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Moral Realism
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-2-4 9:32)
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[Revised entry by Geoff Sayre-McCord on February 3, 2015.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Taken at face value, the claim that Nigel has a moral obligation to keep his promise, like the claim that Nyx is a black cat, purports to report a fact and is true if things are as the claim purports. Moral realists are those who think that, in these respects, things should be taken at face value - moral claims do purport to report facts and are true if they get the facts right. Moreover, they hold, at least some moral claims actually are true. That much is the common and more...
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Carl Stumpf
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-2-3 11:54)
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[Revised entry by Denis Fisette on February 2, 2015.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
The name Carl Friedrich Stumpf (1848 - 1936) is historically associated with one of the most important philosophical currents in the early twentieth century, phenomenology. Stumpf supervised Husserl's habilitation thesis in Halle in 1887 and the latter's seminal work on phenomenology, Logical Investigations (1900 - 1901), is dedicated to him in recognition of his friendship and his philosophical contribution to this book. Stumpf...
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The Algebra of Logic Tradition
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-1-31 11:34)
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[Revised entry by Stanley Burris and Javier Legris on January 30, 2015.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
The algebra of logic, as an explicit algebraic system showing the underlying mathematical structure of logic, was introduced by George Boole (1815 - 1864) in his book The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847). The methodology initiated by Boole was successfully continued in the 19th century in the work of William Stanley Jevons (1835 - 1882), Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 - 1914), Ernst Schroder (1841 - 1902), among many others, thereby establishing a tradition in (mathematical) logic. From Boole's first book until the influence after WWI of the monumental...
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Natural Kinds
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-1-28 11:17)
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[Revised entry by Alexander Bird and Emma Tobin on January 27, 2015.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Scientific disciplines frequently divide the particulars they study into kinds and theorize about those kinds. To say that a kind is natural is to say that it corresponds to a grouping that reflects the structure of the natural world rather than the interests and actions of human beings. We tend to assume that science is often successful in revealing these kinds; it is a corollary of scientific realism that when all goes well the classifications and taxonomies...
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Spinoza's Psychological Theory
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-1-28 10:30)
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[Revised entry by Michael LeBuffe on January 27, 2015.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
In Part III of his Ethics, "On the Origin and Nature of the Affects," which is the subject of this article, Spinoza addresses two of the most serious challenges facing his thoroughgoing naturalism. First, he attempts to show that human beings follow the order of nature. Human beings, on Spinoza's view, have causal natures similar in kind to other ordinary objects, other "finite modes" in the technical language of the Ethics, so they...
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Alfred Tarski
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-1-28 10:11)
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[Revised entry by Mario Gómez-Torrente on January 27, 2015.
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...
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Environmental Aesthetics
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-1-27 11:59)
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[Revised entry by Allen Carlson on January 26, 2015.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Environmental aesthetics is a relatively new sub-field of philosophical aesthetics. It arose within analytic aesthetics in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to its emergence, aesthetics within the analytic tradition was largely concerned with philosophy of art. Environmental aesthetics originated as a reaction to this emphasis, pursuing instead the investigation of the aesthetic appreciation of natural environments. Since its early stages, the scope...
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Quantum Mechanics, Interpretations of
from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-1-26 7:05)
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Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics Quantum mechanics is a physical theory developed in the 1920s to account for the behavior of matter on the atomic scale. It has subsequently been developed into arguably the most empirically successful theory in the history of physics. However, it is hard to understand quantum mechanics as a description of the … Continue reading Quantum Mechanics, Interpretations of →
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Concepts of Disease and Health
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-1-23 12:26)
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[Revised entry by Dominic Murphy on January 22, 2015.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Health and disease are critical concepts in bioethics with far-reaching social and political implications. For instance, any attempt to educate physicians or regulate heath insurance must employ some standards that can be used to assess whether people are ill or not. Concepts of health and disease also connect in interesting ways with issues about function and explanation in philosophy of the biomedical sciences, and theories of well-being in ethics....
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Philosophy of Psychiatry
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2015-1-23 12:21)
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[Revised entry by Dominic Murphy on January 22, 2015.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Philosophical discussions of mental illness 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...
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