哲學百科

[Revised entry by David Pitt on July 21, 2008. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] The notion of a "mental representation" is, arguably, in the first instance a theoretical construct of cognitive science. As such, it is a basic concept of the Computational Theory of Mind, according to which cognitive states and processes are constituted by the occurrence, transformation and storage (in the mind/brain) of information-bearing structures (representations) of one kind or another....

[New Entry by Robert Bishop on July 16, 2008.] The big news about chaos is supposed to be that the smallest of changes in a system can result in very large differences in that system's behavior. The so-called butterfly effect has become one of the most popular images of chaos. The idea is that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Argentina could cause a tornado in Texas three weeks later. By contrast, in an identical copy of the world sans the Argentinian butterfly, no such storm would have arisen in Texas. The...

[Revised entry by Timothy Costelloe on July 15, 2008. Changes to: Bibliography] Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744) spent most of his professional life as Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Naples. He was trained in jurisprudence, but read widely in Classics, philology, and philosophy, all of which informed his highly original views on history, historiography, and culture. His thought is most fully expressed in his mature work, the Scienzia Nuova or The New Science....

[Revised entry by Robert Wicks on July 15, 2008. Changes to: Bibliography] Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher of the late 19th century who challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality. He believed in life, creativity, health, and the realities of the world we live in, rather than those situated in a world beyond. Central to his philosophy is the idea of "life-affirmation," which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain...

[New Entry by Thomas Bolander on July 15, 2008.] In the context of language, self-reference is used to denote a statement that refers to itself or its own referent. The most famous example of a self-referential sentence is the liar sentence: "This sentence is not true." Self-reference is often used in a broader...

[Revised entry by Steven Nadler on July 10, 2008. Changes to: Internet resources] Baruch (or Benedictus) Spinoza is one of the most important philosophers - and certainly the most radical - of the early modern period. His thought combines a commitment to Cartesian metaphysical and epistemological principles with elements from ancient Stoicism and medieval Jewish rationalism into a nonetheless highly original system. His extremely naturalistic views on God, the world, the human being and...

[New Entry by Mark van Atten on July 10, 2008.] We will be principally concerned with the historical development of the intuitionists' explanation of the logical connectives. An "explanation" here is an account of what one knows when one understands and correctly uses the logical connectives. The emphasis is on (the history of) Brouwer's explanation of logic within the framework of intuitionistic mathematics, and on (the history of) its codification in Heyting's Proof Interpretation....

[Revised entry by William Sweet on July 8, 2008. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Jacques Maritain (1882 - 1973), French philosopher and political thinker, was one of the principal exponents of Thomism in the twentieth century and an influential interpreter of the thought of St Thomas Aquinas....

[New Entry by Paul Griffiths on July 4, 2008.] The growth of philosophical interest in biology over the past thirty years reflects the increasing prominence of the biological sciences in the same period. There is now an extensive literature on many different biological topics, and it would be impossible to summarise this body of work in this single entry. Instead, this entry sets out to explain what philosophy of biology is. Why does biology...

[Revised entry by Paul Vincent Spade on July 1, 2008. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Obligationes (literally, "obligations") or disputations de obligationibus were a medieval disputation format that became very widespread in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Although their name might suggest they had something especially to do with ethics or moral duty, they did not. The purpose of these disputations has been something of a mystery to modern scholars....

[New Entry by Nickolas Pappas on June 27, 2008.] If aesthetics is the philosophical inquiry into art and beauty (or, today, "aesthetic value"), then Plato's aesthetics is a rich subject - maybe too rich. For the striking feature of Plato's dialogues in this regard is that he devotes as much time as he does to both beauty and art, but treats the two oppositely. Art, mostly represented by poetry, is closer to a...

[Revised entry by David Robb and John Heil on June 27, 2008. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Worries about mental causation are prominent in contemporary discussions of the mind and human agency. Originally, the problem of mental causation was that of understanding how a mental substance (thought to be immaterial) could interact with a material substance, a body. Most philosophers nowadays repudiate immaterial minds, but the problem of mental causation has not gone away. Instead, focus has...

[Revised entry by Michael Ridge on June 26, 2008. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] There may be as much philosophical controversy about how to distinguish naturalism from non-naturalism as there is about which view is correct. In spite of this widespread disagreement about the content of naturalism and non-naturalism there is considerable agreement about the status of certain historically influential philosophical accounts as non-naturalist. In particular, there is widespread agreement that...

[Revised entry by Carolyn Korsmeyer on June 26, 2008. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, Internet resources] "Feminist aesthetics" does not label a variety of aesthetics in the way that, for example, the terms "virtue theory" and "naturalized epistemology" qualify types of ethics and theories of knowledge. Rather, to refer to feminist aesthetics is to identify a set of perspectives that pursue certain questions about philosophical theories and their assumptions regarding...

[Revised entry by Russell Goodman on June 24, 2008. Changes to: Bibliography] Transcendentalism is an American literary, political, and philosophical movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, and Theodore Parker. Stimulated by English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the skepticism of...

[New Entry by Jerry Samet on June 19, 2008.] We are as we are and we live as we do because of the interplay of our inherent natures and the world around us. This much is uncontroversial. But it is natural to wonder about the extent of the contributions of the two broad factors and about the nature of the interactions. This is where the innateness controversy begins. In the history of philosophy, the focus of the innateness...

[Revised entry by Robert Martin on June 16, 2008. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The St. Petersburg game is played by flipping a fair coin until it comes up tails, and the total number of flips, n, determines the prize, which equals $2n. Thus if the coin comes up tails the first time, the prize is $21 = $2, and the game ends. If the coin comes up heads the first time, it is flipped again. If it comes up tails the second time, the prize is $22 = $4, and the game...

[Revised entry by Paul Vincent Spade on June 16, 2008. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] 'Binarium famosissimum' (= "most famous pair") is the name given by some twentieth-century historians of medieval philosophy to what was regarded as a characteristic pair of doctrines - universal hylomorphism and plurality of forms - often maintained together by members of the "Augustinian" school of scholastics in the thirteenth century. The doctrines were...

[Revised entry by Catherine Wilson on June 16, 2008. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Kant's interest in the physics, metaphysics, epistemology, and theology of his predecessor G.W. Leibniz is evident in his writings in the philosophy of natural science as well as in the Critique of Pure Reason. The conventional view that Kant sought to steer a middle course between the rationalism of 18th century German school philosophy initiated by Leibniz's follower Christian Wolff and the...

[Revised entry by Marc Fleurbaey on June 9, 2008. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, lorenz2006.png] Distributive justice is often considered not to belong to the scope of economics, but there is actually an important literature in economics that addresses normative issues in social and economic justice. A variety of economic theories and approaches provide many insights in these matters. Presented below are the theory of inequality and poverty measurement, welfare economics, the theory of social choice,...