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Republicanism
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-4-15 18:49)
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[Revised entry by Frank Lovett on April 15, 2014.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
In political theory and philosophy, the term 'republicanism' is generally used in two different, but closely related, senses. In the first sense, republicanism refers to a loose tradition or family of writers in the history of western political thought, including especially: Machiavelli and his fifteenth-century Italian predecessors; the English republicans...
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George Boole
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-4-15 7:39)
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[Revised entry by Stanley Burris on April 14, 2014.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
George Boole (1815 - 1864) was an English mathematician and a founder of the algebraic tradition in logic. He worked as a schoolmaster in England and from 1849 until his death as professor of mathematics at Queen's University, Cork, Ireland. He revolutionized logic by applying methods from the then-emerging field of symbolic algebra to logic. Where traditional (Aristotelian) logic relied on...
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Géraud de Cordemoy
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-4-14 8:51)
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[Revised entry by Fred Ablondi on April 13, 2014.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Geraud de Cordemoy (1626 - 1684) was one of the more important Cartesian philosophers during the decades immediately following the death of Descartes. While he is in some respects a very orthodox Cartesian, Cordemoy was the only Cartesian to embrace atomism, and one of the first to argue for occasionalism. Though a lawyer by profession, Cordemoy was a prominent figure in Parisian philosophical circles. His...
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Justice and Bad Luck
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-4-12 9:46)
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[Revised entry by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen on April 11, 2014.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, supplement1.html, supplement2.html]
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...
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Pascal, Blaise
from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-4-11 16:41)
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Blaise Pascal (16231662) Blaise Pascal was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, inventor, and theologian. In mathematics, he was an early pioneer in the fields of game theory and probability theory. In philosophy he was an early pioneer in existentialism. As a writer on theology and religion he was a defender of Christianity. Despite chronic ill […]
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Hannah Arendt
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-4-11 15:23)
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[Revised entry by Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves on April 10, 2014.
Changes to: Bibliography]
Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a...
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The Chinese Room Argument
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-4-10 9:25)
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[Revised entry by David Cole on April 9, 2014.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
The argument and thought-experiment now generally known as the Chinese Room Argument was first published in a paper in 1980 by American philosopher John Searle (1932- ). It has become one of the best-known arguments in recent philosophy. Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals...
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Scientific Reduction
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-4-9 9:38)
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[New Entry by Raphael van Riel and Robert Van Gulick on April 8, 2014.]
The English verb 'reduce', derives from the Latin 'reducere', whose literal meaning 'to bring back', informs its metaphorical use in philosophy. If one asserts that the mental reduces to the physical, that heat reduces to kinetic molecular energy, or that one theory reduces to another theory, one implies that in some relevant sense the reduced theory can be...
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Brentano's Theory of Judgement
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-4-8 12:45)
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[Revised entry by Johannes Brandl on April 7, 2014.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
One of Brentano's foremost aims in philosophy was to provide a new foundation for epistemology and logic as two closely related disciplines. He tried to achieve this by a systematic analysis of the mental phenomena involved in attaining knowledge and in drawing inferences. For Brentano knowledge is reached by judgements that are directly or indirectly evident, and logical inferences contribute...
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Animalism
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2014-4-8 12:43)
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[New Entry by Stephan Blatti on April 7, 2014.]
Among the questions to be raised under the heading of "personal identity" are these: "What are we?" (fundamental nature question) and "Under what conditions do we persist through time?" (persistence question). Against the dominant neo-Lockean approach to these questions, the view known as animalism answers that each of us is an organism of the species Homo...
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