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John M. E. McTaggart
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2009-12-11 15:52)
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[New Entry by Kris McDaniel on December 10, 2009.]
John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, henceforth simply "McTaggart", was one of the most important systematic metaphysicians of the early 20th century. His greatest work is The Nature of Existence, the first volume of which was published in 1921 while the second volume was published posthumously in 1927 with C.D. Broad as the editor of the manuscript. In addition,...
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Qualia: The Knowledge Argument
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2009-11-24 15:49)
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[Revised entry by Martine Nida-Rümelin on November 23, 2009.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
The knowledge argument aims to establish that conscious experience involves non-physical properties. It rests on the idea that someone who has complete physical knowledge about another conscious being might yet lack knowledge abouthow it feels to have the experiences of that being. It is one of the most discussed arguments against physicalism....
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Space and Time: Inertial Frames
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2009-11-5 7:43)
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[Revised entry by Robert DiSalle on November 4, 2009.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
A "frame of reference" is a standard relative to which motion and rest may be measured; any set of points or objects that are at rest relative to one another enables us, in principle, to describe the relative motions of bodies. A frame of reference is therefore a purely kinematical device, for the geometrical description of motion without regard to the masses or forces involved. A dynamical account of...
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Neo-Taoism
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2009-10-2 13:38)
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[New Entry by Alan Chan on October 1, 2009.]
"Neo-Daoism" (or "Neo-Taoism" in the "Wade-Giles" system of romanization) names the focal development in early "medieval" Chinese philosophy, from the third to the sixth century C.E. In Chinese sources, this development is called xuanxue (hsuan-hsueh, in Wade-Giles), literally the "learning" or study (xue) of the "dark" or mysterious and profound...
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Peter Frederick Strawson
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2009-9-17 10:48)
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[New Entry by Paul Snowdon on September 16, 2009.]
Peter Frederick Strawson (1919 - 2006) was an Oxford-based philosopher whose career spanned the second half of the twentieth century. He wrote most notably about the philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology and the history of philosophy, especially Kant....
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Information Processing and Thermodynamic Entropy
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2009-9-16 11:59)
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[New Entry by Owen Maroney on September 15, 2009.]
Are principles of information processing necessary to demonstrate the consistency of statistical mechanics? Does the physical implementation of a computational operation have a fundamental thermodynamic cost, purely by virtue of its logical properties? These two questions lie at the centre of a large body of literature concerned with the Szilard engine (a variant of the Maxwell's demon thought experiment),...
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Epistemological Problems of Memory
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2009-9-5 15:09)
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[Revised entry by Thomas D. Senor on September 4, 2009.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
That most of our knowledge is in memory at any particular time is a given. What is perhaps surprising, however, is the degree to which even our current conscious knowledge typically depends on memory. For example, you look at the sky and come to believe that the sunset is beautiful. This is a newly formed belief about an event currently taking place. Nevertheless, its justification is no doubt dependent...
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Leibniz's Influence on 19th Century Logic
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2009-9-5 14:54)
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[New Entry by Volker Peckhaus on September 4, 2009.]
It is an important question in the historiography of modern logic whether Leibniz's logical calculi influenced logic in its present state or whether they were only ingenious anticipations. The most significant of Leibniz's contributions to formal logic were published in the early 20th century. Only then, Leibniz's logic could be fully understood. Nevertheless, the essentials of his...
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Plato's Ethics and Politics in The Republic
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2009-9-1 16:46)
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[Revised entry by Eric Brown on August 31, 2009.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Plato's Republic centers on a simple question: is it always better to be just than unjust? The puzzles in Book One prepare for this question, and Glaucon and Adeimantus make it explicit at the beginning of Book Two. To answer the question, Socrates takes a long way around, sketching an account of a good city on the grounds that a good city would be just and that defining justice as a virtue of a...
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The Distinction Between Innate and Acquired Characteristics
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2009-8-4 17:32)
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[New Entry by Paul Griffiths on August 4, 2009.]
The idea that some characteristics of an organism are explained by the organism's intrinsic nature, whilst others reflect the influence of the environment is an ancient one. It has even been argued that this distinction is itself part of the evolved psychology of the human species. The distinction played an important role in the history of philosophy as the locus of the dispute between Rationalism and...
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