Cardinal John Henry Newman

Ideas – All things human develop and change in time, including the Church institution and doctrine. – It is a collective responsibility to see that ideas develop rightly and in a continuous fashion. – A university is a place of teaching universal knowledge to produce intelligent members of society by fostering cultivation of the

1 Comments

John Langshaw Austin

British philosopher. A graduate of Oxford, he was a fellow of All Souls (1933–35) and Magdalen (1935–52) colleges before he became White’s professor of moral philosophy (1952–60), also at Oxford. He strongly influenced analytic philosophy, urging that the use of words be closely examined and holding that the distinctions of ordinary language are more

1 Comments

Jonathan Edwards

Ideas – The world was created out of and is maintained only by the abundance, grace, and love of the sovereign and radically trancendent God, who foreordains all of life according to his provodentoal but hidden will. – Although themselves endowed with will and reason, both of which operate solely within God’s providential and

1 Comments

Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Ideas – Human beings and their circumstances exist in a dynamic interplay. – ‘I am I and my circumstance’ is the phrase that conveys this dynamic interplay. – The individual can influence his circumstance but he cannot disregard it. – How the individual influences his circumstance is his ‘quehacer vital’, or his creative action.

4 Comments

Jourdain’s paradox (1913)

Named after its discoverer, the mathematician Philip Edward Bertrand Jourdain (1879-1919). The paradox is equivalent to the sentence ‘The second part of this sentence is true and the first part of this sentence is false’, which contradicts itself whether the first half is true or not. However, the halves of the sentence refer indirectly

1 Comments

Jules Henri Poincare

Poincare was born on April 29,1854 in Nancy. Poincare’s family was influential. His cousin Raymond was the President and the Prime Minister of France, and his father Leon was a professor of medicine at the University of Nancy. His sister Aline married the spiritualist philosopher Emile Boutroux. Poincare studied mining engineering, mathematics and physics

2 Comments

Justice

Theory of the morally appropriate way of resolving social differences. There is no one theory of justice. One view is that justice involves avoiding or preventing harm to people; another that it involves treating people according to their deserts; another that people should be treated according to their needs; another that they should be

1 Comments

Karl Jaspers

Karl Jaspers (pronounced “Yaspers”) was born 23 February 1883 in Oldenburg to Carl William and Henriette Jaspers, a respected family within the community. Carl was a lawyer, the local sheriff for a time, and a bank director. Jaspers did well in secondary school, which he atttended from 1892–1901. At graduation he had been accepted

2 Comments

Karl Raimund Popper

Born in Vienna (then Austria-Hungary) in 1902 to middle-class parents of Jewish origins, Karl Popper was educated at the University of Vienna. He took a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1928, and taught in secondary school from 1930 to 1936. In 1937, the rise of Nazism and the threat of the Anschluss led Popper to

1 Comments

Karl Rahner

Ideas – In acts of knowledge and volition, a person experiences the inexhaustable depth and richness of the totality of being; this experience is an unthematic, nonconceptional preapprehension of God as the end of all dynamic acts of the human spirit. – The triune God reveals his inner essence throughout the history of salvation

1 Comments

Language of thought

Theory developed by Jerry A Fodor, though going back to the English philosopher William of Ockham (c. 1285-1349). It seeks to explain thinking by postulating a hypothetical language of thought (or mentalese) such that to have a belief or desire and so on is to be related in certain ways to one or more sentences

1 Comments

Lawyer paradox (5TH CENTURY BC)

Ascribed to the sophist philosopher Protagoras(c.490-420 BC). A lawyer teaches law to a student without fee on condition that the student will pay him when he qualifies and wins his first case. However, when the student qualifies he takes up another profession. The lawyer sues him for his fees, on the grounds that if he

2 Comments

Legal positivism

Doctrine (or set of doctrines) stemming primarily from English jurist John Austin (1790-1859) in his The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832). It emphasizes what the law actually is rather than what it should be: it cannot, like natural law, be defined by reference to its content, but is what is commanded by the sovereign.

2 Comments

Leibniz’s law

Name often given to either or both of the identity of indiscernibles and the indiscernibility of identicals; called after German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). Leibniz himself seems to have held explicitly only the first, and to have treated it sometimes as necessary and sometimes as contingent. Source: H G Alexander, ed.. The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (1956) Leibniz’ law may

3 Comments

Leucippus (5TH CENTURY BC)

Leucippus was the founder of atomism. We know almost nothing about his life, and his book appears to have been incorporated in the collected works of Democritus. No writer subsequent to Theophrastos seems to have been able to distinguish his teaching from that of his more famous disciple. Indeed his very existence has been denied, though

3 Comments

Principle of limited independent variety

Principle adopted by English economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) to underpin his Bayesian approach to induction by finding a justification for assigning the relevant probabilities. The principle says that, for at least that sphere we are investigating, the number of objects and qualities it contains may be infinite, but the number of independent groups into which

1 Comments

Linguistic phenomenology

Name sometimes used for the detailed and careful analysis of ordinary language undertaken by linguistic philosophy. Though not unconnected with ordinary phenomenology – especially in the work of English philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) – it was an empirical rather than an a priori study, and did not involve ‘bracketing’ the world. Source: G Ryle, Collected Papers, 1 (1971)

1 Comments

Linguistic philosophy

Linguistic philosophy Also called ordinary language philosophy. A philosophical movement arising after World War II and lasting until the early 1960s (not to be confused with the philosophical subject called philosophy of language). A leading exponent was John Langshaw Austin(1911-1960). Partly as a reaction against the constraints of logical positivism, and influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889-1951) slogan

1 Comments

Local sign theory

Theory, originated by German philosopher Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817-1881), that we assign a bodily location to the cause of a bodily sensation (for example, we come to treat a pain as ‘in’ our right hand) because of a special quality which the sensation has. This special quality we come to associate with the location of its

1 Comments

Logical atomism

Theory, held briefly by Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) soon after World War I, that a proper description of reality would be in terms of atomic propositions, each containing a word standing for a quality or relation and one or more words standing for objects which had the quality or relation. The objects must be basic

1 Comments