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Stoicism
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2013-12-7 12:17)
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[Revised entry by Dirk Baltzly on December 6, 2013.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Stoicism was one of the new philosophical movements of the Hellenistic period. The name derives from the porch (stoa poikile) in the Agora at Athens decorated with mural paintings, where the members of the school congregated, and their lectures were held. Unlike 'epicurean,' the sense of the English adjective 'stoical' is not utterly misleading with regard...
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Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2013-12-5 11:53)
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[Revised entry by Mark van Roojen on December 4, 2013.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, agent-centered-teleology.html, assertion-conditions.html, embedding-problem-responses.html]
Non-cognitivism is a variety of irrealism about ethics with a number of influential variants. Non-cognitivists agree with error theorists that there are no moral properties or moral facts. But rather than thinking that this makes moral statements false, non-cognitivists claim that moral statements are not in the business of predicating properties or making statements which could be true or false in any substantial...
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Personalism
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2013-12-3 11:01)
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[Revised entry by Thomas D. Williams and Jan Olof Bengtsson on December 2, 2013.
Changes to: Bibliography]
Although it was only in the first half of the twentieth century that the term personalism became known as a designation of philosophical schools and systems, personalist thought had developed throughout the nineteenth century as a reaction to perceived depersonalizing elements in Enlightenment rationalism, pantheism, Hegelian absolute idealism, individualism as well as collectivism in politics, and materialist, psychological, and evolutionary determinism. In its various strains, personalism always underscores...
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The Epsilon Calculus
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2013-11-28 9:17)
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[Revised entry by Jeremy Avigad and Richard Zach on November 27, 2013.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
The epsilon calculus is a logical formalism developed by David Hilbert in the service of his program in the foundations of mathematics. The epsilon operator is a term-forming operator which replaces quantifiers in ordinary predicate logic. Specifically, in the calculus, a term ex A denotes some x satisfying A(x), if there is one. In Hilbert's...
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The Concept of Evil
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2013-11-27 8:29)
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[New Entry by Todd Calder on November 26, 2013.]
During the past thirty years, moral, political, and legal philosophers have become increasingly interested in the concept of evil. This interest has been partly motivated by ascriptions of 'evil' by laymen, social scientists, journalists, and politicians as they try to understand and respond to various atrocities and horrors of the past eighty years, e.g., the Holocaust,...
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Logical Consequence
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2013-11-20 12:04)
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[Revised entry by Jc Beall and Greg Restall on November 19, 2013.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
A good argument is one whose conclusions follow from its premises; its conclusions are consequences of its premises. But in what sense do conclusions follow from premises? What is it for a conclusion to be a consequence of premises? Those questions, in many respects, are at the heart of logic (as a philosophical discipline). Consider the following argument:...
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Transmission of Justification and Warrant
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2013-11-20 11:01)
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[New Entry by Luca Moretti and Tommaso Piazza on November 19, 2013.]
Ted is on his way to the Philosophy Department, early in the freezing morning. Although he doesn't know how cold it is, Ted conjectures that the temperature must be below 0 dC. Out of curiosity, he checks the weather app of his smartphone. To his astonishment, he sees that it is -30 dC. He concludes that this is the least temperature to which he has been exposed ever. Ted's belief about his personal record...
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Pierre Gassendi
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2013-11-19 12:26)
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[Revised entry by Saul Fisher on November 18, 2013.
Changes to: Bibliography]
Pierre Gassendi (b. 1592, d. 1655) was a French philosopher, scientific chronicler, observer, and experimentalist, scholar of ancient texts and debates, and active participant in contemporary deliberations of the first half of the seventeenth century. His significance in early modern thought has in recent years been rediscovered and explored, towards a better understanding of the dawn...
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Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2013-11-16 13:08)
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[Revised entry by Jeff Jordan on November 15, 2013.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html]
Pragmatic arguments have often been employed in support of theistic belief. Theistic pragmatic arguments are not arguments for the proposition that God exists; they are arguments that believing that God exists is rational. The most famous theistic pragmatic argument is Pascal's Wager....
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Time Travel
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2013-11-15 10:59)
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[New Entry by Nicholas J.J. Smith on November 14, 2013.]
There is an extensive literature on time travel in both philosophy and physics. Part of the great interest of the topic stems from the fact that reasons have been given both for thinking that time travel is physically possible - and for thinking that it is logically impossible! This entry deals primarily with philosophical issues; issues related to the physics of time travel are covered in the separate entries on time travel and modern physics...
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