Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Cambridge Platonists

(Encyclopedia)Cambridge Platonists, group of English philosophers, centered at Cambridge in the latter half of the 17th cent. In reaction to the mechanical philosophy of Thomas Hobbes this school revived certain Pl...

will, in philosophy and psychology

(Encyclopedia)will, in philosophy and psychology, term used to describe that which is alleged to stimulate the motivation of purposeful activity. It is characteristic of the will that it can be observed only in one...

sovereignty

(Encyclopedia)sovereignty, supreme authority in a political community. The concept of sovereignty has had a long history of development, and it may be said that every political theorist since Plato has dealt with t...

Spinoza, Baruch

(Encyclopedia)Spinoza, Baruch or Benedict spinōˈzə [key], 1632–77, Dutch philosopher, b. Amsterdam. Politically, Spinoza and Hobbes again share assumptions about the social contract: Right derives from p...

Egerton, Thomas

(Encyclopedia)Egerton, Thomas: see Ellesmere, Thomas Egerton, Baron. ...

Eakins, Thomas

(Encyclopedia)Eakins, Thomas āˈkĭnz [key], 1844–1916, American painter, photographer, and sculptor, b. Philadelphia, where he worked most of his life. Eakins is considered the foremost American portrait painte...

Dekker, Thomas

(Encyclopedia)Dekker, Thomas, c,1570–1632, English dramatist and pamphleteer. Little is known of his life except that he frequently suffered from poverty and served several prison terms for debt. He began his lit...

Deloney, Thomas

(Encyclopedia)Deloney, Thomas dəlōˈnē [key], c.1543–c.1600, English ballad writer, fiction writer, and pamphleteer. He was a silk weaver. Deloney's chief works are three prose narratives—Jack of Newbury, Th...

Abell, Thomas

(Encyclopedia)Abell or Abel, Thomas both: āˈbəl [key], d. 1540, English priest, chaplain to Katharine of Aragón. In 1528 he served as Katharine's secret envoy to her nephew, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, in con...

Dixon, Thomas

(Encyclopedia)Dixon, Thomas, 1864–1946, American novelist, b. Shelby, N.C., grad. Wake Forest College. A militant Southerner, he is best known for his novel The Clansman (1905), on which D. W. Griffith's movie Th...

Browse by Subject