<algorithm> A multi-way balanced tree. The "B" in B-tree has never been officially defined. It could stand for
"balanced" or "Bayer", after one of the original designers of the algorithms and structure. A B-tree is not (necessarily?) a "binary tree".
A B+-tree (as used by IBM's VSAM) is a B-tree where the leaves are also linked sequentially, thus allowing both fast random access and sequential access to data.
[Knuth's Art of Computer Programming].
[Example algorithm?]
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Babbage Charles
<history of philosophy, biography> english mathematician (1792-1871). A century before the development of electronic computers, Babbage invented a mechanical "difference engine" for the calculation of arithmetical functions and set out plans for an "analytical engine" whose operation would have included logarithmic and trigonometric functions as well. Babbage's interest in the practical conduct of business led to an extensive commentary on the inefficiency of common practices in The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832), Comparative View of the Various Institutions for the Assurance of Lives, and Reflections on the Decline of Science in England.
Recommended Reading:
Charles Babbage: Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, ed. by Martin Campbell-Kelly (Rutgers, 1994) Bruce Collier and James MacLachlan, Charles Babbage and the Engines of Perfection (Oxford, 2000).
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
28-09-2001
Bachelard Gaston
<history of philosophy, biography> french philosopher of science (1884-1962); author of Psychoanalyse du feu (Psychoanalysis of Fire) (1937), Le nouvel esprit scientifique (The New Scientific Spirit) (1934), and L'Actualitié de l'histoire des sciences (History of Science) (1951).
Rejecting both naive realism and absolute idealism, Bachelard maintained that scientific knowledge emerges from an imaginative interaction between the mind and experimental evidence. His emphasis on discontinuity in the progress of science anticipated portions of the work of Thomas Kuhn.
Recommended Reading:
Mary Tiles, Bachelard: Science and Objectivity (Cambridge, 1985).
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
28-09-2001
back-propagation
<networking> (Or "backpropagation") A learning algorithm for modifying a feed-forward neural network which minimises a continuous "error function" or "objective function."
Back-propagation is a "gradient descent" method of training in that it uses gradient information to modify the network weights to decrease the value of the error function on subsequent tests of the inputs. Other gradient-based methods from numerical analysis can be used to train networks more efficiently.
Back-propagation makes use of a mathematical trick when the network is simulated on a digital computer, yielding in just two traversals of the network (once forward, and once back) both the difference between the desired and actual output, and the derivatives of this difference with respect to the connection weights.
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Background
<philosophy of mind> a set of nonrepresentational capacities that enable all representing to take place.
The Background includes biological and cultural capacities, skills, stances, assumptions and presuppositions.
Introduced in Searle (1978).
1. Introduction
It should be noted right off that the hypothesis of the Background is, by Searle's admission, marked by
"obscurity" (1991, p. 289), and accordingly, its developing theorisation has involved a number of shifts and clarifications (1992, pp. 186- 187; cf. 1991 generally) since it was first introduced to explain the fixing of literal meaning (1978). The general explanatory function of the Background has remained constant, however, and that is to account for how intentions are grounded and how skills can be applied.
The Background can be seen as one solution to the rule- or representation-grounding problem: how does one prevent an infinite regress in the interpretation of a rule or a representation? Searle's basic argument is that no rule or meaning is self-interpreting; a person needs a contextual understanding in order to arrive at the correct application or interpretation.
According to Searle the literal meaning of a sentence underdetermines its truth conditions; our correct literal reading of, e.g., a verb can only be secured given a certain Background in relation to which a clarifying interpretive context can be established (1995, p. 132; 1992, pp. 178-179; 1983, pp. 145-148). The Background, then, functions as the precondition for the intelligibility of representation and intentionality generally.
2. The Topography and Make-Up of the Background
Searle has described the Background as consisting of two major divisions which he calls the Deep Background and the Local Background (1983, p. 143-144).
The Deep Background is composed of biological skills and universally human capacities, such as eating, walking, and seeing given patterns of perceptual stimuli as discrete objects.
The Local Background, by contrast, is composed of culturally-bound skills and capacities, such as knowing what culturally-specific objects are for, recognising culturally-specific situations as appropriate or inappropriate for certain types of behaviour, and so forth. Within each of these major divisions, Searle further distinguishes between knowing how things are and knowing how to do things (1983, p. 144) -- roughly, between presuppositions and stances on the one hand, and skills on the other (see knowledge how). What becomes apparent almost immediately is the sheer heterogeneity of the items said to make up the Background. Some appear to be entirely physical skills dependent on automatised sequences of motor activity. For example, Searle describes the case of a skier who first learns the basics of balance by being taught certain rules, and who, after having skied enough times, no longer is mindful of those rules but instead lets the learned responses of the body take over (1983, pp. 150-151). At this point the skills required for skiing have become part of the skier's Background; his or her "repeated experiences" have effectively created the right kind of
"physical capacities" (1983, p. 150).
Other Background capacities appear to consist in what might be described as habits. These capacities, which seem to belong largely to the Local Background, are characterised as skills and abilities that are "functionally equivalent" to the systems of rules guiding socially- or culturally-situated behaviours and practices, but without involving any "representation or internalisation of those rules" (1995, p. 142). Rather than internalising rules, Searle holds, we "evolve a set of dispositions that are sensitive to the rule structure" (1995, p. 145).
A third category of Background capacities consists of the cognitive capacities inhering in stances, presuppositions, pretheoretical commitments, and the like. One such presupposition or stance, according to Searle, is the sense that objects are solid, which he claims is simply manifested in one's behaviour without one's having to have any belief or conviction about the matter (1992, p. 185). My sitting, walking, and manipulation of objects for instance, are executed in such a way that manifests my taking for granted the
solidity of things like tables, chairs, the ground beneath me, and so forth (1992, p. 186; 1983, pp. 142-143).
Searle emphasizes that such stances are not beliefs or expectations, but rather are simply presupposed by the agent in performing the actions manifesting them (1992, p. 186; 1983, pp. 156-157).
3. Is the Background a Form of tacit knowledge?
There would seem to be a certain amount of ambiguity in the Background. A major source of this ambiguity, as Searle acknowledges, is the difficulty of avoiding terms associated with mental representation per se for describing the Background's nonrepresentational capacities (1983, pp. 156-157). But we might point to another source, and that is the fact that, in at least some cases, the notion of an embodied commitment is liable to explanatory elimination.
At one level, some Background capacities can be described as the automatised effects of our having acquired certain skills (e.g., of grasping objects or walking) under contingent circumstances. To the extent that contingent facts about our learning how to walk (i.e., that we did so on Earth with its solid ground, particular gravitational force, etc. rather than in a weightless environment) have produced the physical habits that afford our walking, we can describe those habits as automatised physical responses to a given environment, and perhaps leave it at that. What is embodied is simply a certain causal history that has left the right kinds of traces in the appropriate neural pathways. While the characterisation of Background capacities in terms of neurophysiological structures is consistent with Searle's thesis (1995, p. 130; 1992, p. 188), it is difficult to see how purely automatised physical skills or habits could qualify as mental.
But to the extent that these physical responses can be associated with properly cognitive commitments regarding the environment, i.e., that it will be reasonably like that in which the physical responses were formed in the first place, we can say that there is an element of expectation involved, if not of hypothesis formation.
This raises the possibility that at least some Background capacities can be described as a kind of tacit knowledge or cognitive unconscious in the sense of Reber (1995), which may implicate them as induced abstract generalisations of some sort. That Background stances can be individuated in terms of specific contents would further seem to indicate that they are a kind of tacit knowledge.
Searle's response to the suggestion that the Background's cognitive capacities are a kind of tacit knowledge would probably be that Background capacities are not themselves a form of knowledge (such as beliefs, theories, empirical hypotheses, and so forth) but rather are the preconditions of knowledge. He might further argue -- as he in fact does (1983 pp. 156-157) -- that though it is very difficult to describe the contents of the Background other than in language that is more appropriate to the description of representational content, Background capacities are not representational. By this he means that Background capacities are not "features of the world independent of the mind" (1991, p. 291). (For Searle, mental representation is defined in terms of such mind-independent features as conditions of satisfaction, and directions of fit and causation).
Still, the case for understanding some Background items as elements in a cognitive unconscious is compelling.
Much of what Searle consigns to the Background does seem to contain information about how the world is, and as with hypotheses is subject to falsification, as in cases of breakdown (1992, pp. 184-185; 1983, p. 155).
In addition, a Background at least partly composed of induced generalizations would flesh out the otherwise vague suggestion that the Background is (or contains) a mechanism that is sensitive to the appropriate features of the world, such as socially- or culturally-specific rules (1995, p. 146).
4. The Background as a Mental Causal Mechanism
What Searle wants to capture with the postulation of a Background is a causal mechanism that is mental. Not only are Background mechanisms described as "causal structures generally" (1995, p. 129), but as specifically neurophysiological structures (1995, p. 130; 1992, p. 188). While the latter stipulation can be understood to follow from Searle's overall position of "biological naturalism" in regard to mental phenomena (1992, p. 1), it also seems to mean that Background capacities, to the extent that they remain in the Background and do not manifest themselves in intentional states or behaviours, are simply "neurophysiological rather than psychological" (1992, p. 188). Although it is difficult to say for certain, Searle here seems to be saying that the Background as such simply is the capacity for certain neurophysiological events to occur and thus to produce mental events with their associated intentional contents. The relation of this view of the Background to the Background skills described above as automatised motor skills is obscure, as the latter seem more or less independent of the generation of psychological events.
But the postulation of the Background as a physical, causal mechanism also can be interpreted as showing the way out of a difficulty that turns up in a certain class of explanatory theories. These are theories of "practices"
such as Bourdieu's, to which Searle's theory of the Background bears some resemblance (1995, p. 132; 1992, p. 177). ("Practices" can be defined, roughly, as consisting in the agreements and regularities, behavioural and otherwise, characterising given social groups and communities.) Such theories, as Turner has pointed out (1995), often suffer from a vagueness regarding "where" practices are located, what kind of entities they may be, and what exact causal role they may play in producing behaviour. By positing a Background that is in people's brains, Searle effectively addresses these issues by redescribing "practices" as ultimately physical mechanisms in individuals, and thus provides the kind of causal explanation that such theories require.
Recommended Reading:
Lepore, E. and Van Gulick, R., eds. (1991). John Searle and His Critics. Cambridge, MA, Blackwell.
Searle, J. (1978). "Literal Meaning." In Erkenntnis 1, pp. 207-224. Reprinted in Searle (1979).
Searle, J. (1979). Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. New York, Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. (1983). Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. New York, Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. (1991). "Response: The Background of Intentionality and Action." In Lepore and Van Gulick (1991).
Searle, J. (1992). The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
Searle, J. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. New York, Free Press.
Turner, S. (1995). The Social Theory of Practices. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
See also intentionality, intention-in-action, implicit memory, tacit knowledge Daniel Barbiero
Chris Eliasmith - [Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind] Homepage (http://artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/) 16-03-2001
backtracking
<algorithm> A scheme for solving a series of sub-problems each of which may have multiple possible solutions and where the solution chosen for one sub-problem may affect the possible solutions of later sub-problems.
To solve the overall problem, we find a solution to the first sub-problem and then attempt to recursively solve the other sub-problems based on this first solution. If we cannot, or we want all possible solutions, we backtrack and try the next possible solution to the first sub-problem and so on. Backtracking terminates when there are no more solutions to the first sub-problem.
This is the algorithm used by logic programming languages such as Prolog to find all possible ways of proving a goal. An optimisation known as "intelligent backtracking" keeps track of the dependencies between sub-problems and only re-solves those which depend on an earlier solution which has changed.
Backtracking is one algorithm which can be used to implement non-determinism. It is effectively a depth-first search of a problem space.
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backward analysis
<<mathematics, logic> An analysis to determine properties of the inputs of a program from properties or context of the outputs. E.g. if the output of this function is needed then this argument is needed.
Compare forward analysis.
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backward chaining
<algorithm> An algorithm for proving a goal by recursively braking it down into sub-goals and trying to prove these until facts are reached. Facts are goals with no sub-goals which are therefore always true. Backward training is the program execution mechanism used by most logic programming language like Prolog.
Opposite: forward chaining.
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Bacon Francis
<history of philosophy, biography> english politician and philosopher (1561-1626). Bacon became Lord Chancellor of England in 1618, but was driven immediately from office under charges of official corruption. As an early empiricist, he rejected scholastic accounts of the natural world in favor of a new method for achieving knowledge, based exclusively on careful observation and cautious induction, which he described in The Advancement of Learning (1605) and Novum Organum ( New Organon) (1620).
Bacon warned that effective reasoning must be freed from the "idolatrous" influence of personal interest, human nature, social conventions, and academic philosophy. In The New Atlantis (1626), Bacon described the far-reaching social consequences of his epistemological program. Bacon's Essays (1601) address the whole range of his philosophical and social interests.
Recommended Reading:
Selected Philosophical Works, ed. by Rose-Mary Sargent (Hackett, 1999);
The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. by Markku Peltonen (Cambridge, 1996);
Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge, 2001).
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
28-09-2001
Bacon Roger
<history of philosophy, biography> english philosopher (1214-1292) who translated many Aristotelean treatises from Arabic into Latin. Although passionately interested in alchemy and magic, Roger defended reliance upon mathematics and experimental methods for the improvement of human knowledge generally and theological understanding in particular in the Opus Maius (Greater Work) (1267) and On Experimental Science (1268). His novel educational doctrines were supposed to violate the condemnation of 1277, and much of Roger's later work, including the Compendium Studii Theologiae (1292) was suppressed.
Recommended Reading:
Roger Bacon's Philosophy of Nature, tr. by David C. Lindberg (St. Augustine, 1997);
Stewart C. Easten, Roger Bacon and His Search for a Universal Science (Greenwood, 1984).
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
28-09-2001
baculum argumentum ad
<logic, philosophy of science> see appeal to force.
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
28-09-2001
bad faith
<ontology, ethics> in the philosophy of Sartre, an effort to avoid anxiety by denying the full extent of one's own freedom. Bad faith, on this view, is an especially harmful variety of self-deception, since it forestalls authentic appropriation of responsibility for ourselves.
Recommended Reading:
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. by Hazel E. Barnes (Washington Square, 1993);
Ronald E. Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre's Early Philosophy (Temple, 1995).
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
28-09-2001
Baier Annette
<history of philosophy, biography> american moral philosopher (1929- ). From a thoughtful reading of Hume, Baier derives an ethical stance that emphasizes the importance of membership within a moral community in A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume's Treatise (1991). In "What Do Women Want in a Moral Theory?" (1983), she argues that the concept of trust provides a vital link between traditional (male) accounts of rational obligation and the equally traditional (female) "ethics of love." Her most recent publications include and Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (1994) and The Commons of the Mind (Open Court, 1997).
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
28-09-2001
Baier Kurt
<history of philosophy, biography> american moral philosopher (1917- ). In The Moral Point of View (1958), Baier argues that practical reasoning that takes into account both individual and social considerations is the appropriate method for deciding "what is the best thing to do" in particular circumstances. Thus, we are moral because it is rational so to be, even when our private interests are outweighed by the welfare of others.
Recommended Reading:
Kurt Baier, The Rational and the Moral Order: The Social Roots of Reason and Morality (Open Court, 1994);
Reason, Ethics, and Society: Themes from Kurt Baier With His Responses, ed. by Kurt Baier and J.B.
Schneewind (Open Court, 1996).
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
28-09-2001
Bakunin Mikhail Alexandrovich
<history of philosophy, biography> russian philosopher and political anarchist (1814-1876); author of Marxism, Freedom, and the State (1872) and God and the State (1916). Bakunin participated in several European revolutionary movements in an effort to derive practical benefits from the theories of Marx and Proudhon. His philosophical writings emphasized the use of negative arguments as a dialectical method for defining creative results rather than relying upon pseudo-scientific theories of government.
Recommended Reading:
The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869-1871, ed. by Robert M. Cutler (Prometheus, 1992) Brian Morris, Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom (Consortium, 1996).
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
28-09-2001
Banach algebra
<mathematics> An algebra in which the vector space is a Banach space.
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Banach inverse mapping theorem
<mathematics> In a Banach space the inverse to a continuous linear mapping is continuous.
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Banach space
<mathematics> A complete normed vector space. Metric is induced by the norm: d(x,y) = ||x-y||. Completeness means that every Cauchy sequence converges to an element of the space. All finite-dimensional real and complex normed vector spaces are complete and thus are Banach spaces.
Using absolute value for the norm, the real numbers are a Banach space whereas the rationals are not. This is because there are sequences of rationals that converges to irrationals.
Several theorems hold only in Banach spaces, e.g. the Banach inverse mapping theorem. All finite-dimensional real and complex vector spaces are Banach spaces. Hilbert spaces, spaces of integrable functions, and spaces of absolutely convergent series are examples of infinite-dimensional Banach spaces. Applications include wavelets, signal processing, and radar.
[Robert E. Megginson, "An Introduction to Banach Space Theory", Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 183, Springer Verlag, September 1998].
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Banach-Tarski paradox
<mathematics> It is possible to cut a solid ball into finitely many pieces (actually about half a dozen), and then put the pieces together again to get two solid balls, each the same size as the original.
This paradox is a consequence of the Axiom of Choice.
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Barbara
<logic, philosophy of science> name given by medieval logicians to any categorical syllogism whose standard form may be designated as AAA-1. Example: All finches are birds, and all cardinals are finches, so all cardinals are birds. This most common of all patterns in syllogistic reasoning is one of only fifteen forms that are always valid.
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
28-09-2001
Baroco
<logic, philosophy of science> name given by medieval logicians to a categorical syllogism whose standard form is AOO-2. Example: All cats are furry mammals, but some housepets are not furry mammals, so some housepets are not cats. This is another of the fifteen forms in which syllogisms are always valid.
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
28-09-2001
base
<mathematics> radix.
20-11-2003
base class
<PI> (Or "superclass") The class from which another class (a "subclass") inherits.
"base class" is the term used in C++. The term "superclass" is perhaps confusing since objects of the subclass have a superset of the fields of objects in the superclass.
See inheritance.
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basis
mathematical induction 20-11-2003
Bayes Thomas
<history of philosophy, biography> english clergyman and mathematician (1702-1761). "Bayes theorem," first stated in his Essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances (1764), proposes that evidence confirms the likelihood of an hypothesis only to the degree that the appearance of this evidence would be more probable with the assumption of the hypothesis than without it.
Recommended Reading:
Bradley P. Carlin and Thomas A. Louis, Bayes and Empirical Bayes Methods for Data Analysis (CRC, 2000);
Empirical Bayes and Likelihood Inference, ed. by S. E. Ahmed and N. Reid (Springer Verlag, 2000);
John Earman, Bayes or Bust?: A Critical Examination of Bayesian Confirmation (Bradford, 1992).
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
28-09-2001
Bayle Pierre
<history of philosophy, biography> although born in France and educated at Toulouse and Geneva, Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) spent most of his life in Holland, as the leading member of an active intellectual community at Rotterdam. The early writings of this French Protestant include a plea for broad political toleration of divergent opinions on religion. His greatest work is the incredibly ambitious Dictionnaire historique et critique (Historical and Critical Dictionary) (1697), which could reasonably be regarded as Western culture's first significant hypertext document. Although its articles about obscure ancient and modern figures sometimes contain little information of direct interest, Bayle used them as the starting-points for a complex series of endnotes, sidenotes, and footnotes in which he addressed contemporary philosophical nand theological concerns.
Bayle's predominant theme was a profound skepticism about human knowledge, derived originally from his admiration of the ancient Pyrrhonists but applied strictly to the new science and philosophy of his own time. He used the fact of animal thinking as evidence against Cartesian efforts to establish the unique status of an immaterial human soul. On the other hand, he also argued that the untenability of the primary / secondary quality distinction poses an insurmountable difficulty for both rationalism and empiricism.
On religious matters, Bayle delighted in pointing out contradictions between theological tenets and the self-evident dictates of reason. This declaration of the fundamental irrationality of Christianity, however, left ample room for adherence to a rigorous fideism about god and revelation. Bayle's treatment of such issues posed important challenges for the development of modern thought and were greatly influential on the philosophy of Hume.
Recommended Reading:
Primary sources: Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, ed. by Richard H. Popkin and Craig Bush (Hackett, 1991);
Pierre Bayle, Political Writings (Cambridge, 2000).
Secondary sources:
Thomas M. Lennon, Reading Bayle (Toronto, 1999).
Additional on-line information about Bayle includes:
Gianluca Mori's comprehensive treatment at the Centro Interdipartimentale di Servizi Informatici, Universitý di Torino.
Paul F. Johnson's article in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.
Also see: dictionaries and encyclopaedias of philosophy, Pyrrhonism, and skepticism.
The thorough collection of resources at EpistemeLinks.com;
The article in the Columbia Encyclopedia at Bartleby.com.
A brief entry in The Macmillan Encyclopedia 2001.
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
28-09-2001
beauty
<aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics> the characteristic feature of things that arouse pleasure or delight, especially to the senses of a human observer. Thus, "beauty" is the most general term of aesthetic appreciation. Whether judgments about beauty are objective or subjective has been a matter of serious philosophical dispute.
Recommended Reading:
James Kirwan, Beauty (Manchester, 1999)
Philosophies of Art and Beauty, ed. by Hugh Bredin and Liberato Santoro-Brienza (Edinburgh, 2000).
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
28-09-2001
Beauvoir Simone de
<history of philosophy, biography> born and educated in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was among the first women permitted to complete a program of study at the Šcole Normale SupÈrieure. Through her lifelong friendship with Sartre, she contributed significantly to the development and expression of existentialist philosophy.
In Le DeuxiËme Sexe (The Second Sex) (1949), de Beauvoir traced the development of male oppression through historical, literary, and mythical sources, attributing its contemporary effects on women to a systematic objectification of the male as a positive norm. This consequently identifies the female as Other, which commonly leads to a loss of social and personal identity, the variety of alienation unique to the experience of women. Her works of fiction focus on women who take responsibility for themselves by making life-altering decisions, and the many volumes of her own autobiography exhibit the application of similar principles in reflection on her own experiences.
Recommended Reading:
Primary sources:
Simone De Beauvoir: A Critical Reader, ed. by Elizabeth Fallaize (Routledge, 1998);
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, tr. by H. M. Parshley (Vintage, 1989);
The Prime of Life: The Autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir (Marlowe, 1994).
Secondary sources:
Margaret A. Simons, Beauvoir and the Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999);
Debra B. Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir:
Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (SUNY, 1996);
Simone de Beauvoir's the Second Sex: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. by Ruth Evans (St. Martin's, 1998);
Feminist Interpretations of Simone De Beauvoir, ed. by Margaret A. Simons (Penn. State, 1995); Sally Scholz, On De Beauvoir (Wadsworth, 1999).
Additional on-line information about Beauvoir includes:
Melanie Garneau's excellent site on Beauvoir.
Jane O'Grady's article in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.
Also see: French philosophy, feminist philosophy, and women in philosophy.
The article in the Columbia Encyclopedia at Bartleby.com.
The thorough collection of resources at EpistemeLinks.com.
An article in The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography.
An entry in the Penguin Biographical Dictionary of Women.
Snippets from de Beauvoir (French and English) in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
A brief summary at The Window; Kristin Switala's brief bibliography at the Feminist Theory Website.
An analysis of philosophical influences on The Second Sex from Margaret Simons.
A brief entry in The Macmillan Encyclopedia 2001.
A short article in Oxford's Who's Who in the Twentieth Century.
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
28-09-2001
bedeutung
<logic, mathematics> Frege's German term for the reference of a concept. See Sinn / Bedeutung.
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
28-09-2001