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Locke's Political Philosophy
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2016-1-12 13:01)
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[Revised entry by Alex Tuckness on January 11, 2016.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
John Locke (1632 - 1704) is among the most influential political philosophers of the modern period. In the Two Treatises of Government, he defended the claim that men are by nature free and equal against claims that God had made all people naturally subject to a monarch. He argued that people have rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and property, that have a foundation independent of the laws of any particular society. Locke used the claim that men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for...
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Neoplatonism
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2016-1-12 10:54)
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[New Entry by Christian Wildberg on January 11, 2016.]
The term "Neoplatonism" refers to a philosophical school of thought that first emerged and flourished in the Greco-Roman world of late antiquity, roughly from the time of the Roman Imperial Crisis to the Arab conquest, i.e., the middle of the 3rd to the middle of the 7th century. In consequence of the demise of ancient materialist or corporealist thought such as Epicureanism and Stoicism, Neoplatonism became the dominant philosophical ideology of the period, offering a comprehensive understanding of the universe and the individual human being's place in it. However, in...
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Aristotle's Psychology
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2016-1-9 14:34)
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[Revised entry by Christopher Shields on January 8, 2016.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Aristotle (384 - 322 BC) was born in Macedon, in what is now northern Greece, but spent most of his adult life in Athens. His life in Athens divides into two periods, first as a member of Plato's Academy (367 - 347) and later as director of his own school, the Lyceum (334 - 323). The intervening years were spent mainly in Assos and Lesbos, and briefly back in Macedon. His years away from Athens were predominantly taken up with biological research and writing. Judged on...
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Holism and Nonseparability in Physics
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2016-1-6 15:34)
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[Revised entry by Richard Healey on January 5, 2016.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
It has sometimes been suggested that quantum phenomena exhibit a characteristic holism or nonseparability, and that this distinguishes quantum from classical physics. One puzzling quantum phenomenon arises when one performs measurements on certain separated quantum systems. The results of some such measurements regularly exhibit patterns of statistical correlation that resist traditional causal explanation. Some have held that it is possible to understand these...
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Evolutionary Epistemology
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2016-1-6 12:30)
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[Revised entry by Michael Bradie and William Harms on January 5, 2016.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Evolutionary Epistemology is a naturalistic approach to epistemology, which emphasizes the importance of natural selection in two primary roles. In the first role, selection is the generator and maintainer of the reliability of our senses and cognitive mechanisms, as well as the "fit" between those mechanisms and the world. In the second role, trial and error learning and the evolution of scientific theories are construed as selection processes....
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Classification
from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2016-1-5 16:59)
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Classification One of the main topics of scientific research is classification. Classification is the operation of distributing objects into classes or groupswhich are, in general, less numerous than them. It has a long history that has developed during four periods: (1) Antiquity, where its lineaments may be found in the writings of Plato and Aristotle; … Continue reading Classification →
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The Pure Theory of Law
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2016-1-5 13:39)
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[Revised entry by Andrei Marmor on January 4, 2016.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
The idea of a Pure Theory of Law was propounded by the formidable Austrian jurist and philosopher Hans Kelsen (1881 - 1973) (see the bibliographical note). Kelsen began his long career as a legal theorist at the beginning of the 20th century. The traditional legal philosophies at the time, were, Kelsen claimed, hopelessly contaminated with political ideology and moralizing on the one hand, or with attempts to reduce the law to natural or social sciences, on...
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The Problem of Perception
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2016-1-1 10:52)
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[Revised entry by Tim Crane and Craig French on December 31, 2015.
Changes to: Bibliography
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Sense-perception has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. One pervasive and traditional problem, sometimes called "the Problem of Perception", is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are possible, how can perception be what we ordinarily understand it to be, an openness to and awareness of the world? The present entry is about how these possibilities of error challenge the intelligibility of the phenomenon of perception, and how the major theories of experience in the last century are best understood as responses to this challenge....
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Ancient Logic
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-12-30 14:56)
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[Revised entry by Susanne Bobzien on December 29, 2015.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html]
Logic as a discipline starts with the transition from the more or less unreflective use of logical methods and argument patterns to the reflection on and inquiry into these methods and patterns and their elements, including the syntax and semantics of sentences. In Greek and Roman antiquity, discussions of some elements of logic and a focus on methods of inference can be traced back to the late 5th century BCE. The Sophists, and later Plato (early 4th c.)...
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Belief, Aim of
from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-12-29 4:49)
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The Aim of Belief It is often said that belief has an aim. This aim has been traditionally identified with truth and, since the late 1990s, with knowledge. With this claim, philosophers designate a feature of belief according to which believing a proposition carries with it some sort of commitment or teleological directedness toward the … Continue reading Belief, Aim of →
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