The Ethics is a philosophical treatise written by Baruch Spinoza. The full title of the book is Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (Latin: Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata). The book closely resembles Euclid's Elements. At the beginning of Part 1, Spinoza defines key terms and lists axioms. On the basis of these and other definitions and axioms provided in the remaining four parts of the book, Spinoza offers proofs of hundreds of propositions and corollaries such as "When the Mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it", "A free man thinks of nothing less than...

Immanence refers to philosophical and metaphysical theories of divine presence in which the divine is seen to be manifested in or encompassing the material world. It is often contrasted with theories of transcendence, in which the divine is seen to be outside the material world. It is usually applied in monotheistic, pantheistic, pandeistic, or panentheistic faiths to suggest that the spiritual world permeates the . Major faiths commonly devote significant philosophical efforts to explaining the relationship between immanence and transcendence, but these efforts run the gamut from casting...

Plane of immanence is a founding concept in the metaphysics or ontology of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Immanence, meaning "existing or remaining within" generally offers a relative opposition to transcendence, a divine or metaphysical beyond or outside. Deleuze, however, employs the term plane of immanence as a pure immanence, an unqualified immersion or embeddedness, an immanence which denies transcendence as a real distinction, Cartesian or otherwise. Pure immanence is thus often referred to as a pure plane, an infinite field or smooth space without substantial or constitutive divi...

Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, vocal, or sign language use or any significant semiotic event. The objects of discourse analysis—discourse, writing, conversation, communicative event—are variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences, propositions, speech acts, or turns-at-talk. Contrary to much of traditional linguistics, discourse analysts not only study language use 'beyond the sentence boundary', but also prefer to analyze 'naturally occurring' language use, and not invented examples. Tex...

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse that views language as a form of social practice and focuses on the ways social and political domination are reproduced in text and talk. Since Norman Fairclough's Language and Power in 1989, CDA has been deployed as a method of multidisciplinary analysis throughout the humanities and social sciences. It does not confine itself only to method, though the overriding assumption shared by CDA practitioners is that language and power are linked. Background Critical discourse analysis emerged from 'c...

Jürgen Habermas ( or ; ; born June 18, 1929) is a German sociologist and a philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of communicative rationality and the public sphere. His work focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics, particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and...

Paul Ricœur (; 27 February 1913 – 20 May 2005) was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutics. As such his thought is situated within the same tradition as other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. In 2000 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for having "revolutionized the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, expanding the study of textual interpretation to include the broad yet concrete domains of mythology, biblical exegesis, psychoanalysis, theory of metaphor, and narrative the...

In geometry, the parallel postulate, also called Euclid's fifth postulate because it is the fifth postulate in Euclid's Elements, is a distinctive axiom in Euclidean geometry. It states that, in two-dimensional geometry: If a line segment intersects two straight lines forming two interior angles on the same side that sum to less than two right angles, then the two lines, if extended indefinitely, meet on that side on which the angles sum to less than two right angles. Euclidean geometry is the study of geometry that satisfies all of Euclid's axioms, including the parallel postulate. A...

Leonhard Euler (, , , similarly to 'oiler'; 15 April 170718 September 1783) was a pioneering Swiss mathematician and physicist. He made important discoveries in fields as diverse as infinitesimal calculus and graph theory. He also introduced much of the modern mathematical terminology and notation, particularly for mathematical analysis, such as the notion of a mathematical function. He is also renowned for his work in mechanics, fluid dynamics, optics, and astronomy. Euler spent most of his adult life in St. Petersburg, Russia, and in Berlin, Prussia. He is considered to be the pre-emi...