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Moral Character
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-3-10 12:08)
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[Revised entry by Marcia Homiak on March 9, 2015.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Questions about moral character have recently come to occupy a central place in philosophical discussion. Part of the explanation for this development can be traced to the publication in 1958 of G. E. M. Anscombe's seminal article "Modern Moral Philosophy." In that paper Anscombe argued that Kantianism and utilitarianism, the two major traditions in western moral philosophy, mistakenly placed the foundation for morality in legalistic notions such as duty and...
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Feminist History of Philosophy
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-3-10 11:38)
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[Revised entry by Charlotte Witt and Lisa Shapiro on March 9, 2015.
Changes to: bib.html]
The past twenty-five years have seen an explosion of feminist writing on the philosophical canon, a development that has clear parallels in other disciplines like literature and art history. Since most of the writing is, in one way or another, critical of the tradition, a natural question to ask is: Why does the history of philosophy have importance for feminist philosophers? This question assumes that the history of philosophy is of importance for feminists, an assumption that is...
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Confirmation
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-3-10 8:08)
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[Revised entry by Vincenzo Crupi on March 9, 2015.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Human cognition and behavior heavily relies on the notion that evidence (data, premises) can affect the credibility of hypotheses (theories, conclusions). This general idea seems to underlie sound and effective inferential practices in all sorts of domains, from everyday reasoning up to the frontiers of science. Yet it is also clear that, even with extensive and truthful evidence available, drawing a mistaken conclusion is more than a mere possibility. For painfully concrete...
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Global Justice
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-3-7 9:22)
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[New Entry by Gillian Brock on March 6, 2015.]
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 years or so has seen a marked extension to the global...
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The Structure of Scientific Theories
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-3-6 15:54)
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[New Entry by Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther on March 5, 2015.]
Scientific inquiry has led to immense explanatory and technological successes, partly as a result of the pervasiveness of scientific theories. Relativity theory, evolutionary theory, and plate tectonics were, and continue to be, wildly successful families of theories within physics, biology, and geology. Other powerful theory clusters inhabit comparatively recent disciplines such as cognitive science, climate science, molecular biology, microeconomics,...
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Many-Valued Logic
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-3-6 13:52)
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[Revised entry by Siegfried Gottwald on March 5, 2015.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Many-valued logics are non-classical logics. They are similar to classical logic because they accept the principle of truth-functionality, namely, that the truth of a compound sentence is determined by the truth values of its component sentences (and so remains unaffected when one of its component sentences is replaced by another sentence with the same truth value). But they differ from classical logic by the fundamental fact that they do not restrict the...
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The Problem of Evil
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-3-4 13:57)
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[Revised entry by Michael Tooley on March 3, 2015.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, alternate.html, notes.html]
The epistemic question posed by evil is whether the world contains undesirable states of affairs that provide the basis for an argument that makes it unreasonable to believe in the existence of God....
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Locke: Knowledge of the External World
from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-3-4 13:15)
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Locke: Knowledge of the External World The problem of how we can know the existence and nature of the world external to our mind is one of the oldest and most difficult in philosophy. The discussion by John Locke (1632-1704) of knowledge of the external world have proved to be some of the most confusing … Continue reading Locke: Knowledge of the External World →
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Method and Metaphysics in Plato's Sophist and Statesman
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-3-3 11:53)
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[Revised entry by Mary Louise Gill on March 2, 2015.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html]
The Sophist and Statesman are late Platonic dialogues, whose relative dates are established by their stylistic similarity to the Laws, a work that was apparently still "on the wax" at the time of Plato's death (Diogenes Laertius 3.37). These dialogues are important in exhibiting Plato's views on method and metaphysics after he criticized his own most famous contribution to the history of philosophy, the theory of...
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Experiment in Physics
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-2-28 7:45)
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[Revised entry by Allan Franklin and Slobodan Perovic on February 27, 2015.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, app7.html]
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]...
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