Philosophy Links

[Revised entry by Christine Sypnowich on July 28, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] If law is a system of enforceable rules governing social relations and legislated by a political system, it might seem obvious that law is connected to ideology. Ideology refers, in a general sense, to a system of political ideas, and law and politics seem inextricably intertwined. Just as ideologies are dotted across the political spectrum, so too are legal systems. Thus we speak of both legal systems and ideologies as...

[New Entry by Dominic Murphy on July 28, 2010.] 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...

[Revised entry by George Graham on July 27, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] It has sometimes been said that "behave is what organisms do." Behaviorism is built on this assumption, and its goal is to promote the scientific study of behavior. In this entry I consider different types of behaviorism. I outline...

[Revised entry by James Garson on July 27, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Connectionism is a movement in cognitive science which hopes to explain human intellectual abilities using artificial neural networks (also known as 'neural networks' or 'neural nets'). Neural networks are simplified models of the brain composed of large numbers of units (the analogs of neurons) together with weights that measure the strength of connections between the...

[New Entry by W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz on July 26, 2010.] In the discipline of international relations there are contending general theories or theoretical perspectives. Realism, also known as political realism, is a view of international politics that stresses its competitive and conflictual side. It is usually contrasted with idealism or liberalism, which tends to emphasize cooperation. Realists consider the principal actors in the international arena to be states,...

[Revised entry by Jan Woleński on July 23, 2010. Changes to: Bibliography] The Lvov-Warsaw School (LWS) was the most important movement in the history of Polish philosophy. It was established by Kazimierz Twardowski at the end of the 19th century in Lvov, a city at that time belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The LWS flourished in the years 1918 - 1939. Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Stanisław Leśniewski, Jan Łukasiewicz...

[Revised entry by Nick Zangwill on July 22, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Beauty is an important part of our lives. Ugliness too. It is no surprise then that philosophers since antiquity have been interested in our experiences of and judgments about beauty and ugliness. They have tried to understand the nature of these experiences and judgments, and they have also wanted to know whether these experiences and judgments were legitimate. Both these projects took a sharpened...

[Revised entry by Paul Redding on July 22, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Along with J. G. Fichte and F. W. J. von Schelling, Hegel (1770 - 1831) belongs to the period of "German idealism" in the decades following Kant. The most systematic of the post-Kantian idealists, Hegel attempted, throughout his published writings as well as in his lectures, to elaborate a comprehensive and systematic ontology from a "logical" starting point. He is perhaps most well-known...

[New Entry by Steven Hecht Orzack and Patrick Forber on July 22, 2010.] "Adaptationism" refers to a family of views about the importance of natural selection in the evolution of organisms, in the construction of evolutionary explanations, and in defining the goal of research on evolution. Advocates of adaptationism or "adaptationists" view natural selection among individuals within a population as the only important cause of the evolution of a trait; they also typically believe that the construction of explanations based solely on natural selection to be the most fruitful...

[New Entry by Gualtiero Piccinini on July 21, 2010.] In our ordinary discourse, we distinguish between physical systems that perform computations, such as computers and calculators, and physical systems that don't, such as rocks. Among computing devices, we distinguish between more and less powerful ones. These distinctions affect our behavior: if a device is computationally more powerful than another, we pay more money for it. What grounds these...

[Revised entry by Lex Newman on July 20, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650) is widely regarded as the father of modern philosophy. His noteworthy contributions extend to mathematics and physics. This entry focuses on his philosophical contributions in the theory of knowledge. Specifically, the focus is on the epistemological project of Descartes' famous work, Meditations on First Philosophy. Upon its completion, the work was circulated to other...

[Revised entry by Peter Vallentyne on July 20, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Libertarianism, in the strict sense, is the moral view that agents initially fully own themselves and have certain moral powers to acquire property rights in external things. In a looser sense, libertarianism is any view that approximates the strict view. This entry will focus on libertarianism in the strict sense. For an excellent discussion of the liberty tradition more generally...

[Revised entry by Andrew Fiala on July 19, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Pacifism is a commitment to peace and opposition to war. Our ordinary language allows a diverse set of beliefs and commitments to be held together under the general rubric of pacifism. This article will explain the family resemblance among the variety of pacifisms. It will locate pacifism within deontological and consequentialist approaches to ethics. And it will consider and reply to objections to pacifism....

[Revised entry by Susanna Siegel on July 19, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] In contemporary philosophy, the phrase 'the contents of perception' means, roughly, what is conveyed to the subject by her perceptual experience. For example, suppose you are looking into a piano at the array of hammers and strings. There will be a way these things look to you when you see them: they will look to have a certain shape, color, texture, and arrangement relative to one another, among...

[Revised entry by Allen Janis on July 15, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] In his first paper on the special theory of relativity, Einstein indicated that the question of whether or not two spatially separated events were simultaneous did not necessarily have a definite answer, but instead depended on the adoption of a convention for its resolution. Some later writers have argued that Einstein's choice of a convention is, in fact, the only possible choice within the framework...

[New Entry by Scott Edgar on July 15, 2010.] Hermann Cohen, more than any other single figure, is responsible for founding the Neo-Kantianism that dominated academic philosophy in Germany from the 1870s until the end of the First World War. Earlier German philosophers finding inspiration in Kant tended either towards speculative, metaphysical idealism, or sought to address philosophical questions with the resources of the empirical sciences,...

[Revised entry by Brian Treanor on July 14, 2010. Changes to: Bibliography] Gabriel Marcel (1889 - 1973) was a philosopher, drama critic, playwright and musician. He converted to Catholicism in 1929 and his philosophy was later described as "Christian Existentialism" (most famously in Jean-Paul Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism") a term he initially endorsed but later repudiated. In addition to his numerous...

[Revised entry by Brigitte Sassen on July 12, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] In Germany, the eighteenth century was the age of enlightenment, the age, that is, that called for the independence of reason. Although the ethos of this age found its clearest (and certainly its most famous) articulation towards the end of the century with Immanuel Kant and his critical philosophy, he was not the first to issue this call. Instead, that task fell to Christian Thomasius (Thomas) at the end of the...

[Revised entry by Judy Whipps on July 9, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] The last three decades have seen a resurgence of interest in American Pragmatist philosophy, and part of the energy of that resurgence is due to feminist interest in pragmatism. What is now called "classical" American pragmatism is a grouping of philosophies that were developed from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century, and were largely influential in the...

[Revised entry by James Lesher on July 9, 2010. Changes to: Bibliography] Xenophanes of Colophon was a philosophically-minded poet who lived in various parts of the ancient Greek world during the late 6th and early 5th centuries BCE He is best remembered for a novel critique of anthropomorphism in religion, a partial advance toward monotheism, and some pioneering reflections on the conditions of knowledge. Many later writers, perhaps influenced by...