadings and laws already submitted to the arbitrator.
Publici juris is Latin for something that is public property or a public matter.
To pudder is an older way of saying to bewilder, confuse or bother someone. As a noun, pudder means a noisy commotion or bustle.
Pugilism is the sport or practice of boxing, fighting with the fists. A pugilist is a boxer; pugilistic is the related adjective.
The pupil is the dark-looking opening in the middle of the eye through which light passes.
Pure act (Latin actus purus) is the classical description of God as wholly actual, with no unrealized powers or potentialities. It belongs to the doctrine of divine simplicity, which denies any composition of potency and act in God.
For Descartes, pure intellection is thinking by the intellect alone, without corporeal images; its content arises from innate ideas without any accompanying brain processes.
In Catholic teaching, purgatory is an intermediate place between heaven and hell where the dead must atone for their sins while awaiting the Last Judgment. The name comes from the Latin purgatorium, “cleansing fire”, and only the Catholic Church holds a doctrine of purgatory.
Pusillanimity, in Spinoza’s Short Treatise, is failure to do what one knows must be decided upon to advance a good or prevent an evil; its extreme form is called timidity.
Putrid fever is an older medical name for typhus fever. It was so called from the decomposed and offensive state of the patient’s discharges and diseased tissues.
In Greek myth Pygmalion is a king and sculptor who falls in love with a female statue he has made. At his request Aphrodite brings it to life, and she becomes his wife, Galateia; Ovid retells the story in the Metamorphoses.
The Pyrrhonists were ancient sceptics named after Pyrrho (about 365–275 BCE); Sextus Empiricus is a major source for their philosophy. They kept inquiring but suspended judgement when opposing views seemed of equal weight, and aimed at the tranquillity that such suspension was said to bring.
Pythagoras was a Greek thinker from Samos, active in southern Italy in the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE. Early reports associate him with the soul’s survival through successive lives and with religious observance and personal discipline. He left no writings. His own mathematical achievements remain disputed, and later accounts often credit him with ideas developed by his successors.
Pythagoreans followed religious and intellectual traditions associated with Pythagoras. They were not a single school with an unchanged doctrine: sources describe both disciplined ways of life and investigations of number, music and the cosmos. Later thinkers such as Philolaus and Archytas developed distinct accounts of these subjects; their theories cannot simply be assigned to Pythagoras himself.
The Pythia was the priestess through whom Apollo’s oracle at Delphi gave its responses. Women from Delphi held the role and delivered oracles in the god’s temple on appointed consultation days.
The Pythian games were a Panhellenic festival held at Delphi in honour of Apollo. They took place every four years and belonged to the same major festival circuit as the Olympic, Isthmian and Nemean games.
Q.E.D. abbreviates the Latin quod erat demonstrandum, meaning what was to be demonstrated. It is often placed at the end of a mathematical proof to mark its completion.
Qua, from Latin, means in so far as, or in the capacity or character of; as.
Quadrature of the circle, or squaring the circle, is the problem of constructing a square with the same area as a given circle. The classical construction restricts the tools to a straightedge and compass; it was proved impossible under those conditions in the nineteenth century.
Quadrennial describes something lasting four years or recurring every four years.
A quadrireme was a type of ancient war galley associated with the development of larger warships beyond the trireme. At Athens, the Assembly could authorize the Council to build quadriremes with their tackle and sheds.
Quaesitum is the Latin name for what is sought in an inquiry. Descartes contrasts it with a datum, something given or already known with which the unknown is compared.
Quakers, also called the Society of Friends, are a Christian religious movement that arose in seventeenth-century England under George Fox. They traditionally refuse to swear oaths.
In Aristotle’s logical classification, qualia are things described as having a quality, such as white things or knowledgeable people; quale is the singular. They are distinguished from the qualities that account for those descriptions.
Quality is the category by which things are said to be of a certain kind, such as white, knowledgeable or triangular. Aristotle’s classification distinguishes habits and dispositions, natural capacities, affective qualities and affections, and shapes. Qualified things receive their descriptions from these qualities, though the names need not always have a derivative form.
Words such as every, no and some determine the extent of a claim about a class. Aristotle distinguishes using a universal term from making a universal assertion: a sentence about human beings need not assert something of all of them. Universal and particular assertions consequently have different negations.
Quantity is a category Aristotle divides into discrete and continuous kinds. Parts of discrete quantities, such as number, have no shared boundary; parts of continuous quantities, such as a line, do. He also distinguishes quantities whose parts have relative positions from those whose parts have an order without positions.
Cartesian quantity of motion increases with a body's size and speed. It is distinguished from the direction of motion and can remain the same when that direction changes.
Quarter sessions were English county courts held by the justices of the peace four times a year, at Epiphany, Easter, Midsummer and Michaelmas. Beginning in the late Middle Ages as criminal tribunals, they tried offences not serious enough for the assizes and also gathered wide administrative duties in the county, until the Courts Act 1971 replaced them and the assizes with the Crown Court.
“Qui statuit aliquid parte inaudita altera, aequum licet statuerit, haud aequus fuit” is a line of Seneca's tragedy Medea (199–200), spoken by Medea to King Creon: whoever has decided anything without hearing the other side has not been just, even if what he decided was just.
“Quid valeant umeri, quid ferre recusent”, “what the shoulders can carry and what they refuse to bear”, comes from Horace's Ars poetica (38–40), which advises writers to choose a subject equal to their strength and to consider long what their shoulders can and cannot bear.
Quintus Curtius Rufus wrote a Latin history of Alexander the Great, usually called Historiae Alexandri Magni. Almost nothing is known of his life; he probably lived in the first century CE.
Quoad means “with regard to” or “in respect of,” introducing the particular respect in which a statement applies.
Quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri ne feceris is a Latin form of the negative golden rule: do not do to another what you do not wish done to you. The Historia Augusta says that the emperor Severus Alexander, who had heard it from a Jew or a Christian, often repeated the saying and had it proclaimed by a herald when he punished someone.
In the algebraic terminology discussed by Descartes, radix names the first power of a quantity, square the second, cube the third, and biquadratic the fourth. He replaces these geometric names with first, second, and subsequent proportionals to avoid confusing powers with spatial figures.
Ralph Cudworth (1618–1688) was an English philosopher usually associated with the Cambridge Platonists. His philosophy combined Platonist ethics and metaphysics with an atomist account of nature.
Rampjaar, or disaster year, names the Dutch crisis of 1672, when French forces occupied much of the country. Johan de Witt lost power, and William III became stadtholder.
In older physical terminology, a rare body has intervals between its component parts. In Cartesian physics these intervals can be occupied by other matter rather than being empty.
Rarefaction is the process of making a substance thinner or less dense, so that it expands without any addition of matter.
Rase is an older spelling of raze, to tear a building or town down to the ground.
Rashi, Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzhak, was a Jewish commentator on the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud.
Ratiocination is methodical, logical reasoning.
A rational capacity involves a rational principle and can extend to contrary outcomes. An irrational capacity need not do so: fire has the capacity to heat. Aristotle nevertheless allows that some irrational capacities admit opposites, so the distinction is not a rule that every natural capacity has only one outcome.
In the Ethics, Spinoza calls a person free insofar as they live under the guidance of reason, seeking what truly helps them act and preserve their being. He argues that such a person is freer under common laws in a state than in independent solitude.
For Descartes the rational soul is the thinking mind, the only soul in human beings: he explained by mechanical processes the vegetative and sensitive powers that Aristotelians had ascribed to the soul. He held that it must be created by God and closely united with the body, which is how human beings have sensations and appetites.
In Descartes’ mechanical optics, a light ray is a line specifying the direction in which a luminous body acts on an illuminated body. The ray is not itself material in the intervening medium, although particles of that medium transmit the action.
A real being (ens reale) is contrasted in the Short Treatise with beings of reason, which exist in our understanding and not in Nature. Wolf notes that Spinoza’s Cogitata Metaphysica distinguishes a real thing from a chimera, a thing of reason and a fiction. Spinoza warns that an upright philosopher must avoid confusing a real thing with a thing of reason when speaking of good and evil.
In Catholic teaching, real presence means that the whole Christ is truly present in the Eucharist under the appearances of bread and wine.
In scholastic Aristotelian philosophy, real qualities are sensible qualities such as heat, cold and colour, held to exist in bodies in a way that resembles how they are experienced. Descartes sought to replace them with the sizes, shapes and motions of material particles.
Descartes recognized three kinds of distinction in his Principles of Philosophy (Part I, articles 60–62): real, modal and of reason. Two things are really distinct when each can be understood apart from the other and so can exist apart, as Descartes held of mind and body. A modal distinction holds between a substance and one of its modes, or between two modes of the same substance, and a distinction of reason between a substance and an attribute without which it cannot be understood.
The Short Treatise uses realiter for distinctions between different attributes or between things belonging to different attributes. It uses modaliter for the distinction of particular extended things from extension, as modifications rather than separate substances.
The Receivers-General were ten Athenian officials selected by lot. They received public payments, recorded instalments and distributed revenue among magistrates under the Council's supervision.
Recreate can mean to refresh or revive someone mentally or physically.
To recruit can mean to repair by fresh supplies something that has been used up. Hence it also means to restore wasted vigour, renewing a person in strength or health.
A rectilinear figure is bounded by straight sides, as in a triangle or quadrilateral.
Redintegration is the restoration of something to a whole or complete state.
Reflections on the Revolution in France is Edmund Burke’s political work published in 1790. It criticizes the French Revolution and argues that liberty must be understood together with the other conditions of civilized government.
Reflective knowledge is knowledge of an idea, or an idea of an idea, in Spinoza’s account of method. Method presupposes a given true idea and directs the mind by its standard; the most perfect method uses the idea of the most perfect being.
In Descartes’ optics, refraction is the bending of a light ray as it crosses obliquely into a transparent body that receives its action more or less easily than the body it leaves.
Refraction is the change in direction of a ray of light as it passes obliquely between different media.
In French hydraulic and technical vocabulary, a regard is an access shaft over a water conduit or an opening that allows an installation to be inspected or cleaned.
The Regency Crisis of 1788–1789 arose when George III’s illness prevented him from carrying out his royal duties. Government and opposition disputed the powers to be given to the Prince of Wales as regent, but the king recovered before the proposed arrangement took effect.
Regeneration, in Spinoza’s Short Treatise, is a second birth through awareness of the effects of love and union with God, distinguished from the first union with the body.
Regicide is the killing of a king, or a person who kills a king.
Regiment, in an obsolete sense, means government, mode of ruling, rule or authority, as in Marlowe’s line about what kings are when regiment is gone.
Rehoboam is Solomon’s son and successor in the Hebrew Bible. In that account, the northern kingdom breaks away, leaving him king of Judah; Egyptian troops also attack Jerusalem during his reign.
Hume distinguishes relations of ideas, which can be established independently of experience, from matters of fact, whose knowledge depends on experience. Mathematical relations illustrate the first class; the denial of a matter of fact can be conceived without contradiction.
Relatives are things described by reference to something else, as double is double of something and knowledge is knowledge of something. Aristotle examines reciprocal descriptions of correlates and warns that an appropriate name may be needed to state the relation accurately.
Relics are the bodily remains of a holy person or objects that belonged to, or came into physical contact with, a saint and are venerated in religious practice.
Spinoza distinguishes outward religious practice, which falls under sovereign authority, from inward knowledge and love of God, which cannot be transferred to a ruler. He also advocates a shared moral faith to reduce sectarian conflict.
A religious interpreter, or exegete, was a specialist who explained sacred traditions and ancestral religious law in ancient Greece. In Athens, such advisers dealt especially with unwritten customs, including everyday duties and family obligations with religious implications. The role could be an official appointment, although other Greek communities also recognised interpreters without a formal office.
Spinoza’s Short Treatise distinguishes remorse about an action whose goodness remains doubtful from repentance for an action judged bad. It rejects both as forms of sorrow, preferring reason and love of truth as means of improvement.
René Descartes (1596–1650) is widely regarded as a key figure in the founding of modern philosophy, and he also contributed to mathematics and physics. His Meditations and Principles of Philosophy set out the philosophy that Spinoza expounds in his 1663 book. In physics he gave the first distinctly modern formulation of laws of nature and a conservation principle of motion.
The Second Replies are Descartes’s answers to the second set of objections to his Meditations, published together with the Meditations in 1641. At their end he gives a geometrical exposition of some of his central arguments, arranged as definitions, postulates, axioms or common notions, and propositions.
The Republic of Genoa was a maritime republic centred on Genoa in Liguria, Italy. Its doges held office for life before the reform of 1528, which introduced two-year terms.
The Republic of Venice was a maritime state centred on Venice in northeastern Italy, whose independence ended in 1797. An elected doge headed it, with his authority limited by governing councils.
Repugnant can mean contradictory or inconsistent, especially in logic. It also has the distinct sense of causing disgust or aversion.
A resident is a diplomatic representative who lives at a foreign court, usually a minister of lower rank than an ambassador.
In Kant’s ethics, respect for the moral law is the motive of acting from duty: being moved by the recognition that the moral law is a supremely authoritative standard that binds us. It is also a feeling, akin to awe and fear, but Kant holds that it is produced by a rational concept rather than received through the senses, and that its object is the law alone. Respect for a person is, on this view, respect for the law of which that person gives an example.
Ressentiment is Nietzsche’s name for the persistent, corrosive hatred that people kept powerless by their oppressors come to feel against them, a hatred denied any outlet in action. Nietzsche argues that this emotion became creative: it produced the moral concept of evil to condemn the strong and, by negating it, a new concept of the good. The French word itself means resentment or ill will.
Resty describes stubborn refusal to move or give way.
The retina is the light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye. Its photoreceptor cells convert light into electrical signals that reach the brain through the optic nerve.
Revaluation, or transvaluation, of values is Nietzsche’s term for the creation of new values by revaluing existing ones. He describes the slave revolt in morality as such a revaluation, and he calls his own task a revaluation of all values.
Reversion can mean the right to inherit or to possess and enjoy property in the future.
A rhapsode was a performer of epic poetry in ancient Greece, particularly the Iliad and Odyssey. Rhapsodes recited memorized verse at gatherings and festivals, typically carrying a staff. They are distinguished from earlier singers who improvised epic song with string accompaniment.
In an older sense, a rhapsody is a loosely connected medley of ideas or passages assembled into one piece.
Richard Cumberland (1732–1811) was an English dramatist. His play The Jew was translated into Danish in 1796 and performed at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen from 1795 to 1835; its Jew, Sheva, is taken by everyone for a miser and usurer but does good in secret, knowing himself better than those who judge him.
Richard Hooker (1554?–1600) was an English theologian and priest in London. His Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in eight books, is the foundational theological work of Anglicanism.
Richard III (1452–1485) was King of England from 1483, previously Duke of Gloucester, a brother of Edward IV, and was killed at the Battle of Bosworth. In literature, notably in Shakespeare's play Richard III, he is portrayed as a malicious monster who clears his own way to the throne.
Richard Price (1723–1791) was a Welsh dissenting minister and moral philosopher. His sermon A Discourse on the Love of our Country (1789) defended the French Revolution and provoked Burke’s response in Reflections.
Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was a German composer who developed a new form of music drama, which he called the Gesamtkunstwerk. His opera house at Bayreuth opened in 1876 with the premiere of Der Ring des Nibelungen, and his last opera, Parsifal, was completed in 1882. Reading Schopenhauer in 1854 changed his outlook radically. Nietzsche met him as a student in Leipzig; Wagner was for a time the strongest influence on him, and their break was painful.
To ride or travel post was to travel with post horses, kept at a series of stations on a recognized route, and hence to go in haste.
For Spinoza, the commonwealth’s right is natural right determined by the power of a multitude acting as if with one mind. It cannot extend to what people cannot be induced to do, and is diminished when government provokes widespread opposition.
The ring of Gyges is a story about a Lydian shepherd who discovers a ring that makes him invisible and uses it to seize royal power. The story poses a challenge: whether justice would matter if wrongdoing could go undetected. Its challenge is distinct from an endorsement of the shepherd’s actions.
“Spectatum admissi risum teneatis, amici?”, “admitted to the sight, could you hold back your laughter, friends?”, is line 5 of Horace's Ars Poetica. Horace asks it of an imagined painting that joins a human head to a horse's neck, adds feathers from every kind of creature and ends a beautiful woman in a black fish, his image of absurd incongruity.
In ancient Greek religion, ritual pollution was a state of impurity, often called miasma, associated with events such as killing, contact with the dead, childbirth, or violations of sacred places. It could arise without deliberate wrongdoing. Customs governing its transmission, duration, and removal through purification differed between communities and kinds of pollution.
Athena's robe, or peplos, was a woven garment offered by the Athenians to the goddess during the Panathenaic festival. It clothed her wooden cult image, housed in the Erechtheion on the Acropolis. Selected young women wove its decoration depicting the Gigantomachy, the mythical battle in which the Olympian gods fought the Giants.
Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) was an Italian Jesuit theologian and cardinal, professor of controversial theology in Rome from 1576, whose Disputationes de controversiis Christianae fidei (1586–1593) set out the Catholic case against the Protestant movements and provoked many replies. He was canonized in 1930.
Robert Boyle (1627–1691) was a natural philosopher whose experiments supported mechanical explanations of nature. With Robert Hooke, he developed an air pump for investigating air.
Robert Dudley, first Earl of Leicester, was an English politician who led English forces sent to assist the Netherlands in 1585.
Robert Sibthorpe was an English clergyman whose sermon Apostolical Obedience, preached at the Lent assizes at Northampton on 22 February 1626/7 and licensed by the bishop of London, was printed in support of the forced loan. It taught that where the word of the king is there is power, that the prince’s duty is to direct and make laws, and that subjects owe active obedience in almost all cases and passive obedience where they cannot give active obedience.
A rodemester was a municipal official in Copenhagen with various supervisory duties, among them the collection of taxes.
Rodomontade means boastful or empty bluster.
Roger Manwaring was an English clergyman who in 1627 preached two sermons before Charles I and the court at Whitehall in support of the forced loan. He taught that the king is not bound to observe the laws of the realm concerning the subjects’ rights and liberties, that his command in imposing loans and taxes without consent in Parliament binds the subject’s conscience on pain of damnation, and that the authority of Parliament is not necessary for raising aids and subsidies.
In the Roman Republic, a dictator was an extraordinary magistrate granted supreme civil and military command for a limited period under exceptional circumstances.
The Roman senate, by tradition the council to which Romulus appointed the patricians, was the most important body of the Republic, directing foreign policy and finances; it had originally 300 members and 600 from Sulla’s time. Under the emperors it lost most of its influence, and senator became little more than an honorary title.
A Roman triumph was a ceremonial procession honouring a victorious commander, accompanied by soldiers, captives and spoils. It continued to the Capitol, where sacrifices were made to Jupiter.
A New Testament letter. Romans 1:19–20 concerns what may be known of God and says that divine power is recognizable through creation.
The Royal Exchange in the City of London was a meeting place for merchants and traders, modelled on the bourse at Antwerp where Thomas Gresham had been based. Elizabeth I opened it on 23 January 1571 and proclaimed that it should be called the Royal Exchange. Destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, it was rebuilt and reopened to merchants in 1669.
The Royal Society is a scientific fellowship whose first meeting took place in London in 1660. Its early members gathered observations, conducted experiments and exchanged information through correspondence.
In Spinoza’s account of scriptural Hebrew, ruagh can signify wind, breath, life, courage, disposition or mind; the surrounding usage determines how the word spirit should be understood.
A rub is something that hinders or obstructs motion or progress, an impediment or difficulty, as in Hamlet's “there's the rub”. In the game of bowls the word also named an unevenness of the ground.
Rudolf Virchow was a German physician, pathologist, anthropologist and politician, a towering figure in nineteenth-century medicine. His Cellular Pathology (1858) laid the foundation of modern pathology. He also pursued physical anthropology and was one of the founders of the German anthropological society in 1869.
The Rule of Three finds a fourth proportional by multiplying the second number by the third and dividing by the first: the fourth then stands to the third as the second stands to the first. In his Short Treatise, Spinoza uses it to distinguish repeating a rule from understanding the proportion.
Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676), born in Smyrna, was a Jewish mystic and leader who in 1665 was publicly proclaimed the Messiah by the kabbalist Nathan of Gaza. The news spread to Jewish communities in many countries, Holland among them, and a millenarian movement arose in which tens of thousands resolved to travel to the Land of Israel. Arrested by the Ottoman sultan in 1666, he converted to Islam under threat of execution.
Sacerdotal means priestly, or relating to priests and the priesthood.
Sædelighed is the Danish word for the sum of what is good in a society, including its dispositions, actions and customs and its moral, philosophical and political ideals. In more recent German philosophy it is often contrasted with morality, the domain of actual duties and moral commands. In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Sittlichkeit, ethical life, is the higher unity in which abstract right and subjective morality are reconciled, unfolding in the family, civil society and the state.
Sagacity is a quick, successful conjecture of the middle term that explains why something is so. Aristotle illustrates it by recognizing why the moon is bright on the side facing the sun: it is illuminated by the sun.
In Locke's theory of knowledge, sagacity is the quickness of mind that finds out the intermediate ideas which show the agreement or disagreement of two other ideas, and applies them correctly. Such intervening ideas, which Locke calls proofs, are what make demonstration possible when two ideas cannot be compared directly.
Saguntum, now Sagunto in Spain, was a Roman ally besieged by Hannibal in 219 BCE. Livy describes the siege continuing while Rome deliberates over its response.
Sais was an ancient Egyptian city in the western Nile Delta, at modern Sa el-Hagar. Its principal goddess was Neith, whose sanctuary made the city a religious centre. Sais also became the capital of Egypt under the rulers of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, commonly called the Saite dynasty. The Greek name Sais derives from the Egyptian name Sa.
Salamis is an island in the Saronic Gulf, west of Piraeus in Attica. In 480 BCE, the Greek fleet defeated the Persians in the strait between the island and the mainland.
Sallust was a historian and politician of the Roman Republic, best known for accounts of Catiline’s conspiracy and the Jugurthine War. Two letters to Caesar transmitted under his name have disputed authorship.
Salt, sulphur and mercury—the tria prima—were three principles that Paracelsus proposed alongside the four elements in his account of matter. Nicholson’s 1808 dictionary tentatively interprets them as what remains fixed in fire, what burns, and what rises as vapour without burning, respectively.
Salus populi suprema lex esto means let the people’s welfare be the highest law. In On the Laws, Cicero assigns this principle to the consuls in his proposed constitution.
A salvo, from the Latin salvo jure, ‘the right being reserved’, is an exception, a reservation or an excuse.
Samkhya, or Sankhya, is an ancient Hindu philosophical system of India. Its classical form is attributed to Ishvarakrishna’s Sankhyakarika, probably of about the fifth century CE, though many of its ideas are older.
Samos is a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, separated from the Turkish coast by the narrow Samos Strait.
Samuel is a biblical prophet who, in the First Book of Samuel, anoints Saul as king. When Samuel was old he made his sons judges over Israel, but they took bribes and perverted judgment, and the elders asked him for a king to judge them like all the nations (1 Samuel 8).
Samuel Clarke (1675–1729) was a British philosopher and theologian. His argument for a necessarily existent being, developed in his Boyle Lectures, became a major early modern argument for God’s existence.
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), often called Dr. Johnson, was an English writer, editor, lexicographer, critic and biographer, and one of the best-known figures of later eighteenth-century Britain. His chief work, A Dictionary of the English Language, begun in 1747 and completed in 1755, long remained a standard work for English usage.
Sappho was a Greek lyric poet from Lesbos, active around the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE. Her surviving poetry includes intimate expressions of desire and attachment. Much of her work survives only in fragments, and reliable knowledge of her life is limited.
Sarah, originally Sarai, is in the Hebrew Bible Abraham’s wife and the mother of Isaac, and Genesis counts her as the first of the four matriarchs of the Israelites. She is the first of the Bible’s many childless women who, with God’s help, nevertheless conceive. When the Lord promises the aged couple a son, Sarah, listening at the tent door, laughs to herself (Genesis 18:12).
Sarah is the daughter of Raguel and Edna in the Book of Tobit, a young woman of Tobit's family. A demon who loves her has killed the men given to her in marriage, until Tobias, as an angel advised, drives it away with the smoke of a fish's heart and liver on glowing coals and marries her.
Sardis was the capital of ancient Lydia in Asia Minor, near the Gediz River in present-day Turkey. Herodotus describes its capture, apart from the citadel, by an Ionian expedition and a fire spreading through the town.
Saturn is a Roman god associated with agriculture, corresponding to the Greek god Kronos, the father of Zeus.
A woodland deity or demigod conventionally represented with a mixture of human and goat features.
A satyr play is an ancient Greek dramatic form performed as a shorter afterpiece to tragedy. Its chorus represents satyrs, the part-human, part-animal companions of Dionysus. It treats mythical heroes and gods with burlesque humour and colloquial language. Euripides’s Cyclops is a surviving example.
Saul was the first king of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, anointed king by the prophet Samuel. He led the wars against the Philistines and other neighbouring peoples and won a series of victories; according to the biblical account he died fighting the Philistines on Mount Gilboa.
A scalene triangle has three sides of different lengths.
In philosophy, sceptics are thinkers who suspend judgement instead of affirming claims about how things really are. The Greek skepsis means investigation, and the ancient sceptics of Plato’s Academy and the Pyrrhonist tradition devoted their lives to inquiry. Cicero’s writings carried ancient scepticism into early modern philosophy, where it was mostly discussed by philosophers who aimed to refute it.
Spinoza calls interpreters who subordinate reason to Scripture sceptics, and those who make Scripture conform to reason dogmatists; he rejects both approaches.
In Descartes’ music theory, Schism names the small difference between a major tone and a minor tone. Descartes uses it when discussing how a note can shift slightly to fit different consonances.
The disputation was a regular form of teaching, apprenticeship and research in the medieval universities, conducted by a dialectical method under a presiding master. Arguments for and against a thesis were brought forward, a student serving as respondent answered them, and the master gave the final determination. In the related exercises the opponent put forward propositions and the respondent had to grant, deny or doubt them, and treatises on the modes of opposing and responding taught the techniques of winning.
Scholastic philosophy, or scholasticism, was a methodical, authority- and tradition-bound philosophy that sought to reconcile Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle, with Christian doctrine; it was cultivated above all in the cathedral and monastery schools of Europe from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, and its name comes from Latin scholasticus, belonging to a school. It reasoned by deduction from set premises, such as Aristotle's metaphysics and the Bible, and its characteristic form was the disputation, which argued for and against a thesis by strict rules. In the early seventeenth century the Jesuit colleges still taught a philosophy curriculum that followed Aristotle in logic, morals, physics and metaphysics, while Galileo, Descartes, Bacon and other modern philosophers and scientists set themselves against the scholastic tradition.
In early modern philosophical usage, the sciences are learned disciplines, including philosophy, mathematics, medicine and jurisprudence.
Science, in Aristotle’s logical classification, denotes knowledge, illustrated by grammar and music as well as by knowledge in general. It can be considered a stable quality of a knower and also a relative whose correlate is something knowable.
In Aristotle’s strict sense, scientific demonstration is a syllogism yielding knowledge of a necessary conclusion through its cause. Its premises must be true, primary, immediate, better known than the conclusion, prior to it and explanatory of it; valid inference alone does not suffice.
A person whose learning is superficial, especially one who pretends to possess knowledge.
A score, in an older sense, is an account or reckoning, an account of dues, a bill, and hence indebtedness, as in paying one’s score.
To scout an idea is to dismiss it contemptuously or mockingly.
Scylla and Charybdis are neighbouring sea dangers in Greek myth. In the Odyssey, Scylla is a monster that snatches sailors, while Charybdis draws the sea into a destructive whirlpool. Odysseus passes between them at the cost of six companions. Later tradition located the passage in the Strait of Messina; the pair became an image of danger on either side.
Scyros is an island in the Aegean Sea, the largest and southernmost of the Sporades.
Scythians is a Greek name for ancient Iranian peoples living north of the Black Sea, also used more broadly for related peoples across the Eurasian steppe. Their communities included both nomads and settled farmers, with extensive contacts with Greek colonies around the Black Sea.
Seasonable can mean timely or suited to the occasion, an archaic sense. It can also describe something appropriate to the season of the year.
In scholastic usage a second notion, or second intention, is contrasted with a first notion, which represents what things really are, as a mode of conceiving things. Second notions do not directly represent real things but are ways of thinking about them, such as the classifications that compare many things. In the first dialogue the character Desire appeals to the philosophers’ agreement that “whole” is a second notion with no place in Nature apart from human thought.
A sectary is an adherent of a sect or a dissenter from an established church.
To seek a knot in a bulrush (nodum in scirpo quaerere) is a Latin proverb for inventing a difficulty where none exists. Lewis and Short cite Plautus’s Menaechmi for the wording “In scirpo nodum quaeris.”
The seisachtheia, or 'shaking off of burdens', names Solon's measures freeing Athenians from debt bondage and prohibiting loans secured on a debtor's person. Later accounts describe cancellation of all public and private debts, but the extent and nature of debt relief remain disputed.
For Spinoza, self-complacency is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as its cause.
Spinoza’s Short Treatise distinguishes self-respect, an unprejudiced recognition of one’s actual perfection without seeking esteem, from humility, recognition of one’s actual imperfection without regard to others’ contempt.
In Spinoza’s proposed aristocracy, the senate is subordinate to the supreme council and manages public business. Its duties include publishing laws, overseeing defence and receiving embassies; decisions on war and peace require the supreme council’s confirmation.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher who wrote in Latin and died in 65 CE. His philosophical works include the Moral Letters to Lucilius and the Natural Questions.
Senna is a plant-derived preparation used as a laxative, traditionally made from dried senna leaves.
Sensibility is a capacity for feeling and responding to emotional impressions, including pleasure, distress and the feelings of others.
Sensible can mean perceiving or being aware of something through the senses or the mind. To be sensible of something is to feel or recognize it.
Sensible can mean perceptible through the senses. In the expression “sensible perception,” it denotes sensory perception.
A sentence is meaningful speech whose parts can themselves have meaning. Aristotle uses this category broadly enough to include a prayer. Only sentences that assert or deny something bear truth or falsity; these form the narrower class of enunciations.
Sepium denotes the cuttlebone, the internal calcareous shell of a cuttlefish. Aristotle compares it by analogy with a fish’s bone and the bone of a land animal.
The Septuagint is a collection of Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures made in Egypt, especially in the large Greek-speaking Jewish community of Alexandria, from the third century BCE to the first century CE. Early Christianity quoted it in the New Testament and used it as scripture until Jerome’s Latin translation; it never gained a comparable place in Jewish circles, and today the Greek Orthodox Church uses it.
Seraphim are beings in Isaiah 6 depicted with six wings who take part in the prophet’s calling.
Serapis was a Hellenistic Egyptian god represented in Greek form and associated with Osiris-Apis.
Serein is an older French noun for cold evening damp or vapour believed to fall at sunset and to be unhealthy.
Sesquialter denotes the ratio three to two, or one and a half to one. Sesquitertian denotes four to three, or one and a third to one.
To set light by someone is to undervalue or slight them, to treat them as of no importance, to despise them.
Sexennial describes something lasting six years or recurring every six years.
Sextus Empiricus was a Pyrrhonian sceptic who probably lived in the second or third century CE. His surviving works include the Outlines of Pyrrhonism, the fullest account of Pyrrhonian scepticism, whose practitioner seeks for every argument an equal and opposing argument and so suspends judgement.
Shabbat is a tractate in the Mishnah, Tosefta and both Talmuds, devoted chiefly to the rules of Sabbath observance.
Shalmaneser is the name of several kings of Assyria. Shalmaneser III (about 858–824 BCE) waged constant wars of conquest and fought a coalition at Qarqar on the Orontes in 853 BCE; Shalmaneser V (726–722 BCE) marched against Hoshea of Israel and besieged Samaria, which fell in 722 BCE.
Shambles originally meant a place where butcher’s meat is sold, or a place for slaughtering animals for meat.
Shankara (about 788–820) was an Indian Hindu philosopher and founder of monastic communities who systematized advaita, or non-dualist, philosophy. He wrote influential commentaries on the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Brahmasutra, and taught that brahman and the self (atman) are identical.
In Act 1, scene 4 of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Lear calls on Nature to curse his daughter Goneril. He wishes that she may bear a child who torments her, so that she may feel ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child.’
A sheepcote, or sheepcot, is a small enclosure for sheep, a pen or fold.
Shem, Ham and Japheth are the three sons of Noah in Genesis, from whose families the nations are said to have spread after the flood. Shem, the eldest, is the ancestor of the Semitic peoples, including Israel, and Japheth is the ancestor of many peoples (Genesis 10:1–5). Older English texts spell Ham as Cham and Japheth as Japhet.
Shishak is the Egyptian king whom the Hebrew Bible says attacked Jerusalem during Rehoboam’s reign. He is commonly identified with Shoshenq I, but his Karnak record does not name Jerusalem, and whether he actually attacked that city remains uncertain.
Silenus is a satyr in Greek mythology associated with Dionysus. He is often depicted as a bald, potbellied, wine-drinking figure with a flattened nose and animal features. In the story of Midas, his capture and release lead Dionysus to grant the king his disastrous golden touch.
Sils-Maria is a place in Switzerland where Nietzsche spent his summers in his later years. The Upper Engadine is the highest part of the Engadine, the valley of the river Inn in the Swiss canton of Graubünden.
Simmias was a Theban associate of Socrates who also heard the Pythagorean thinker Philolaus; the extent of his commitment to Pythagorean teaching is uncertain. Plato portrays him in the Phaedo testing the soul’s immortality through an analogy with the harmony produced by a lyre, which disappears when the instrument is destroyed.
Simon Joosten de Vries (about 1633/4–1667) was a friend and correspondent of Spinoza.
Simonides of Ceos was a Greek lyric poet of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. He worked in Athens, Thessaly and Sicily, composing choral poetry, victory songs and laments, including commemorations of the Persian Wars. Only fragments of his poetry survive.
In Descartes’ terminology a composite entity has two or more attributes, each of which can be distinctly understood apart from the others, while a simple entity has no such separable attributes.
Simple natures are features that Descartes treats as so clear and distinct to the understanding that they cannot be divided into simpler elements of knowledge. He groups them as intellectual, material, or common to both, and explains compound knowledge through their connections.
In the civil account of Ethics IV, Spinoza defines sin as disobedience to the state’s authority, and associates merit with obedience and enjoyment of the advantages the state provides. These notions presuppose common laws and consent, rather than existing in the state of nature.
A sinecure is a paid position requiring little or no work. Historically, it could be a church benefice without parish spiritual duties.
Sir John Fortescue, an English judge who became lord chief justice in 1442, wrote De laudibus legum Angliae in praise of English law and, probably after 1470, On the Governance of the Kingdom of England. He contrasted the absolute monarchy he saw in France with the limited monarchy of England, where rulers govern through laws the people assent to.
Sir Robert Filmer (about 1588–1653) was an English political writer of the generation of Charles I. His Patriarcha, published posthumously in 1680, gave the fullest statement of the patriarchal version of the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Locke's First Treatise of Government is a polemical refutation of the theological basis of that doctrine.
A fabulous female creature associated with the sea and with songs that lure sailors to destruction.
Skandalon is a Greek word for offence or stumbling block that occurs several times in the New Testament, for example in 1 Corinthians 1:23, where Paul preaches Christ crucified, ‘a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’.
The skilling was a Danish monetary unit, originally a unit of account of twelve pennies, first struck as a silver coin in the 1440s; the last skilling was minted in 1872, and from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century it was one of the most important coins of daily life. In Kierkegaard’s day a rigsdaler was divided into 6 marks of 16 skilling each, 96 skilling in all, so that 4 skilling (abbreviated Sk.) was small change.
Slave morality, in Nietzsche’s account, is the morality of the weak and oppressed, whose primary judgement is that the strong are evil and whose idea of the good is the complement of that evil. He traces its victory over aristocratic values to a “slave revolt in morality” driven by ressentiment, which revalued the values of the noble. Nietzsche counts Christian morality as a slave morality.
To call human beings political or social animals is to regard life in society as natural to them. Aristotle’s Politics describes humans as political animals, and Spinoza accepts the schoolmen’s description insofar as people need mutual help to live independently.
The Society of Jesus is a Catholic religious order founded by Ignatius of Loyola and his companions and approved by the pope in 1540. Its members, called Jesuits, became active in education, missions and the Catholic response to the Reformation.
Socinians were members of a Christian movement of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that embraced the teaching of the Italian theologian Faustus Socinus. Centred in Poland at Raków, they rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, held Jesus to be a man divine by office rather than by nature, insisted that Christian doctrine must be rational, and advocated the separation of church and state. The Polish Diet forced them into exile in 1658, and their ideas influenced English Unitarianism.
Socrates was a Greek philosopher active in Athens whose questioning of others influenced Plato and later philosophical methods. He left no writings, and surviving portrayals of him differ substantially.
Socrates’ divine sign, or daimonion, was a personal warning he described as restraining particular actions. Ancient accounts associate it with a voice; equating it simply with conscience obscures its religious character.
Sodom and Gomorrah are, in the Hebrew Bible, two prehistoric cities said to have lain at the southern end of the Dead Sea. According to Genesis 18–19 their inhabitants’ godlessness and inhospitality led God to destroy them with fire and brimstone, and only Lot and his closest family escaped. Before the destruction Abraham intercedes for Sodom, asking God to spare the city if it holds only ten righteous people.
A solecism is an error of expression or something that departs from a proper or coherent order.
Solomon, son of King David and Bathsheba, probably reigned over Israel from about 970 to 931 BCE; tradition credits him with building the first temple in Jerusalem and with the authorship of Proverbs, though modern scholarship dates that book much later. His wisdom became the subject of many legends.
Solon was an Athenian statesman, lawgiver and poet, traditionally counted among the Seven Sages of Greece. Appointed to reform Athens in 594 BCE, he sought to ease conflict between rich and poor; his poetry survives in quotations by later writers.
The Council of Four Hundred was an early Athenian civic body attributed to Solon, with one hundred members from each of the four tribes. It prepared business for the citizen assembly and was distinct from the Areopagus Council and the later oligarchic Four Hundred.
The Solonian property classes were four Athenian civic ranks associated with Solon: pentacosiomedimnoi, hippeis, zeugitai and thetes. Rank governed eligibility for public offices. The Athenian Constitution gives produce qualifications of 500, 300 and 200 measures for the first three ranks and reports horse maintenance as an alternative for hippeis. The historical accuracy of these precise requirements is debated; thetes were excluded from office but admitted to the Assembly and juries.
A somnambulist is a sleepwalker.
Sophie is the young woman whom Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduces in his educational treatise Émile, or On Education (1762) as the future wife of his pupil Émile. Rousseau explains how her education should differ from Émile’s: it is less concerned with theoretical matters and prepares her for what he takes to be her natural role as a wife, submissive to her husband.
The Sophists were diverse Greek teachers and intellectuals of the fifth century BCE. Many offered paid instruction in speaking and public life; they shared no single philosophical doctrine.
Sophocles was a fifth-century BCE Athenian tragic playwright, a contemporary of Aeschylus and Euripides. Seven of his more than one hundred plays survive complete, including Antigone and Oedipus the King. He also held public and military offices in Athens.
The Sorbonne was a celebrated theology college and faculty associated with the University of Paris.
The soul, in Spinoza’s Short Treatise, is an idea or represented essence of an actually existing object in the attribute of thought. A human soul is the idea of its body’s particular proportion of motion and rest.
South Sea is a former name for the Pacific Ocean, the ocean between America and Asia.
The sovereign individual is Nietzsche’s figure for the human being who has acquired the capacity, even the right, to make promises and so bears responsibility for his actions. Nietzsche calls him the ripest fruit of a long history of discipline by the morality of custom.
A spagyrist was a chemist, especially one devoted to alchemical pursuits; the word also named a sect that sought remedies for disease by chemical means.
Sparta, also known as Lacedaemon, was a powerful Greek city-state in Laconia in the Peloponnese. Its institutions combined two hereditary kings with a council, an assembly, and elected officials; its citizen way of life depended on the labour of the unfree helots.
Spartacus led a great slave uprising in Italy in 73–71 BCE. According to one tradition he was a Thracian who had served in the Roman auxiliary troops and was sold to a gladiator school at Capua; the revolt spread through southern Italy until Crassus defeated the slave army in 71 BCE, and Spartacus died on the battlefield.
The Spartan gerousia was the council of elders, comprising twenty-eight men aged over sixty and the two kings. The elders held office for life. The council prepared proposals for the citizen assembly and exercised important judicial powers, including trials involving serious crimes. Other Greek cities also used the name gerousia for councils whose organization differed.
In older medical usage a specific is a remedy that cures a particular disease by a peculiar adaptation rather than on general principles, as quinine was held to be for malaria.
A spekhøker was a small trader who sold bacon, butter and other fats and provisions.
Speusippus was Plato’s nephew, the son of his sister Potone, and succeeded him as head of the Academy in 348/347 BCE. He led the school for about eight years. His writings survive only fragmentarily, and his philosophical positions differed from Plato’s, including his rejection of the theory of Forms.
The Greek Sphinx is a monster with a woman’s face, a lion’s body, and wings. In the Theban story, Oedipus solves her riddle about a creature that walks on four, two, and three feet: a human being in infancy, adulthood, and old age, with a walking stick.
A spidsborger is a petty bourgeois with a very narrow intellectual horizon; like ‘philistine’, the term of abuse arose among students in the nineteenth century. The word comes from German Spießbürger, ‘spear-citizen’, originally a man in military service with no equipment but a spear; Spidsborgerlighed is the corresponding quality.
Spine can denote a fish’s bone in older translations of Aristotle. Fish bones, cuttlebones and the bones of land animals illustrate correspondence by analogy rather than a single common part.
Spirit of nitre is a historical name for nitric acid.
Spirit of salt is a historical name for hydrochloric acid.
In Book 10 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam, after the Fall, turns on Eve with the words ‘Out of my sight, thou Serpent’. He asks why God, who ‘peopl’d highest Heav’n / With Spirits Masculine’, created at last ‘this fair defect / Of Nature’ instead of filling the world with men.
A spiritual automaton is Spinoza’s image of the soul or mind acting according to fixed laws, as a mechanism does.
In an older sense, a spring is any active power by which action or motion is produced: a cause, origin or motive.
In ancient arithmetic, a square, also called an equilateral number, is a product of two equal numbers. An oblong number can be represented as a product of two unequal numbers. These factor representations can overlap: 16 is 4×4 or 2×8. A later, narrower convention restricts oblong to products of consecutive numbers, n(n+1).
St. Elmo’s fire is a luminous glow caused by atmospheric electricity, seen at the tips of ships’ masts and yards during storms.
A stadion was an ancient Greek measure of distance based on the length of a running track: 600 Greek feet. Its precise length varied with the local standard of the foot, so a conversion of roughly 185–190 metres is approximate. The plural is stadia; English translations also use stadium for the singular.
A stamherre is the son of a family, usually the eldest, who is to inherit the entailed family estate, the stamgods or stamhus.
A standish is a stand or case for pen and ink.
For Locke, the state of nature is the condition of people living together without a common superior on earth with authority to judge between them. It is governed by the law of nature, whose fundamental rule is that mankind is to be preserved as much as possible, but it lacks a settled known law, an impartial judge and the power to execute sentences, which is why people leave it for political society.
The state of nature is the human condition considered apart from common laws and government. Spinoza argues that isolated people have little secure power there, and that civil ownership and legally forbidden wrong-doing arise only under dominion.
Stater was a name for the principal coin in a Greek monetary system. Its metal, weight and value depended on the issuing community and period. Silver staters could represent different numbers of drachmas, so the name alone does not specify a uniform sum across the Greek world.
Stemning is the heading of the opening section of Fear and Trembling, rendered in English as ‘Attunement’ or ‘Tuning Up’. It tells four different versions of the story of Abraham, each prepared to obey God but each differing from the Abraham who is the ‘father of faith’.
Stendhal was the pen name of Henri Beyle (1783–1842), a French writer. His works include De l’amour (1822), Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839).
Stereometry is the measurement of three-dimensional figures, especially the calculation of their surface areas and volumes. The term can also refer more broadly to elementary solid geometry.
Stesichorus was a Greek lyric poet associated with Himera in Sicily, active around 600 BCE. His extended poems retold myths and connected epic narrative with choral song; only fragments survive. A traditional story connects his loss and recovery of sight with a poem reviling Helen and a subsequent recantation, or palinode.
“The sting of death” comes from 1 Corinthians 15 in the King James Bible: verse 55 asks “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”, and verse 56 answers that “the sting of death is sin”.
The Stoics belonged to the philosophical school founded around 300 BCE by Zeno of Citium. They held that only bodies exist, in the sense of being able to act or be acted upon, and that the soul is itself a body.
Story, in an older sense, is a narration or recital of that which has occurred, a description of past events: a history.
To straiten is to make narrow, contract or confine, and hence to restrict, or to distress and embarrass someone in means or conditions of life.
Strandvejen (older spelling Strandveien) is the road along the Øresund coast between Helsingør and Copenhagen. It passes the royal Deer Park, Jægersborg Dyrehave, a popular destination for Sunday outings.
Strangury is a condition in which urination is slow and painful.
Spinoza calls actions arising from the mind’s understanding strength of character (fortitudo). He divides it into courage (animositas), the rational striving to preserve oneself, and highmindedness (generositas), the rational striving to help others and unite with them in friendship.
A strigil was a scraping tool used to clean the skin after applying oil, especially by athletes in ancient Greece. It formed part of an athletic washing kit alongside a sponge and a small oil flask called an aryballos.
In older philosophical usage the subject (subjectum) was the substrate or concrete reality supporting its properties, and hence also the subject of predication. Wolf notes that the present senses of “subjective” and “objective” are the reverse of the former usage. In the Short Treatise Spinoza argues that ideas which are not merely imagined must have a subjectum outside the thinker, without which they cannot be.
In eighteenth-century British aesthetics, the sublime was the quality of great, powerful or obscure objects, and writers asked what its nature was and whether it should be ranked with the beautiful. Joseph Addison counted the pleasures of what is great, or sublime, among the primary pleasures of the imagination: a great object strains the imagination and flings the mind into a pleasing astonishment. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) held that the sublime excites astonishment and the beautiful love, and that the two rest on very different foundations.
In Descartes’ metaphysics a substance is a thing that can exist by itself, whereas its modes depend on it. Strictly only God fits this definition, but Descartes also recognised created substances, minds and bodies, which need nothing else to exist apart from God. Each is understood through its principal attribute: thought for a mind, extension for a body.
In Aristotle’s logical classification, a primary substance is an individual, such as a particular person or horse, that is neither said of a subject nor present in a subject. Secondary substances are its species and genera, such as man and animal. These senses distinguish the individual bearer from the kinds used to say what it is.
Substance, for Spinoza, exists through itself rather than being contained in another thing. Nature is one infinite substance, whose infinitely many attributes are each infinite and perfect in their kind.
In Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy a substantial form is the internal constitution that makes a thing what it is, such as a human being or a dog, as distinguished from its matter; when matter gains a substantial form, a new substance comes into existence. The scholastic Aristotelian ontology dominant in the early seventeenth century explained all natural bodies as prime matter informed by a substantial form, and innovators such as Descartes held that natural philosophy had no need of such forms.
In Descartes’ optics, subtle matter is the very fine matter filling the pores of transparent bodies; light is its action or tendency to move. He explains surface reflection through parts of that matter encountering solid parts at the boundary between different transparent bodies.
Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus) was a Roman writer who rose to head the imperial correspondence until the emperor Hadrian dismissed him in 121. His Lives of the Caesars, in eight books, covers Caesar and eleven emperors up to Domitian and is an important source for the early imperial period; as a historian he reports rather than reflects, with a fondness for anecdote.
A suffrage is a vote given in deciding a disputed question or in choosing someone for an office or trust, and more broadly the formal expression of an opinion, an assent or approval; it could also mean testimony or attestation. The meaning of the right to vote, the franchise, is only one of its senses. The word comes from Latin suffragium.
A sugarloaf is a conical mass of solid sugar.
Sui generis describes something unique, in a class of its own. The Latin phrase means of its own kind.
Sumptuary laws restrict spending regarded as extravagant or luxurious.
Sunium, also called Sounion, is the cape at the southern tip of Attica. Its sanctuary of Poseidon overlooks the Aegean and the sea route to Athens; the surviving temple dates from the fifth century BCE.
Here super-predications involve a reiterated qualification specifying the respect in which something is predicated, such as “in that it is good” or “so far as he is sensible”. In resolving these propositions into syllogistic terms, this chapter attaches the qualification to the major term rather than the middle term.
Superficies means the surface or exterior of something. In geometry, a surface has length and breadth, with no third dimension.
Superintendents of the Mart were Athenian officials overseeing the trading mart. The Athenian Constitution describes ten chosen by lot who required merchants to bring into the city two-thirds of the grain arriving by sea at the Corn Mart.
A superparticular ratio, expressed in its smallest whole-number terms, has its greater term exceed the smaller by one: for example, four to three.
Supposititious can mean spurious, fraudulently substituted for the genuine. It can also mean hypothetical or merely supposed.
Spinoza’s supreme authorities are the holders of sovereign power, whether one ruler or a council. Their right is limited by the power of the multitude, and they direct legislation, judgment, war and peace.
In Spinoza’s proposed aristocracy, the supreme council consists of all the patricians. It holds supreme right, makes and repeals laws, and chooses patricians and public officials.
Surplusage is surplus or excess, what remains beyond what is wanted; in law it also names matter in pleading that is not necessary or relevant to the case.
Surveillance capitalism is Shoshana Zuboff’s term for an economic logic that treats human experience as material for behavioural data. These data support predictions about behaviour that can be sold for commercial advantage.
Suum cuique means to each his own. In the Roman Digest, Ulpian defines justice as a constant commitment to give each person what is due to them.
Aristotle defines a syllogism broadly as an argument in which something different from the premises follows necessarily because of them. His categorical syllogistic studies a narrower form: two premises share a middle term, and the conclusion relates their two remaining terms.
In Descartes’ music theory, syncope occurs when a note held in one voice overlaps the beginning of a note in another. The resulting dissonance delays the expected consonance and helps sustain the listener’s attention.
In Spinoza’s proposed aristocracy, syndics form a council that safeguards the constitution and judges officials who violate the laws of their office. They are chosen for life from former senators aged sixty or older. Their collective, permanent authority replaces the power of an individual dictator.
In Aristotle’s classification, synonymous things share both a name and the definition corresponding to it. A person and an ox are animals in this same sense.
Syracuse was a major Greek city on the eastern coast of Sicily, at modern Siracusa. Traditionally founded by Corinthian settlers in 734 BCE on the island of Ortygia, it expanded onto the mainland. Under rulers including Gelon and Dionysius I, it became a leading power in the western Mediterranean.
Syssitia are organized common meals for groups of citizens, especially associated with Sparta and Crete. At Sparta, membership in a mess was a condition of citizenship, admission required the members’ consent, and each member had to contribute produce regularly. The meals were a civic institution as well as an occasion for eating together.
Tabula rasa is a Latin expression for a smoothed writing tablet. Figuratively it describes a mind before it has received impressions.
Tacitus was a Roman historian and public official whose principal historical works are the Histories and the Annals.
The Tagus (Spanish Tajo, Portuguese Tejo) is a river of Spain and Portugal, 1,007 kilometres long and the longest river of the Iberian Peninsula. It rises in the mountains of the Sistema Ibérico, forms the border between Spain and Portugal for 50 kilometres, and reaches the sea at Lisbon, where it widens into a basin that forms a natural harbour.
A talent was an ancient unit of weight, also used to reckon the value of a quantity of gold or silver. In conventional Greek monetary reckoning it represented sixty minas or six thousand drachmas, rather than a single circulating coin. Its physical weight varied by place and period; the talent associated with Solon at Athens is estimated at about 26 kilograms.
Talus denotes a downward slope or inclination, as on the side of a pyramid, wall or bank.
An incline or sloping cut. Applied to a cutting tool, it describes the bevel behind the edge; tallué means bevelled.
Tantalus was a wealthy king in Greek mythology, a son of Zeus who enjoyed the gods' favour before gravely offending them. Accounts differ about his offence. His best-known punishment was unending hunger and thirst: standing in water beneath fruit trees, he found the water withdrawing whenever he tried to drink and the fruit retreating whenever he reached for it.
Lucius Tarquinius Superbus was, according to ancient tradition, the last of Rome’s seven kings, said to have reigned from 534 to 509 BCE; his expulsion marks Rome’s passage from monarchy to republic. The written sources depict him as a tyrant, as his surname Superbus, ‘the proud’, suggests. A story tells how, when his son Sextus sent a messenger from the town of Gabii to ask what to do, the king said nothing but struck the heads off the tallest poppies in his garden; the son understood that he should remove the town’s leading men, while the messenger did not.
Tartarus is a place far beneath the earth in Greek myth, where Cronus and other older gods were cast after Zeus’s victory over the Titans. In later antiquity it was imagined as the abode of the wicked dead.
Tartuffe is the title character of Molière’s comedy of 1664, a religious hypocrite. His name came to be used for a moral or religious hypocrite, especially one who affects piety.
A tautology is a statement that says the same thing twice in different words when this is unnecessary.
Taxiarchs were Athenian infantry officers. The Athenian Constitution describes ten elected commanders, one from each tribe, who commanded their own tribesmen and appointed captains of companies.
Daniel Solove’s taxonomy groups privacy problems into information collection, information processing, information dissemination and invasion. It distinguishes harms arising from how data are handled from those caused by intrusion or interference with decisions.
Technological mediation is the way technologies shape relations between people and the world. Technologies can influence what people perceive, how they act and how social practices develop.
The teleological suspension of the ethical is the question of Problema I of Fear and Trembling: whether the story of Abraham contains a suspension of the ethical for the sake of a higher end (Greek telos). The ethic in question is the civic morality corresponding to Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, and the end for which it is suspended is God’s unconditional command. Without such a suspension, Johannes de silentio argues, Abraham is not a man of faith but a murderer.
To tell can mean to count or enumerate. Telling votes means counting them, and a teller is a person who performs that count.
Telos is Greek for end, aim or purpose.
The Athenian Constitution describes two successive boards of ten governing Athens after the Thirty's defeat. The first maintained coercive rule with Spartan assistance; its replacement helped negotiate reconciliation with the returning democratic party.
A tenant in common is one who holds real or personal property in common with others, each having a distinct but undivided interest.
In Descartes’ mechanics, a body’s tendency toward a direction means its disposition to move that way, whether or not resistance prevents the motion. It implies no thought or will; an effort to move presupposes resistance.
Term conversion infers a proposition with the subject and predicate exchanged under permitted conditions. Universal negatives and particular affirmatives convert with their quantity preserved; universal affirmatives yield particular affirmatives in Aristotle’s system, which assumes non-empty terms. Particular negatives do not generally permit conversion.
Terraqueous means consisting of land and water, as in ‘the terraqueous globe’.
A tertian fever returns every other day, counted inclusively as the third day. A quartan fever returns every 72 hours, counted as the fourth day. These terms are used of recurring malarial fevers.
Tertullian was the first known Christian writer in Latin and one of the great Church Fathers. He came from a pagan home in Carthage in North Africa, was probably born around 160 and died some time between 220 and 230.
Thales was a sixth-century BCE thinker from Miletus, remembered as one of the earliest Greek investigators of nature. Later writers associate him with astronomy and geometry; Aristotle reports his view that water is the underlying principle of things. No writings by him survive, and many familiar stories about his life are later anecdotes rather than securely documented events.
A thaumaturge (Danish Thaumaturg) is a miracle-worker, in particular a pagan maker of miracles.
In Fear and Trembling the absurd is that by virtue of which the knight of faith believes he will receive back what he has renounced: humanly speaking it is impossible, yet he believes it because for God everything is possible. Johannes de silentio stresses that the absurd is not the same as the improbable, the unexpected or the unforeseen, and that it does not belong to the distinctions that lie within the understanding’s own range. In Kierkegaard’s writings more broadly, the absurd names the paradox that God, in the form of Jesus Christ, has become human and so entered time.
The Adventurer was a periodical begun by John Hawkesworth with other writers in 1752.
The Analogy of Religion (1736) is the major work of natural theology of Joseph Butler (1692–1752), the Anglican bishop and moral philosopher, and the work for which he was best known in his lifetime. It was aimed at convincing deists of the truth of core doctrines of natural and revealed theology, while arguing only from premises Butler shared with them. Its case for the reasonableness of basic Christian teachings relies on probable evidence, such as the probable evidence for an afterlife, rather than on demonstration.
The Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy is Sir Robert Filmer’s tract of 1648 against Philip Hunton’s Treatise of Monarchy and the parliamentary doctrine of a mixed or limited monarchy. In the collected edition of his writings it appears as Observations upon Mr Hunton’s Treatise of Monarchy, or the Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy.
In Act 4, scene 1 of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero ends a pageant performed by spirits with the words ‘Our revels now are ended’. Like ‘the baseless fabric of this vision’, he says, towers, palaces, temples and the great globe itself shall dissolve and leave nothing behind.
In Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, the demonic is the dark counterpart of faith: like the divine, it allows the single individual to enter an absolute relation that sets him above the universal. Silence belongs to both, for silence is the snare of the demon and also the shared knowledge between God and the individual. Johannes de silentio explores it in Problema III through the merman of the Agnete legend, through Sarah of the Book of Tobit imagined as a man, and through Shakespeare's Gloucester, and he finds its beginning in being placed outside the universal by nature or circumstance through no fault of one's own.
The image of a world supported by an elephant, itself supported by a tortoise, illustrates how a proposed explanation can merely postpone the question of what provides support. Locke uses this story when discussing substance.
The Eleven were Athenian officials chosen by lot who supervised the state prison and carried out executions. They also brought certain accused offenders before the courts when the charge was contested.
Each of the three problemata of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling begins from the thesis that the ethical as such is the universal. The ethic meant is a public, shareable morality close to Hegel's customary morality (Sittlichkeit), within which a person can explain his actions to others. Problema II identifies the universal with the divine, and Problema III with what is disclosed, so that the individual's ethical task is to leave his hiddenness and become open in the universal.
Psalm 14 opens with a fool denying God in his heart and contrasts corrupt evildoers with the righteous. The psalm’s heading attributes it to David.
The Forty were a board of Athenian judicial officials chosen by lot, four from each tribe. Under their recorded procedure, they decided cases involving no more than ten drachmas and referred cases above that amount to public arbitrators.
Xenophon’s Memorabilia (2.1.20) cites the testimony of Epicharmus in the line that the gods demand of us toil as the price of all good things.
The interesting was introduced as an aesthetic term by Friedrich Schlegel in the 1790s for what attracts subjectively and works poetically in modern poetry, in contrast to the objective universality sought by Greek poetry. In Copenhagen J.L. Heiberg had called it, in 1842, a modern concept unknown to ancient tragedy and still bound up with reflection. Johannes de silentio calls it the category of the turning point and a border category between aesthetics and ethics.
In Kierkegaard the leap (Danish springet) is the transition from one quality to another: unlike a quantitative transition, from little to much, a qualitative transition, from possibility to actuality, is not a continuous extension but a complete break with what went before. Such breaks give movement to existence, and in Kierkegaard’s view they cannot be contained in a logical system of the kind Hegel proposed. Johannes de silentio ties it to passion: every movement of infinity comes about through passion, and no reflection can produce a movement.
The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse is a children’s story by Dorothy Kilner that follows a mouse’s adventures while conveying moral lessons.
Revelation 19:6 tells of a voice like that of a great multitude, of many waters and of mighty thunderings, saying ‘Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.’
The Origine of Formes and Qualities, according to the Corpuscular Philosophy, is a work by Robert Boyle published in 1666–7.
The paradox is a key concept in Kierkegaard’s attempt to sharpen the understanding of what the religious, and especially the Christian-religious, means; it denotes a joining of time and eternity that conflicts with our ideas. In Fear and Trembling faith itself is called a paradox: the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal and stands in an absolute relation to the absolute, which no thinking can grasp. In Philosophical Fragments the incarnation, the eternal God becoming a finite human being, is presented as the paradox that offends reason.
Romans 13:1–2 tells every soul to be subject to the higher powers, since there is no power but of God and the powers that be are ordained of God, and warns that whoever resists the power resists the ordinance of God.
The rich young man is the figure in Matthew 19:16–22 who asks Jesus what he must do to have eternal life. When Jesus tells him to sell what he has, give to the poor and follow him, he goes away sorrowful, for he has great possessions.
The Sceptical Chymist (1661) is Robert Boyle’s book in which he sought to educate the chemists of his day towards a more philosophical approach to the study of nature.
The Search after Truth is Nicolas Malebranche’s philosophical work published in 1674–1675, examining the human mind and the sources of error in knowledge.
The single individual (Danish den enkelte) is a principal category in Kierkegaard’s account of a person’s existential development: every human being is a single human being who can and should become the single individual, this particular person. The category stands opposed to the numerical, to the crowd and to wanting to be like everyone else. Fear and Trembling calls it the paradox of faith that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal and stands in an absolute relation to the absolute.
For Danish writers of the 1840s ‘the System’ meant the all-embracing speculative philosophy of Hegel and his followers. Hegel sought, by a special method, to gather philosophical standpoints into one great system embracing both the material and the spiritual world. Kierkegaard mocked the ambition in an 1842 newspaper article, observing that Professor Rasmus Nielsen’s first 21 logical paragraphs formed the first part of a logic that was itself the first part of an all-embracing encyclopaedia.
The Thirty were the oligarchic rulers installed in Athens with Spartan support after the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE. Their violent regime, led by Critias, was overthrown the following year, when democracy was restored.
The World (Le Monde) is Descartes’ treatise intended to explain all the phenomena of nature, planned in parts on light, on man and on the soul. When it was ready for publication in 1633 he decided against publishing it after the Church condemned Galileo, whose world system shared its Copernican basis. Its surviving parts appeared after his death as the Treatise on Light and the Treatise on Man.
Theaetetus was an Athenian mathematician associated with the study of incommensurable magnitudes and the regular solids. His work contributed to material later presented in Euclid’s Elements. Much of the evidence about his life comes from Plato’s portrayal of him as a gifted young student of Theodorus; the date and circumstances of his death remain uncertain.
Theatrocracy means rule by the audience. In Plato’s Laws, the speaker uses it critically for audiences claiming the authority to judge music.
Thebes was a major Greek city in Boeotia, northwest of Athens. It was an important political centre and the setting of traditions about Cadmus and other legendary figures.
Themistocles was an Athenian statesman who promoted the development of Athens’ fleet and helped secure the Greek victory over Persia at Salamis in 480 BCE. He also developed Piraeus as a naval harbour. Political opponents later secured his exile by ostracism.
A theocracy is government that attributes supreme political authority to a deity, exercised by human rulers claiming divine authority.
Theodorus Craanen (1620–1690) was born in Cologne and died in Potsdam. He held the chair of philosophy at Leiden from 1671 to 1673 and founded a mechanical-philosophical school based entirely on Cartesian concepts. In anatomy he explained human physiology in mechanistic terms derived from Gassendi and Descartes.
Theodorus Kerckring (1638–1693), born in Amsterdam, studied medicine at Leiden and first described the permanent transverse folds of the inner surface of the small intestine. He made his anatomical observations with an excellent microscope made by Spinoza, and in early 1673 Spinoza was still in contact with him on anatomical questions.
Theodorus of Cyrene was a Greek geometer associated with the teaching of Theaetetus. The principal evidence for his mathematical work is Plato’s account of demonstrations concerning square roots that are incommensurable with the unit, proceeding as far as seventeen. His original method of proof is unknown. He should not be confused with other ancient men named Theodorus, including the Byzantine rhetorician.
Theodosius I was a Roman emperor from 379 to 395 who promoted Nicene Christianity and was required by Ambrose of Milan to do penance after the killing of rebellious Thessalonians.
Theognis of Megara was a Greek poet of the sixth century BCE. The elegiac collection transmitted under his name includes work by several poets. Verses attributed to Theognis offer advice to Cyrnus and express traditional aristocratic values; the whole collection cannot be treated as the work of one author.
Theogony means the origin and descent of the gods, or an account of their genealogy.
The Theological-Political Treatise is Spinoza’s work on Scripture, religion and politics, published anonymously in 1670. It argues that freedom to philosophize can coexist with piety and public peace, and that suppressing it threatens both.
For Spinoza, theology in the strict sense is revelation teaching the way of obedience and the practical doctrines of piety and faith, whereas reason seeks truth and wisdom.
Theramenes was an Athenian political leader. The Athenian Constitution portrays him opposing the Four Hundred's monopoly and criticizing the Thirty, who put him to death. Ancient assessments of his conduct differed.
Theseus is a legendary Greek hero and king of Athens, particularly associated with Athens and Attica. His best-known adventures include killing the Minotaur in the labyrinth on Crete.
A thesis is an immediate, indemonstrable starting point of a science that, unlike an axiom, need not be possessed by everyone learning anything. Aristotle distinguishes hypotheses, which assert one side of a contradiction, from definitions, which specify what something is without making that assertion.
The thesmothetae were six Athenian archons. The Athenian Constitution assigns them the scheduling and distribution of courts, the introduction of public and private proceedings, and duties in scrutiny of officials and jury allotment.
Thessaly is a region of mainland Greece between the Pindus mountains and the Aegean. In antiquity, powerful aristocratic families competed for influence there, and its communities could appoint a leader known as a tagos.
Thetis is a sea goddess, one of the Nereids, and the mother of Achilles by the mortal Peleus. In accounts of their courtship she changes shape while trying to escape him. The gods attend their wedding, and in the Iliad she repeatedly seeks divine help for her son.
Kant distinguishes appearances, things as they are given to us through the senses, from things as they are in themselves, independently of how they affect us. We can know only appearances; things in themselves remain unknown to us.
A thinking thing is Descartes’ description of the self or mind considered simply as something that thinks, where thinking includes understanding, willing, imagining and sense perception. Knowing with certainty that one exists as a thinking thing does not by itself show that this thinker is not material; Descartes argued for that separately.
The Thirty Years’ War was a series of European wars from 1618 to 1648, centred on the Holy Roman Empire, which ended with the Peace of Westphalia.
The Tholos, also called the Skias, was a circular public building in the southwestern Athenian Agora. It served the prytaneis, the fifty councillors from one tribe who administered the city for one tenth of the year. They ate there at public expense, and some stayed overnight. The building also housed the city’s official standards of measurement.
Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), called the Doctor angelicus, brought about the most intimate fusion between Aristotelianism and Catholicism. His favourite argument for the existence of God was the Aristotelian a posteriori argument from motion to an original unmoved Mover.
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) was a British naturalist and a leading supporter of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, nicknamed ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. His writings include Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863) and Evolution and Ethics (1893).
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher whose political theory explains state authority through agreements intended to secure peace.
Thoth is the Egyptian god associated with writing, wisdom and the moon, commonly represented as an ibis, an ibis-headed man or a baboon. He records the judgment of the dead and is closely connected with scribal activity. Theuth is a Greek form of his name.
Thraldom, also written thralldom, is the condition of a thrall: slavery, bondage, a state of servitude.
Thrasybulus was an Athenian general and politician who defended democracy after the oligarchic coup of 411 BCE. Leading a force of exiles in 403 BCE, he helped overthrow the Thirty and played a central part in restoring Athenian democracy.
Thrasymachus was a Greek rhetorician and diplomat. Plato portrays him as a forceful challenger of conventional justice, especially in the first book of the Republic. Little is known about the historical figure’s own ideas, so the philosophical character should not be treated as a straightforward biographical record.
The Three Thousand were citizens listed for political participation under Athens' Thirty. The Athenian Constitution describes changing membership and reserving arms to those listed, while citizens outside the list could be put to death by the Thirty.
“Through a glass, darkly” comes from 1 Corinthians 13:12 in the King James Bible: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” The verse sets present, partial knowledge against full knowledge to come.
Thucydides was a Greek historian and general from Athens who lived in the fifth century BCE. His history of the Peloponnesian War concerns the conflict between Athens and Sparta.
Thucydides, son of Melesias, was an Athenian politician who opposed Pericles in the fifth century BCE. He challenged the use of allied tribute for Athens’ building programme and was eventually ostracized. He is distinct from the historian Thucydides.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s literary-philosophical work, published in four parts between 1883 and 1885. In it the prophet Zarathustra becomes the mouthpiece for ideas that challenge modernity, among them the overman. It has remained his best-known book.
A thyrsus is an ivy-wrapped staff topped with a pine cone, carried in mythology by Dionysus and his followers. In Plato’s Phaedo, the saying about many thyrsus-bearers but few initiates distinguishes outward participation from true initiation.
Tiberius was the second Roman emperor, ruling from 14 to 37 CE. He was adopted by Augustus and designated as his successor.
The larger inner bone of the lower leg, commonly called the shinbone.
A ticket-hanger was a juror chosen by lot during Athenian court selection to place jurors' identity tickets from one chest on the correspondingly labelled bar. The recorded procedure explains that random selection was intended to prevent a permanent ticket-handler from tampering with the results.
Timaeus is Plato’s account of the formation and order of the universe, presented through the image of a divine Craftsman shaping a preexisting disorder according to an eternal model.
For Spinoza time is not a feature of things themselves but a mode of thought, an aid of the imagination by which duration is determined, as measure determines quantity and number determines things grouped into classes. Using such notions to explain what can only be understood by the intellect, such as substance and eternity, only produces confusion.
In Plato’s Republic, timocracy is government shaped by honour and military ambition, intermediate between aristocracy and oligarchy. In Aristotle’s usage, the term instead refers to a constitution in which political standing depends on property.
Timur, called Timur Lenk or Tamerlane (1336–1405), was a Central Asian ruler and conqueror, a Mongol prince who claimed descent from Genghis Khan. By 1370 he controlled Samarkand, which he made his capital, and from there began wars of conquest that extended his power over a great part of Eurasia; he died while preparing a campaign against China.
A tithe is a payment for the support of a church or clergy, traditionally a tenth of income or produce.
Titus Manlius Imperiosus Torquatus was a Roman general and consul whom Roman tradition represents as ordering his son’s execution for fighting contrary to his command.
A tocsin is an alarm bell, or the ringing of a bell to raise an alarm.
Toilet can mean the act of dressing and grooming oneself.
A topical argument is one found by means of a topic (Greek topos, ‘place’), one of the general headings or argument schemes under which, according to Aristotle's Topics and Rhetoric, many particular arguments fall and from which they can be constructed on any subject. Such dialectical arguments proceed from reputable opinions, accepted by all, by most or by the experts, rather than from established scientific principles.
The Topics is Aristotle’s account of dialectical argument from generally accepted opinions. It develops methods for constructing and examining arguments, distinguishing this reasoning from demonstration based on true primary premises.
Torpedo is an older name for an electric ray, a fish whose electric organs can produce a numbing shock.
In the Torricellian experiment a tube closed at one end is filled with a fluid such as mercury and inverted, and the fluid descends until it is counterbalanced by the pressure of the atmosphere, leaving a vacuum above it. Torricelli discovered in 1643 that the rise of the liquid in such a tube is due to atmospheric pressure.
Before it named a political party, tory, probably from an Irish word for a pursuer, was applied to the Irish outlaws who robbed and plundered during the English civil wars while claiming to support the royal cause. The word first appeared as a party label in 1679, as an insult for those who opposed excluding the Duke of York from the succession, and later named the party of existing royal and ecclesiastical authority.
The Tower of Babel is a mythical tower known from Genesis 11:1–9. After the flood, humankind settled on the plain of Shinar and began to build a city and tower; God confused their language so that they could no longer understand one another and scattered them over the whole earth. The name plays on the Hebrew word for mixing or confusing and stands for Babylon.
Traducianism is the theological belief that a child receives its soul from its parents along with its body.
In Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, the tragic hero is a figure such as Agamemnon, Jephthah or Brutus, a father who sacrifices his child for a cause regarded as higher, such as the good of the state. Unlike Abraham, the tragic hero can explain his deed in terms that others understand, so he remains within the ethical as the universal. Johannes de silentio contrasts him with the knight of faith: the tragic hero gives himself up to express the universal, while the knight of faith gives up the universal to become the single individual.
Trahit sua quemque voluptas means each is drawn by their own pleasure. In Virgil’s second Eclogue, it concludes a comparison between Corydon’s pursuit of Alexis and animals following their own attractions.
Trajan was Roman emperor from 98 to 117 CE. His reign brought the Roman Empire to its greatest territorial extent.
In older grammatical usage, trajection is the transposition of words: moving them from their usual order in a sentence.
The transcendentals are notions such as one, true and good that medieval scholastics treated as properties of being as such; their generality extends beyond the categories. Spinoza calls attributes through which a thing’s essence or existence is understood affections of being, distinguished only by reason, while denying that truth is a transcendental property of things.
The Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect is Spinoza’s essay on philosophical method, on which he worked while living in Rijnsburg. It was his first work, begun in the late 1650s, and was left unfinished for reasons that are unknown.
Trepan is an archaic verb meaning to trap or ensnare someone.
A triad is the number three in Aristotle’s arithmetic examples. In Posterior Analytics II.13, Aristotle uses the triad to illustrate how predicates individually broader than a thing can together identify its essence.
Tribunes of the plebs were Roman officials who protected plebeians, presided over their assembly and could veto actions of other magistrates.
A trierarch was a wealthy Athenian citizen responsible for the costly public service of equipping and maintaining a warship. The obligation could be shared by joint trierarchs, and personal service could be delegated to a hired replacement.
The Trinity is the Christian doctrine, commonly expressed as the statement that the one God exists as or in three equally divine Persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Tripoli is a friable siliceous rock whose powdered form is used as an abrasive for cleaning and polishing glass, wood and metals.
A trireme was an ancient warship propelled by oarsmen arranged in three tiers. Greek fleets used these vessels for warfare, while particular ships also carried out sacred and public missions.
An early Athenian trittys was a subdivision of one of the four old tribes. The Athenian Constitution describes each tribe as divided into three trittyes. These earlier divisions were distinct from the groups of demes later created by Cleisthenes.
The Trojan War was the legendary campaign of the Greek kings against the city of Troy, the subject of some of the most famous Greek and Roman legends and poems, above all Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The legend may rest on a historical campaign of around 1200 BCE.
Trop is a character in J.L. Heiberg’s vaudeville Recensenten og Dyret (1826), an eternal student. In its seventh scene he proposes to cut his tragedy Menneskeslægtens Ødelæggelse (The Destruction of the Human Race) into equal pieces over two volumes to suit the prevailing taste, asking why one should not save taste when it costs no more.
Truck, as a verb, means to exchange or barter commodities; as a noun it is exchange of commodities, barter.
True belief, also called reason in Spinoza’s Short Treatise, enables knowledge of good and evil. It may teach what is better without bringing the direct enjoyment or union required to overcome an experienced passion.
A true idea, for Spinoza, agrees with its object but also has intrinsic marks by which it is distinguished from a false idea. Possessing a true idea requires no further sign to establish its truth.
True knowledge, in Spinoza’s Short Treatise, comes from the object’s direct disclosure to the understanding rather than inference from another thing. Knowledge of God in this way produces love and union, even without knowing God perfectly or adequately.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet calls his father’s Ghost “truepenny” when it demands that his companions swear secrecy. He later bids the troubled spirit rest.
Tuition, from a Latin word for protection, could mean guardianship: the superintending care of a tutor or guardian over a pupil or ward, rather than teaching or the fee paid for it.
The Twelve Tables were a codification of the oldest Roman law, compiled in Rome by a board of ten men, the decemvirs, in 451–450 BCE and adopted in 449. Recorded on twelve tablets and preserved only in fragments, they were regarded as the foundation of Roman public and private law.
Tyburn was a London site of public execution near the present Marble Arch. Condemned prisoners were taken through the streets to executions there, which attracted large crowds.
Tyrtaeus was a Greek elegiac poet associated with seventh-century BCE Sparta. His surviving poems and fragments urge courage in battle and loyalty to the community, praising soldiers who hold their ground together.
Umpirage is the office or authority of an umpire to decide, or the act of umpiring, arbitrament.
To perceive things under a form of eternity is to understand them without regard to duration or number. Spinoza contrasts this with imagination, which presents things in a determinate number, duration and quantity.
A written message sent under cover is sent in an envelope, or enclosed within another letter.
To be under hatches is to be confined below deck in a ship, and so, figuratively, to be under arrest, in slavery or in distress.
A universal is something that can be predicated of many, such as human being. A singular is an individual that cannot be predicated of many in that way, such as Callias. A statement can concern a universal without making a claim about every instance of it.
Spinoza’s universal faith is a shared moral creed centred on obedience and love of God and one’s neighbour. It is intended to reduce sectarian conflict while permitting different private beliefs.
Descartes calls the general study of order and measurement Universal Mathematics. Its subject is what different mathematical inquiries share, independently of whether they concern numbers, figures, stars, sounds, or other objects.
Ut, re, mi, fa, sol, and la are the six syllables of a traditional system for learning and singing pitch relationships. In the scheme described by Descartes, mi to fa is the semitone step, while the other adjacent syllables mark whole tones.
Utopia is Thomas More’s Latin political fiction, first published in 1516, describing the society of an imaginary island. Its invented name suggests both no place and a good place.
For Spinoza, vacillation is a disposition arising from contrary emotions, such as love and hatred directed toward the same thing.
A vacuum is extension without corporeal substance; Cartesian physics rejects it because extension is itself corporeal.
Vae victis is a Latin expression meaning “woe to the vanquished”. According to the story, when the Gallic king Brennus had defeated the Romans in 390 BCE and they protested that the Gauls’ weights were too heavy, he threw his sword into the scale with that cry.
Valerius Maximus was a Roman writer of the time of Tiberius, in the first century CE. He published a collection of memorable deeds and sayings (Facta ac dicta memorabilia) in nine books for the use of orators, through which many ancient anecdotes have been transmitted.
A valetudinarian is a person in poor health, especially one persistently preoccupied with their own health and well-being.
The Vandals were a Germanic people who raided the Roman Empire during the Migration Period. They crossed the frozen Rhine in 406, settled in Spain, crossed to Roman North Africa in 428 or 429, and sacked Rome in 455.
“Vanity and vexation of spirit” comes from Ecclesiastes 1:14 in the King James Bible: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.”
Vedanta, roughly ‘end of the Veda’, is a group of Hindu philosophical schools that interpret the Upanishads, the final part of the Veda. Its schools include Shankara’s advaita, or radical non-dualism, and Ramanuja’s modified non-dualism.
In Aristotelian natural philosophy the soul was a principle of life, and textbooks divided its powers into three groups: vegetative powers of nutrition, growth and reproduction, shared by plants and animals; sensitive powers of the senses, appetite and motion, belonging to all animals; and rational powers, belonging to human beings alone. Descartes explained the vegetative and sensitive functions mechanically and equated the soul with the mind.
A velleity is a weak wish or inclination that does not lead to action.
Venery is an archaic term for the pursuit of or indulgence in sexual activity.
Venous artery renders the Latin arteria venosa, “vein-like artery”, the older anatomical name of what is now called the pulmonary vein, which brings blood from the lungs to the left side of the heart. Ancient anatomists counted the vessels opening into the left ventricle as arteries, but this one has the thin wall of a vein.
A verb signifies something said of a subject and also indicates time. Aristotle contrasts a noun such as health with a verb expressing being healthy now. In his technical classification, past and future forms are cases of the verb, while the verb proper indicates the present.
Verisimilitude is the appearance of truth or reality, which need not involve anything actually true.
Vespasian (9–79 CE) was Roman emperor from 69 to 79 and established the Flavian dynasty.
An article of food or provision.
A vicissitude is a change or variation, especially an unexpected change of circumstance.
“Viresque acquirit eundo”, “and gains strength as it goes”, is said of Rumour (Fama) in Virgil's Aeneid (IV.175), where Rumour, the swiftest of evils, flourishes by speed and grows as she spreads.
Virtue can mean the effective power or efficacy of something.
Vis inertiae, Latin for “force of inertia”, is the resistance of matter to any change in its state of rest or motion. Figuratively it means mere inertness or inactivity.
The vital spirits in Wolf’s translation are bodily agents of motion in the Short Treatise’s historical account of sensation and passion. Their movements can be redirected by the soul or altered through bodily causes such as wine.
Aulus Vitellius was a Roman emperor in 69 CE who was defeated and killed after Vespasian challenged his rule.
Viz. is a contraction of Latin videlicet meaning “to wit”, “that is” or “namely”, used to introduce a specification of what has just been mentioned.
Voltaire, the pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), was a French writer and philosopher and the foremost representative of the Enlightenment in France. He is remembered chiefly for philosophical tales such as Candide (1759), and with humour and irony he fought fanaticism and argued for freedom and tolerance.
A voluptuary is one who makes physical enjoyment his chief care, addicted to luxury and the gratification of sensual appetites; a sensualist.
A Cartesian vortex is a circulating group of particles of matter moving around a common center in the hypothesis used to explain the heavens.
A votary is someone committed by vows to religious service, or a devoted worshipper or follower. The word can also describe an enthusiastic devotee of a pursuit.
To vouchsafe is to grant or bestow something, or to disclose or reveal it; the word is archaic.
Vox populi, vox Dei is a Latin saying meaning that the voice of the people is the voice of God. In letter 132, Alcuin warns against invoking it, associating the uproar of a crowd with madness.
Vulgar originally meant belonging to the mass or multitude of people: common, general, ordinary and in general use, as in the vulgar tongue for the vernacular; as a noun it could denote one of the common people. The senses of lacking refinement, coarse or offensive developed from this. The word comes from Latin vulgaris, from vulgus, the multitude.
The vulgar tongue is the vernacular, the language of ordinary speech, as opposed to a learned language such as Latin.
Wampum are beads made of shells, which the Indigenous peoples of North America used as money and worked into belts and ornaments. Strictly the name belongs to the white beads; the dark purple ones were called suckanhock.
As a noun, a waste is a devastated, uncultivated or wild country, a deserted region or an unoccupied space; as an adjective, waste land is land lying unused and unproductive.
Weal can mean the welfare of a community or the general good.
To be ‘wedded to the left hand’ (viet til venstre Haand) is an older Danish expression for having entered an illegitimate union, having the standing of a lover rather than a spouse.
In Descartes’ mechanical physics, terrestrial weight is the force that holds the Earth’s parts together and makes them tend toward its centre. He explains it as pressure from surrounding celestial matter that rotates faster and has a stronger tendency to move away from that centre.
Weltschmerz, from German Welt, world, and Schmerz, pain, is sadness over the evils of the world, especially as an expression of romantic pessimism.
Westminster Hall is the great hall of the old royal palace of Westminster in London, first built under William Rufus (William II) in 1097. From the reign of Henry III the chief royal courts of justice sat there, and they remained there for centuries.
Matthew 6:19–21 urges laying up treasures in heaven rather than on earth, “for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”.
A white elephant is a burdensome possession: something that requires much care and expense to maintain, yields little profit and is often difficult to sell.
White lead is a lead-based white pigment formerly used extensively in painting. It is highly poisonous.
Whitehall was the royal palace at Westminster in London that grew from York Place, the residence of Cardinal Wolsey, which Henry VIII took over in November 1529; the name Whitehall is recorded for it from about 1530. A fire on 4 January 1698 destroyed most of the main palace buildings, stopping at the Banqueting House, which it damaged.
Whitened sepulchres is a biblical image of hypocrisy: tombs that look beautiful outside but contain death and uncleanness within. In Matthew 23:27–28, Jesus uses the comparison when rebuking scribes and Pharisees.
In spinning, a whorl is a small flywheel that helps regulate a hand-operated spindle’s rotation. The word also denotes a spiral form or a single turn of a spiral shell.
Spinoza’s Short Treatise treats a general faculty of will as an abstraction formed from particular acts of willing, rather than an independently existing cause. Particular affirmations and denials are themselves necessarily caused.
The will to power is Nietzsche’s term for a basic drive to master and overcome resistance, which he sets against the view that life is essentially adaptation to circumstances. In the Genealogy he argues that every purpose a thing comes to serve is a sign that a will to power has mastered it and imposed a new interpretation. How far he meant it as a doctrine about everything that exists is disputed.
Willem van Blijenbergh (about 1613–1694) of Dordrecht was a correspondent of Spinoza.
William Barclay (Aberdeen 1546 or 1547 – Angers 1608) was a Catholic theologian and jurist who taught civil law at the university of Pont-à-Mousson. His best-known work, De regno et regali potestate adversus Buchananum, Brutum, Boucherium et reliquos monarchomachos (1600), is a defence of monarchy.
William Blackstone (1723–1780) was a British jurist. His Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1768) became an influential account of English law.
William Gilbert was an English physician and investigator of magnetism. His De Magnete, published in 1600, explains the compass through the magnetic character of the Earth.
William Harvey was an English physician, a pupil of Fabricius of Aquapendente, who lectured at the College of Physicians. He is known for discovering the circulation of the blood.
William III (reigned 1689–1702) was offered the English throne jointly with his wife Mary II after Parliament declared in 1689 that James II had abdicated by deserting his kingdom. The two accepted a Declaration of Rights, later enacted as the Bill of Rights, which limited the sovereign’s power and reaffirmed Parliament’s control of taxation and legislation. Mary died of smallpox in 1694 and William in 1702 after a riding fall at Hampton Court.
William King (1650–1729) was a Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin. His De origine mali, published in 1702, examined the problem of evil and drew a response from Leibniz.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. His works include Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and a collection of 154 sonnets.
William I, the Conqueror, was duke of Normandy from 1035 and king of England from 1066 to 1087. He claimed the English throne, defeated Harold Godwinson at Hastings on 14 October 1066 and was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day; a Norman aristocracy was then imposed as the new governing class, and the Domesday survey of 1086 recorded his kingdom.
To wiredraw is to draw metal into wire. Figuratively, it means to prolong a discussion or refine it to excessive detail.
A witling is a would-be wit, someone who aspires to be witty. The word can also mean a person with little wit.
Spinoza defines wonder as imagination fixed on a new particular object because it is not associated with other images. He does not include wonder itself among the emotions, explaining the fixation by the absence of a cause that would lead thought to another object. Contempt directs the mind toward qualities absent from a thing rather than qualities that are present.
Works of supererogation are good actions beyond what duty requires. In Roman Catholic doctrine, their surplus merit can benefit others through the spiritual treasury of the Church.
A worldling is someone absorbed in worldly pursuits and pleasures.
In Spinoza’s strict political usage, wrong-doing is conduct forbidden by civil law. It requires a dominion that determines what is lawful. He also discusses the broader usage in which acting against reason is called wrong-doing.
Xenelasia was the Spartan expulsion of foreigners. Plutarch attributes it to Lycurgus as a safeguard against foreign habits; Xenophon reports that earlier Spartans were also forbidden to live abroad.
Xenophanes was a travelling Greek poet and thinker from Colophon, active in the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE. His surviving fragments criticize human-shaped portrayals of the gods and reflect on nature, civic life and the limits of knowledge. Later writers made him a founder of Eleatic philosophy, but the surviving evidence does not securely establish that simple classification.
Xerxes I (about 519–465 BCE) was a Persian king of the Achaemenid dynasty. He is known above all for his campaign against the Greeks in 480 BCE, with the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis, where the Persian fleet was destroyed.
Zalmoxis was a religious figure worshipped by the Getae and other Thracian peoples. Ancient accounts associate him with priesthood, kingship and teachings about immortality; whether he was originally a historical person remains uncertain.
In Nietzsche’s work, Zarathustra is the central figure of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), who heralds the Übermensch. The name is that of the Iranian prophet traditionally regarded as the founder of Zoroastrianism, known to the Greeks as Zoroaster.
Zeno of Citium founded the Stoic school around 300 BCE.
Zeno of Elea was a fifth-century BCE Greek philosopher associated with Parmenides. His paradoxes expose difficulties in ordinary assumptions about plurality, motion and spatial division; the race between Achilles and a tortoise is a famous example. The arguments survive through later authors, and his precise purposes remain debated. He is distinct from Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism.
Zeus Soter is Zeus addressed as saviour or protector. Ancient Greek banquet ritual included a third libation, an offering of drink, to Zeus under this title.
Zeuxis was a Greek painter active in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE, known for illusionistic painting and his use of light and shade.
Zoroaster is the Greek form of the name Zarathustra, the Iranian prophet traditionally regarded as the founder of Zoroastrianism. The date, setting and historical details of his life remain disputed. His religious tradition centres on Ahura Mazda and the choice between good and evil. Ancient Greek accounts often recast him as an idealized foreign sage and should not be read as straightforward biography.
Ἀνθρωπίνη κτίσις, literally ‘human creation’ or ‘human ordinance’, is the phrase of 1 Peter 2:13, ‘Ὑποτάγητε πάσῃ ἀνθρωπίνῃ κτίσει διὰ τὸν κύριον’, rendered in the King James Version ‘Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme’. Read as calling government a human institution, the words were used to argue that governments are made by the contrivance and consent of men.
Anthrōpos (ἄνθρωπος) means human being, and mys (μῦς) means mouse. Dividing a meaningful word into syllables need not yield independently meaningful parts: the fragment ῦς is presented as a sound within the word for mouse.
Epaktrokeles is a Greek compound rendered pirate-boat. The component kēlēs (κέλης), rendered boat in this example, contributes to the compound’s meaning without functioning as an independent expression within it.
Kallippos is a compound name rendered Fairsteed in English. Its horse component, hippos (ἵππος), contributes to the whole name rather than functioning as a separate word within it. The separate phrase kalos hippos (καλὸς ἵππος) means a fair horse.
Tragelaphos is a Greek compound meaning goat-stag. It illustrates how a name can have meaning without, by itself, asserting that the named thing exists or making any statement that is true or false.
