Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Recent Episodes
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This channel provides information about new and revised entries as they are published in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
[New Entry by Timothy Stoll on February 14, 2025.] Nietzsche's first book was entitled The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), and one of his very last works was called The Case of Wagner: A Musician's Problem (1888). As this simple fact indicates, reflection on art (and especially, on music and drama) is an abiding and central feature of Nietzsche's thought. Indeed, very nearly all of his works address aesthetic questions at least in passing. Some of these questions are familiar from the philosophical tradition: e.g., how...
[Revised entry by John Conley on February 12, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] A prominent novelist, Madeleine de Scudery (1607 - 1701) composed a series of dialogues dealing with philosophical issues. Primarily ethical in focus, her dialogues examine the virtues and vices proper to the aristocratic society of the period. They also explore questions of moral psychology, in particular the interplay between temperament and free will. In the area of epistemology, Scudery analyzes the problem of certitude and self-knowledge. Theologically, she defends cosmological arguments demonstrating...
[New Entry by Randall Curren on February 11, 2025.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Randall Curren replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous authors.]...
[Revised entry by John Henry on February 10, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Henry More (1614 - 1687), theologian, and philosopher, is usually regarded as characteristic of a group of broadly like-minded thinkers, discerned by historians and designated by them as the Cambridge Platonists (Tulloch 1874, Cassirer 1953, Hedley and Hengstermann 2024). Certainly, More's dualistic theology of body and soul was heavily indebted to Neoplatonic thought, but the philosophical theology which he developed through the 1650s and 1660s should be recognised as almost entirely idiosyncratic, even though, in some...
[New Entry by Mark Balaguer on February 10, 2025.] This entry surveys the literature surrounding certain kinds of views about metaphysics. In particular, the central concern here will be with critiques of metaphysics and responses to those critiques. And so the views under discussion can be thought of as metametaphysical views, or metaontological views....
[Revised entry by Sophie-Grace Chappell and Francesco Verde on February 7, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] This article introduces Plato's dialogue the Theaetetus (section 1), and briefly summarises its plot (section 2). Two leading interpretations of the dialogue, the Unitarian and Revisionist readings, are contrasted in section 3. Sections 4 to 8 explain and discuss the main arguments of the chief divisions of the dialogue. Section 9 provides some afterthoughts about the dialogue as a whole. One of the most challenging issues in this dialogue, as in all Platonic dialogues, is the comparison with Plato's other...
[Revised entry by Theo M. V. Janssen and Thomas Ede Zimmermann on February 5, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Montague semantics is a theory of natural language semantics and of its relation with syntax. It was originally developed by the logician Richard Montague (1930 - 1971) and subsequently modified and extended by linguists, philosophers, and logicians. The most important features of the theory are its use of model theoretic semantics which is nowadays commonly used for the semantics of logical languages and its adherence to the principle of compositionality - that is, the meaning of the whole is a function of the meanings of its parts and...
[Revised entry by Timothy Bays on February 5, 2025. Changes to: Main text, notes.html] Skolem's Paradox involves a seeming conflict between two theorems from classical logic. The Lowenheim-Skolem theorem says that if a first-order theory has infinite models, then it has models whose domains are only countable. Cantor's theorem says that some sets are uncountable. Skolem's Paradox arises when we notice that the basic principles of Cantorian set theory - i.e., the very principles used to prove Cantor's theorem on the existence of uncountable...
[Revised entry by Dominic Murphy on February 5, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Philosophical discussions of mental disorder fall into three families. First, there are topics that arise when we treat psychiatry as a special science and deal with it using the methods and concepts of philosophy of science. This includes discussion of such issues as explanation, reduction and classification. Second, there are conceptual issues that arise when we try to understand the very idea of mental illness and its ethical and experiential dimensions. Third, there are interactions between psychopathology and the philosophy of...
[Revised entry by Carlo Rovelli on February 4, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) is the most recent among the interpretations of quantum mechanics that are widely discussed today. It was introduced in 1996, with quantum gravity as a remote motivation (Rovelli 1996); interests has grown since, first very slowly, but steadily, and has peaked during the last years (see Calosi and Riedel 2024, also for a good account of the historical evolution of the interpretation)....
[Revised entry by Nicola Angius, Giuseppe Primiero, and Raymond Turner on February 3, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The philosophy of computer science is concerned with the ontological and methodological issues arising from within the academic discipline of computer science, and from the practice of software development and its commercial and industrial deployment. More specifically, the philosophy of computer science considers the ontology and epistemology of computational systems, focusing on problems associated with their specification, programming, implementation, verification and testing. The complex nature of computer programs ensures that many of the...
[Revised entry by Michael James and Adam Burgos on February 2, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The concept of race has historically signified the division of humanity into a small number of groups based upon five criteria: (1) Races reflect some type of biological foundation, be it Aristotelian essences or modern genes; (2) This biological foundation generates discrete racial groupings, such that all and only all members of one race share a set of biological characteristics that are not shared by members of other races; (3) This biological foundation is inherited from generation to generation, allowing observers to identify an...
[Revised entry by Don A. Howard and Marco Giovanelli on February 2, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) is well known as the most prominent physicist of the twentieth century. His contributions to twentieth-century philosophy of science, though of comparable importance, are less well known. Einstein's own philosophy of science is an original synthesis of elements drawn from sources as diverse as neo-Kantianism, conventionalism, and logical empiricism, its distinctive feature being its novel blending of realism with a holist, underdeterminationist form of conventionalism. Of special note...
[Revised entry by Paul Russell and Anders Kraal on November 15, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] David Hume's various writings concerning problems of religion are among the most important and influential contributions on this topic. In these writings Hume advances a systematic, sceptical critique of the philosophical foundations of various theological systems. Whatever interpretation one takes of Hume's philosophy as a whole, it is certainly true that one of his most basic philosophical objectives is to discredit the doctrines and dogmas of traditional theistic, and especially Christian, belief. There are,...
[Revised entry by William Ramsey on November 12, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist and have no role to play in a mature science of the mind. Descartes famously challenged much of what we take for granted, but he insisted that, for the most part, we can be confident about the content of our own minds. Eliminative materialists go further than Descartes on this point, since they...
[Revised entry by David Sullivan on November 12, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817 - 1881) mediated the transition from the exuberance of German idealism, in the first half of the nineteenth century, to the sober, scholarly and scientific ethos that came to prevail in the second half. In Lotze's work, he adapted the notion of "chief" or defining problems in the philosophical sub-disciplines, inherited from Herbart, and brought opposing approaches to bear on them, preparing the way for the modern textbook. A professor in a changing situation, he mostly restricted...
[New Entry by Theodore M. Lechterman, Emma Saunders-Hastings, and Rob Reich on November 12, 2024.] Philanthropy involves the voluntary contribution of money or other goods and resources for broadly public purposes. Unlike taxation, contributions are not coerced: rather, their magnitude, their direction, and often their specific use is determined by the donor's discretion. Unlike the case of ordinary market exchange, the giver does not ask or receive payment for what she offers, though she may receive psychological, reputational, or even material benefits from her gift (e.g., she may feel a "warm glow", see her...
[Revised entry by Katharine Jenkins, Matthew Cull, Sally Haslanger, and Ásta on November 8, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Metaphysics is the study of the basic structure of reality, of what there is and what it is like. It considers, for example, concepts such as identity, causation, substance, and kind, that seem to be presupposed by any form of inquiry; and it attempts to determine what there is at the most general level. For example, are there minds in addition to bodies? Do things persist through change? Is there free will or is all action determined by prior events? But since metaphysics not only concerns itself with what...
[Revised entry by Rebecca Copenhaver on November 7, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Thomas Reid held a direct realist theory of memory. Like his direct realism about perception, Reid developed his account as an alternative to the model of the mind that he called 'the theory of ideas.' On such a theory, mental operations such as perception and memory have mental states - ideas or impressions - as their direct objects. These mental states are understood as representations that encode information about their causes. The mind is directed towards and reads off from these representations,...
[New Entry by Robin L. West on November 6, 2024.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Robin L. West replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.]...
[Revised entry by Katalin Bimbó on November 5, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Combinatory logic (henceforth: CL) is an elegant and powerful logical theory that is connected to many areas of logic, and has found applications in other disciplines, especially, in computer science and mathematics. CL was originally invented as a continuation of the reduction of the set of logical constants to a singleton set in classical first-order...
[New Entry by J. L. Schellenberg on November 5, 2024.] This entry explores six general approaches to the reconciliation of reason and religious commitment and the relations among them. Though it touches on the intellectual status of theism and the rational credentials of Christianity, these are not its central themes. Instead, it addresses the supernatural or transcendent reference that makes religious commitment at once philosophically interesting and philosophically problematic, examining the main ways of seeking to remove the latter feature without imperiling the former....
[Revised entry by Henry Pickford and Lambert Zuidervaart on November 4, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Theodor W. Adorno (1903 - 1969) was one of the most important philosophers, cultural, and music critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than many of his contemporaries, such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jurgen Habermas, Germany's...
[Revised entry by Cressida Heyes on November 1, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The laden phrase "identity politics" has come to signify a wide range of political activity and theorizing founded in the shared experiences of injustice of members of certain social groups. Rather than organizing solely around belief systems, programmatic manifestos, or party affiliation, identity political formations typically aim to secure the political freedom of a specific constituency marginalized within its larger context. Members of that constituency assert or reclaim ways of understanding their distinctiveness that challenge...
[Revised entry by Maria Aloni on October 30, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] In logic, disjunction is a binary connective ((vee)) classically interpreted as a truth function the output of which is true if at least one of the input sentences (disjuncts) is true, and false otherwise. Its supposed connection with disjunctive words of natural language like or has long intrigued philosophers, logicians and linguists. In this entry we give an overview of logical and linguistic analyses of disjunction with focus on developments at the interface between logic and language. Sections 1 and 2 present...
[New Entry by Muhammad U. Faruque and Mohammed Rustom on October 30, 2024.] ʿAyn al-Quḍāt was a first-rate philosopher, Sufi master, theologian, legal judge, poet, and scriptural exegete. He was a highly innovative author who wrote in both Arabic and Persian, and whose ideas in so many domains, from cosmology and metaphysics to epistemology and love theory, left an indelible mark upon later Islamic thought. His writings in Persian had a lasting influence upon various Sufi figures and orders in Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and particularly India, while his Arabic writings were studied in...
[Revised entry by Matthias Steup and Ram Neta on October 26, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] The term "epistemology" comes from the Greek words "episteme" and "logos". "Episteme" can be translated as "knowledge" or "understanding" or "acquaintance", while "logos" can be translated as "account" or "argument" or "reason". Just as each of these different translations captures some facet of the meaning of these Greek terms, so too does each translation capture a different facet of...
[Revised entry by Paul Weirich on October 24, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Causal decision theory adopts principles of rational choice that attend to an act's consequences. It maintains that an account of rational choice must use causality to identify the considerations that make a choice rational. Given a set of options constituting a decision problem, decision theory recommends an option that maximizes utility, that is, an option...
[Revised entry by Jeroen van den Hoven, Martijn Blaauw, Wolter Pieters, and Martijn Warnier on October 4, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Human beings value their privacy and the protection of their personal sphere of life. They value some control over who knows what about them. They certainly do not want their personal information to be accessible to just anyone at any time. But recent advances in information technology threaten privacy and have reduced the amount of control over personal data and open up the possibility of a range of negative consequences as a result of access to personal data. In the second half of the 20th century data protection regimes...
[New Entry by Bart Geurts on October 3, 2024.] Compare and contrast the following scenarios. In the first, Betty sends Fred an email saying that she will be in town tomorrow, and then sends the same message to Barney. In the second scenario, Betty addresses the two men jointly with one message. In both scenarios, Barney and Fred are apprised of the fact that Betty will be in town tomorrow, but otherwise their information states are palpably different: whereas in the first scenario they unwittingly share the same information, in the second scenario, it is common ground between...
[Revised entry by Michael LeBuffe on October 1, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach was a philosopher, translator, and prominent social figure of the French Enlightenment. In his philosophical writings Holbach developed a deterministic and materialistic metaphysics, which grounded his polemics against organized religion as well as his utilitarian ethical and political theory. As a translator, Holbach made significant contributions to the European Enlightenment in science and religion. He translated German works on chemistry and geology into French, summarizing many of the...
[Revised entry by Willem deVries on October 1, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (1912 - 89) was an original, systematic, and profound American philosopher. His effort in philosophy was "to formulate a scientifically oriented, naturalistic realism which would 'save the appearances'" (AR: 289). Broadly educated in philosophy, the influences on Sellars's work range from critical realism and logical positivism to German Idealism and phenomenology. Sellars was influential in part through his editorial work as a co-founder of the...
[Revised entry by Alberto Giubilini on October 1, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Reading the philosophical and historical literature on conscience, the first thing one would notice is the variety of meanings and psychological and ethical assessments of the concept. Different philosophical, religious and common sense approaches to conscience have emphasized different aspects of the following, broad characterization: through our individual conscience, we become aware of our deeply held moral principles, we are motivated to act upon them, and we assess our character, our behavior and ultimately our...
[Revised entry by George Karamanolis on October 1, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Numenius, a Platonist philosopher of the mid 2nd century CE, had considerable impact on later Platonism, most notably on Plotinus (3rd c.) and Porphyry (3rd-4th c). His work, surviving only in fragments, is important both historically and philosophically. Its historical significance lies mainly in that it shows how much of Plotinus' philosophy, especially Plotinus' metaphysics, was inspired by earlier Platonists such as Numenius, who was one of...
[New Entry by Mark Boespflug and Elizabeth Jackson on October 1, 2024.] Doxastic voluntarism is the thesis that our beliefs are subject to voluntary control. While there's some controversy as to what "voluntary control" amounts to (see s1.2), it's often understood as direct control: the ability to bring about a state of affairs "just like that", without having to do anything else. Most of us have direct control over, for instance, bringing to mind an image of a pine tree. Can one, in like...
[Revised entry by Justin Steinberg on September 30, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] At least in anglophone countries, Spinoza's reputation as a political thinker is eclipsed by his reputation as a rationalist metaphysician. Nevertheless, Spinoza was a penetrating political theorist whose writings have enduring significance. In his two political treatises, Spinoza advances a number of forceful and original arguments in defense of democratic governance, freedom of thought and expression, and the subordination of religion to the state. On the basis of his naturalistic metaphysics, Spinoza also...
[Revised entry by Catherine Legg and Christopher Hookway on September 30, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that - very broadly - understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. This general idea has attracted a remarkably rich and at times contrary range of interpretations, including: that all philosophical concepts should be tested via scientific experimentation, that a claim is true if and only if it is useful (relatedly: if a philosophical theory does not contribute directly to social progress then it is not worth much), that experience consists...
[Revised entry by Bryan Van Norden on September 27, 2024. Changes to: Bibliography] Mencius (fourth century BCE) was a Confucian philosopher. Often referred to as the "Second Sage" of Confucianism (meaning second in importance only to Confucius himself), Mencius is best known for his claim that "human nature is good." He has attracted interest in recent Western philosophy because his views on the virtues, ethical cultivation, and human nature have intriguing similarities with but also provocative differences from familiar Humean and Aristotelian formulations....
[Revised entry by Carl Huffman on September 27, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Philolaus of Croton, in southern Italy, was a Greek philosopher/scientist, who lived from ca. 470 to ca. 385 BC and was thus a contemporary of Socrates. He is one of the three most prominent figures in the Pythagorean tradition, born a hundred years after Pythagoras himself and fifty years before Archytas. He wrote one book, On Nature, which was probably the first book to be written by a Pythagorean. There has been considerable controversy concerning the 20+ fragments which have been preserved in Philolaus' name. It...
[Revised entry by Sara L. Uckelman on September 26, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] William of Sherwood (Guilelmus, Willelmus, Schyrwode, Shirwode, Shyreswode, and others) was a 13th century English logician who taught at the University of Paris and who worked in the Realist tradition of logic. His Introduction to Logic, written in the middle of the century, was one of the four most influential textbooks on logics in the 13th century, along with Lambert of Auxerre's Summary, Roger Bacon's Art and Science of Logic, and Peter of Spain's Summaries of Logic....
[Revised entry by K. Scarlett Kingsley and Richard Parry on September 25, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] In the middle of the fifth century BCE, Empedocles of Acragas formulated a philosophical program in hexameter verse that pioneered the influential four-part theory of roots (air, water, earth, and fire) along with two active principles of Love and Strife, which influenced later philosophy, medicine, mysticism, cosmology, and religion. The philosophical system responded to Parmenides' rejection of change while embracing religious injunctions and magical practices. As a result, Empedocles has occupied a significant position...
[Revised entry by John Hare and Jennifer Herdt on September 25, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] From the beginning of the Abrahamic faiths and of Greek philosophy, religion and morality have been closely intertwined in Western thought. This is true whether we go back within Greek philosophy or within Christianity and Judaism and Islam. This entry proceeds chronologically, seeking to describe the main options as they have occurred historically. This will make evident that morality and religion have been inseparable until very recently, and that our moral vocabularies are still deeply infused with this history....
[New Entry by Paul Kalligas on September 25, 2024.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Paul Kalligas replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.]...
[Revised entry by David McNaughton on September 24, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Richard Price (1723 - 1791) was a prominent dissenting minister and a leading figure in philosophical and political thought in the second half of the eighteenth century. As well as publishing on a wide range of subjects, including ethics, politics, theology, and probability theory, he also greatly advanced work on actuarial tables, which enabled insurers to predict more accurately the life-expectancy of people in their differing circumstances. His passionate commitment to the cause of liberty led him to take a prominent public role in...
[Revised entry by Peter Dybjer and Erik Palmgren on September 23, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Intuitionistic type theory (also constructive type theory or Martin-Lof type theory) is a formal logical system and philosophical foundation for constructive mathematics. It is a full-scale system which aims to play a similar role for constructive mathematics as Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory does for classical mathematics. It is based on the...
[Revised entry by Fraser MacBride and Christopher Daly on September 23, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] This much is agreed: "x makes it true that p" is a construction that signifies, if it signifies anything at all, a relation borne to a truth-bearer by something else, a truth-maker. But it isn't generally agreed what that something else might be, or what truth-bearers are, or what the character might be of the relationship that holds, if it does, between them, or even whether such a relationship ever does hold. Indeed sometimes there's barely enough agreement amongst the parties to the...
[Revised entry by Neil Lewis and Nicola Polloni on September 23, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1168 - 1253), Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 to 1253, was one of the most prominent and remarkable figures in thirteenth-century English intellectual life. A philosopher, theologian, and student of nature, Grosseteste also translated and commented on works by Aristotle and Greek patristic thinkers. He played a pivotal role in the development of Aristotelianism, being among the first Latin philosophers to incorporate theories of Avicenna and Averroes, while also drawing heavily from Augustine. Grosseteste...
[Revised entry by Herman Saatkamp and Martin Coleman on September 23, 2024. Changes to: Bibliography] Philosopher, poet, literary and cultural critic, George Santayana is a principal figure in Classical American Philosophy. His naturalism and emphasis on creative imagination were harbingers of important intellectual turns on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a naturalist before naturalism grew popular; he appreciated multiple perfections before multiculturalism became an issue; he thought of philosophy as literature before it became a theme in American and European scholarly circles; and he managed to naturalize Platonism, update Aristotle,...
[Revised entry by Frédérique de Vignemont on September 20, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] At the sensory level we continuously receive a flow of information about our own body through external and internal perceptions. Not only can we see our body and touch it, but we also have several inner receptors that convey information about the position of our limbs, the balance of our body, and its physiological condition. Unlike external perception, the inner sensory flow never stops and cannot be voluntarily controlled. Thus, an important amount of information is constantly available whether we want it or not, whether we pay...
[Revised entry by John Morreall on September 19, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Although most people value humor, philosophers have said little about it, and what they have said is largely critical. Three traditional theories of laughter and humor are examined, along with the theory that humor evolved from mock-aggressive play in apes. Understanding humor as play helps counter the traditional objections to it and reveals some of its benefits, including those it shares with philosophy itself....
[Revised entry by Kevin Connolly and Adrienne Prettyman on September 19, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] "Perceptual Learning" refers, roughly, to long-lasting changes in perception that result from practice or experience (see E.J. Gibson 1963). William James, for instance, writes about how a person can become able to differentiate by taste between the upper and lower half of a bottle for a particular kind of wine (1890: 509). Assuming that the change in the person's perception lasts, is genuinely perceptual (rather than, say, a learned inference), and is based on prior experience, James' case is a case of perceptual...
[Revised entry by Daniel Philpott on September 17, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Sovereignty, though its meanings have varied across history, also has a core meaning, supreme authority within a territory. It is a modern notion of political authority. Historical variants can be understood along three dimensions - the holder of sovereignty, the absoluteness of sovereignty, and the internal and external dimensions of sovereignty. The state is the political institution in which sovereignty is embodied. An assemblage of states forms a sovereign states system....
[Revised entry by Bryan Van Norden on September 17, 2024. Changes to: Bibliography] Wang Yangming (1472 - 1529) was a Chinese statesman, general, and Neo - Confucian philosopher. He was one of the leading critics of the orthodox Neo - Confucianism of Zhu Xi (1130 - 1200). Wang is perhaps best known for his doctrine of the "unity of knowing and acting," which can be interpreted as a denial of the possibility of weakness of will....
[Revised entry by Bryan Van Norden and Nicholaos Jones on September 17, 2024. Changes to: Bibliography] Huayan is one of the most philosophically interesting and historically influential Buddhist schools. The distinctive contributions of Huayan include the doctrines that "one is all, and all is one," that ultimate reality is ontologically identical with the illusory world of common sense, and that realizing these facts leads to universal compassion. Huayan is known also for the incisive nature of its arguments, particularly in Fazang's "Rafter Dialogue" and Zongmi's On the Origin of...
[Revised entry by Chris Fraser on September 3, 2024. Changes to: Bibliography] The "School of Names" (ming jia) is the traditional Chinese label for a diverse group of Warring States (479 - 221 B.C.E.) thinkers who shared an interest in language, disputation, and metaphysics. They were notorious for logic-chopping, purportedly idle conceptual puzzles, and paradoxes such as "Today go to Yue but arrive yesterday" and "A white horse is not a horse." Because reflection on language in ancient China centered on "names" (ming, words) and their...
[Revised entry by Chris Fraser on September 2, 2024. Changes to: Bibliography] The Mohist Canons are a set of brief statements on a variety of philosophical and other topics by anonymous members of the Mohist school, an influential philosophical, social, and religious movement of China's Warring States period (479 - 221 B.C.).[1] Written and compiled most likely between the late 4th and mid 3rd century B.C., the Canons are often referred to as the...
[Revised entry by Chris Fraser on September 1, 2024. Changes to: Bibliography] Mohism was an influential philosophical, social, and religious movement that flourished during the Warring States era (479 - 221 BCE) in ancient China. Mohism originates in the teachings of Mo Di, or "Mozi" ("Master Mo," fl. ca. 430 BCE), from whom it takes its name. Mozi and his followers initiated philosophical argumentation and debate in China. They were the first in the tradition to engage, like Socrates in ancient Greece, in an explicit, reflective search for objective moral standards and to give...
[Revised entry by Emine Hande Tuna on September 1, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The phenomenon of "imaginative resistance" refers to psychological difficulties otherwise competent imaginers experience when engaging in particular imaginative activities prompted by works of fiction. Usually, we seem to have no trouble engaging with time-travel or space-exploration stories, superhero movies, or talking non-human animal fables. At other times, we do not seem to be able to play along that easily; for instance, when we are presented with an alternative Macbeth where...
[Revised entry by Jouko Väänänen on August 31, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Second-order logic has a subtle role in the philosophy of mathematics. It is stronger than first order logic in that it incorporates "for all properties" into the syntax, while first order logic can only say "for all elements". At the same time it is arguably weaker than set theory in that its quantifiers range over one limited domain at a time, while set theory has the universalist approach in that its quantifiers range over all possible domains. This stronger-than-first-order-logic/weaker-than-set-theory duality is the...
[Revised entry by Hans Hansen on August 30, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Two competing conceptions of fallacies are that they are false but popular beliefs and that they are deceptively bad arguments. These we may distinguish as the belief and argument conceptions of fallacies. Academic writers who have given the most attention to the subject of fallacies insist on, or at least prefer, the argument conception of fallacies, but the belief conception is prevalent in popular and non-scholarly discourse. As we shall see, there are yet other conceptions of what fallacies are, but the present inquiry focuses on...
[Revised entry by Neal Tognazzini and D. Justin Coates on August 30, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Blame is a common reaction to something of negative normative significance about someone or their behavior. A paradigm case, perhaps, would be when one person wrongs another, and the latter responds with resentment and a verbal rebuke, but of course we also blame others for their attitudes and characters (Eshleman 2004, Smith 2005, Holroyd 2012). Thus blaming scenarios typically involve a wide range of inward and outward responses to a wrongful or bad action, attitude, or character (such responses include: beliefs, desires,...
[Revised entry by Russell Dancy and Giulia De Cesaris on August 29, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, figure1.svg, figure2.svg] Speusippus of Athens was the son of Plato's sister Potone; he became head of the Academy on Plato's death in 348/347 and remained its head for eight years (Diogenes Laertius, Lives IV 1), apparently until his death. His date of birth is harder to get a fix on; it has reasonably been estimated at ca. 410. He apparently wrote a lot: "a great many treatises and many dialogues" (Lives IV 4; Diogenes lists about 30 titles, but his bibliography, by his own admission, is incomplete). We have very...
[Revised entry by Andrea Staiti and Luca Oliva on August 27, 2024. Changes to: math.html] Heinrich Rickert was born in Gdańsk (then Danzig, in Prussia) on May 25th 1863. His father Heinrich Rickert Sr. (1833 - 1902) was a politician and editor in Berlin. Heinrich Sr. was a liberal democrat particularly invested in the cause of the German Jews. In 1890 Heinrich Sr. founded the Society Against Anti-Semitism in Berlin (Zijderveld 2006, 9). This is an interesting fact about Rickert Jr.'s background, considering that he eventually worked to...
[New Entry by Fedor Benevich on August 24, 2024.] The core issue of Islamic metaphysics is whether the essences of things are distinct from their existence. The philosophical intuition underlying the distinction between essence and existence is that what something is (e.g., human, horse) is different from the fact that it exists. The debate on the distinction between essence and existence in Islamic philosophy revolves around the question whether there is such a distinction to be made at all and, if so, then whether this distinction is between two features that are...
[Revised entry by Joel Pust on August 23, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, supplement.html] This entry addresses the nature and epistemological role of intuition by considering the following questions: (1) What are intuitions?, (2) What roles do they serve in philosophical (and other "armchair") inquiry?, (3) Ought they serve such roles?, (4) What are the implications of the empirical investigation of intuitions for their proper roles?, and (in the supplementary document titled "The Logical Structure of the Method of Cases")...
[Revised entry by Maria Alvarez and Jonathan Way on August 22, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Why should the UN intervene in this international crisis? Why did the Ancient Egyptians mummify their dead? Should Huck Finn have helped Jim escape and, if so, why? Why is she selling her car? What shall we do this evening? Questions like these that explicitly or implicitly ask for reasons, specifically reasons for action, are ubiquitous. Most contemporary philosophers who have sought to understand the nature of reasons for acting start by distinguishing two kinds: "normative" reasons - that is, reasons which, very...
[Revised entry by J.B. Shank on August 21, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Francois-Marie d'Arouet (1694 - 1778), better known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French writer and public activist who played a singular role in defining the eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment. At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept of each. Yet in other ways Voltaire was not a philosopher at all in the modern sense of the term. He wrote as many plays, stories, and poems as patently philosophical...
[Revised entry by Brian Copenhaver on August 21, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, figdesc.html, sefirot.svg] A few paragraphs from a speech that Giovanni Pico (1463 - 1494) did not write about human dignity have drawn more comment than any other statement by a philosopher of his day. No philosophers of post-medieval, pre-Cartesian Europe are better known now than the prince and his contemporaries, Erasmus (b. 1466), Machiavelli (b. 1469) and Thomas More (b. 1478). Unlike them, he was fully committed to philosophia, as he understood it, and he was remarkably original - indeed, idiosyncratic. His persistently esoteric and...
[Revised entry by Frédéric Seyler on August 19, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Michel Henry (1922 - 2002) developed a radically revised approach to phenomenology through a critical reading of the phenomenological tradition (especially of Husserl and Heidegger). Henry named his approach "phenomenology of life" and, before that, "material phenomenology" or "radical phenomenology". He was, in part, influenced by the work of Maine de Biran. Perhaps the most characteristic, as well as most controversial, feature of Henry's phenomenology of life is that...
[New Entry by Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson on August 16, 2024.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.] Environmental aesthetics is a relatively new sub-field of...
[Revised entry by Terence Ball and Antis Loizides on August 16, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] James Mill (1773 - 1836) was a Scots-born political philosopher, historian, psychologist, educational theorist, economist, and legal, political and penal reformer. Well-known and highly regarded in his day, he is now all but forgotten. Mill's reputation now rests mainly on two biographical facts. The first is that his first-born son was John Stuart Mill, who became even more eminent than his father. The second is that the elder Mill was the collaborator and ally of Jeremy Bentham, whose subsequent reputation also eclipsed the elder...
[Revised entry by Greg Restall on August 15, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Substructural logics are non-classical logics notable for the absence of one or more structural rules present in classical logic. Initial interest in substructural logics developed independently in the second half of the twentieth century, through considerations from philosophy (relevant logics), from linguistics (the Lambek calculus) and from the mathematics of proof theory (linear logic). Since the 1990s, these independent lines of inquiry have been understood to be different aspects of a unified field, and techniques...
[Revised entry by Waheed Hussain and Margaret Kohn on August 14, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] In ordinary political discourse, the "common good" refers to those facilities - whether material, cultural or institutional - that the members of a community provide to all members in order to fulfill a relational obligation they all have to care for certain interests that they have in common. Some canonical examples of the common good in a modern liberal democracy include: the road system; public parks; police protection and public safety; courts and the judicial system; public schools; museums and cultural...
[Revised entry by Richard Allen on August 13, 2024. Changes to: Bibliography] David Hartley (1705 - 57) is the author of Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (1749) - a wide-ranging synthesis of neurology, moral psychology, and spirituality (i.e., our "frame," "duty," and "expectations"). The Observations gained dedicated advocates in Britain, America, and Continental Europe, who appreciated it both for its science and its spirituality. As science, the work grounds consciousness in neuro-physiology, mind in brain. On...
[Revised entry by Lori Gruen and Susana Monsó on August 12, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Is there something distinctive about humanity that justifies the idea that humans have moral status while non-humans do not? Providing an answer to this question has become increasingly important among philosophers as well as those outside of philosophy who are interested in our treatment of non-human animals. For some, answering this question will enable us to better understand the nature of human beings and the proper scope of our moral obligations. Some argue that there is an answer that can distinguish humans from the rest of the...
[Revised entry by Barry Maund on August 9, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, color-science-complexities.html, color-special-topics.html] Colors are of philosophical interest for a number of reasons. One of the most important reasons is that color raises serious metaphysical issues, concerning the nature both of physical reality and of the mind. Among these issues are questions concerning whether color is part of a mind-independent reality, and what account we can give of experiences of color. These issues have been, and continue to be, inextricably linked with important epistemological and semantic issues....
[Revised entry by Christian Wildberg on August 9, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Olympiodorus of Alexandria, presumably a late pupil of Ammonius Hermeiou, the commentator on Aristotle and teacher of Simplicius and Philoponus, was one of the last pagans to teach philosophy at the school of Alexandria in the 6th century. He interpreted classical philosophical works in his lectures, mainly texts by Plato and Aristotle; we still possess three of his commentaries on Plato and two on Aristotle. At times, these lectures read like carefully crafted pieces of pedagogy, but at other times, they read more like more or...
[New Entry by Laura W. Ekstrom on August 8, 2024.] Stemming from theos (God) and dike (justice), a theodicy is an attempt to show how the justice, goodness and other features of God can be upheld in light of the evils in our world. As such, theodicies suggest reasons for which God would cause or allow the suffering, premature death, loss, and harm we experience and observe, including genocides, illnesses, persistent pain, grief, natural disasters, and assaults....
[Revised entry by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong on August 1, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] "Moral Skepticism" names a diverse collection of views that deny or raise doubts about common beliefs in various roles of reason in morality. Different versions of moral skepticism deny or doubt moral knowledge, justified moral belief, moral truth, moral facts or properties, and reasons to be moral. Despite this diversity among the views that get labeled "moral...
[Revised entry by Elizabeth Anderson on August 1, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Feminist epistemology and philosophy of science studies the ways in which gender does and ought to influence our conceptions of knowledge, knowers, and practices of inquiry and justification. It identifies how dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification disadvantage women and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform them to serve the interests of these groups. Various feminist epistemologists and philosophers of science argue that dominant knowledge practices disadvantage women by...
[Revised entry by Carl Craver, James Tabery, and Phyllis Illari on August 1, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] The concept of mechanism has been an important organizing principle in science and philosophy since at least the early modern period (Dijksterhuis 1950 [1961]; Boas 1952). The nature of that organizing principle, and precisely how it scaffolds the organization of material knowledge, has changed considerably over time. In late twentieth century philosophy of science, the term "mechanism" came to stand for a kind of theoretical structure according to which some capacity or behavior of a whole or an endstate of a process is...
[Revised entry by Michael Rohlf on July 31, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) is the central figure in modern philosophy. He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism, set the terms for much of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, and continues to exercise a significant influence today in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and other fields. The fundamental idea of Kant's "critical philosophy" - especially in his three Critiques: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), the Critique of...
[Revised entry by Jeff Speaks on July 31, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] The term "theory of meaning" has figured, in one way or another, in a great number of philosophical disputes over the last century. Unfortunately, this term has also been used to mean a great number of different things. In this entry, the focus is on two sorts of "theory of meaning". The first sort of theory - a semantic theory - is a theory which assigns semantic contents to expressions of a language. The second sort of theory - a metasemantic theory - is a theory which states the facts in virtue...
[Revised entry by R. Jay Wallace and Benjamin Kiesewetter on July 31, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Practical reason is the general human capacity for resolving, through reflection, the question of what one is to do. Deliberation of this kind is practical in at least two senses. First, it is practical in its subject matter, insofar as it is concerned with action. But it is also practical in its consequences or its issue, insofar as reflection about action itself directly moves people to act. Our capacity for deliberative self-determination raises two sets of philosophical problems. For one thing, there are questions about how deliberation...
[Revised entry by Graciela De Pierris and Michael Friedman on July 31, 2024. Changes to: Bibliography] Kant famously attempted to "answer" what he took to be Hume's skeptical view of causality, most explicitly in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783); and, because causality, for Kant, is a central example of a category or pure concept of the understanding, his relationship to Hume on this topic is central to his philosophy as a whole. Moreover, because Hume's famous discussion of causality and induction is equally central to his philosophy, understanding the relationship between the...
[Revised entry by Thomas Adajian on July 30, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] The definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy. Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy. The philosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been debated. There is also disagreement, at a second-order level, about how to classify definitions of...
[Revised entry by Douglas Lackey on July 29, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] J. N. Findlay was a twentieth century South African philosopher who taught at universities in South Africa, New Zealand, England, and North America. He was respected for his analytical abilities, and is credited by Arthur Prior with being the founder of tense logic. In the philosophy of mind and language, he maintained the tradition of Brentano, Meinong, and Husserl against the contrary tradition of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. In a series of Gifford lectures, he argued for a mystical metaphysics that was very much influenced by...
[Revised entry by Timothy Yenter and Ezio Vailati on July 29, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Samuel Clarke (1675 - 1729) was the most influential British metaphysician and philosophical theologian in the generation between Locke and Berkeley, and only Shaftesbury rivals him in ethics. In all three areas he was critical of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Toland. Clarke defended natural religion against the view that nature constitutes a self-sufficient system, and he defended revealed...
[Revised entry by Jeffrey K. McDonough on July 26, 2024. Changes to: Bibliography] Although better known today for his bold metaphysics and optimistic theodicy, Leibniz's intellectual contributions extended well beyond what is now generally thought of as philosophy or theology. Remarkably in an era that knew the likes of Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, Hooke and Newton, Leibniz stood out as one of the most important figures in the development of the Scientific Revolution. This entry will attempt to provide an overview of the central themes of Leibniz's philosophy of physics broadly understood, as well...
[Revised entry by Julie Brumberg-Chaumont and E. Jennifer Ashworth on July 22, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] A singular term is a term such as a proper name, a demonstrative pronoun, like 'this [one]' ('hic' in Latin), or a combination of a demonstrative pronoun and a common name, like ('this man'), ('hic homo' in Latin). This is the stable list of discrete terms we find in terminist tracts from the beginning of the thirteenth century on. What they have in common is that they all signify exactly one individual thing. These expressions, as well as the metalinguistic expressions used to...
[Revised entry by Nickolas Pappas on July 22, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] If aesthetics is the philosophical inquiry into beauty, or another aesthetic value, and art, then the striking feature of Plato's dialogues is that he devotes as much time as he does to both topics and yet treats them oppositely. Art, mostly as represented by poetry, is closer to a greatest danger than any other phenomenon Plato speaks of. Beauty is close to a greatest good. Can there be such a thing as "Plato's aesthetics" that contains both positions?...
[Revised entry by M. A. Roberts on July 19, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The nonidentity problem raises questions regarding both the moral obligations agents have in respect of possible future people - people, that is, who do not yet but may exist at some future time - and how those obligations (to the extent we have them) are most credibly explained. It today remains among the most challenging problems in all of population ethics....
[Revised entry by Tzvi Langermann on July 19, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The centuries following the remarkable achievement of Ibn Sina (Avicenna; d. 1037) were a remarkably creative period in the sciences and philosophy. Sa'd ibn Mansur Ibn Kammūna, a Jew from Baghdad, actively participated in the lively discourse of his day. In his copious writings he takes up the entire gamut of philosophical issues discussed by his contemporaries. Editions, translations and studies of works by Ibn Kammūna and other thinkers of the time have appeared in recent years. Nonetheless, it remains difficult at...
[Revised entry by Thomas Bolander on July 19, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] In the context of language, self-reference is used to denote a statement that refers to itself or its own referent. The most famous example of a self-referential sentence is the liar sentence: "This sentence is not true." Self-reference is often used in a broader context as well. For instance, a picture could be considered self-referential if it contains a copy of itself (see the animated image above); and a piece of literature could be considered self-referential if it includes a reference to the work itself. In...
[New Entry by Marc Artiga on July 19, 2024.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Marc Artiga replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.] The concept of information is widely used in the biological sciences....
[Revised entry by Michael Beaney and Thomas Raysmith on July 18, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, bib1.html, bib2.html, bib3.html, bib4.html, bib5.html, bib6.html, s1.html, s2.html, s3.html, s4.html, s5.html, s6.html] Analysis has always been at the heart of philosophical method, but it has been understood and practised in many different ways. Perhaps, in its broadest sense, it might be defined as a process of identifying or working back to what is more fundamental by means of which something, initially taken as given, can be derived, explained or reconstructed. The derivation, explanation or reconstruction is sometimes conceived as the corresponding process of synthesis, but it is more often counted as part of the analytic project as a whole. This allows great...
[Revised entry by Jeremy Avigad and Richard Zach on July 18, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The epsilon calculus is a logical formalism developed by David Hilbert in the service of his program in the foundations of mathematics. The epsilon operator is a term-forming operator which replaces quantifiers in ordinary predicate logic. Specifically, in the calculus, a term (varepsilon x A) denotes some (x) satisfying (A(x)), if there is one. In Hilbert's Program, the epsilon terms play the role of ideal elements; the aim of Hilbert's finitistic consistency proofs is to give a procedure which removes such terms from a formal...
[Revised entry by José Bermúdez and Arnon Cahen on July 17, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The central idea behind the theory of nonconceptual mental content is that some mental states can represent the world even though the bearer of those mental states need not possess the concepts required to specify their content. This basic idea has been developed in different ways and applied to different categories of mental state. Not all of these developments and applications are consistent with each other, but each offers a challenge to the widely held view that the way a creature can represent the world is determined by its conceptual...
[Revised entry by Sergei Artemov, Melvin Fitting, and Thomas Studer on July 17, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] You may say, "I know that Abraham Lincoln was a tall man. " In turn you may be asked how you know. You would almost certainly not reply semantically, Hintikka-style, that Abraham Lincoln was tall in all situations compatible with your knowledge. Instead you would more likely say, "I read about Abraham Lincoln's height in several books, and I have seen photographs of him next to other people. " One certifies knowledge by providing a reason, a justification. Hintikka semantics captures knowledge as true belief....
[Revised entry by Peter Øhrstrøm and Per Hasle on July 11, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Future contingents are contingent statements about the future - such as future events, actions, states etc. To qualify as contingent the predicted event, state, action or whatever is at stake must neither be impossible nor inevitable. Statements such as "My mother shall go to London" or "There will be a sea-battle tomorrow" could serve as standard examples. What could be called the problem of future contingents concerns how to ascribe truth-values to such statements. If there are several possible decisions out of...
[Revised entry by Bart Geurts, David I. Beaver, and Emar Maier on July 11, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, box1.svg, box2.svg, diagram.svg, figdesc.html] In the early 1980s, Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) was introduced by Hans Kamp as a theoretical framework for dealing with issues in the semantics and pragmatics of anaphora and tense (Kamp 1981a); a very similar theory was developed independently by Irene Heim (1982). The distinctive features of DRT, to be discussed below, are that it is a mentalist and representationalist theory of interpretation, and that it is a theory of the interpretation not only of individual sentences but of discourse, as well. In these respects...
[New Entry by Szilvia Szanyi on July 7, 2024.] Alongside Madhyamaka, Yogācāra is one of the two major philosophical traditions of Mahāyāna Buddhism that originated in India. The philosophical and soteriological ideas set forth in the Yogācāra works had a great impact on the development of Buddhist thought not only in the Indian subcontinent but also in other parts of Asia, especially in China, Japan and Tibet. Besides its highly influential exposition of the stages of the Mahāyāna path to liberation, the tradition developed several...
[Revised entry by Wilfrid Hodges on July 5, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]Model theory began with the study of formal languages and their interpretations, and of the kinds of classification that a particular formal language can make. Mainstream model theory is now a sophisticated branch of mathematics (see the entry on first-order model theory). But in a broader sense, model theory is the study of the interpretation of any language, formal or natural, by means of set-theoretic structures, with Alfred Tarski's truth definition as a paradigm. In this broader sense, model theory meets philosophy at several points, for example in the theory of logical consequence and in the semantics of natural languages. 1. Basic notions of model theory 2. Model-theoretic definition 3. Model-theoretic consequence 4. Expressive strength...
[Revised entry by Gillian Brock and David Miller on July 3, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Much ordinary discourse about political and moral matters invokes the language of needs. In such contexts claims about need are often thought to carry significant weight. By contrast, the role that needs should play in normative reasoning is contested among philosophers. In this article we discuss several core issues concerning needs in contemporary moral and political philosophy. We begin by discussing the normativity of needs and some of the disputes concerning the significance of needs claims....
[Revised entry by David Sidorsky and Robert Talisse on July 2, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Sidney Hook was a leading interpreter and proponent of Deweyan pragmatic naturalism from his years as Dewey's graduate student at Columbia in the 1920s through the six decades of his philosophical teaching and writing until his death in 1989. A notoriously scrappy polemicist, Hook identified with the attribution given to him as "Dewey's bulldog."...
[Revised entry by Seumas Miller on June 28, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] This entry is in four parts. The first part concerns the definition of torture and addresses the question, what is torture? The second part concerns the defining features of torture from a moral standpoint and addresses the question, what makes torture inherently morally wrong? For instance, it is generally held that torture is defined in part as the deliberate infliction of extreme suffering and that - by virtue of this defining feature - torture is morally wrong. Note that even actions or practices that are inherently morally wrong might...
[New Entry by Thomas Hurka on June 27, 2024.] If morality and self-interest don't always coincide - if sometimes doing what's right isn't also best for you - morality can sometimes require you to do what will be worse for you or to forgo an act that would benefit you. But some philosophers think a reasonable morality can't be too demanding in this sense and have proposed moral views that are less so....
[Revised entry by Thomas Ainsworth on June 27, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Aristotle famously contends that every physical object is a compound of matter and form. This doctrine has been dubbed "hylomorphism", a portmanteau of the Greek words for matter (hule) and form (eidos or morphe). Highly influential in the development of Medieval philosophy, Aristotle's hylomorphism has also enjoyed something of a renaissance in contemporary metaphysics....
[Revised entry by Mats Wahlberg on June 26, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] "Revelation" (lat. revelatio) is a translation of the Greek word apokalypsis, which means the removal of a veil so that something can be seen. Many religions appeal to purported divine revelations in order to explain and justify their characteristic beliefs about God, and revelation has usually been understood as an epistemic notion.[1] Paradigmatically, it refers to alleged instances of divine speaking or special divine acts in history, although in a more general sense "revelation" can denote any means of divine self-disclosure, for example through nature. The topic of divine revelation has been a long-standing and central focus in theology, and philosophical discussions have often taken their cues from Christian theological debates.[2] This entry will treat theological perspectives only in so far as they are relevant for philosophical questions about the purported nature and means of divine revelation and the justification of revelatory claims. 1. Conceptions of Divine Revelation...
[Revised entry by Kimberley Brownlee and David Jenkins on June 26, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] In almost all our activities, we engage with other people, usually in persistent connections or associations that vary according to our purposes. We have foundational associative experiences within our families; formative years of schooling with peers and teachers; workplace links with bosses, employees, and colleagues with whom we share at least corridors, carpet, and resources; and connections with like-minded companions, such as fellow hobbyists, devotees, friends, or union members....
[Revised entry by Lloyd Humberstone on June 25, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Natural language sentence-linking words (like "and", "or") have traditionally had aspects of their use simulated by corresponding connectives in various systems of formal logic. (In fact we use the word "connective" more generously, so that there don't have to be two or more sentences linked, allowing us to consider the analogues of words like "not" and "necessarily" as connectives too.) Among the questions this enterprise has raised are the following. (1)...
[Revised entry by Robert Fullinwider on June 21, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] "Affirmative action" means positive steps taken to increase the representation of women and minorities in areas of employment, education, and culture from which they have been historically excluded. When those steps involve preferential selection - selection on the basis of race, gender, or ethnicity - affirmative action generates intense controversy....
[Revised entry by Robert B. Griffiths on June 19, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The consistent histories, also known as decoherent histories, approach to quantum interpretation is broadly compatible with standard quantum mechanics as found in textbooks. However, the concept of measurement by which probabilities are introduced in standard quantum theory no longer plays a fundamental role. Instead, all quantum time dependence is probabilistic (stochastic), with probabilities given by the Born rule or its extensions. By requiring that the description of a quantum system be carried out...
[Revised entry by Tom Christiano and Sameer Bajaj on June 18, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Normative democratic theory deals with the moral foundations of democracy and democratic institutions, as well as the moral duties of democratic representatives and citizens. It is distinct from descriptive and explanatory democratic theory, which aim to describe and explain how democracy and democratic institutions function. Normative democracy theory aims to provide an account of when and why democracy is morally desirable as well as moral principles for guiding the design of democratic institutions and the actions of citizens and...
[Revised entry by Joel Smith on June 14, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, scepticism-indexicality.html, scope-of-immunity.html] Human beings are conscious not only of the world around them but also of themselves: their activities, their bodies, and their mental lives. They are, that is, self-conscious (or, equivalently, self-aware). Self-consciousness can be understood as an awareness of oneself. But a self-conscious subject is not just aware of something that merely happens to be themselves, as one is if one sees an old photograph without realising that it is of oneself. Rather a self-conscious subject is aware of themselves as themselves; it is manifest...
[Revised entry by Katherina Kinzel on June 13, 2024. Changes to: Bibliography] Wilhelm Windelband (1848 - 1915) was a German neo-Kantian philosopher. He is considered the founding father of the Baden (or Southwest) school of Neo-Kantianism. The Baden school included his student and successor at Heidelberg, Heinrich Rickert (1863 - 1936), and Rickert's student Emil Lask (1875 - 1915) as its core members. Alongside his contemporary Hermann Cohen (1842 - 1918) - the founder of the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism - Windelband is a central proponent of...
[Revised entry by Matthew Fulkerson on June 12, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The sense of touch is one of the central forms of perceptual experience. While it has often been overshadowed by vision in both philosophy and psychology, recent years have seen an increased interest in touch. Touch is thought to be one of the first senses to develop. Unlike the other modalities, which have distinct sensory organs, touch spans across the whole body using a variety of receptors in the skin, muscles, and viscera. It often combines these signals with motor feedback as we actively move and explore the world, and...
[Revised entry by Jaap Mansfeld and David Runia on June 10, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The great majority of Greek (and Roman) philosophical writings have been irretrievably lost. But this loss is made good to some extent not only by quotations from lost works recorded by later writers, but also by the varieties of ancient reportage that are extant. The modern name for these forms of reportage is 'doxography', which could be translated 'tenet-writing'. Broadly speaking, doxography encompasses those writings, or parts of writings, in which the author presents philosophical views of some or other of the...
[Revised entry by John L. Bell and Herbert Korté on June 8, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Hermann Weyl was a great and versatile mathematician of the 20th century. His work had a vast range, encompassing analysis, algebra, number theory, topology, differential geometry, spacetime theory, quantum mechanics, and the foundations of mathematics. His scientific writing is informed by a rare literary and artistic sensibility - in his words, "Expression and shape mean almost more to me than knowledge itself". He was...
[Revised entry by Luca Gasparri and Diego Marconi on June 7, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Word meaning has played a somewhat marginal role in early contemporary philosophy of language, which focused more on the compositional processes whereby words combine to form meaningful sentences, rather than on their individual meanings (see the entry on compositionality). Nowadays, there is widespread consensus that the study of word meaning is crucial to our understanding of human language. This entry provides an overview of the way issues related to word meaning have...
[Revised entry by Daniel Bell on June 7, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Communitarianism is the idea that human identities are largely shaped by different kinds of constitutive communities (or social relations) and that this conception of human nature should inform our moral and political judgments as well as policies and institutions. We live most of our lives in communities, similar to lions who live in social groups rather than individualistic tigers who live alone most of the time. Those communities shape, and ought to shape, our moral and political judgments and we have a strong obligation to support and...
[Revised entry by Luis Xavier López-Farjeat on June 5, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (c. 870 - 950), known in the Arabic philosophical tradition as the "Second Master" (al-mu'allim al-thānī) after Aristotle, and Alpharabius/Alfarabi in the Latin West tradition, is one of the major thinkers in the history of Islamic philosophy. He wrote extensively on logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, natural philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, philosophical psychology and epistemology. His teachings had a strong Aristotelian...
[Revised entry by Ron Mallon on June 5, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Social "construction," "constructionism" and "constructivism" are terms in wide use in the humanities and social sciences, and are applied to a diverse range of objects including the emotions, gender, race, sex, homo- and hetero-sexuality, mental illness, technology, quarks, facts, reality, and truth. This sort of terminology plays a number of different roles in different discourses, only some of which are philosophically interesting, and fewer of which admit of a "naturalistic" approach - an...
[Revised entry by Karen Green on June 4, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Catharine Macaulay's most substantial work was the eight-volume A History of England from the Accession of James I. to that of the Brunswick Line, the first volume of which was published in 1763, but the last not until twenty years later. This history, which began with the accession of James 1, and told the history of the English Civil War as the outcome of the struggle of the Commons to retain their liberties against the absolutist tendencies of the Stuarts, affirmed the right of the people to depose their monarch. She wrote a...
[Revised entry by Stephen Phillips on June 4, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Gaṅgeśa, the "Great Professor" (mahopādhyāya), lived in the fourteenth century in northeastern India. In Sanskrit, he wrote a philosophic masterpiece called the Jewel solidifying several centuries of advances in epistemology and logic within the classical school of "Logic," Nyāya, and incorporating much of the ontology, following Udayana (eleventh century), of a sister school, Vaiśeṣika. By all counts, Gaṅgeśa is one of the...
[Revised entry by Matthew Talbert on June 3, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Making judgments about whether a person is morally responsible for their behavior, and holding others and ourselves responsible for actions and the consequences of actions, is a fundamental and familiar part of our moral practices and our interpersonal relationships. The judgment that a person is morally responsible for their behavior involves - at least to a first approximation - attributing...
[New Entry by Mikko Tolonen and Robin Douglass on June 3, 2024.] Bernard Mandeville (1670 - 1733), an Anglo-Dutch physician and philosopher, achieved fame through his notorious work The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. He is most well-known for arguing that economic prosperity depends upon harnessing individuals' self-interested and even vicious passions, an idea which outraged his contemporaries and has subsequently led to him occupying an important place in the history of economic thought. The Fable of the Bees is a far more...
[Revised entry by Graham Oppy, Joshua Rasmussen, and Joseph Schmid on June 3, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Ontological arguments are arguments, for the conclusion that God exists, from premises which are supposed to derive from some source other than observation of the world - e.g., from reason alone. In other words, ontological arguments are arguments from what are typically alleged to be none but analytic, a priori and necessary premises to the conclusion that God exists....
[Revised entry by Laurence R. Horn on June 3, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] This entry outlines the role of the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), or Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC), as the foremost among the first (indemonstrable) principles of Aristotelian philosophy and its heirs, and depicts the relation between LNC and LEM (the law of excluded middle) in establishing the nature of contradictory and contrary opposition. s1 presents the classical treatment of LNC as an axiom in Aristotle's "First Philosophy" and reviews the status of contradictory and contrary opposition as schematized on...
[Revised entry by Matt Hettche and Corey Dyck on June 1, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Christian Wolff (1679 - 1754), philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, is widely and rightly regarded as the most important and influential German philosopher between Leibniz and Kant. His scholarly output was prolific, numbering more than 50 titles (most multi-volume), in addition to dozens of shorter essays and prefaces and nearly 500 book reviews. Through his series of textbooks, published first in German and then in Latin, Wolff made signal contributions to nearly every area of philosophical investigation of...
[Revised entry by James Nickel and Adam Etinson on May 31, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Human rights are norms that aspire to protect all people everywhere from severe political, legal, and social abuses. Examples of human rights are the right to freedom of religion, the right to a fair trial when charged with a crime, the right not to be tortured, and the right to education. The philosophy of human rights addresses questions about the existence, content, nature, universality, justification, and legal status of human rights. The strong claims often made on behalf of human rights (for example, that they are universal, inalienable, or...
[Revised entry by Jan Faye on May 31, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] As the theory of the atom, quantum mechanics is perhaps the most successful theory in the history of science. It enables physicists, chemists, and technicians to calculate and predict the outcome of a vast number of experiments and to create new and advanced technology based on the insight into the behavior of atomic objects. But it is also a theory that challenges our imagination. It seems to violate some fundamental principles of classical physics, principles that eventually have become a part of western common sense since the rise...
[Revised entry by Kepa Korta and John Perry on May 28, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] These lines - also attributed to H. L. Mencken and Carl Jung - may or may not be fair to diplomats, but are surely correct in reminding us that more is involved in what one communicates than what one literally says; more is involved in what one means than the standard, conventional meaning of the words one uses. The words 'yes,' 'perhaps,' and 'no' each has a perfectly identifiable meaning, known by every speaker of English (including not very competent ones). However, as those lines...
[Revised entry by Christopher S. Celenza on May 28, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Marsilio Ficino (1433 - 99) combined elements drawn from different philosophical, religious, and literary traditions to become one of the most famous philosophers of the Italian Renaissance. Ficino's writings, however, are difficult, and there is no single work of his that attained canonical status once the historiography of Western philosophy was set on its modern footing in the eighteenth century....
[Revised entry by Pablo Gilabert and Martin O’Neill on May 25, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Socialism is a rich tradition of political thought and practice, the history of which contains a vast number of views and theories, often differing in many of their conceptual, empirical, and normative commitments. Going back a century, Angelo Rappoport in his 1924 Dictionary of Socialism canvassed no fewer than forty definitions of socialism, telling his readers in the book's preface that "there are many mansions in the House of Socialism" (Rappoport 1924: v, 34 - 41). To take even a...
[Revised entry by John Earman, Christian Wüthrich, and JB Manchak on May 22, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Recent years have seen a growing consensus in the philosophical community that the grandfather paradox and similar logical puzzles do not preclude the possibility of time travel scenarios that utilize spacetimes containing closed timelike curves. At the same time, physicists, who for half a century acknowledged that the general theory of relativity is compatible with such spacetimes, have intensely studied the question whether the operation of a time machine would be admissible in the context of the same theory and of its...
[Revised entry by Robert Pasnau on May 22, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Divine illumination is the oldest and most influential alternative to naturalism in the areas of mind and knowledge. The doctrine holds that human beings require a special divine assistance in their ordinary cognitive activities. Although most closely associated with Augustine and his scholastic followers, the doctrine has its origins in the ancient period and would reappear, transformed, in the early modern era....
[New Entry by Jon Hoover on May 22, 2024.] Ibn Taymiyya (1263 - 1328) of Damascus was a prominent Sunnī religious scholar, activist, and reformer who sought to root out religious innovation and return Islam to the Qurʾān, the practice (sunna) of the Prophet Muḥammad, and the interpretations of the early Muslims (salaf). Ibn Taymiyya is best known today as a major inspiration to the global Salafism movement (Meijer 2009). A few modern scholars have heralded him as a philosopher on account of his nominalism, empiricism, and similarities...
[Revised entry by Natalie Stoljar on May 20, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Autonomy is usually understood by feminist writers in the same way that it is understood within moral psychology generally, namely, as self-government or self-direction: being autonomous is acting on motives, reasons, or values that are one's own. Early feminist literature regarded the notion of autonomy with suspicion because it was thought to promote unattractive "masculinist" ideals of personhood; that is, it was thought to presuppose a conception of the person as...
[Revised entry by Quill R Kukla, Teresa Baron, and Katherine Wayne on May 17, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Pregnancy and birth can be approached from many philosophical angles, including philosophy of law, philosophy of biology, and mereology. Some authors have focused on ethical issues surrounding abortion and assisted reproduction, others have discussed pregnancy in phenomenological terms, and others have used pregnancy and/or birth as a springboard for more theoretical reflections on the nature of selfhood, care, embodiment, and personal identity (see entries on feminist perspectives on reproduction and the family,...
[Revised entry by Jc Beall, Greg Restall, and Gil Sagi on May 17, 2024. Changes to: Bibliography, local.js] A good argument is one whose conclusions follow from its premises; its conclusions are consequences of its premises. But in what sense do conclusions follow from premises? What is it for a conclusion to be a consequence of premises? Those questions, in many respects, are at the heart of logic (as a philosophical discipline). Consider the following argument:...
[Revised entry by Hendrik Lorenz on May 15, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Ancient philosophical theories of soul are in many respects sensitive to ways of speaking and thinking about the soul [psuche] that are not specifically philosophical or theoretical. We therefore begin with what the word 'soul' meant to speakers of Classical Greek, and what it would have been natural to think about and associate with the soul. We then turn to various Presocratic thinkers, and to the philosophical theories that are our primary concern, those of Plato (first in the Phaedo, then in the...
[Revised entry by Therese-Anne Druart on May 14, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] We know little that is really reliable about al-Fārābī's life. Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī was probably born in 870 CE (AH 257) in a place called Farab or Farayb. In his youth he moved to Iraq and Baghdad. In 943 CE (AH 331) he went to Syria and Damascus. He may have gone to Egypt but died in Damascus in December 950 CE or January 951 CE (AH 339). Scholars have disputed his ethnic origin. Some claimed he was Turkish but more recent research points to him being a Persian...
[New Entry by András Kraft on May 13, 2024.] John Italos (fl. 1070s) was a prominent and controversial intellectual figure in eleventh-century Byzantium. An immigrant from Byzantine Italy, he made a stellar career in Constantinople succeeding Michael Psellos as head of the imperially sponsored school of philosophy. His dialectical method and combative temper made him a renowned figure in the Eastern Mediterranean. Among his students counted the future Constantinopolitan elite as well as foreigners from the Latin West, the Near East, and the Caucasus. His meteoric rise and Platonic...
[Revised entry by Harald Atmanspacher on May 13, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] It is widely accepted that consciousness or, more generally, mental activity is in some way correlated to the behavior of the material brain. Since quantum theory is the most fundamental theory of matter that is currently available, it is a legitimate question to ask whether quantum theory can help us to understand consciousness. Several approaches answering this question affirmatively, proposed in recent decades, will be surveyed. There are three basic types of corresponding approaches: (1) consciousness is a manifestation of...
[Revised entry by Patrick Grim and Daniel Singer on May 13, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Computational philosophy is the use of mechanized computational techniques to instantiate, extend, and amplify philosophical research. Computational philosophy is not philosophy of computers or computational techniques; it is rather philosophy using computers and computational techniques. The idea is simply to apply advances in computer technology and techniques to advance discovery, exploration and argument within any philosophical area....
[Revised entry by Richmond Campbell on May 12, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] How is moral knowledge possible? This question is central in moral epistemology and marks a cluster of problems. The most important are the following. Sociological: The best explanation of the depth of moral disagreements and the social diversity that they reflect is one of two...
[Revised entry by Jeffrey Brower on May 11, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] The purpose of this entry is to provide a systematic introduction to medieval views about the nature and ontological status of relations. Given the current state of our knowledge of medieval philosophy, especially with regard to relations, it is not possible to discuss all the nuances of even the best-known medieval philosophers' views. In what follows, therefore, we shall restrict our aim to identifying and describing (a) the main types of position that were developed during the Middle Ages, and (b) the most important considerations that...
[Revised entry by Alessandro Conti on May 10, 2024. Changes to: Bibliography] Walter Burley, or Burleigh, (ca. 1275 - 1344) was one of the most prominent and influential philosophers of the fourteenth century. He had a very long career in both England and France, becoming Master of Arts at Oxford by 1301 and Master of Theology at Paris by 1324. He produced a large body of about fifty works, many of which were widely read in the later Middle Ages. Especially prominent were his last commentaries on the Ars Vetus and Physics, which were studied all over Europe and particularly at Italian universities...
[Revised entry by Graham Priest, Francesco Berto, and Zach Weber on May 9, 2024. Changes to: Bibliography] A dialetheia is a sentence, (A), such that both it and its negation, (neg A), are true. If falsity is assumed to be the truth of negation, a dialetheia is a sentence which is both true and false. Such a sentence is, or has, what is called a truth-value glut, in distinction to a gap, a sentence that is neither true nor false. (We shall talk of sentences throughout this entry; but one could run the definition in terms of propositions, statements, or whatever one takes as one's favourite...
[Revised entry by Michael W. Dunne on May 9, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Richard FitzRalph (1299 - 1360) was regarded, even during his lifetime, as one of the leading thinkers to emerge from that generation of exceptionally talented thinkers at Oxford in the early 1330s. Although his later fame was mainly due to his polemical writings, especially regarding the poverty question and his attacks on the Franciscans, he was acknowledged as a significant interlocutor by thinkers such as Holcot, Wodeham, Wyclif and Gregory of Rimini among others. Although viewed as somewhat traditional in his doctrinal...
[Revised entry by Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran on May 8, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Edith Stein (1891 - 1942) was a realist phenomenologist associated with the Gottingen school and later a Christian metaphysician. She was a Jew who converted to Catholicism in 1922 and was ordained a Carmelite nun in 1933. She died in Auschwitz in 1942. She was subsequently declared a Catholic martyr and saint. She campaigned publicly on issues relating to women's rights and education. Stein is known philosophically primarily for her phenomenological work on empathy and affectivity, her contributions as research assistant to...
[Revised entry by Eric Oberheim and Paul Hoyningen-Huene on May 7, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The term 'incommensurable' means 'to have no common measure'. The idea traces back to Euclid's Elements, where it was applied to magnitudes. For example, there is no common measure between the sides and the diagonal of a square. Today, such incommensurable relations are represented by irrational numbers. The metaphorical application of the mathematical notion specifically to the relation between successive scientific theories became controversial in 1962 after it was popularised by two...
[Revised entry by Thomas Uebel on May 7, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The Vienna Circle was a group of early twentieth-century philosophers who sought to reconceptualize empiricism by means of their interpretation of then recent advances in the physical and formal sciences. Their radically anti-metaphysical stance was supported by an empiricist criterion of meaningfulness and a broadly logicist conception of mathematics. They denied that any principle or claim was synthetic a priori. Moreover, they sought to account for the presuppositions of scientific theories by regimenting such theories...
[Revised entry by Timothy McGrew and Robert Larmer on May 7, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] A miracle (from the Latin mirari, to wonder), at a first and very rough approximation, is an event that is not explicable by natural causes alone. A reported miracle excites wonder because it appears to require, as its cause, something beyond the reach of human action and natural causes. Historically, the appeal to miracles has formed one of the primary lines of argument in favor of specific forms of theism, the argument typically being that the event in question can best (or can only) be explained as the act of a particular deity....
[Revised entry by Howard Robinson and Ralph Weir on May 6, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, wiggins.html] Many of the concepts analysed by philosophers have their origin in ordinary - or at least extra-philosophical - language. Perception, knowledge, causation, and mind are examples. But the concept of substance is a philosophical term of art. Its uses in ordinary language tend to derive, often in a rather distorted way, from the philosophical senses. There is an ordinary concept in play when philosophers discuss "substance", and this, as we shall see, is the concept of object, or thing when...
[Revised entry by James Lennox and Charles H. Pence on May 6, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Darwinism designates a distinctive form of evolutionary explanation for the history and diversity of life on earth. Its original formulation is provided in the first edition of On the Origin of Species in 1859. This entry first formulates 'Darwin's Darwinism' in terms of six philosophically distinctive themes: (i) probability and chance, (ii) the nature, power and scope of selection, (iii) adaptation and teleology, (iv) the interpretation of the concept of 'species', (v) the tempo...
[Revised entry by Valentin Goranko and Antje Rumberg on May 3, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, 1st-order-relational.html, axiomatic-ltl.html, burgess-xu.html, interdefine-hs.html, pbtl.html] Broadly construed, Temporal Logic covers all formal approaches to representing and reasoning about time and temporal information. More narrowly, it usually refers to the modal-logic style approach introduced by Arthur Prior in the 1950s under the name Tense Logic and subsequently developed further by many logicians and computer scientists. Temporal Logic has been widely used as a formalism for clarifying philosophical issues about time, as a framework for defining the semantics of temporal expressions in...
[Revised entry by Mark Csikszentmihalyi on May 2, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] At different times in Chinese history, Confucius (trad. 551 - 479 BCE) has been portrayed as a teacher, advisor, editor, philosopher, reformer, and prophet. The name Confucius, a Latinized combination of the surname Kong 孔 with an honorific suffix "Master" (fuzi 夫子), has also come to be used as a global metonym for different aspects of traditional East Asian society. This association of Confucius with many of the foundational concepts and cultural practices in East Asia, and his...
[Revised entry by Alessandro Conti on April 30, 2024. Changes to: Bibliography] Paul of Venice was the most important Italian thinker of his times, and one of the most prominent and interesting logicians of the Middle Ages. His philosophical theories (culminating in a metaphysics of essences which states the ontological and epistemological primacy of universals over any other kind of beings) are the final and highest result of the preceding realistic tradition of thought. He fully developed the new form of realism started up by Wyclif and his Oxonian followers in the last decades of the 14th century, and...
[Revised entry by Gordon Graham on April 29, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Philosophical debate in 19th century Scotland was very vigorous, its agenda being set in large part by the impact of Kant and German Idealism on the philosophical tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment. The principal figures are Thomas Brown, Sir William Hamilton, James Frederick Ferrier and Alexander Bain, and later in the century, the so-called "Scottish Idealists" notably James Hutchison Stirling, Edward Caird, and D.G. Ritchie. The self-conscious identity of the Scottish philosophical tradition owes...
[Revised entry by Christian Tornau on April 26, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Augustine of Hippo was perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence. He is a saint of the Catholic Church, and his authority in theological matters was universally accepted in the Latin Middle Ages and remained, in the Western Christian tradition, virtually uncontested till the nineteenth century. The impact of his views on sin, grace, freedom and sexuality on Western culture can hardly be overrated. These views, deeply at variance with the ancient...
[Revised entry by Peter Adamson on April 25, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Abu Yusuf Ya'qub ibn Ishaq Al-Kindi (ca. 800 - 870 CE) was the first self-identified philosopher in the Arabic tradition. He worked with a group of translators who rendered works of Aristotle, the Neoplatonists, and Greek mathematicians and scientists into Arabic. Al-Kindi's own treatises, many of them epistles addressed to members of the caliphal family, depended heavily on these translations, which included the famous Theology of Aristotle...
[Revised entry by Eric Schwitzgebel on April 25, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Introspection, as the term is used in contemporary philosophy of mind, is a means of learning about one's own currently ongoing, or perhaps very recently past, mental states or processes. You can, of course, learn about your own mind in the same way you learn about others' minds - by reading psychology texts, by observing facial expressions (in a mirror), by examining readouts of brain activity, by noting patterns of past behavior - but it's generally thought that you can also learn about your mind...
[Revised entry by Dorothea Frede and Marije Martijn on April 23, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Alexander was a Peripatetic philosopher and commentator, active in the late second and early third century CE. He continued the tradition of writing close commentaries on Aristotle's work established in the first century BCE by Andronicus of Rhodes, the editor of Aristotle's 'esoteric' writings, which seem to have been designed for use in his school only. This tradition reflected a gradual revival of interest in Aristotle's philosophy, beginning in the late second century BCE, and helped to reestablish Aristotle as...
[New Entry by Matthew Duncombe on April 23, 2024.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Matthew Duncombe replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.] Diodorus Cronus (died circa 284 BCE) was a figure widely known and...
[Revised entry by Gareth Sparham and Chandra Chiara Ehm on April 17, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa (1357 - 1419) is a well-known Tibetan religious philosopher and one of the most influential and innovative scholars and practitioners in the history of Tibetan Buddhism. He added to the Tibetan Buddhist traditions more globally by setting a paradigm to integrate theory and practice while maintaining focus on ethics, monastic discipline, and the traditions of scholarship and meditation within the esoteric Buddhist tradition. His main contribution to Buddhist philosophy was to show how to develop a...
[Revised entry by Michael McKenna and D. Justin Coates on April 16, 2024. Changes to: Bibliography, supplement.htmlChanges to: Main text, Bibliography] Compatibilism offers a solution to the free will problem, which concerns a disputed incompatibility between free will and determinism. Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism. Because free will is typically taken to be a necessary condition of moral responsibility, compatibilism is sometimes expressed as a thesis about the compatibility between moral responsibility and determinism....
[Revised entry by Ajume Wingo on April 15, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The culture of the Akan people of West Africa dates from before the 13th century. Like other long-established cultures the world over, the Akan have developed a rich conceptual system complete with metaphysical, moral, and epistemological aspects. Of particular interest is the Akan conception of persons, a conception that informs a variety of social institutions, practices, and judgments about personal identity, moral responsibility, and the proper relationship both among individuals and between individuals and...
[Revised entry by Dror Ehrlich and Shira Weiss on April 14, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Joseph Albo (c. 1380 - 1444) was a Jewish philosopher active in Christian Spain in the first half of the fifteenth century. His main philosophical work is Sefer ha-'Ikkarim [Book of Principles], completed in 1425 in the town of Soria in the crown of Castile. In this work, Albo addresses a wide variety of interpretive, theological and philosophical issues, in a style integrating logical, methodical analyses with exegetical discussions. Albo's composition reveals his exposure to the works of many...
[Revised entry by Kathleen Lennon and Clara Fischer on April 11, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] For much of the history of western philosophy the body has been conceptualized as simply one biological object among others, part of a biological nature, which our rational faculties set us apart from, as well as an instrument to be directed, and a possible source of disruption to be controlled. Problematically, for feminists, the opposition between mind and body has also been correlated with an opposition between male and female, with the female regarded as enmeshed in her bodily existence in a way that makes attainment of...
[Revised entry by Paisley Livingston on April 11, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Questions central to the ontology of art include the following: what sort of things are works of art? Do all works of art belong to a single category of entities? Do they have multiple instances? Do works have parts or constituents, and if so, what is their relation to the work as a whole? How are works of art individuated? Are they created or discovered? Can they be destroyed?...
[Revised entry by Carla Fehr and Letitia Meynell on April 6, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Feminist philosophers of biology bring the tools of feminist theory, and in particular the tools of feminist philosophy of science, to investigations of the life sciences. While the critical examination of the categories of sex and gender (which will be explained below) takes a central place, the methods, ontological assumptions, and foundational concepts of biology more generally have also enjoyed considerable feminist scrutiny. Through such investigations, feminist philosophers of biology reveal the extent to which the theory and...
[New Entry by David Lines on April 5, 2024.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by David Lines replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.]...
[Revised entry by Alessandro Salice, James DuBois, and Barry Smith on April 5, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Adolf Reinach was a leading representative of so-called "realist" phenomenology. So pivotal was his role in shaping the early phases of the phenomenological movement that many young scholars saw in Reinach their real teacher in phenomenology. Although his life was tragically cut short at the age of 34 in 1917, Reinach's production is remarkably wide and diverse in its thematic breadth, touching on issues of relevance to general ontology, philosophy of mind and action, philosophy of law, philosophy of...
[Revised entry by Thomas A. Ryckman on April 4, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Early philosophical interpretations of the general theory of relativity selected distinct aspects of that theory for praise or favored recognition. Positivist followers of Mach initially lauded Einstein's attempt to implement a "relativization of inertia" - roughly, that the inertia of a body (inertial mass, local inertial behavior) is an effect due to presence of all other masses - in the general theory. But Machians were daunted by the theory's unprecedented distance between mathematical...
[Revised entry by Anil Gupta and Stephen Mackereth on September 13, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Definitions have interested philosophers since ancient times. Plato's early dialogues portray Socrates raising questions about definitions (e.g., in the Euthyphro, "What is piety?") - questions that seem at once profound and elusive. The key step in Anselm's "Ontological Proof" for the existence of God is the definition of "God," and the same holds of Descartes's version of the argument in his Meditation V. More recently, the Frege-Russell definition of...
[New Entry by Benjamin Kiesewetter and Alex Worsnip on September 13, 2023.] Many paradigm instances of irrationality involve one's mental states failing to cohere with one another, in a fairly broad sense of 'cohere'.[1] For example, it's commonly thought to be irrational to hold (obviously) inconsistent beliefs - say, to believe that you are a great cook, to believe that great cooks never overcook eggs, and yet to believe that you have overcooked the eggs. These three beliefs are jointly incoherent. Similarly, many central instances of practical...
[Revised entry by Russell Goodman on September 12, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Transcendentalism is an American literary, philosophical, religious, and political movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Theodore Parker. Stimulated by English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the skepticism of Hume, the transcendentalists operated with the sense that a new era was at...
[Revised entry by Jack Zupko on September 11, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Thomas of Erfurt was the most influential member of a group of later medieval philosophers known as the speculative grammarians or Modistae (Modists), after the central place they assigned to the modi significandi (modes of signifying) of a word in their analyses of human discourse. The notion that a word, once it has been imposed to signify, carries with it all of its syntactical modes, or possible combinations with other words, had been around since the twelfth century. What the Modistae did was to posit the...
[Revised entry by Ingo Farin on September 8, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Count Hans Ludwig Paul Yorck von Wartenburg (1835 - 1897) was a German philosopher. He is primarily known for his long collaboration with his friend Wilhelm Dilthey (1833 - 1911) and for his impact on Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 - 2002). Together with Dilthey, Yorck was the first philosopher to elaborate the specific concept of historicity [Geschichtlichkeit] as a defining characteristic in the ontology of human beings. In particular, Yorck emphasized...
[Revised entry by James Tabery on September 7, 2023. Changes to: Main text] Evelyn Fox Keller dubbed the 1900s the "century of the gene", and for good reason (Fox Keller 2002). During a 100-year span that opened with excitement about the research Mendel conducted decades earlier and closed with the Human Genome Project, disciplines ranging from comparative anatomy to oncology were infused with genetic concepts, genetic principles, and genetic methodologies. The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen this trend only expand....
[Revised entry by Thomas Izbicki and Matthias Kaufmann on September 7, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The School of Salamanca is a name for an intellectual movement or a certain group of theologians in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Portugal. In a broad sense, it is more or less identical with Spanish Scholasticism, which also includes authors from the Spanish Netherlands. In a narrower sense, the School of Salamanca refers to two or three generations of pupils of Francisco de Vitoria, who was, in effect, the founding father of the school in both the broad and narrow sense. On the whole, it is more useful to choose the...
[New Entry by Dunja Šešelja on September 7, 2023.] Agent-based models (ABMs) are computational models that simulate behavior of individual agents in order to study emergent phenomena at the level of the community. Depending on the application, agents may represent humans, institutions, microorganisms, and so forth. The agents' actions are based on autonomous decision-making and other behavioral traits, implemented through formal rules. By simulating decentralized local interactions among agents, as well as interactions between agents and their environment, ABMs enable us to...
[Revised entry by George Gale on September 7, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Sometimes, philosophy drives science. Cosmology between 1932 - 48 provides an excellent example how explicitly philosophical considerations directed the evolution of a modern science during a crucial period of its development. The following article exhibits these philosophical aspects of cosmological thinking in detail, beginning with a brief sketch of the historical development of general relativity cosmology until 1932. Following this, the historical participants in the philosophical debate are introduced, along with...
[Revised entry by John L. Bell on September 6, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Traditionally, expressions in formal systems have been regarded as signifying finite inscriptions which are - at least in principle - capable of actually being written out in primitive notation. However, the fact that (first-order) formulas may be identified with natural numbers (via "Godel numbering") and hence with finite sets makes it no longer necessary to regard formulas as inscriptions, and suggests the...
[New Entry by Marta Halina on September 6, 2023.] Comparative cognition is the study of cognition across the tree of life. Nonhuman animals (hereafter animals) display a broad and often surprising range of cognitive abilities. Kea (a species of large parrot endemic to New Zealand) solve problems using domain-general statistical inference (Bastos a Taylor 2020), Eurasian jays are deceived by magic tricks (Garcia-Pelegrin et al. 2021), and bumblebees may be conscious (Gibbons et al. 2022). Researchers in the field of comparative cognition seek to understand the cognitive mechanisms...
[Revised entry by Nicholas Davey and Cynthia Nielsen on September 6, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 - 2002) does not provide an account of the aesthetic in any customary sense. His approach to art runs, in many ways, against conventional philosophical expectations. Aesthetic qualities are not debated in the manner of the analytic tradition of modern philosophy, nor does he concern himself overtly with the problems of aesthetic pleasure. Gadamer's approach to aesthetic experience stands squarely in the phenomenological tradition. He is primarily concerned with the place of art in our experience of the...
[Revised entry by Dominique Leydet on September 5, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] A citizen is a member of a political community who enjoys the rights and assumes the duties of membership. This broad definition is discernible, with minor variations, in the works of contemporary authors as well as in the entry "citoyen" in Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie [1753].[1] Notwithstanding this common starting-point and certain shared...
[Revised entry by Don Ross on September 3, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Game theory is the study of the ways in which interacting choices of economic agents produce outcomes with respect to the preferences (or utilities) of those agents, where the outcomes in question might have been intended by none of the agents. The meaning of this statement will not be clear to the non-expert until each of the italicized words and phrases has been explained and featured in some examples. Doing this will be the main business of this article. First, however, we provide some...
[Revised entry by Fabienne Pironet and Joke Spruyt on August 31, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] In contrast to the meaning the word 'sophism' had in ancient philosophy, 'sophisma' in medieval philosophy is a technical term with no pejorative connotation: a sophisma proper is a sentence (proposition) that raises a difficulty for logic or grammar: it is a proposition whose truth value is difficult to determine, because it is ambiguous, puzzling or simply difficult to interpret, or a sentence that can be shown to be both grammatically correct and incorrect. Discussions of...
[Revised entry by Brian Weatherson on August 31, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] As anyone who has flown out of a cloud knows, the boundaries of a cloud are a lot less sharp up close than they can appear on the ground. Even when it seems clearly true that there is one, sharply bounded, cloud up there, really there are thousands of water droplets that are neither determinately part of the cloud, nor determinately outside it. Consider any object that consists of the core of the cloud, plus an arbitrary selection of these droplets. It will look like a cloud, and circumstances permitting rain like a cloud, and...
[New Entry by Alexander Paseau and Fabian Pregel on August 25, 2023.] Deductivism says that a mathematical sentence (s) should be understood as expressing the claim that (s) deductively follows from appropriate axioms. For instance, deductivists might construe "(2 + 2 = 4)" as "the sentence '(2 + 2 = 4)' deductively follows from the axioms of arithmetic". Deductivism promises a number of benefits. It captures the fairly common idea that mathematics is about "what can be deduced from the axioms"; it avoids an ontology of abstract mathematical...
[Revised entry by Natalja Deng on August 24, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The term "eternity" plays a key role in discussions about how the God of Western theism relates to time. These discussions have a long and venerable history. They are also of lively contemporary interest. The reason for this long-standing and continued interest is straightforward. How one sees God's relationship to time has...
[Revised entry by Brendan Gillon on August 23, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The exercise of reasoning and the practice of argument are recorded in the early texts of India. Preoccupation with the nature of reason and argument occurs in the earliest philosophical texts, where their treatment is intimately connected with questions of ontology, epistemology and dialectics. These questions continued to be at the center of philosophical discussion through the classical and medieval period of Indian philosophy. This article will chronicle the answers Indian philosophers gave to these questions during the preclassical...
[Revised entry by Paolo Livieri and George di Giovanni on August 22, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (b. 1743, d. 1819) was a critic of both modern philosophy and its offspring (the rationalism of German late Enlightenment), of Kant's transcendental idealism, of Fichte's systematic philosophy, and eventually of Schelling's idealism. He was initially not regarded as a first - rate philosopher, but he had the natural talent of asking the right question: has philosophy forgotten the difference between conditions of conceptualization and conditions of existence? Has it...
[New Entry by Pablo Lorenzano on August 21, 2023.] Philosophy of biology is a sub-discipline within philosophy of science, and it became professionalized and institutionalized in regions like the United States, Canada, and Europe during the 1970s and 1980s. In Latin America, this process began a decade later, after a long period of early history from the colonial period to the mid-twentieth century. The professionalization and institutionalization of philosophy of science, including the germination of philosophy of biology, took place between the...
[Revised entry by Peter Schroeder-Heister on August 18, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, definitional-reflection.html, examples.html] Proof-theoretic semantics is an alternative to truth-condition semantics. It is based on the fundamental assumption that the central notion in terms of which meanings are assigned to certain expressions of our language, in particular to logical constants, is that of proof rather than truth. In this sense proof-theoretic semantics is semantics in terms of proof. Proof-theoretic semantics also means the semantics of proofs, i.e., the semantics of entities which describe how we arrive at...
[Revised entry by Richard Hayes on August 18, 2023. Changes to: Bibliography] The Madhyamaka school of Buddhism, the followers of which are called Mādhyamikas, was one of the two principal schools of Mahāyāna Buddhism in India, the other school being the Yogācāra. The name of the school is a reference to the claim made of Buddhism in general that it is a middle path (madhyamā pratipad) that avoids the two extremes of eternalism - the doctrine that all things exist because of an eternal essence - and annihilationism - the doctrine that...
[Revised entry by Lorenz Demey, Barteld Kooi, and Joshua Sack on August 17, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Logic and probability theory are two of the main tools in the formal study of reasoning, and have been fruitfully applied in areas as diverse as philosophy, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and mathematics. This entry discusses the major proposals to combine logic and probability theory, and attempts to provide a classification of the various approaches in this rapidly developing field....
[Revised entry by William Mander on August 17, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The term 'pantheism' is a modern one, possibly first appearing in the writing of the Irish freethinker John Toland (1705) and constructed from the Greek roots pan (all) and theos (God). But if not the name, the ideas themselves are very ancient, and any survey of the history of philosophy will uncover numerous pantheist or pantheistically inclined thinkers; although it should also be noted that in many cases all that history has preserved for us are second-hand reportings of attributed doctrines, any...
[Revised entry by Tim Noone, R. E. Houser, and Joshua Benson on August 16, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (b. ca. 1221, d. 15 July 1274) was a Franciscan, a master of philosophy and theology at the University of Paris, Minister General of the Order of Friars Minor (O.F.M.), a Bishop and Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. During his lifetime he rose to become one of the most prominent men in Latin Christianity. Bonaventure's known works all derive from his career as a student and master of theology at the University of Paris and from his career as Minister General. Throughout his corpus, Bonaventure...
[New Entry by Jackie Leach Scully on August 16, 2023.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Jackie Leach Scully replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous authors.] In the last two decades, feminist bioethics has emerged as a leading...
[Revised entry by Matthew Lutz on August 11, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] 'Moral naturalism' is a term with a variety of meanings in ethics, but it usually refers to the version of moral realism according to which moral facts are natural facts. That is the subject of this entry. Naturalistic approaches to ethics are as old as moral theory itself. Both Aristotelian and Confucian ethics, for instance, contain...
[Revised entry by David Wong on August 10, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The tradition of Chinese ethical thought is centrally concerned with questions about how one ought to live: what goes into a worthwhile life, how to weigh duties toward family versus duties toward strangers, whether human nature is predisposed to be morally good or bad, how one ought to relate to the non-human world, the extent to which one ought to become involved in reforming the larger social and political structures of one's society, and how one ought to conduct oneself when in a position of influence or power. The...
[Revised entry by Andrew Arlig on August 9, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] The term "mereology" is sometimes used to refer to any one of the formal languages that describe the part-to-whole relation. In this article, I will use the term more broadly to refer to any theoretical study (formal or informal) of parts, wholes, and the relations (logical or metaphysical) that obtain between them. In what follows I will survey some of the ways that philosophers in the medieval Latin West thought about parts and wholes. (While there is very little contemporary scholarship on medieval Arabic, Hebrew, or...
[Revised entry by Susanne Bobzien and Matthew Duncombe on August 9, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The 'Dialectical School' denotes a group of early Hellenistic philosophers that were loosely connected by philosophizing in the - Socratic - tradition of Eubulides of Miletus and by their interest in logical paradoxes, propositional logic and dialectical expertise. Its two best-known members, Diodorus Cronus and Philo the Logician, made ground-breaking contributions to the development of theories of conditionals and modal logic. Philo introduced a version of material implication; Diodorus devised a...
[Revised entry by Bas van der Vossen and Billy Christmas on August 7, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Libertarianism is a family of views in political philosophy. Libertarians take individual freedom as the paramount political value and understand coercion to be the antithesis of that freedom. While people can justifiably be forced to do certain things - most obviously, to refrain from infringing the liberty of others - they cannot be coerced to serve the good of other members of society, nor even their own personal good....
[Revised entry by David Cunning on August 7, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Descartes sometimes speaks of things that have possible existence, in addition to speaking of things as having actual existence. He also speaks of eternal and necessary truths that are the product of God's free and wholly unconstrained activity. One of the interpretive projects that is inspired by Descartes' sometimes provocative claims about possibility and necessity is the construction of a general Cartesian theory of modality. Any such theory would of course need to be sensitive to all of the claims that Descartes makes...
[Revised entry by C.A.J. Coady on August 7, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Should political leaders violate the deepest constraints of morality in order to achieve great goods or avoid disasters for their communities? This question poses what has become known amongst philosophers as the problem of dirty hands. There are many different strands to the philosophical debate about this topic, and they echo many of the complexities in more popular thinking about politics and morality. All, however, involve the idea that correct political action must sometimes conflict with profound moral norms. This entry seeks to...
[Revised entry by Edward N. Zalta on August 5, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Over the course of his life, Gottlob Frege formulated two logical systems in his attempts to define basic concepts of mathematics and to derive mathematical laws from the laws of logic. In his book of 1879, Begriffsschrift: eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens, he developed a second-order predicate calculus and used it both to define interesting mathematical concepts and to state and prove mathematically interesting propositions. However, in his two-volume work of 1893/1903,...
[New Entry by Gideon Elford on August 3, 2023.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Gideon Elford replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.]...
[New Entry by Thomas Mulligan on August 3, 2023.] Understood literally, a meritocracy is a society in which influence (of some sort) is possessed on the basis of merit (whatever that means). Meritocracy is of perennial interest and has shaped - for good or ill - political, economic, and cultural life in the East and the West. Yet meritocracy has received little direct philosophical attention. As David Miller puts it,...
[Revised entry by Maricarmen Martinez and Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson on August 3, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] At their most basic, logic is the study of consequence, and information is a commodity. Given this, the interrelationship between logic and information will centre on the informational consequences of logical actions or operations conceived broadly. The explicit inclusion of the notion of information as an object of logical study is a recent development. It was by the beginning of the present century that a sizable body of existing technical and philosophical work (with precursors that can be traced back to the...
[Revised entry by Martin Peterson on August 1, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The St. Petersburg paradox was introduced by Nicolaus Bernoulli in 1713. It continues to be a reliable source for new puzzles and insights in decision theory. The standard version of the St. Petersburg paradox is derived from the St. Petersburg game, which is played as follows: A fair coin is flipped until it comes up heads the first time. At that point the...
[Revised entry by Katherine Brading, Elena Castellani, and Nicholas Teh on August 1, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Symmetry considerations dominate modern fundamental physics, both in quantum theory and in relativity. Philosophers are now beginning to devote increasing attention to such issues as the significance of gauge symmetry, quantum particle identity in the light of permutation symmetry, how to make sense of parity violation, the role of symmetry breaking, the empirical status of symmetry principles, and so forth. These issues relate directly to traditional problems in the philosophy of science, including the status of the laws of nature, the...
[Revised entry by Fred Kroon and Alberto Voltolini on July 26, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Philosophical issues surrounding fiction have attracted increasing attention from philosophers over the past few decades. What follows is a discussion of one familiar and quite fundamental topic in this area: fictional entities (both the issue of what such entities might be like and whether there really are such entities). A familiar characteristic of works of fiction is that they feature...
[Revised entry by Jesse Alama and Johannes Korbmacher on July 25, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The (lambda)-calculus is, at heart, a simple notation for functions and application. The main ideas are applying a function to an argument and forming functions by abstraction. The syntax of basic (lambda)-calculus is quite sparse, making it an elegant, focused notation for representing functions. Functions and arguments are on a par with one another. The result is a non-extensional theory of functions as rules of computation, contrasting with an extensional theory of functions as sets of ordered pairs. Despite its sparse...
[Revised entry by Paolo Mancosu, Francesca Poggiolesi, and Christopher Pincock on July 21, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The philosophical analysis of mathematical explanation concerns itself with two different, although connected, areas of investigation. The first area addresses the problem of whether mathematics can play an explanatory role in the natural and social sciences. The second deals with the problem of whether mathematical explanation occurs within mathematics itself. Accordingly, this entry surveys the contributions to both areas, it shows their relevance to the history of philosophy, mathematics, and science, it articulates their connection, and points...
[Revised entry by Alison McIntyre on July 17, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The doctrine (or principle) of double effect is often invoked to explain the permissibility of an action that causes a serious harm, such as the death of a human being, as a side effect of promoting some good end. According to the principle of double effect, sometimes it is permissible to cause a harm as an unintended and merely foreseen side effect (or "double effect") of bringing about a good result even though it would not be permissible to cause such a harm as a means to bringing about the same good end....
[Revised entry by Guido Giglioni and Jonathan Regier on July 17, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] In addition to being one of the most original and talented physicians, mathematicians and astrologers of his time, Girolamo Cardano (b. 1501, Pavia, d. 1576, Rome) occupies an important place in the history of Renaissance philosophy. His contributions range from a comprehensive account of order in all its various meanings (natural, human, and divine) to epistemological and methodological directions concerning the progress of knowledge, from an elaborate theory of the immortality of the soul to a sophisticated analysis of the role of practical...
[Revised entry by Thomas Williams on July 16, 2023. Changes to: Bibliography] Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033 - 1109) was the outstanding Christian philosopher and theologian of the eleventh century. He is best known for the celebrated "ontological argument" for the existence of God in the Proslogion, but his contributions to philosophical theology (and indeed to philosophy more generally) go well beyond the ontological argument. In what follows I examine Anselm's theistic proofs, his conception of the divine nature, and his account of human freedom, sin, and redemption....
[Revised entry by Noëlle McAfee, Ann Garry, Anita Superson, Heidi Grasswick, and Serene Khader on July 14, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] This entry provides an introduction to the feminist philosophy section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). Overseen by a board of feminist philosophers, this section primarily takes up feminist philosophy of the twentieth and tweny-first century. It has three subsections of entries (as can be seen in Table of Contents under "feminist philosophy"): (1) approaches to feminist philosophy, (2) feminist interventions in philosophy, and (3) feminist philosophical topics. By "approaches to feminist...
[New Entry by David Wong on July 10, 2023.] This entry covers major views of mind in the period of classical Chinese philosophy (from about the 6th to the end of the 3rd century BCE). The nearest equivalent to the English term for mind in the classical period is xin 心, which originated as a picture of the heart in human beings and animals and directs body's behavior. Since ethical guidance in Western thought arises from both the cognitive function of the mind and the affective states attributed to the heart, xin is frequently...
[Revised entry by Antonella Mallozzi, Anand Vaidya, and Michael Wallner on July 7, 2023. Changes to: Main text] Actual facts are facts about how things are. For example, Mary actually wore her white dress to the party. Modal facts, by contrast, are facts about how things could, must, or could not have been. For example, Mary could have worn her red dress; but she couldn't have worn a dress that is red and green all over at the same time. Modal reasoning is central to human cognition, since it is pervasive both in philosophy and in every-day contexts. It involves investigating and evaluating...
[Revised entry by Robert Stern and Tony Cheng on July 7, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] As standardly conceived, transcendental arguments are taken to be distinctive in involving a certain sort of claim, namely that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y - where then, given that Y is the case, it logically follows that X must be the case too. Moreover, because these arguments are generally used to respond to sceptics who take our knowledge claims to be problematic, the Y in question is then normally taken to be some fact about us or our mental...
[Revised entry by Torin Alter and Derk Pereboom on July 4, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Russellian monism is a theory in the metaphysics of mind, on which a single set of properties underlies both consciousness and the most basic entities posited by physics. The theory is named for Bertrand Russell, whose views about consciousness and its place in nature were informed by a structuralist conception of theoretical physics. On such a structuralist conception, physics describes the world in terms of its spatiotemporal structure and dynamics (changes within that structure) and says nothing about what, if anything, underlies that...
[Revised entry by Achille Varzi on July 3, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] We think of a boundary whenever we think of an entity demarcated from its surroundings. There is a boundary (a line) separating Maryland and Pennsylvania. There is a boundary (a circle) isolating the interior of a disc from its exterior. There is a boundary (a surface) enclosing the bulk of this apple. Sometimes the exact location of a boundary is unclear or otherwise controversial (as when you try to trace out the borders of a desert, the edges of a mountain, or even the boundary of your own body). Sometimes the boundary lies skew to any physical...
[Revised entry by Eric T. Olson on June 30, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons). This contrasts with questions about ourselves that arise by virtue of our being living things, conscious beings, moral agents, or material objects. Many of these questions occur to nearly all of us now and again: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Others are more abstruse. They have been discussed since the origins of Western...
[Revised entry by Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi on June 29, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Smiles, walks, dances, weddings, explosions, hiccups, hand-waves, arrivals and departures, births and deaths, thunder and lightning: the variety of the world seems to lie not only in the assortment of its ordinary citizens - animals, physical objects, social creatures of various kinds - but also in the sort of things that happen to or are performed by them. In contemporary philosophy, this view has been a focus of considerable debate, with implications reaching far into the concern of other disciplines as well, above all linguistics and...
[Revised entry by Bernard Linsky on June 24, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The term "logical construction" was used by Bertrand Russell to describe a series of similar philosophical theories beginning with the 1901 "Frege-Russell" definition of numbers as classes and continuing through his "construction" of the notions of space, time and matter after 1914. Philosophers since the 1920s have argued about the significance of "logical construction" as a method in analytic philosophy and proposed various ways of interpreting...
[Revised entry by Bjørn Ramberg and Susan Dieleman on June 22, 2023. Changes to: Bibliography] Richard Rorty (1931 - 2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative - a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive - an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of...
[Revised entry by Gregory W. Dawes on June 20, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Although empiricism is often thought to be a modern doctrine, it has ancient roots, and its modern forms derive from late medieval developments. This article will begin by outlining three different forms of empiricism. It will examine the Presocratic and Hippocratic origins of the empiricist attitude, and discuss its development in the work of Aristotle, the Hellenistic medical writers, Epicureans, Stoics, and Sceptics. It will then examine the combination of Aristotelian and Augustinian views in the work of thirteenth and...
[Revised entry by Jeffrey Barrett on June 20, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Hugh Everett III proposed solving the quantum measurement problem by adopting pure wave mechanics, the theory one gets by dropping the collapse dynamics from the standard von Neumann formulation of quantum mechanics. Everett's relative state formulation consists in pure wave mechanics supplemented with a distinction between absolute and relative states, a model of situated observation, and a standard of typicality. His aim was to recapture the predictions of the standard collapse theory by showing that the relative records of a typical...
[Revised entry by Christian B. Miller on June 16, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The turn of the century saw a significant increase in the amount of attention being paid by philosophers to empirical issues about moral character. Dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle in the West, and Confucius in the East, philosophers have traditionally drawn on empirical data to some extent in their theorizing about character. One of the main differences in recent years has been the source of this empirical data, namely the work of social and personality psychologists on morally relevant thought and action....
[Revised entry by William Robinson on June 15, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events. Behavior is caused by muscles that contract upon receiving neural impulses, and neural impulses are generated by input from other neurons or from sense organs. On the epiphenomenalist view, mental events play no causal role in this process. Huxley (1874), who held the view, compared mental events to a steam whistle that contributes nothing to the work of a locomotive. James (1879), who rejected the...
[Revised entry by C. D. C. Reeve on June 14, 2023. Changes to: Bibliography] Plato discusses love (eros) and friendship (philia) primarily in two dialogues, the Lysis and the Symposium, though the Phaedrus also adds significantly to his views. In each work, Socrates as the quintessential philosopher is in two ways center stage, first, as a lover of wisdom (sophia) and discussion (logos), and, second, as himself an inverter or disturber of erotic norms. Plato's views on love are a meditation on Socrates and the power...
[Revised entry by Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi on June 14, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Holes are an interesting case study for ontologists and epistemologists. Naive, untutored descriptions of the world treat holes as objects of reference, on a par with ordinary material objects. ('There are as many holes in the cheese as there are cookies in the tin.') And we often appeal to holes to account for causal interactions, or to explain the occurrence of certain events. ('The water ran out because the bucket has a hole.')...
[Revised entry by Yitzhak Y. Melamed and Martin Lin on June 14, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The Principle of Sufficient Reason is a powerful and controversial philosophical principle stipulating that everything must have a reason, cause, or ground. This simple demand for thoroughgoing intelligibility yields some of the boldest and most challenging theses in the history of philosophy. In this entry we begin by explaining the Principle and then turn to the history of the debates around it. We conclude with an examination of the emerging contemporary discussion of the Principle....
[Revised entry by Gillian Brock and Nicole Hassoun on June 9, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] On common accounts, we have a state of justice when everyone has their due. The study of justice has been concerned with what we owe one another, what obligations we might have to treat each other fairly in a range of domains, including over distributive and recognitional matters. Contemporary political philosophers had focused their theorizing about justice almost exclusively within the state, but the last twenty-five years or so has seen a marked extension to the global sphere, with a huge expansion in the array of topics covered. While...
[Revised entry by Titus Stahl on June 8, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Georg (Gyorgy) Lukacs (1885 - 1971) was a literary theorist and philosopher who is widely viewed as one of the founders of "Western Marxism" and as a forerunner of 20th-century critical theory. Lukacs is best known for his Theory of the Novel (1916) and History and Class Consciousness (1923). In History and Class Consciousness, he laid out a wide-ranging critique of the phenomenon of "reification" in capitalism and formulated a vision of Marxism as a self-conscious...
[Revised entry by Samuel Newlands on June 6, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Spinoza's views on necessity and possibility, which he claimed were the "principal foundation" of his Ethics (Ep75), have been less than well received by his readers, to put it mildly. From Spinoza's contemporaries to our own, readers of the Ethics have denounced Spinoza's views on modality as metaphysically confused at best, ethically nihilistic at worst.[1] However, expressing matters this way implies that there is a...
[Revised entry by Alice Sowaal on June 6, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Mary Astell (1666 - 1731) was an English philosopher. She was born in Newcastle, and lived her adult life in London. Her patrons were Lady Ann Coventry, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, and Catherine Jones, and among those in her intellectual circle were Lady Mary Chudleigh, Judith Drake, Elizabeth Elstob, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and John Norris. In addition to a number of pamphlets, she wrote the following books:...
[Revised entry by Philip Kremer and Edoardo Rivello on June 6, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Consider the following sentence: (1) (1) is not true....
[Revised entry by Marcus P. Adams on June 5, 2023. Changes to: Main text] Thomas Hobbes is rightly regarded as a monumental figure in the history of philosophy, especially for his masterpiece Leviathan (1651 in English; 1668 in Latin). The scholarly literature on Leviathan is voluminous and has been especially focused upon issues in political philosophy, such as representation and authorization, sovereignty and absolutism, contracts and covenants, and the relationship of civil authority to religion, among others. Since its printing the portrayal in Leviathan XIII of...
[Revised entry by Kevin Corrigan and L. Michael Harrington on June 5, 2023. Changes to: Bibliography] Dionysius, or Pseudo-Dionysius, as he has come to be known in the contemporary world, was a Christian Neoplatonist who wrote in the late fifth or early sixth century CE and who transposed in a thoroughly original way the whole of Pagan Neoplatonism from Plotinus to Proclus, but especially that of Proclus and the Platonic Academy in Athens, into a distinctively new Christian context....
[Revised entry by Elinor Mason on June 4, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The word 'pluralism' generally refers to the view that there are many of the things in question (concepts, scientific world views, discourses, viewpoints etc.) The issues arising from there being many differ widely from subject area to subject area. This entry is concerned with moral pluralism - the view that there are many different moral values....
[Revised entry by Noa Shein on June 3, 2023. Changes to: Bibliography] Attributes sit at the very heart of Spinoza's metaphysics. They enable us to understand and talk about an extended world and a thinking world in terms of which we understand such things as bodies and minds. Furthermore, it is due to the relation of attributes to one another and to the infinite substance that an elegant resolution to the Cartesian mind - body problem is possible. Attributes furnish Spinoza's substance with variety while preventing it from being an ephemeral, homogenous totality - an eleatic "one"...
[Revised entry by Cary Nederman on June 2, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Although widely and commonly confused with republicanism, civic humanism forms a separate and distinct phenomenon in the history of Western political thought. Republicanism is a political philosophy that defends a concept of freedom as non-domination, and identifies the institutions that protect it (Pettit 1999). In particular, republicanism stands against two alternative theories of politics. The first is despotism, especially as manifested in any form of one-man rule; a republic is self-governing, and so are its denizens. The...
[Revised entry by Michael Engel on June 2, 2023. Changes to: Bibliography] Elijah Del Medigo is a unique figure in the history of western philosophy. In the realm of Jewish thought he is mostly remembered for Beḥinat ha-Dat (Examination of Religion) - a work which discusses the role and function of philosophical discourse within the Jewish-religious sphere. Yet Del Medigo also played a central role in the development of the Averroist tradition in the Latin west: translating works by and composing commentaries on the works of Averroes, at the request of his Christian...
[Revised entry by Partha Dasgupta on June 2, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] How should we conceptualise human well-being over time and across generations? How ought the interests of people in the distant future to be taken into account when we make our own decisions? How much of its output should a nation invest for the future? In which assets should that investment be made? What should be the balance among private, public, and communitarian investments in the overall investment that a generation makes for the future? How much should the world spend in...
[Revised entry by Allan Franklin and Slobodan Perovic on June 2, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Physics, and natural science in general, is a reasonable enterprise based on valid experimental evidence, criticism, and rational discussion. It provides us with knowledge of the physical world, and it is experiment that provides the evidence that grounds this knowledge. Experiment plays many roles in science. One of its important roles is to test theories and to provide the basis for scientific knowledge.[1]...
[New Entry by Rebecca Chan on June 1, 2023.] Transformative experiences are experiences that radically change the experiencer in both an epistemic and personal way (see Paul 2014). When a person transforms epistemically, they gain knowledge of "what the experience is like" that they could not have had without the experience. For instance, falling in love for the first time - be it with a romantic partner, child, friend, or pet - is the only way to truly know what it's like to fall in love and allows one to better understand human bonds and...
[Revised entry by Heinrich Wansing on June 1, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Many prominent systems of non-classical logic are subsystems of what is generally called 'classical logic.' Systems of connexive logic are contra-classical in the sense that they are neither subsystems nor extensions of classical logic. Connexive logics have a standard logical vocabulary and comprise certain non-theorems of classical logic as theses. Since classical propositional logic is Post-complete, any additional axiom in its language gives rise to the trivial system, so that any non-trivial...
[New Entry by Jon McGinnis and Rahim Acar on May 31, 2023.] This entry focuses on the historical sources and formative moments in the development of Islamic theology and philosophy of religion. While most of the thinkers and ideas are from the classical period of Islam (ca. 800 - 1300) in a few cases we have extended our survey to the seventeenth century to include influential post-classical thinkers, like Mulla Ṣadrā. Despite this limitation, the period covered was one of the most intellectually robust periods in the development of Islamic philosophy of religion. While most of the...
[Revised entry by Lydia Patton on May 27, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Hermann von Helmholtz (1821 - 1894) participated in two of the most significant developments in physics and in the philosophy of science in the 19th century: the proof that Euclidean geometry does not describe the only possible visualizable and physical space, and the shift from physics based on actions between particles at a distance to the field theory. Helmholtz achieved a staggering number of scientific results, including the formulation of energy conservation, the vortex equations for fluid dynamics, the notion of...
[Revised entry by Diana Ines Perez and Santiago Echeverri on May 24, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Analytic philosophy was introduced in Latin America in the mid-twentieth century. Its development has been heterogeneous in different countries of the region but has today reached a considerable degree of maturity and originality, with a strong community working within the analytic tradition in Latin America. This entry describes the historical development of analytic philosophy in Latin America and offers some examples of original contributions by Latin American analytic philosophers....
[New Entry by John Lippitt and C. Stephen Evans on May 22, 2023.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by John Lippitt and C. Stephen Evans replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.]...
[Revised entry by John Capps on May 22, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Pragmatic theories of truth are usually associated either with C.S. Peirce's proposal that true beliefs will be accepted "at the end of inquiry" or with William James' proposal that truth be defined in terms of utility. More broadly, however, pragmatic theories of truth focus on the connection between truth and epistemic practices, notably practices of inquiry and assertion. Depending on the particular pragmatic theory, true statements might be those that are useful to believe, that are the result of inquiry, that have...
[Revised entry by Tim Lewens and Andrew Buskell on May 22, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Researchers in the field of cultural evolutionary theory pursue an eclectic program of investigation that lies at the intersection of cognitive science, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. "Cultural Evolutionary Theory", as we understand it here, is most thoroughly exemplified in the ongoing research tradition initiated in the 1970s and early 1980s by Cavalli-Sforza a Feldman (1981) on the one hand, and Boyd a Richerson (1985, 2005; Richerson a Boyd 2005) on the other....
[Revised entry by Patricia Easton on May 22, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Dom Robert Desgabets (1610 - 1678) was an early defender and teacher of the Cartesian philosophy at St. Maur in the region of Lorraine, France. He was born in Ancemont and in 1636 became a monk in the Benedictine order. He taught theology at Saint-Evre at Toul between 1635 - 1655 and served as Procurer General of Mihiel to Paris during 1648 - 49. Although he is little-known today, he played an important role in the development and transmission of the Cartesian philosophy, especially in Paris and Toulouse. He is best...
[Revised entry by James Lesher on May 19, 2023. Changes to: Bibliography] Xenophanes of Colophon was a philosophically-minded poet who lived in various parts of the ancient Greek world during the late 6th and early 5th centuries BCE. He is best remembered for a novel critique of anthropomorphism in religion, a partial advance toward monotheism, and some pioneering reflections on the conditions of knowledge. Many later writers, perhaps influenced by two brief characterizations of Xenophanes by Plato (Sophist 242c - d) and Aristotle (Metaphysics 986b18 - 27),...
[Revised entry by Rondo Keele and Jenny Pelletier on May 18, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Walter Chatton or more rarely "Catton" (c. 1290 - 1343) was an English theologian and philosopher who trained at Oxford around the same time as his famous colleague and frequent philosophical target, William of Ockham. More inclined to speculative metaphysics and less skeptical of reason than Ockham, Chatton was one of the most energetic and gifted critics of the influential brand of nominalism which arose in early fourteenth-century England around Ockham. As a constructive philosopher, Chatton was not a...
[Revised entry by Wil Waluchow and Dimitrios Kyritsis on May 18, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Constitutionalism is the idea, often associated with the political theories of John Locke and the founders of the American republic, that government can and should be legally limited in its powers, and that its authority or legitimacy depends on its observing these limitations. This idea brings with it a host of vexing questions of interest not only to legal scholars, but to anyone keen to explore the legal and philosophical foundations of the state. How can a government be legally limited if law is the creation of government? Does this...
[Revised entry by James Ladyman on May 18, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Structural realism is considered by many realists and antirealists alike as the most defensible form of scientific realism. There are different forms of structural realism, and an extensive literature about their pros and cons, and how they relate to case studies from science and its history. There are connections with debates in metaphysics, philosophical logic and philosophy of mathematics. This entry is a comprehensive survey of the field....
[New Entry by Curtis Franks on May 18, 2023.] Propositional logic is the study of the meanings of, and the inferential relationships that hold among, sentences based on the role that a specific class of logical operators called the propositional connectives have in determining those sentences' truth or assertability conditions. As early as Aristotle it was observed that propositional connectives have a logical significance, and over many centuries piecemeal observations about some of their properties were made. But propositional logic per se did not emerge until the...
[Revised entry by Wilfrid Hodges and Therese-Anne Druart on May 9, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (Iraq, c. 870 - c. 950) devoted his career to introducing the work of Aristotle to educated Arabic-speaking citizens of the Islamic Empire. Several of his major writings are lost in whole or part. But many of his books explaining Aristotle's Organon (the collection of Aristotle's writings on logic and related subjects) have survived, and the number of them available in Western translations is increasing steadily. For general information on...
[Revised entry by Andrew Fiala on May 8, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Pacifism is a commitment to peace and opposition to war. Our ordinary language allows a diverse set of beliefs and commitments to be held together under the general rubric of pacifism. This article will explain the family resemblance among the variety of pacifisms. It will locate pacifism within deontological and consequentialist approaches to ethics. It will consider diverse cultural and religious sources of pacifism. And it will consider and reply to objections to pacifism....
[Revised entry by Jennifer Radden on May 7, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Mental disorder (earlier entitled "illness" or "disease"), is ascribed to deviations from normal thoughts, reasoning, feelings, attitudes, and actions that are by their subjects, or by others, considered socially or personally dysfunctional and apt for treatment. Schizophrenia, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, substance abuse, and mania are examples. The concept of mental disorder plays a role in many domains, including medicine, social sciences such as psychology and...
[Revised entry by Luca Moretti and Tommaso Piazza on May 6, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, formalizations.html, notes.html, propositional-doxastic.html] Ted is on his way to the Philosophy Department, early in the freezing morning. Although he doesn't know how cold it is, Ted conjectures that the temperature must be below 0dC. Out of curiosity, he checks the weather app of his smartphone. To his astonishment, he sees it is -30dC. He concludes that this is the least temperature to which he has been exposed ever. Ted's belief about his personal record owes its justification to Ted's belief that it is -30dC, justified by the evidence supplied...
[Revised entry by James Woodward on May 6, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Manipulability theories of causation, according to which causes are to be regarded as handles or devices for manipulating effects, have considerable intuitive appeal and are popular among many scientists and statisticians. This article surveys several prominent versions of such theories advocated by philosophers, and the many difficulties they face. Until recently, philosophical statements of the manipulationist approach have generally been reductionist in aspiration and have assigned a central role to human action. These...
[New Entry by David Meißner on May 6, 2023.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by David Meisner replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.] The Cratylus is the only Platonic dialogue devoted...
[Revised entry by Raja Halwani on May 5, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Sex has received little attention in the history of western philosophy, and what it did receive was not good: Plato denigrated it, arguing that it should lead to something higher or better (Phaedrus, Symposium), Aristotle barely mentioned it, and Christian philosophers condemned it: Augustine argued that its pleasures are dangerous in mastering us, and allowed sex only for procreation (City of God, bk 14; On Marriage and Concupiscence), while Aquinas confined its permissibility to...
[Revised entry by Peter van Inwagen, Meghan Sullivan, and Sara Bernstein on May 4, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] It is not easy to say what metaphysics is. Ancient and Medieval philosophers might have said that metaphysics was, like chemistry or astrology, to be defined by its subject-matter: metaphysics was the "science" that studied "being as such" or "the first causes of things" or "things that do not change". It is no longer possible to define metaphysics that way, for two reasons. First, a philosopher who denied the existence of those things that had once been seen as constituting the...
[Revised entry by Paul Snowdon and Anil Gomes on May 4, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Peter Frederick Strawson (1919 - 2006) was an important and influential philosopher of the late twentieth century. His writings range over philosophical logic, the philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology and the history of philosophy. Across these debates, Strawson aimed to identify the most fundamental concepts involved in our ordinary ways of thinking. He took these to include such core concepts as those of body, person, space and time, and causation. Strawson aimed to show both that sceptical challenges to...
[Revised entry by Jeffrey Bub on May 2, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Quantum entanglement is a physical resource, like energy, associated with the peculiar nonclassical correlations that are possible between separated quantum systems. Entanglement can be measured, transformed, and purified. A pair of quantum systems in an entangled state can be used as a quantum information channel to perform computational and cryptographic tasks that are impossible for classical systems. The general study of the information-processing capabilities of quantum systems is the subject of quantum information theory....
[New Entry by Amber L. Griffioen on May 1, 2023.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Amber Griffioen replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous authors.]] Although rather unlikely to make many philosophers'...
[Revised entry by Michael Ridge and Sean McKeever on May 1, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Among the many questions that arise in the attempt to come to philosophical grips with morality is what role, if any, moral principles have to play. Moral generalists think morality is best understood in terms of moral principles; moral particularists deny this. To many people, ordinary moral practice seems suffused with principles (keep your promises; do not steal; do unto others as you would have them do unto you). To many moral theorists, the central task of moral theory has been to articulate and defend moral...
[Revised entry by Patricia Easton on May 1, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Antoine Le Grand (1629 - 1699) was a philosopher and catholic theologian who played an important role in propagating the Cartesian philosophy in England and beyond during the latter half of the seventeenth century. He was born in Douai, (at the time under rule by the Spanish Hapsburgs), and early in life was associated with an English community of Franciscans who had a college there. Le Grand became a Franciscan Recollect friar prior to leaving for England as a missionary in 1656. In England, he taught philosophy and theology,...
[Revised entry by Jeff Malpas on April 28, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Donald (Herbert) Davidson was one of the most important philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century whose reception and influence is matched, among American philosophers, perhaps only by that of his teacher, W. V. O. Quine. Davidson's ideas, presented in a series of essays (and one posthumous monograph) from the 1960s onwards, have had an impact in a range of areas from semantic theory through to epistemology and ethics. His work exhibits a breadth of approach, as well as a unitary and systematic character, that is...
[Revised entry by Francesco Berto and Mark Jago on April 27, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] According to David Hume, the impossible cannot be conceived. Moritz Schlick claimed that the logically impossible, such as an explicit inconsistency, is simply unthinkable. Yet Hegel complained that it is "one of the fundamental prejudices of...
[Revised entry by John Culp on April 24, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] "Panentheism" is a constructed word composed of the English equivalents of the Greek terms "pan", meaning all, "en", meaning in, and "theism", derived from the Greek 'theos' meaning God. Panentheism considers God and the world to be inter-related with the world being in God and God being in the world. While panentheism offers an increasingly popular alternative to classical theism, both panentheism and classical theistic systems affirm divine transcendence and...
[Revised entry by Istvan Bodnar on April 24, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Aristotle had a lifelong interest in the study of nature. He investigated a variety of different topics, ranging from general issues like motion, causation, place and time, to systematic explorations and explanations of natural phenomena across different kinds of natural entities. These different inquiries are integrated into the framework of a single overarching enterprise describing the domain of natural entities. Aristotle provides the general theoretical framework for this enterprise in his Physics, a treatise...
[Revised entry by Christopher Bertram on April 21, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Jean-Jacques Rousseau remains an important figure in the history of philosophy, both because of his contributions to political philosophy and moral psychology and on account of his influence on later thinkers. Rousseau's own view of most philosophy and philosophers was firmly negative, seeing them as post-hoc rationalizers of self-interest, as apologists for various forms of tyranny, and as playing a role in the alienation of the modern individual from humanity's natural impulse to compassion. The...
[Revised entry by Stephanie Rivera Berruz on April 21, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Latin American feminism, which in this entry includes Caribbean feminism, is rooted in the social and political context defined by colonialism, the enslavement of African peoples, and the marginalization of Native peoples. Latin American feminism focuses on the critical work that women have undertaken in reaction to the forces that created this context. At present, the context is dominated by neoliberal economic policies that, in the environment of globalization, have disproportionally impacted the most vulnerable...
[Revised entry by Herman Cappelen, Ernest Lepore, and Matthew McKeever on April 19, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Starting with Frege, the semantics (and pragmatics) of quotation has received a steady flow of attention over the last one hundred or so years. It has not, however, been subject to the same kind of intense debate and scrutiny as, for example, the semantics of definite descriptions or of propositional attitude verbs. Many philosophers probably share Davidson's experience: 'When I was initiated into the mysteries of logic and semantics, quotation was usually introduced as a somewhat shady device, and the introduction...
[Revised entry by Seyed Mousavian, Suzanne Sumner, Mehdi Aminrazavi, and Glen Van Brummelen on April 18, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Umar Khayyam was a polymath, scientist, philosopher, and poet of the 11th century CE. Whereas his mathematical works and poetry have been the subject of much discussion, his recently edited and published philosophical works have remained a largely neglected area of study. In what follows, we shall review and comment on the salient features of Khayyam's poetry and philosophy, their relationship with one another, and Khayyam's pioneering views on mathematics....
[Revised entry by Edward Wierenga on April 10, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The psalmist asks God, Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there;...
[Revised entry by Robin Rollinger and Hynek Janousek on April 10, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Anton Marty (October 18, 1847 - October 1, 1914) was a philosopher of language, psychologist, and ontologist. He was born in Schwyz, Switzerland in a very large family and baptized as a Catholic with the full name of 'Martin Anton Maurus Marty'. His oldest brother went into the priesthood and became a missionary to the Sioux in North America. Though Marty himself was ordained, he left the priesthood shortly after Brentano had done so (in 1873, a few years after the declaration of papal infallibility) and pursued an academic...
[Revised entry by Ingo Brigandt and Alan Love on April 10, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Reductionism encompasses a set of ontological, epistemological, and methodological claims about the relations between different scientific domains. The basic question of reduction is whether the properties, concepts, explanations, or methods from one scientific domain (typically at higher levels of organization) can be deduced from or explained by the properties, concepts, explanations, or methods from another domain of science (typically at lower levels of organization). Reduction is germane to a variety of issues in philosophy of science,...
[Revised entry by Hannah Kasher and Moshe Kahan on April 10, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Harry A. Wolfson once described medieval philosophy as one "which placed itself at the service of Scriptures" (Philo, II, p. 439). From a formal aspect, a new genre was created: "From now on, a new form of exposition appears in philosophic literature, the homily on some scriptural text, or the running commentary upon some scriptural books" (p. 444). Joseph ibn Kaspi perfectly illustrates this characterization of the medieval philosopher. He wrote some thirty works dedicated to explaining the...
[Revised entry by Yuri Pines on April 7, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Legalism (which henceforth will be called the fa tradition) is a popular - albeit quite inaccurate - designation of an intellectual current that gained considerable popularity in the latter half of the Warring States period (Zhanguo, 453 - 221 BCE). Fa thinkers were political realists who sought to attain "a rich state and a powerful army" and to ensure domestic stability in an age marked by intense inter- and intra-state competition. They believed that human beings - commoners and...
[Revised entry by Del Ratzsch and Jeffrey Koperski on April 5, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Some phenomena within nature exhibit such exquisiteness of structure, function or interconnectedness that many people have found it natural to see a deliberative and directive mind behind those phenomena. The mind in question is typically taken to be supernatural. Philosophically inclined thinkers have both historically and at present labored to shape the relevant intuition into a more formal, logically rigorous inference. The resultant theistic arguments, in their various logical forms, share a focus on plan, purpose,...
[New Entry by Josh Thurow on April 5, 2023.] Atonement is what we do to fix relationships fractured by wrongdoing. To atone is, at first pass, to do something to repair this rupture by addressing the source of the rupture, namely the wrongdoing. The end goal is to become one, to be at one, or to reconcile. "Making amends" is often used to describe what is done to repair the rupture. Atonement is a particularly prominent concept within Judaism and Christianity, which hold that humans must atone for their sins against God. The Christian doctrine of the atonement states that...
[Revised entry by Kyle Stanford on April 4, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] At the heart of the underdetermination of scientific theory by evidence is the simple idea that the evidence available to us at a given time may be insufficient to determine what beliefs we should hold in response to it. In a textbook example, if I know that you spent $10 on apples and oranges and that apples cost $1 while oranges cost $2, then I know that you did not buy six oranges, but I do not know whether you bought one orange and eight apples, two oranges and six apples, and so on. A simple scientific example can be found in the...
[Revised entry by Janet Levin on April 4, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part. This doctrine is rooted in Aristotle's conception of the soul, and has antecedents in Hobbes's conception of the mind as a "calculating machine", but it has become fully articulated (and popularly endorsed) only in the last third of the 20th century....
[Revised entry by Joél Biard on March 30, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Albert of Saxony (ca. 1320 - 1390), Master of Arts at Paris, then Rector of the University of Vienna, and finally Bishop of Halberstadt (Germany). As a logician, he was at the forefront of the movement that expanded the analysis of language based on the properties of terms, especially their reference (in Latin: suppositio), but also in the exploration of new fields of logic, especially the theory of consequences. As a natural philosopher, he worked, along with Oresme and Buridan, in the context of the new Parisian physics, contributing...
[Revised entry by Øystein Linnebo on March 28, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Platonism about mathematics (or mathematical platonism) is the metaphysical view that there are abstract mathematical objects whose existence is independent of us and our language, thought, and practices. Just as electrons and planets exist independently of us, so do numbers and sets. And just as statements about electrons and planets are made true or false by the objects with which they are concerned and these objects' perfectly objective properties, so are statements about numbers and sets. Mathematical truths are...
[Revised entry by Charles Taliaferro on March 28, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Philosophy of religion is the philosophical examination of the themes and concepts involved in religious traditions as well as the broader philosophical task of reflecting on matters of religious significance including the nature of religion itself, alternative concepts of God or ultimate reality, and the religious significance of general features of the cosmos (e.g., the laws of nature, the emergence of consciousness) and of historical events (e.g., the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, the Holocaust). Philosophy of religion also includes the...
[New Entry by Matthew Frise on March 27, 2023.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Matthew Frise replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.]...
[Revised entry by Robert Kirk on March 25, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Zombies in philosophy are imaginary creatures designed to illuminate problems about consciousness and its relation to the physical world. Unlike the ones in films or witchcraft, they are exactly like us in all physical respects but without conscious experiences: by definition there is 'nothing it is like' to be a zombie. Yet zombies behave just like us, and some even spend a lot of time discussing consciousness....
[New Entry by Andrea Sangiovanni and Juri Viehoff on March 25, 2023.] The term "solidarity" first becomes prevalent in the early- to late-nineteenth century in France. Since then, it has always been used to describe a special relationship of unity and mutual indebtedness within a group. The term's origins lie in French legal usage, in which the Roman legal concept of an obligation in solidum - a joint contractual obligation in which each signatory declared himself liable for the debts of all together - long had a place in the French code civile...
[Revised entry by Melissa Lane on March 22, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Ancient political philosophy is understood here to mean ancient Greek and Roman thought from the classical period of Greek thought in the fifth century BCE to the end of the Roman empire in the West in the fifth century CE, excluding the development of Jewish and Christian ideas about politics during that period. Political philosophy as a genre was developed in this period by Plato and, in effect, reinvented by Aristotle: it encompasses reflections on the origin of political institutions, the concepts used to interpret and organize political...
[Revised entry by Neil Lewis and Katrin Fischer on March 18, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] William of Auvergne or Paris, (ca.1180/90 - 1249), Bishop of Paris from 1228 until his death in 1249, was one of the first wave of thinkers in the Latin West to engage with the writings on natural philosophy and metaphysics by Greek, Islamic and Jewish thinkers that had recently become available in Latin translation. William took these writings to pose errors dangerous to the Christian faith, and his philosophical works are in large part aimed at combating their errors. Yet at the same time he recognized their philosophical value and,...
[New Entry by Lauren Ross and James Woodward on March 17, 2023.] This entry discusses some accounts of causal explanation developed after approximately 1990. For a discussion of earlier accounts of explanation including the deductive-nomological (DN) model, Wesley Salmon's statistical relevance and causal mechanical models, and unificationist models, see the general entry on scientific explanation. Recent accounts of non-causal explanation will be discussed in a separate entry. In addition, a substantial amount of recent discussion...
[Revised entry by Liam Shields, Anne Newman, and Debra Satz on March 17, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] It is widely accepted that educational opportunities for children ought to be equal. This thesis follows from two observations about education and children: first, that education significantly influences a person's life chances in terms of labor market success, preparation for democratic citizenship, and general human flourishing; and second, that children's life chances should not be fixed by certain morally arbitrary circumstances of their birth such as their social class, race, and gender. But the precise meaning of, and...
[Revised entry by Barry Dainton on March 17, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html, specious-present.html] In ordinary conscious experience, consciousness of time seems commonplace. For example, we are often aware of changes, movements, and successions unfolding over brief temporal intervals. How is this possible? Many different models of temporal consciousness have been proposed. Some philosophers have argued that consciousness is confined to a momentary interval and that we are not in fact directly aware of change. Others have argued that although consciousness itself is momentary, we are nevertheless conscious of change. Still others have...
[Revised entry by Peter Hylton and Gary Kemp on March 16, 2023. Changes to: Bibliography] Willard Van Orman Quine (1908 - 2000) worked in theoretical philosophy and in logic. (In practical philosophy - ethics and political philosophy - his contributions are negligible.) He is perhaps best known for his arguments against Logical Empiricism (in particular, against its use of the analytic-synthetic distinction). This argument, however, should be seen as part of a comprehensive world-view which makes no sharp distinction between philosophy and empirical science, and thus requires a wholesale reorientation of the...
[Revised entry by Anna-Sofia Maurin on March 16, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Trope theory is the view that reality is (wholly or partly) made up from tropes. Tropes are things like the particular shape, weight, and texture of an individual object. Because tropes are particular, for two objects to 'share' a property (for them both to exemplify, say, a particular shade of green) is for each to contain (instantiate, exemplify) a greenness-trope, where those greenness-tropes, although numerically distinct, nevertheless exactly resemble each other....
[Revised entry by Jack Lyons on March 14, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] The central problem in the epistemology of perception is that of explaining how perception could give us knowledge or justified belief about an external world, about things outside of ourselves. This problem has traditionally been viewed in terms of a skeptical argument that purports to show that such knowledge and justification are impossible. Skepticism about the external world highlights a number of epistemological difficulties regarding the nature and epistemic role of experience and the question of how perception might bring us into...
[Revised entry by Ian Deweese-Boyd on March 13, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Virtually every aspect of self-deception, including its definition and paradigmatic cases, is a matter of controversy among philosophers. Minimally, self-deception involves a person who (a) as a consequence of some motivation or emotion, seems to acquire and maintain some false belief despite evidence to the contrary and (b) who may display behavior suggesting some awareness of the truth. Beyond this, philosophers divide over whether self-deception is intentional, whether it involves belief or some other sub- or...
[Revised entry by Martha Bolton on March 13, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Mary Shepherd (1777 - 1847) advocates a systematic metaphysics and theory of knowledge which were highly regarded by her contemporaries. Well versed in the doctrines of leading eighteenth century British empiricists, she finds them unable to sustain scientific inquiry, everyday practical reasoning, and belief in an almighty deity. She aims to replace them with a theory of perceptual knowledge that is reliable and supported by reasons. She urges a theory on which sensation, the reception of impressions by means of the senses, and...
[Revised entry by Thomas Hofweber on March 13, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] A number of important philosophical problems are at the intersection of logic and ontology. Both logic and ontology are diverse fields within philosophy and, partly because of this, there is not one single philosophical problem about the relation between them. In this survey article we will first discuss what different philosophical projects are carried out under the headings of "logic" and "ontology" and then we will look at several areas where logic and ontology overlap....
[Revised entry by Boudewijn de Bruin, Lisa Herzog, Martin O’Neill, and Joakim Sandberg on March 10, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Finance and philosophy may seem to be worlds apart. But they share at least one common ancestor: Thales of Miletus. Thales is typically regarded as the first philosopher, but he was also a financial innovator. He appears to have been what we would now call an option trader. He predicted that next year's olive harvest would be good, and therefore paid a small amount of money to the owners of olive presses for the right to the next year's use. When the harvest turned out to be as good as predicted, Thales earned a sizable...
[Revised entry by Andrea Falcon on March 7, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Causality is at the heart of Aristotle's scientific and philosophical enterprise. Each Aristotelian science consists in the causal investigation of a specific department of reality. If successful, such an investigation results in causal knowledge; that is, knowledge of the relevant or appropriate causes. The emphasis on the concept of cause explains why Aristotle developed a theory of causality which is commonly known as the doctrine of the four causes. For Aristotle, a firm grasp of what a cause is, and how many kinds of...
[Revised entry by Maarten Franssen, Gert-Jan Lokhorst, and Ibo van de Poel on March 6, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] If philosophy is the attempt "to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term", as Sellars (1962) put it, philosophy should not ignore technology. It is largely by technology that contemporary society hangs together. It is hugely important not only as an economic force but also as a cultural force. Indeed during the last two centuries, when it gradually emerged as a discipline, philosophy of technology has mostly been concerned with the meaning of...
[Revised entry by Mark Siderits on March 6, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The Buddha (fl. circa 450 BCE) is the individual whose teachings form the basis of the Buddhist tradition. These teachings, preserved in texts known as the Nikāyas or Āgamas, concern the quest for liberation from suffering. While the ultimate aim of the Buddha's teachings is thus to help individuals attain the good life, his analysis of the source of suffering centrally involves claims concerning the nature of persons, as well as how we acquire knowledge about the world and our place in it. These teachings...
[Revised entry by Mark Colyvan on March 6, 2023. Changes to: Bibliography] One of the most intriguing features of mathematics is its applicability to empirical science. Every branch of science draws upon large and often diverse portions of mathematics, from the use of Hilbert spaces in quantum mechanics to the use of differential geometry in general relativity. It's not just the physical sciences that avail themselves of the services of mathematics either. Biology, for instance, makes extensive use of difference equations and statistics. The roles mathematics plays in these theories is also...
[Revised entry by Christopher Smeenk, Frank Arntzenius, and Tim Maudlin on March 6, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html, toy-models.html] Time travel has been a staple of science fiction. With the advent of general relativity it has been entertained by serious physicists. But, especially in the philosophy literature, there have been arguments that time travel is inherently paradoxical. The most famous paradox is the grandfather paradox: you travel back in time and kill your grandfather, thereby preventing your own existence. To avoid inconsistency some circumstance will have to occur which makes you fail in this attempt to kill your grandfather. Doesn't this...
[Revised entry by Rick Anthony Furtak on March 2, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) was an American philosopher, poet, environmental scientist, and political activist whose major work, Walden, draws upon each of these various identities in meditating upon the concrete problems of living in the world as a human being. He sought to revive a conception of philosophy as a way of life, not only a mode of reflective thought and discourse. Thoreau's work was informed by an eclectic variety of sources. He was well-versed in classical Greek and Roman philosophy (and...
[Revised entry by Stephen Read on March 2, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] The theory of properties of terms (proprietates terminorum) was the basis of the medievals' semantic theory. It embraced those properties of linguistic expressions necessary to explain truth, fallacy and inference, the three central concepts of logical analysis. The theory evolved out of the work of Anselm and Abelard at the turn of the twelfth century, developed steadily through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and was still undergoing changes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is generally agreed that its early stages...
[Revised entry by Kurt Smith on March 1, 2023. Changes to: Bibliography] Descartes has been heralded as the first modern philosopher. He is famous for having made an important connection between geometry and algebra, which allowed for the solving of geometrical problems by way of algebraic equations. He is also famous for having promoted a new conception of matter, which allowed for the accounting of physical phenomena by way of mechanical explanations. However, he is most famous for having written a relatively short work, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Meditations On First Philosophy),...
[Revised entry by William Hasker and Charles Taliaferro on February 27, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] One of the points where there is a significant, long-lasting intersection of the interests of many philosophers with the interests of many people of all kinds and conditions concerns the nature and significance of death. How should we understand the mortality of all living things and, closer to home, how should we understand our own mortality? Is it possible for persons to survive biological death? This is a topic that has occupied both analytic and continental philosophy in the twentieth century (e.g., Fred Feldman, Martin...
[New Entry by Li-Hsiang Rosenlee on February 27, 2023.] The study of gender in Confucian philosophy is a complicated task, since there is no conceptual equivalent of "gender" in the Chinese linguistic construct. Instead of deriving from a set of natural dispositions or bodily functions, man and woman in the Confucian textual tradition are kinship- and ritual-dependent. The process of genderization where a person becomes a socially recognizable "man" (nan 男) or "woman" (nu 女) is concomitant with...
[New Entry by Remy Debes on February 18, 2023.] Dignity is a complex concept. In academic and legal contexts, it is typically used in the couplet "human dignity" to denote a kind of basic worth or status that purportedly belongs to all persons equally, and which grounds fundamental moral or political duties or rights. In this sense, many believe that dignity is a defining ideal of the contemporary world, especially in western society. However, the concept of dignity has long been associated with many more meanings, some of which cut in distinctly different directions: rank, station,...
[New Entry by Elliot Paul and Dustin Stokes on February 16, 2023.] Few things shape the human experience as profoundly or as pervasively as creativity does. And creativity raises a wealth of philosophical issues. Since art is such a salient domain of creativity, you might assume, at first, that the philosophy of creativity is the philosophy of art or aesthetics, or a branch thereof. But creativity invites questions of its own that go beyond the purview of those other fields....
[Revised entry by Nick Zangwill on February 16, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Beauty is an important part of our lives. Ugliness too. It is no surprise then that philosophers since antiquity have been interested in our experiences of and judgments about beauty and ugliness. They have tried to understand the nature of these experiences and judgments, and they have also wanted to know whether these experiences and judgments were legitimate. Both these projects took a sharpened form in the twentieth century, when this part of our lives came under a sustained attack in both European and North American intellectual...
[Revised entry by John P. Pittman on February 16, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Double-consciousness is a concept in social philosophy referring, originally, to a source of inward "twoness" putatively experienced by African-Americans because of their racialized oppression and disvaluation in a white-dominated society. The concept is associated with William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, who introduced the term into social thought in his groundbreaking The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Its source has been traced back from there, by recent commentators, to the development of clinical...
[Revised entry by Nicolas Troquard and Philippe Balbiani on February 16, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Logics of programs are modal logics arising from the idea of associating a modality ([alpha]) with each computer program (alpha) of a programming language. The formula ([alpha]A) is then to be read as: (A) is true after the execution of the program (alpha). This idea comes from the line of works by Engeler [1967], Hoare [1969], Yanov [1959], and others who formulated and studied logical languages in which the properties of program connectives can be expressed. The algorithmic logic (AL) first developed by Salwicki...
[New Entry by Marie-Hélène Gorisse on February 13, 2023.] The Jains are those who consider that the teaching of the omniscient Jinas is the expression of the eternal essential nature of the universe. The only extent teaching is that of Mahāvīra (traditional dates 599 - 527/510 BCE, in Magadha, South of modern Bihar), the last Jina of the current cosmic period. In their practice, Jaina renunciants follow a rigorous method towards...
[Revised entry by Andrew Bowie on February 9, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775 - 1854) is, along with J.G. Fichte and G.W.F. Hegel, one of the three most influential thinkers in the tradition of 'German Idealism'. Although he is often regarded as a philosophical Proteus who changed his conception so radically and so often that it is hard to attribute one clear philosophical conception to him, Schelling was in fact often an impressively rigorous logical thinker. In the era during which Schelling was writing, so much was changing in philosophy that a...
[Revised entry by Matthew Festenstein on February 9, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] John Dewey (1859 - 1952) was an American philosopher, associated with pragmatism. His immense philosophical and other written output encompasses most areas of philosophy as well as a host of other educational, social and political concerns. Although much of Dewey's political writing is prompted by specific issues, his overall orientation is deeply shaped by his pragmatism or (as he preferred) "experimentalism". At the core of his political thinking are the beliefs that science and democracy are mutually...
[New Entry by Roy Cook on February 7, 2023.] Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (b. 1848, d. 1925) is often credited with inventing modern quantificational logic in his Begriffsschrift. While there has been some controversy over exactly what was novel with Frege, and what can be found in the work of contemporaries such as George Boole, Augustus DeMorgan, Ernst Schroder, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Venn (see, e.g., Putnam 1982 or Boolos 1994 for accounts that resist the tendency to attribute all of modern logic to Frege, and also the entry on...
[Revised entry by Hans Maes on February 7, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] What is erotic art? Do all paintings with a sexual theme qualify as erotic? How to distinguish between erotica and erotic art? In what way are aesthetic experiences related to, or different from, erotic experiences and are they at all compatible? Both people and works of art can be sensually appealing, but is the beauty in each case substantially the same? How helpful is the distinction between the nude and the naked? Can we draw a strict line between erotic art and pornography? We tend to think of art as complex and of pornography as...
[Revised entry by Pierre Jacob on February 7, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] In philosophy, intentionality is the power of minds and mental states to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. To say of an individual's mental states that they have intentionality is to say that they are mental representations or that they have contents. Furthermore, to the extent that a speaker utters words from some natural language or draws pictures or symbols from a formal language for the purpose of conveying to others the contents of her mental states, these artifacts...
[Revised entry by Niko Kolodny and John Brunero on February 5, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, supplement.html] Someone displays instrumental rationality insofar as she adopts suitable means to her ends. Instrumental rationality, by virtually any reckoning, is an important, and presumably indispensable, part of practical rationality. However, philosophers have been interested in it for further reasons. To take one example, it has been suggested that instrumental rationality, or some tendency toward it, is partly constitutive of intention, desire, or action. To take another, more important, example, it has been argued that instrumental rationality...
[New Entry by Peter Adamson and Fedor Benevich on February 5, 2023.] Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (1149 - 1210) was one of the most innovative and influential thinkers in the first stage of what is sometimes called "post-classical" Islamic thought. Along with other major thinkers of the Islamic East in the twelfth century, notably Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī and al-Suhrawardī, Fakhr al-Dīn reacted critically to the philosophy of Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna). He produced a voluminous corpus that is often elusive in terms of conveying Fakhr...
[Revised entry by Merel Noorman on February 2, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Traditionally philosophical discussions on moral responsibility have focused on the human components of moral action. Accounts of how to ascribe moral responsibility usually describe human agents performing actions that have well-defined, direct consequences. In today's increasingly technological society, however, human activity cannot be properly understood without making reference to technological artifacts, which complicates the ascription of moral responsibility (Jonas 1984; Doorn a van de Poel...
[Revised entry by David Robb, John Heil, and Sophie Gibb on February 2, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Questions about the existence and nature of mental causation are prominent in contemporary discussions of the mind and human agency. Originally, the problem of mental causation was that of understanding how an immaterial mind, a soul, could interact with the body. Most philosophers nowadays repudiate souls, but the problem of mental causation has not gone away. Instead, focus has shifted to mental properties. How could mental properties be causally relevant to bodily behavior? How could something mental be a cause qua mental?...
[Revised entry by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen on February 2, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Some people end up worse off than others partly because of their bad luck. For instance, some die young due to a genetic disease, whereas others live long lives. Are such differential luck induced inequalities unjust? Many are inclined to answer this question affirmatively. To understand this inclination, we need a clear account of what luck involves. On some accounts, luck nullifies responsibility. On others, it nullifies desert. It is often said that justice requires luck to be 'neutralized'. However, it is...
[Revised entry by Dorothea Frede and Mi-Kyoung Lee on February 1, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Like most other ancient philosophers, Plato maintains a virtue-based eudaemonistic conception of ethics. That is to say, happiness or well-being (eudaimonia) is the highest aim of moral thought and conduct, and the virtues (arete: 'excellence') are the dispositions/skills needed to attain it. If Plato's conception of happiness is elusive and his support for a morality of happiness seems somewhat subdued, there are several reasons. First, he nowhere defines the concept or makes it the...
[Revised entry by Leopold Stubenberg and Donovan Wishon on January 31, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Neutral monism is a monistic metaphysics. It holds that ultimate reality is all of one kind. To this extent neutral monism is in agreement with the more familiar versions of monism: idealism and materialism. What distinguishes neutral monism from its monistic rivals is the claim that the intrinsic nature of ultimate reality is neither mental nor material but rather, in some sense, neutral between the two....
[Revised entry by Joan Bagaria on January 31, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, ZF.html] Set theory is the mathematical theory of well-determined collections, called sets, of objects that are called members, or elements, of the set. Pure set theory deals exclusively with sets, so the only sets under consideration are those whose members are also sets. The theory of the hereditarily-finite sets, namely those finite sets whose elements are also finite sets, the elements of which are also finite, and so on, is formally equivalent to arithmetic. So, the essence of set theory is the study of infinite...
[Revised entry by Gareth Matthews and Amy Mullin on January 31, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The philosophy of childhood has recently come to be recognized as an area of inquiry analogous to the philosophy of science, the philosophy of history, the philosophy of religion, and the many other "philosophy of" subjects that are already considered legitimate areas of philosophical study. In addition, philosophical study of related topics (such as parental rights, duties and responsibilities) has flourished in recent years. The philosophy of childhood takes up philosophically interesting questions about...
[Revised entry by Paul Thagard on January 31, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. Its intellectual origins are in the mid-1950s when researchers in several fields began to develop theories of mind based on complex representations and computational procedures. Its organizational origins are in the mid-1970s when the Cognitive Science Society was formed and the journal Cognitive Science began. Since then,...
[Revised entry by Josep Puig Montada on January 29, 2023. Changes to: Bibliography] Philosophy in Al-Andalus developed later than in the East; it grew among Muslims and Jews, since both communities were nurtured by a common Arabic. The Muslim community was much larger and it defined the cultural space, a significant part of which was made by Arabic translations of Greek scientifical and philosophical works. The earliest Arab philosopher al-Kindi (d. c. 853) was possibly known...
[Revised entry by Elizabeth Anderson on January 28, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] John Dewey (1859 - 1952) lived from the Civil War to the Cold War, a period of extraordinary social, economic, demographic, political and technological change. During his lifetime the United States changed from a rural to an urban society, from an agricultural to an industrial economy, from a regional to a world power. It absorbed millions of immigrants from Europe and Asia, but faced wrenching conflicts between capital and labor as they were integrated into the urban industrial economy. As the face-to-face communal life of small...
[Revised entry by Sophie-Grace Chappell and Nicholas Smyth on January 28, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Bernard Williams (1929 - 2003) was a leading influence in philosophical ethics in the latter half of the twentieth century. He rejected the codification of ethics into moral theories that views such as Kantianism and (above all) utilitarianism see as essential to philosophical thinking about ethics, arguing that our ethical life is too untidy to be captured by any systematic moral theory. He was also an important contributor to debates on moral psychology, personal identity, equality, morality and the emotions, and the interpretation...
[Revised entry by Mario Gómez-Torrente on January 28, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Alfred Tarski (1901 - 1983) described himself as "a mathematician (as well as a logician, and perhaps a philosopher of a sort)" (1944, p. 369). He is widely considered as one of the greatest logicians of the twentieth century (often regarded as second only to Godel), and thus as one of the greatest logicians of all time. Among philosophers he is especially known for his mathematical characterizations of the concepts of truth and logical consequence for sentences of classical formalized languages, and to a lesser extent...
[New Entry by Ori Herstein on January 27, 2023.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Ori Herstein replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.]...
[New Entry by Ivan Boldyrev on January 25, 2023.] Ernst Bloch (1885 - 1977) was a German philosopher and cultural critic who is mostly credited for renewing the interest in utopia and for mediating between the radical philosophy of emancipation, non-dogmatic religious thought, analysis of mass culture, and new aesthetic forms, notably those of Expressionism. His books, especially The Principle of Hope (1954 - 1959), contributed to a particular form of critical theory and, being written in a peculiar essayistic style, made him quite popular both in academic and...
[Revised entry by David William Archard on January 24, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] 'In present-day political and moral philosophy the idea that all persons are in some way moral equals has become dogma' (Steinhoff ed. 2015, xi). Yet in the collection of essays from whose Introduction this quotation comes and that seeks to explain and justify this foundational 'dogma', 'children' does not figure in its index and are barely discussed if at all. Whilst children are thought of as human beings and thus having a moral status such that it would be wrong to treat them in certain ways, it is also thought reasonable that there are things children may...
[Revised entry by Josep Puig Montada on January 24, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Philosophy has been divided into theoretical and practical since the time of Aristotle's distinction of the sciences, and within theoretical philosophy, the enquire on nature was of major import in Ancient and Medieval times. Most of its contents later developed into modern natural science as the seeds of physics or chemistry, but its founding concepts are still worth reflecting upon. Concepts such as those of body and extension, motion and change, time and place, finiteness and infiniteness, and of nature itself have kept their...
[New Entry by Christopher Howard on January 24, 2023.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Chris Howard replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.] At the most general level, fitting-attitude theories of value (FA...
[Revised entry by Souleymane Bachir Diagne on January 24, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Towards the end of his life, Aime Cesaire has declared that the question he and his friend Leopold Sedar Senghor came to raise after they first met was: "Who am I? Who are we? What are we in this white world?" And he commented: "That's quite a problem" (Cesaire 2005, 23). "Who am I?" is a question Descartes posed, and a reader of the French philosopher naturally understands such a question to be universal, and the subject who says "I" here to stand for...
[Revised entry by Geoff Sayre-McCord on January 24, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Metaethics is the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice. As such, it counts within its domain a broad range of questions and puzzles, including: Is morality more a matter of taste than truth? Are moral standards culturally relative? Are there moral facts? If there are moral facts, what are their origin and nature? How is it that they set an appropriate standard for our behavior? How might moral facts be...
[Revised entry by Scott Anderson on January 23, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, applications.html, notes.html] The concept of coercion has two different faces, corresponding to the two parties involved in its most ordinary cases. On one face, it picks out a technique agents (coercers) can use to get other agents to do or not do something. On the other face, it picks out a kind of reason for why agents (coercees) sometimes do or refrain from doing something. Coercion is typically thought to carry with it several important implications, including that it diminishes the targeted agent's freedom and responsibility, and that it is a...
[Revised entry by James Garson on January 23, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] A modal is an expression (like 'necessarily' or 'possibly') that is used to qualify the truth of a judgement. Modal logic is, strictly speaking, the study of the deductive behavior of the expressions 'it is necessary that' and 'it is possible that'. However, the term 'modal logic' may be used more broadly for a family of related systems. These include logics for belief, for tense and other temporal expressions, for the deontic (moral) expressions such as...
[Revised entry by Allen Buchanan and Alexander Motchoulski on January 20, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Political revolutions are transformative moments marked by profound, rapid change in the political order achieved through the use of force rather than through consensus or legal process. Moral responses to revolutions are often ambivalent or deeply polarized. On the one hand, revolutions promise to be powerful engines of moral progress, allowing a community to abolish an oppressive social order and providing the opportunity to institute a better one. On the other hand, revolutions risk unravelling the fabric of political community and devolving into...
[New Entry by Antonia Peacocke on January 20, 2023.] A paradigmatic aesthetic experience is a perceptual experience focused on the beauty of an object like a work of art or an aspect of nature. Some philosophers take it that this is the only kind of aesthetic experience, though many more take it that there are other varieties as well. You might, for instance, have an aesthetic experience by witnessing not a beautiful but a sublime storm. You might have an aesthetic experience not by having a perceptual but rather by having an (imagined) emotional experience of the deep suffering of...
[New Entry by Marion Durand, Simon Shogry, and Dirk Baltzly on January 20, 2023.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.] Stoicism was one of the dominant philosophical systems of the...
[Revised entry by Jessica Wilson on January 18, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Determinables and determinates are in the first instance type-level properties that stand in a distinctive specification relation: the 'determinable-determinate' relation (for short, 'determination'). For example, color is a determinable having red, blue, and other specific shades of color as determinates; shape is a determinable having rectangular, oval, and other specific (including many irregular) shapes as determinates; mass is a...
[Revised entry by Margaret Kohn and Kavita Reddy on January 17, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Colonialism is a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another. At least since the Crusades and the conquest of the Americas, political theorists have used theories of justice, contract, and natural law to both criticize and justify European domination. In the nineteenth century, the contradiction between liberal ideals and colonial practice became particularly acute, as the dominion of Europe over the rest of the world reached its zenith. This entry begins with a definition of colonialism, and...
[Revised entry by Brad Hooker on January 15, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The theory of morality we can call full rule-consequentialism selects rules solely in terms of the goodness of their consequences and then claims that these rules determine which kinds of acts are morally wrong. George Berkeley was arguably the first rule-consequentialist. He wrote, "In framing the general laws of nature, it is granted we must be entirely guided by the public good of mankind, but not in the ordinary moral actions of our lives. ... The rule is framed with respect to the good of mankind; but our practice must be always...
[New Entry by Timothy Perrine on January 13, 2023.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Timothy Perrine replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.]...
[New Entry by James Martin on January 13, 2023.] Antonio Gramsci (1891 - 1937) has been enormously influential as a Marxist theorist of cultural and political domination in "developed" capitalism. However, his career was that of a radical journalist and revolutionary organizer, not a professional philosopher. Gramsci was a socialist activist, cultural commentator and, later, communist party leader in Italy. Most of his writings are concerned with assessing the immediate political situation and, particularly, the prospects for revolution in interwar Italy....
[Revised entry by George Graham on January 13, 2023. Changes to: Main text] It has sometimes been said that "behave is what organisms do." Behaviorism is built on this assumption, and its goal is to promote the scientific study of behavior. The behavior, in particular, of individual organisms. Not of social groups. Not of cultures. But of persons and animals. This entry considers different types of behaviorism and outlines...
[Revised entry by Ronald Sundstrom on January 12, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Frederick Douglass (c. 1817 - 1895) is a central figure in U.S. and African American history.[1] He was born into slavery circa 1817; his mother was an enslaved black woman, while his father was reputed to be his white master. Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838 and rose to become a principal leader and spokesperson for the U.S. Abolition movement.[2]...
[Revised entry by Michael Hickson on January 12, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Pierre Bayle (1647 - 1706), the "Philosopher of Rotterdam", was a historian, literary critic, journalist, encyclopedist, French Protestant refugee, professor, and above all, philosopher. Although he is usually grouped today among the "minor figures" in the history of philosophy, Bayle was considered by the leading philosophers of his day as an equal, as one of the most erudite authors of his or any century. Upon Bayle's death, G.W. Leibniz wrote: "he has departed from us, and such a...
[Revised entry by Georgia Warnke on January 11, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] To the extent that Continental and analytic approaches to feminism differ, they do so primarily in the theoretical resources to which they appeal: analytic approaches typically take their starting point from philosophers in the English-speaking world - Russell, Moore, Quine et al. - while Continental approaches typically take theirs either from Germany - Hegel, Marx, the Frankfurt School et al. - or from France - Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida et al. Yet feminist philosophers are not always wedded to one...
[Revised entry by Debra Bergoffen and Megan Burke on January 11, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Simone de Beauvoir (1908 - 1986) was a philosopher, novelist, feminist, public intellectual and activist, and one of the major figures in existentialism in post-war France. She is best known for her trailblazing work in feminist philosophy, The Second Sex (1949), but her original contributions to existentialism and phenomenology can be found across her work, from her first philosophical novel She Came to Stay (1943) to her politicization of old age in The Coming of Age (1970)....
[New Entry by Juan S. Piñeros Glasscock and Sergio Tenenbaum on January 11, 2023.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Juan Pineros Glasscock and Sergio Tenenbaum replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.]...
[Revised entry by Keith Campbell, James Franklin, and Douglas Ehring on January 10, 2023. Changes to: Bibliography] The published work of Donald Williams (1899 - 1983) ranges across a broad spectrum in philosophy, but his importance as a philosopher rests in large measure on four major achievements. Firstly, in a period when the role of philosophy was being diminished and trivialized, he persisted with a traditional style of philosophizing. Although it remained unfashionable throughout most of his active years, he held to the classic program of Western philosophy: to explain and defend our capacity to attain knowledge (so far as that...
[New Entry by Roman Frigg and Charlotte Werndl on January 10, 2023.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Roman Frigg and Charlotte Werndl replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.] Statistical Mechanics is the third pillar of modern physics, next to...
[Revised entry by Robert Shaver on January 9, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Egoism can be a descriptive or a normative position. Psychological egoism, the most famous descriptive position, claims that each person has but one ultimate aim: her own welfare. Normative forms of egoism make claims about what one ought to do, rather than describe what one does do. Ethical egoism claims I morally ought to perform some action if and only if, and because, performing that action maximizes my self-interest. Rational egoism claims that I ought to perform some action if and only if, and because, performing that action maximizes...
[Revised entry by William Scheuerman on January 9, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Covering a wide range of distinct political, economic, and cultural trends, the term "globalization" remains crucial to contemporary political and academic debate. In contemporary popular discourse, globalization often functions as little more than a synonym for one or more of the following phenomena: the pursuit of classical liberal (or "free market") policies in the world economy ("economic liberalization"), the growing dominance of western (or even American) forms of political, economic, and cultural...
[Revised entry by Sylvia Berryman on January 9, 2023. Changes to: Bibliography] The Greek tradition regarded Leucippus as the founder of atomism in ancient Greek philosophy. Little is known about him, and his views are hard to distinguish from those of his associate Democritus. He is sometimes said to have been a student of Zeno of Elea, and to have devised the atomist philosophy in order to escape from the problems raised by Parmenides and his followers....
[Revised entry by Sylvia Berryman on January 7, 2023. Changes to: Bibliography] Democritus, known in antiquity as the 'laughing philosopher' because of his emphasis on the value of 'cheerfulness,' was one of the two founders of ancient atomist theory. He elaborated a system originated by his teacher Leucippus into a materialist account of the natural world. The atomists held that there are smallest indivisible bodies from which everything else is composed, and that these move about in an infinite void. Of the ancient materialist accounts of the natural world which...
[New Entry by Kevin Aho on January 6, 2023.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Kevin Aho replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.]...
[Revised entry by Michaela Boenke on January 4, 2023. Changes to: Bibliography] Bernardino Telesio (1509 - 1588) belongs to a group of independent philosophers of the late Renaissance who left the universities in order to develop philosophical and scientific ideas beyond the restrictions of the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition. Authors in the early modern period referred to these philosophers as 'novateurs' and 'modern'. In contrast to his successors Patrizi and Campanella, Telesio was a fervent critic of metaphysics and insisted on a purely empiricist approach in natural...
[Revised entry by Garrath Williams on January 4, 2023. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Kant's philosophy focuses on the power and limits of reason. Two questions are central. In his theoretical philosophy, Kant asks whether reasoning can give us metaphysical knowledge. In particular, can reason ground insights that go "beyond" (meta) the physical world, as "rationalist" philosophers such as Leibniz and Descartes claimed? In his practical philosophy, Kant asks whether reason can guide action and justify moral principles. "Empiricist" philosophers claimed that...
[Revised entry by Sam Cowling on December 31, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Imagine the following alternative history of the world: Things are qualitatively just as they actually are. There is no difference in anything like the shape, size, or mass of objects. There is no difference in the number of entities. Even so, there is a non-qualitative difference and it concerns you in particular. According to this alternative history, you fail to exist. In your place, there is a distinct individual, Double. Double has all the qualitative properties, whether mental or physical, you actually have,...
[Revised entry by Michael Wreen on December 28, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Monroe Beardsley (1915 - 1985) was born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and educated at Yale University (B.A. 1936, Ph.D. 1939). He taught at a number of colleges and universities, including Mt. Holyoke College and Yale University, but most of his career was spent at Swarthmore College (22 years) and Temple University (16 years). Beardsley is best known for his work in aesthetics - and this...
[Revised entry by Adrian Johnston on December 24, 2022. Changes to: Bibliography] Jacques Marie Emile Lacan (April 13, 1901 to September 9, 1981) was a major figure in Parisian intellectual life for much of the twentieth century. Sometimes referred to as "the French Freud," he is an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis. His teachings and writings explore the significance of Freud's discovery of the unconscious both within the theory and practice of analysis itself as well as in connection with a wide range of other disciplines. Particularly for those interested in the...
[Revised entry by Michael Ridge on December 23, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] The agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction is widely and rightly regarded as a philosophically important one. Unfortunately, the distinction is often drawn in different and mutually incompatible ways. The agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction has historically been drawn three main ways: the 'principle-based distinction', the 'reason-statement-based distinction' and the 'perspective-based distinction'. Each of these approaches has its own distinctive...
[Revised entry by Johan van Benthem and Dominik Klein on December 19, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] In light of logic's historical roots in dialogue and argumentation, games and logic are a natural fit. Argumentation is a game-like activity that involves taking turns, saying the right things at the right time, and, in competitive settings, has clear pay-offs in terms of winning and losing. Pursuing this connection, specialized logic games have already been used in the middle ages as a tool for logic training (Hamblin 1970). The modern area augmented this picture with formal dialogue games as...
[Revised entry by Volker Peckhaus on December 19, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Heinrich Scholz (1884 - 1956) was a German Protestant theologian, philosopher, and logician who supported the neo-positivistic scientific world view, applying it, however, to a scientific metaphysics as well. He helped to establish the academic field "Mathematical Logic and Foundational Research", claiming the priority of language construction and semantics in order to solve foundational problems even outside mathematics. He was also the driving force behind the institutionalization of mathematical logic...
[Revised entry by Kathrin Glüer, Åsa Wikforss, and Marianna Ganapini on December 19, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Normativism in the theory of meaning and content is the view that linguistic meaning and/or intentional content are essentially normative. As both normativity and its essentiality to meaning/content can be interpreted in a number of different ways, there is now a whole family of views laying claim to the slogan "meaning/content is normative"....
[Revised entry by Marion Smiley on December 19, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The notion of collective responsibility, like that of personal responsibility and shared responsibility, refers in most contexts to both the causal responsibility of moral agents for harm in the world and the blameworthiness that we ascribe to them for having caused such harm. Hence, it is, like its two more purely individualistic counterparts, almost always a notion of moral, rather than purely causal, responsibility. But, unlike its two more purely individualistic counterparts, it does...
[Revised entry by Gabriel Uzquiano on December 18, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Quantifier expressions are marks of generality. They come in many syntactic categories in English, but determiners like "all", "each", "some", "many", "most", and "few" provide some of the most common examples of quantification.[1] In English, they combine with singular or plural nouns, sometimes qualified by adjectives or relative clauses, to form explicitly...
[Revised entry by Paul Woodruff on December 18, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Plato's shorter ethical works show Socrates at work on topics related to virtue, which he believes we should seek for the sake of the soul as we should seek health for the body. Works in this group shows stylistic as well as philosophic affinities and are generally considered to have been written early in Plato's career. The dialogues in this group are our main source for the philosophical style and teaching of the Platonic Socrates, who is thought by some scholars to be to a reasonable approximation of the historical figure....
[Revised entry by Joan Moschovakis on December 16, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Intuitionistic logic encompasses the general principles of logical reasoning which have been abstracted by logicians from intuitionistic mathematics, as developed by L. E. J. Brouwer beginning in his [1907] and [1908]. Because these principles also hold for Russian recursive mathematics and the constructive analysis of E. Bishop and his followers, intuitionistic logic may be considered the logical basis of...
[Revised entry by David Pellauer and Bernard Dauenhauer on December 15, 2022. Changes to: Bibliography] Paul Ricoeur (1913 - 2005) is a distinguished French philosopher of the twentieth century, one whose work has been widely translated and discussed across the world. In addition to his academic work, his public presence as a social and political commentator, particularly in France, led to a square in Paris being named in his honor on the centenary of his birth in 2013. In the course of his long career he wrote on a broad range of issues. In addition to his many books, Ricoeur published more than 500 essays, many of which appear in...
[Revised entry by Hugh Rice on December 15, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Though the word "fatalism" is commonly used to refer to an attitude of resignation in the face of some future event or events which are thought to be inevitable, philosophers usually use the word to refer to the view that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do. This view may be argued for in various ways: by appeal to logical laws and metaphysical necessities; by appeal to the existence and nature of God; by appeal to causal determinism. When argued for in the first way, it is commonly called "Logical...
[New Entry by María Manzano and Víctor Aranda on December 15, 2022.] Classical logic is the appropriate formal language for describing mathematical structures containing a single universe or domain of discourse. By contrast, many-sorted logic (MSL) allows quantification over a variety of domains (called sorts). For this reason, it is a suitable vehicle for dealing with statements concerning different types of objects, which are ubiquitous in mathematics, philosophy, computer science, and formal semantics. Each sort groups a unique category of objects (for example, points and straight lines are...
[Revised entry by J. J. MacIntosh and Peter Anstey on December 14, 2022. Changes to: Bibliography] Boyle was one of the leading intellectual figures of the seventeenth century and an important influence on Locke and Newton (Anstey 2018). He was an experimental philosopher, unwilling to construct abstract theories to which his experimental results had to conform. "Our Boyle," Oldenburg wrote to Spinoza, "is one of those who are distrustful enough of their reasoning to wish that the phenomena should agree with it" (Hall a Hall 1965 - 1977, 2:38). Boyle, a champion of both the corpuscularian doctrine and the Baconian...
[Revised entry by Johannes L. Brandl and Mark Textor on December 13, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Franz Brentano (1838 - 1917) is famous for arguing in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) that intentionality - being directed toward something - is the mark of the mental. Brentano used that conception not only for distinguishing mental from physical phenomena, but also for developing a classification of mental phenomena. If intentionality is a fundamental feature of any mental act, Brentano argues, differences in the way mental phenomena are directed toward something constitute...
[Revised entry by Hugh J. McCann and Daniel M. Johnson on December 9, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Traditional theism holds that God is the creator of heaven and earth, and that all that occurs in the universe takes place under Divine Providence - that is, under God's sovereign guidance and control. According to believers, God governs creation as a loving father, working all things for good. Moreover, it is said, God is an absolutely perfect being. He is, first of all, omniscient or all-knowing: he knows of all truths that they are true, and of all falsehoods that they are false, whether they pertain to past, present...
[Revised entry by David Cunning on December 8, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Margaret Lucas Cavendish was a philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction-writer, and playwright who lived in the Seventeenth Century. Her work is important for a number of reasons. One is that it lays out an early and compelling version of the naturalism that is found in current-day philosophy and science. It also offers important insights that bear on recent discussions of the nature and characteristics of intelligence and the question of whether or not the bodies that surround us are minded and intelligent. Another reason...
[Revised entry by Sven Ove Hansson on December 8, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Since the 1970s, studies of risk have grown into a major interdisciplinary field of research. Although relatively few philosophers have focused their work on risk, there are important connections between risk studies and several philosophical subdisciplines. This entry summarizes the most well-developed of these connections and introduces some of the major topics in the philosophy of risk. It consists of seven sections dealing with the definition of risk and with treatments of risk related to epistemology, the...
[Revised entry by Maria Reicher on December 7, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Are there nonexistent objects, i.e., objects that do not exist? Some examples often cited are: Zeus, Pegasus, Sherlock Holmes, Vulcan (the hypothetical planet postulated by the 19th century astronomer Le Verrier), the perpetual motion machine, the golden mountain, the fountain of youth, the round square, etc. Some important philosophers have thought that the very concept of a nonexistent object is contradictory (Hume) or logically ill-formed (Kant, Frege), while others (Leibniz, Meinong, the Russell of Principles of...
[New Entry by Robert Pasnau on December 7, 2022.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Robert Pasnau replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous authors.] Between antiquity and modernity stands Thomas Aquinas (ca....
[Revised entry by Harry Deutsch and Pawel Garbacz on December 6, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Identity is often said to be a relation each thing bears to itself and to no other thing (e.g., Zalabardo 2000). This characterization is clearly circular ("no other thing") and paradoxical too, unless the notion of "each thing" is qualified. More satisfactory (though partial) characterizations are available and the idea that such a relation of absolute identity exists is commonplace. Some, however, deny that a relation of absolute identity exists. Identity, they say, is relative: It is possible for...
[Revised entry by Diego Machuca on December 6, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] After presenting the current situation of epistemological research in Latin America and part of its history, this entry will address six topics: skepticism (especially in its Pyrrhonian stripe), core epistemology, formal epistemology, Wittgenstein's thought in connection with epistemology and skepticism, epistemology of law, and religious epistemology. It should be noted from the outset that the entry does not purport to provide a comprehensive account of epistemology in Latin America, but rather to paint a general picture...
[Revised entry by Kevin Vallier on December 2, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Political theorists propose standards that identify legitimate uses of political power. Some adopt a principle of public justification. A public justification is a kind of rationale for exercising power and control. It is public because the rationale, or group of rationales, is one that members of the public can accept. Put another way, to treat people as equals, we must ensure that political power is justified for or to them by their own lights, so a public justification thus consists of reasons the public...
[Revised entry by Chris Mortensen on November 30, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Inconsistent mathematics is the study of the mathematical theories that result when classical mathematical axioms are asserted within the framework of a (non-classical) logic which can tolerate the presence of a contradiction without turning every sentence into a theorem....
[New Entry by Christopher Menzel on November 28, 2022.] Actualism is a widely-held view in the metaphysics of modality that arises in response to the thesis of possibilism. To understand the motivations for possibilism, consider first that most everyone would agree that things might have been different than they are in fact. For example, no one has free soloed the Dawn Wall route up El Capitan in Yosemite National Park and, given the almost superhuman physical ability and mental strength the feat would require and, more importantly, the massive risk it...
[Revised entry by Mitchell Aboulafia and Scott Taylor on November 24, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] George Herbert Mead (1863 - 1931), American philosopher and social theorist, is often classed with William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey as one of the most significant figures in classical American pragmatism. Dewey referred to Mead as "a seminal mind of the very first order" (Dewey, 1932, xl). Yet by the middle of the twentieth-century, Mead's prestige was greatest outside of professional philosophical circles. He is considered by many to be the father of the school of Symbolic Interactionism in sociology and...
[Revised entry by John D. Norton on November 24, 2022. Changes to: 1.svg, 2.svg, 3.svg, 4.svg, 5.svg, 6.svg, AP_Fig_1.svg, AP_Fig_2.svg, AP_Fig_3.svg, AP_Fig_4.svg, AP_Fig_5.svg, Gauge_1.svg, Gauge_2.svg] What is space? What is time? Do they exist independently of the things and processes in them? Or is their existence parasitic on these things and processes? Are they like a canvas onto which an artist paints; they exist whether or not the artist paints on them? Or are they akin to parenthood; there is no parenthood until there are parents and children? That is, is there no space and time until there are things with spatial properties and processes with temporal durations?...
[Revised entry by Samir Okasha on November 24, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Population genetics is a field of biology that studies the genetic composition of biological populations, and the changes in genetic composition that result from the operation of various factors, including natural selection. Population geneticists develop abstract mathematical models of gene frequency dynamics, extract predictions about the likely patterns of genetic variation in actual populations, and test the predictions against empirical data. A number of the more robust generalizations to emerge from population-genetic analysis are...
[Revised entry by Amie Thomasson on November 22, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] A system of categories is a complete list of highest kinds or genera. Traditionally, following Aristotle, these have been thought of as highest genera of entities (in the widest sense of the term), so that a system of categories undertaken in this realist spirit would ideally provide an inventory of everything there is, thus answering the most basic of metaphysical questions: "What is there?" Skepticism about our ability to discern a unique system of basic categories of 'reality itself' has led others to approach...
[Revised entry by Leah Henderson on November 22, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] We generally think that the observations we make are able to justify some expectations or predictions about observations we have not yet made, as well as general claims that go beyond the observed. For example, the observation that bread of a certain appearance has thus far been nourishing seems to justify the expectation that the next similar piece of bread I eat will also be nourishing, as well as the claim that bread of this sort is generally nourishing. Such inferences from the observed to the unobserved, or to general laws, are known as...
[Revised entry by Robin Smith on November 22, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Aristotle's logic, especially his theory of the syllogism, has had an unparalleled influence on the history of Western thought. It did not always hold this position: in the Hellenistic period, Stoic logic, and in particular the work of Chrysippus, took pride of place. However, in later antiquity, following the work of Aristotelian Commentators, Aristotle's logic became dominant, and Aristotelian logic was what was transmitted to the Arabic and the Latin medieval traditions, while the works of Chrysippus have not...
[Revised entry by Anthony Celano on November 21, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Medieval theories of moral reasoning have their origins in the moral theology of St. Augustine and the rational ethics of Aristotle. Until the thirteenth century Augustine's responses to questions concerning free will, predestination, the nature of goodness, and divine freedom dominated moral speculation in the Latin West. For Augustine morality demands the human will's conformity to the prescriptions of the immutable, necessary and eternal law. Augustine argues in his work on free will that the eternal law "is called...
[Revised entry by Graham Oddie and Gustavo Cevolani on November 21, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, compatibility-approaches.html, complex-frameworks.html, expected-truthlikeness.html, tichy-miller.html, vagueness.html] Truth is widely held to be the constitutive aim of inquiry. Even those who think the aim of inquiry is something more accessible than the truth (such as the empirically discernible truth), as well as those who think the aim is something more robust than possessing truth (such as the possession of knowledge) still affirm truth as a necessary component of the end of inquiry. And, other things being equal, it seems better to end an inquiry by endorsing the truth rather than falsehoods....
[Revised entry by Marshall D. Willman on November 14, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] While growing attention has been paid in recent years to the logical insights and contributions of philosophers of other major traditions of early China, particularly those of the School of Names, scholarship on early Chinese views on logic and language still tends to concentrate on the contributions of the school of Mohism, which played a central role in the debates of philosophers of all...
[Revised entry by Brook Ziporyn on November 13, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Tiantai is the name of a mountain and surrounding geographical location in China, literally meaning "platform of the sky", but the term is traditionally used to denote a particular school of Mahāyāna Buddhism with historical connections to that locale. In this article, the term "Tiantai" will be used to refer to the philosophical ideas developed from the sixth to eleventh centuries by this school, as expounded in the writings of its three most representative figures: Tiantai Zhiyi (538 - 597),...
[Revised entry by Racheli Haliva on November 11, 2022. Changes to: Bibliography] Isaac (Yitzḥak) Polqar was a Jewish Averroist who was active in northern Spain from the second half of the thirteenth century and the first half of the fourteenth century. Jewish Averroism refers in this context to Jewish philosophers from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, whose worldview had two main characteristics: firstly, they adopted the philosophy of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), whom they considered the best interpreter of Aristotle. Secondly, they interpreted Judaism in light of Averroes' Aristotelianism on the assumption that...
[Revised entry by Ronald Desmet and Andrew David Irvine on November 10, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947) was a British mathematician and philosopher best known for his work in mathematical logic and the philosophy of science. In collaboration with Bertrand Russell, he co-authored the landmark three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913). Later, he was instrumental in pioneering the approach to metaphysics now known as process philosophy....
[Revised entry by Timothy O’Connor and Christopher Franklin on November 3, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The term "free will" has emerged over the past two millennia as the canonical designator for a significant kind of control over one's actions. Questions concerning the nature and existence of this kind of control (e.g., does it require and do we have the freedom to do otherwise or the power of self-determination?), and what its true significance is (is it necessary for moral responsibility or human dignity?) have been taken up in every period of Western philosophy and by many of the most...
[Revised entry by Vaughan Pratt on November 3, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Algebra is a branch of mathematics sibling to geometry, analysis (calculus), number theory, combinatorics, etc. Although algebra has its roots in numerical domains such as the reals and the complex numbers, in its full generality it differs from its siblings in serving no specific mathematical domain. Whereas geometry treats spatial entities, analysis continuous variation, number theory integer arithmetic, and combinatorics discrete structures, algebra is equally applicable to all these and other mathematical domains....
[Revised entry by Mark Wynn on November 2, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] This entry examines the relevance of phenomenological considerations for the concept of God (or the sacred otherwise characterised) and the question of what sort of rational sense is implied in the adoption of a religious point of view. The discussion distinguishes various perspectives on the subjective character of religious experience, and examines the relation between religious experience and experience of the material world. It also considers the interaction between experience, conceptual framework (including religious doctrine) and...
[Revised entry by Igor Primoratz on November 2, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Before the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001, the subject of terrorism did not loom large in philosophical discussion. Philosophical literature in English amounted to a few monographs and a single collection of papers devoted solely, or largely, to questions to do with terrorism. Articles on the subject in philosophy journals were few and far between; neither of the two major philosophy encyclopedias had an entry. The attacks of September 11 and their aftermath put terrorism on the philosophical agenda: it is now...
[Revised entry by Andreas Follesdal on November 2, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Federalism is the theory or advocacy of federal principles for dividing powers between member units and common institutions. Unlike in a unitary state, sovereignty in federal political orders is non-centralized, often constitutionally, between at least two levels so that units at each level have final authority and can be self governing in some issue area. Citizens thus have political obligations to, or have their rights secured by, two authorities. The division of power between the member unit and center may vary, typically the...
[Revised entry by Jutta Schickore on October 31, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Scientific discovery is the process or product of successful scientific inquiry. Objects of discovery can be things, events, processes, causes, and properties as well as theories and hypotheses and their features (their explanatory power, for example). Most philosophical discussions of scientific discoveries focus on the generation of new hypotheses that fit or explain given data sets or allow for the derivation of testable consequences. Philosophical discussions of scientific discovery have been intricate and complex...
[Revised entry by John S. Wilkins and Pierrick Bourrat on October 27, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The problem of replication and reproduction arises out of the history of genetics [see the entry gene for a historical review]. It is tied to the concept of the gene and its generalization in an evolutionary context [see the entry evolution]. Richard Dawkins introduced the notion of replicators - things that self-replicate - as a universalization of evolutionary...
[Revised entry by Russell Goodman on October 21, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] An American essayist, poet, and popular philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 82) began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston, but achieved worldwide fame as a lecturer and the author of such essays as "Self-Reliance," "History," "The Over-Soul," and "Fate." Drawing on English and German Romanticism, Neoplatonism, Kantianism, and Hinduism, Emerson developed a metaphysics of process, an epistemology of moods, and an "existentialist" ethics of...
[Revised entry by Alan Kim on October 21, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (1832 - 1920) is known to posterity as the "father of experimental psychology" and the founder of the first psychology laboratory (Boring 1950: 317, 322, 344 - 5),[1] whence he exerted enormous influence on the development of psychology as a discipline, especially in the United States. Reserved and shy in public (cf. Kusch 1995: 249, f.), Wundt aggressively dominated his chosen arenas, the lecture hall and the pages of books, with a witty...
[Revised entry by Sylvia Berryman on October 18, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] A number of philosophical schools in different parts of the ancient world held that the universe is composed of some kind of 'atoms' or minimal parts, albeit for different reasons. Although the modern term 'atom' derives from the ancient Greek adjective atomos, which literally means 'uncuttable', it is possible that the first theories we can describe as atomist were developed in classical Indian philosophy. While the ancient Greeks from whom we derive the modern term were...
[Revised entry by Scott A. Davison on October 18, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] A prophet is a person who plays a special role mediating the relationship between other people and the divine. Typically, a prophet is envisioned as a channel through which God communicates to others some important information that could not have been known to the prophet in any ordinary way. Prophecy is interesting from a philosophical point of view for many reasons, including the fact that it raises compelling questions about divine knowledge/ communication, human language, the nature of time, and human freedom. Unlike...
[Revised entry by Christian Beyer on October 17, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Edmund Husserl was the principal founder of phenomenology - and thus one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. He has made important contributions to almost all areas of philosophy and anticipated central ideas of its neighbouring disciplines such as linguistics, sociology and cognitive psychology....
[Revised entry by Matthias Neuber on October 17, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Herbert Feigl was an Austrian-born logical empiricist philosopher who published the main part of his writings after his emigration to the United States in 1931. To a large extent inspired by the writings of his academic teacher Moritz Schlick, Feigl delivered important contributions to the philosophical analysis of probability, to the debate over scientific realism, and to the analysis of the mind-body problem. His overarching aim was to inform established philosophical analysis by what he called the "scientific attitude."...
[Revised entry by Christian List on October 14, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Social choice theory is the study of collective decision procedures and mechanisms. It is not a single theory, but a cluster of models and results concerning the aggregation of individual inputs (e.g., votes, preferences, judgments, welfare) into collective outputs (e.g., collective decisions, preferences, judgments, welfare). Central questions are: How can a group of individuals choose a winning outcome (e.g., policy, electoral candidate) from a given set of options? What are the properties of different voting systems? When is a voting...
[Revised entry by David Hitchcock on October 12, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, assessment.html, dispositions.html, history.html, methods.html] Critical thinking is a widely accepted educational goal. Its definition is contested, but the competing definitions can be understood as differing conceptions of the same basic concept: careful thinking directed to a goal. Conceptions differ with respect to the scope of such thinking, the type of goal, the criteria and norms for thinking carefully, and the thinking components on which they focus. Its adoption as an educational goal has been recommended on the basis of respect for students' autonomy and preparing students for...
[Revised entry by Rosalind Hursthouse and Glen Pettigrove on October 11, 2022. Changes to: Bibliography] Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative ethics. It may, initially, be identified as the one that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach that emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism). Suppose it is obvious that someone in need should be helped. A utilitarian will point to the fact that the consequences of doing so will maximize well-being, a deontologist to the fact that, in doing so the agent will be acting in...
[Revised entry by James Shelley on October 6, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] 18th-century British aesthetics addressed itself to a variety of questions: What is taste? What is beauty? Is there is a standard of taste and of beauty? What is the relation between the beauty of nature and that of artistic representation? What is the relation between one fine art and another? How ought the fine arts be ranked one against another? What is the nature of the sublime and ought it be ranked with the beautiful? What is the nature of genius and what is its relation to taste?...
[Revised entry by David Leopold on October 6, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The concept of alienation identifies a distinct kind of psychological or social ill; namely, one involving a problematic separation between a self and other that belong together. So understood, alienation appears to play a largely diagnostic or critical role, sometimes said to suggest that something is awry with both liberal societies and liberal political philosophy. Theories of alienation typically pick out a subset of these problematic separations as being of particular importance, and then offer...
[Revised entry by Faviola Rivera on October 5, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Liberal political discourse was dominant in Latin America during most of the nineteenth century. Initially, in the first half of the century, it was a discourse of liberation from colonial rule in Hispanic America. Liberal ideas provided the political language to articulate the urgently needed new kind of legitimacy for the emerging republics. Later, in the second half, liberalism was firmly established as an ideology of nation building in most of the region. However, by the mid twentieth century, liberalism had mostly vanished...
[Revised entry by Anca Gheaus on October 4, 2022. Changes to: Main text] Over the past decades, political philosophers and applied ethicists have been increasingly interested in the value of personal relationships. The goods they generate - or, perhaps, of which they consist - are obviously important, both instrumentally and non-instrumentally, for how well individuals' lives go on various accounts of what makes a life good: They are highly desired by most people, can bring a lot of pleasure and joy and, at least some of them - such as friendship or love - have objective value. More...
[Revised entry by Florian Steinberger on October 4, 2022. Changes to: Bibliography] We consider it to be a bad thing to be inconsistent. Similarly, we criticize others for failing to appreciate (at least the more obvious) logical consequences of their beliefs. In both cases there is a failure to conform one's attitudes to logical strictures. We generally take agents who fall short of the demands of logic to be rationally defective. This suggests that logic has a normative role to play in our rational economy; it instructs us how we ought or ought not to think or reason. The notion that logic has such a normative...
[Revised entry by Fernando Rudy-Hiller on October 4, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Philosophers usually acknowledge two individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a person to be morally responsible for an action, i.e., susceptible to be praised or blamed for it: a control condition (also called freedom condition) and an epistemic condition (also called knowledge, cognitive, or mental condition). The first condition has to do with whether the agent possessed an adequate degree of control or freedom in performing the action, whereas the second condition is concerned with whether the agent's epistemic...
[Revised entry by C. Stephen Evans and David Baggett on October 4, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Moral arguments for God's existence form a diverse family of arguments that reason from some feature of morality or the moral life to the existence of God, usually understood as a morally good creator of the universe. Moral arguments are both important and interesting. They are interesting because evaluating their soundness requires attention to practically every important philosophical issue dealt with in metaethics. They are important because of their prominence in popular apologetic arguments for religious belief. Evidence for this...
[Revised entry by Beth Preston on October 3, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The contemporary world is pervasively artifactual. Even our most mundane, biologically based activities, such as eating, sleeping, and sex, depend on engagement with artifacts. Moreover, many of the plants and animals we encounter on a daily basis qualify as biological artifacts (Sperber 2007). But unlike language - which also pervades human life from top to bottom - artifacts as such are not the subject matter of any well-defined area of philosophical research. This is as much the case today as it has been throughout the history...
[Revised entry by Matt Zwolinski, Benjamin Ferguson, and Alan Wertheimer on October 3, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] To exploit someone is to take unfair advantage of them. It is to use another person's vulnerability for one's own benefit. Of course, benefitting from another's vulnerability is not always morally wrong - we do not condemn a chess player for exploiting a weakness in his opponent's defence, for instance. But some forms of advantage-taking do seem to be clearly wrong, and it is this normative sense of exploitation that is of primary interest to moral and political philosophers....
[Revised entry by John Tucker on October 3, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] In Japan, Confucianism stands, along with Buddhism, as a major religio-philosophical teaching introduced from the larger Asian cultural arena at the dawn of civilization in Japanese history, roughly the mid-sixth century. Unlike Buddhism which ultimately hailed from India, Confucianism was first and foremost a distinctly Chinese teaching. It spread, however, from Han dynasty China, into Korea, and then later entered Japan via, for the most part, the Korean peninsula. In significant respects, then, Confucianism defines much of the East...
[Revised entry by Todd Calder on October 3, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Since World War II, moral, political, and legal philosophers have become increasingly interested in the concept of evil. This interest has been partly motivated by ascriptions of 'evil' by laymen, social scientists, journalists, and politicians as they try to understand and respond to various atrocities and horrors, such as genocides, terrorist attacks, mass murders, and tortures and killing sprees by psychopathic serial killers. It seems that we cannot capture the moral significance of these actions and their perpetrators by...
[New Entry by Andy Egan and Michael G. Titelbaum on September 30, 2022.] Self-locating beliefs are beliefs about one's position or situation in the world, as opposed to beliefs about how the world is in itself. Section 1 of this entry introduces self-locating beliefs. Section 2 presents several distinct arguments that self-locating beliefs constitute a theoretically distinctive category. These arguments are driven by central examples from the literature; we categorize the examples by the arguments to which they contribute. (Some examples serve multiple strands of argument at once.) Section 3...
[Revised entry by Richard Bett on September 24, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Timon (c. 320 - 230 BCE) was the younger contemporary and leading disciple of Pyrrho of Elis. Unlike Pyrrho, he wrote numerous poems and prose works; fragments of and reports on some of these have survived, by far the largest number (more than sixty) being from the Silloi (Lampoons). Several of these works were devoted to, or at least included, laudatory descriptions of Pyrrho and his philosophy;...
[Revised entry by Eric Christian Barnes on September 23, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] In early philosophical literature, a 'prediction' was considered to be an empirical consequence of a theory that had not yet been verified at the time the theory was constructed - an 'accommodation' was one that had. The view that predictions are superior to accommodations in the assessment of scientific theories is known as 'predictivism'. Commonly, however, predictivism is understood more precisely as entailing that evidence confirms theory more strongly when predicted than when...
[Revised entry by Caroline West on September 22, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Can a government legitimately prevent consenting adults from publishing and viewing pornography in private, or would this be an unjustified violation of basic freedoms? This question lies at the heart of a debate that raises fundamental issues about just when, and on what grounds, the state is justified in using its coercive powers to limit individual freedom....
[Revised entry by Dennis Hirota on September 7, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Pure Land Buddhist teachings have played a major role in Japanese intellectual and social life from the sixth century CE, when emissaries from the Korean peninsula first officially introduced Buddhist images and texts to the Japanese court, down to the present. While the influence of the Zen tradition on Japanese thought and culture is widely acknowledged, the role of Pure Land Buddhist concepts and sensibilities have tended to receive only marginal recognition in the West. Nevertheless, it is impossible to ignore...
[Revised entry by Thierry Coquand on September 6, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The topic of type theory is fundamental both in logic and computer science. We limit ourselves here to sketch some aspects that are important in logic. For the importance of types in computer science, we refer the reader for instance to Reynolds 1983 and 1985....
[Revised entry by Carsten Held on September 6, 2022. Changes to: notes.html] The Kochen-Specker theorem is an important and subtle topic in the foundations of quantum mechanics (QM). The theorem demonstrates the impossibility of a certain type of interpretation of QM in terms of hidden variables (HV) that naturally suggests itself when one begins to consider the project of interpretating QM.We here present the theorem/argument and the foundational discussion surrounding it at different levels. The reader looking for a quick overview should read...
[New Entry by Sophie Horowitz on September 6, 2022.] Higher-order evidence is evidence which bears on a believer's rational capacities, epistemic performance, or evidential situation. Many epistemologists hold that this kind of evidence can rationally affect our "first-order" beliefs as well: that is, those beliefs about the world that we form using the relevant rational capacities, or in the relevant evidential situation. It is easiest to get a grip on this phenomenon by looking at examples. Here is a paradigmatic case (paraphrased from Schoenfield 2018: 690, based on...
[Revised entry by Elzbieta Jung on September 6, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Richard Kilvington (ca. 1302 - 1361), Master of Arts and Doctor of Theology at Oxford, member of the household of Richard de Bury, then Archdeacon of London, and finally Dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London. Along with Thomas Bradwardine, he represented the first academic generation of the school of Oxford Calculators. Although he brought new ideas and methods into logic, natural philosophy, and theology, and influenced his contemporaries and followers, he has been little studied until recently....
[New Entry by David Leopold on September 5, 2022.] Analytical Marxism is a predominantly Anglophone variety of Marxism that emerged in the late 1970s, and whose leading proponents are located in philosophy and social science departments in US and European universities. It can be distinguished from certain classical forms of Marxism by its openness to analytical methods, its critical attitude to certain substantive Marxist claims, its acknowledgement of its own normative commitments, and its assertion of the need for socialist design....
[Revised entry by Eva Del Soldato on September 3, 2022. Changes to: Bibliography] Basil Bessarion (d. 1472) was, before Marsilio Ficino (1433 - 1499), the not so grey eminence responsible for the return of Plato in the Western world. Defending Plato's reputation from the attacks of the arch-Aristotelian George of Trebizond - attacks which were founded in a long anti-Platonic tradition - Bessarion introduced Christianized readings of Plato's dialogues, characterizing him as the pagan philosopher best suited to Roman theology. Bessarion's argumentative strategy not only rescued...
[Revised entry by Helen De Cruz on September 3, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The relationship between religion and science is the subject of continued debate in philosophy and theology. To what extent are religion and science compatible? Are religious beliefs sometimes conducive to science, or do they inevitably pose obstacles to scientific inquiry? The interdisciplinary field of "science and religion", also called "theology and science", aims to answer these and other questions. It studies historical and contemporary interactions between these fields, and provides...
[Revised entry by Jan-Erik Jones on September 2, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The technical term 'real essence' is introduced into the philosophical lexicon by the English philosopher John Locke (1632 - 1704) in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding[1] (hereafter "Essay") that was first published in London, in December of 1689. In order to understand a great many of Locke's arguments in Books III and IV of the Essay, it is important to understand what a real essence is. Thus, the purpose...
[Revised entry by Mark Webb on August 26, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Religious experiences can be characterized generally as experiences that seem to the person having them to be of some objective reality and to have some religious import. That reality can be an individual, a state of affairs, a fact, or even an absence, depending on the religious tradition the experience is a part of. A wide variety of kinds of experience fall under the general rubric of religious experience. The concept is vague, and the multiplicity of kinds of experiences that fall under it makes it difficult to capture in any...
[Revised entry by Douglas Bridges, Erik Palmgren, and Hajime Ishihara on August 25, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, supplement1.html, supplement2.html] Constructive mathematics is distinguished from its traditional counterpart, classical mathematics, by the strict interpretation of the phrase "there exists" as "we can construct". In order to work constructively, we need to re-interpret not only the existential quantifier but all the logical connectives and quantifiers as instructions on how to construct a proof of the statement involving these logical expressions....
[Revised entry by David Brink on August 22, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873) was the most famous and influential British philosopher of the nineteenth century. He was one of the last systematic philosophers, making significant contributions in logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and social theory. He was also an important public figure, articulating the liberal platform, pressing for various liberal reforms, and serving in Parliament. During Mill's lifetime, he was most widely admired for his work in theoretical philosophy and political economy. However,...
[Revised entry by Kadri Vihvelin on August 22, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] We believe that we have free will and this belief is so firmly entrenched in our daily lives that it is almost impossible to take seriously the thought that it might be mistaken. We deliberate and make choices, for instance, and in so doing we assume that there is more than one choice we can make, more than one action we are able to perform. When we look back and regret a foolish choice, or blame ourselves for not doing something we should have done, we assume that we could have chosen and done otherwise. When we look forward and make...
[New Entry by Douglas W. Portmore on August 22, 2022.] Act-consequentialism is one of today's leading moral theories. Broadly construed, it holds that the ultimate right-making feature of an act is that its outcome is not evaluatively outranked by that of any available alternative. To evaluatively rank (hereafter, simply "rank") a set of outcomes is to rank them along some evaluative dimension, such as their overall goodness, their goodness for the agent, their goodness for others besides the agent, or some combination of such things. And when we combine act-consequentialism...
[Revised entry by Jeff Malpas on August 22, 2022. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Hans-Georg Gadamer is the decisive figure in the development of twentieth century hermeneutics - almost certainly eclipsing, in terms of influence and reputation, the other leading figures, including Paul Ricoeur, and also Gianni Vattimo (Vattimo was himself one of Gadamer's students). Profoundly affected by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (whose own influence on philosophical hermeneutics is pervasive despite Heidegger's abandonment of the term in his later thought), Gadamer was trained in neo-Kantian...