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Legalism in Chinese Philosophy
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-12-11 12:58)
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[New Entry by Yuri Pines on December 10, 2014.]
Legalism 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). Legalists were political realists who sought to attain a "rich state with 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 elites...
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Game Theory
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-12-10 13:58)
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[Revised entry by Don Ross on December 9, 2014.
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...
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Comparative Philosophy: Chinese and Western
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-12-9 11:00)
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[Revised entry by David Wong on December 8, 2014.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Comparative philosophy brings together philosophical traditions that have developed in relative isolation from one another and that are defined quite broadly along cultural and regional lines - Chinese versus Western, for example. Several main issues about the commensurability of philosophical traditions make up the subject matter of comparative philosophy. One issue is methodological commensurability -- whether and how comparisons between different philosophical...
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Children's Rights
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-12-9 10:53)
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[Revised entry by David William Archard on December 8, 2014.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Children are young human beings. Some children are very young human beings. As human beings children evidently have a certain moral status. There are things that should not be done to them for the simple reason that they are human. At the same time children are different from adult human beings and it seems reasonable to think that there are things children may not do that adults are permitted to do. In the majority of jurisdictions, for instance, children are not allowed to vote, to marry, to buy alcohol, to have sex, or to engage in paid employment. What makes children a special case for...
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Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm
from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-12-7 4:36)
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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) Widely hailed as a universal genius, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was one of the most important thinkers of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. A polymath and one of the founders of calculus, Leibniz is best known philosophically for his metaphysical idealism; his theory that reality is composed of spiritual, non-interacting […]
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Martin Buber
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-12-5 14:35)
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[Revised entry by Michael Zank and Zachary Braiterman on December 4, 2014.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Martin Buber (1878 - 1965) was a prolific author, scholar, literary translator, and political activist whose writings - mostly in German and Hebrew - ranged from Jewish mysticism to social philosophy, biblical studies, religious phenomenology, philosophical anthropology, education, politics, and art. Most famous among his philosophical writings is the short but powerful book I and Thou (1923) where our relation to others is considered as...
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Miracles
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-12-4 12:19)
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[Revised entry by Timothy McGrew on December 3, 2014.
Changes to: 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...
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Otto Neurath
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-12-4 11:18)
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[Revised entry by Jordi Cat on December 3, 2014.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, visual-education.html]
Neurath was a social scientist, scientific philosopher and maverick leader of the Vienna Circle who championed 'the scientific attitude' and the Unity of Science movement. He denied any value to philosophy over and above the pursuit of work on science, within science and for science. And science was not logically fixed, securely founded on experience nor was it the purveyor of any System of knowledge. Uncertainty, decision and cooperation were intrinsic to it. From this naturalistic, holistic and pragmatist viewpoint, philosophy investigates the conditions of the possibility of science...
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Omnipresence
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-12-4 9:42)
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[Revised entry by Edward Wierenga on December 3, 2014.
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; If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there....
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Mencius
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-12-4 9:17)
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[Revised entry by Bryan Van Norden on December 3, 2014.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html]
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....
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