Cutie Stories

Ali Shariati

Ali Shariati did not live to see the Islamic Revolution in Iran of 1979, but he was definitely one of its intellectual authors. Like many Iranians in the twentieth century he combined an education in the traditional religious sciences in Iran with more modern ideas from a European context—in his case Paris.

His connections with the anticolonialist movement in Paris led him to argue that Islam is a basically revolutionary and liberating doctrine; Shariati did not abandon religion as many of his fellow radical Iranians did, nor did he accept the reverence for the imam or spiritual leader so prevalent in Shi'i Islam. This set him firmly aside from Khomeini and the ideology of the Islamic Revolution itself.

He was a great borrower of ideas that he then applied in his own way. Thus while he rejected the dialectical materialism of Marxism, he did use the notion of history having a direction and a pattern—albeit one based on divine will and class struggle by individuals progressively perfecting their consciousness.

Mary Shepherd

Mary Shepherd was born in Scotland at her family’s estate on December 31, 1777, the second daughter of Neil Primrose, Earl of Rosebery; she died in London on January 7, 1847. Relatively few details of her life and education are available. She married an English barrister, Henry Shepherd, in 1808.

She published at least two works in philosophy, An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect (1824), and Essays on the Perception of an External Universe and other Subjects Connected with the Doctrine of Causation (1827).

A third work, originally published anonymously in 1819, Enquiry respecting the Relation of Cause and Effect, has been credited to her, but it differs so significantly from her other work, both in style and content, as to make this attribution dubious. She was as well a participant in an exchange of views with a contemporary, John Fearn, which appeared in various venues.

Lev Isaakovich Shestov

Lev Isaakovich Shestov, the Russian philosopher and religious thinker, was born in Kiev. His real name was Lev Isaakovich Schwarzmann. Shestov studied law at Moscow University but never practiced it. He lived in St. Petersburg from the late 1890s until he migrated to Berlin in 1922; he later settled in Paris. He gave occasional lectures in Berlin, Paris, and Amsterdam and made two lecture tours in Palestine, but he held no regular academic position.

Shestov called William Shakespeare his “first teacher of philosophy”; in his later years he interpreted Hamlet’s enigmatic “the time is out of joint” as a profound existential truth. Shestov apparently turned to philosophy relatively late, perhaps in 1895, when he reportedly underwent a spiritual crisis.

He himself never referred to such a crisis; in general, his works are less confessional and autobiographical than those of most existential thinkers. However, they are neither impersonal nor unimpassioned; intensity and engagement (in a religious and moral rather than a political sense) are hallmarks of his thought.

Sydney Shoemaker

Sydney Shoemaker is the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Cornell University. Before joining the Philosophy Department at Cornell in 1961, he taught at Ohio State University and he held the Santayana Fellowship at Harvard University. He also delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University (1972) on “Mind and Behavior” and the Royce Lectures at Brown University (1993) on “Self-Knowledge” and “Inner Sense.”

He has pioneered work in a variety of areas in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, particularly on the nature of mind, the nature of the self and of self-knowledge, and the nature of properties. Some of the most important of his contributions in these areas are charted in this entry.

Shoemaker’s work on the topic of the self and selfknowledge is informed by a rejection of the Cartesian notion of an immaterial self and the accompanying view that self-knowledge involves a kind of “inner observation” of the contents of one’s mind that is perception-like in certain characteristic ways.

Gustav Gustavovich Shpet

In his most important phenomenological work, Iavlenie i smysl (Appearance and sense, 1914), Gustav Shpet took up Edmund Husserl’s idea of pure phenomenology and developed it in the direction of a “phenomenology of hermeneutical reason.”

In this theoretical framework he formulated, between 1914 and 1918, hermeneutic and semiotic problems, which in the 1920s he elaborated more specifically within the fields of philosophy of language and theory of art. In doing so, he was combining Husserl’s conceptions with ideas from other philosophical movements, particularly Wilhelm Dilthey’s hermeneutics and Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy of language.

Shpet’s reception and transformation of phenomenology must be seen in the context of Russian intellectual and cultural life during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Platonic “Moscow Metaphysical School” (which included Vladimir Solov’ëv and Sergei Trubetskoi) provided the intellectual atmosphere in which Shpet’s turn to Husserl’s phenomonology took place.

Frank Sibley

Frank Sibley was trained as a philosopher in postwar Oxford. His principal teacher was Gilbert Ryle, who, understandably, had a profound influence on Sibley’s way of doing philosophical analysis—an influence that is as apparent in his last papers as in his first ones.

Sibley must be credited with inaugurating the renaissance in aesthetics and philosophy of art in the English-speaking world after World War II, a renaissance that is still in full cry. He did it in 1959, in an article that, in the years since, has never ceased being discussed and cited in the literature, and, at the time of its appearance, produced a veritable deluge of essays, and even books in response or defense, that completely reinvigorated the discipline.

“Aesthetic Concepts” (1959a), as Sibley titled his inaugural article, dealt, in a surprisingly few pages, with three of the most basic and difficult issues in the discipline: taste, criticism, and the distinction between the aesthetic and nonaesthetic.

Siger of Brabant

Of Siger’s life, we know very few facts for certain. His exact place of birth remains unknown, as well as the locale and circumstances of his death. (Did he die peacefully in Liege, Belgium, or was he assassinated in Italy at the Roman curia?) Even the chronology of his works is uncertain. Although they are thought to have been written between 1265 and 1277, the precise dates remain conjectural.

Concerning his university career, facts are again unclear. Although it is certain that he never left the faculty of arts for one of the higher faculties (theology, medicine, law), his role in the debates that shook the University of Paris and led to the statutes of 1272 remains the subject of discussion (Putallaz and Imbach 1997 versus Bianchi 1999). At the beginning of his career, he was one of Thomas Aquinas’s most outspoken adversaries, but the question as to what degree he would have abandoned Averroism to adopt Thomist views remains open.

Certain passages seem to support the view that he would have abandoned Averroism, while others are incompatible with this hypothesis (Van Steenberghen and Maurer defend the developmental interpretation, whereas Mandonnet and Bukowski defend the idea that Siger never changed his mind and was the strictest Averroist of his time, a philosopher who could without any guilt subscribe to heretical propositions).