Operationalism / operationism

Theory due to American physicist Percy Williams Bridgman (1882-1961) and saying that scientific concepts must be defined in terms of the operations by which they are measured or applied. The theory is akin to the verifiability principle in its strongest form, identifying meaning with method of verification; but applies to concepts rather than sentences or propositions,

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Organicism

A version of (or perhaps little more than an alternative name for) holism, emphasizing the analogy with living organisms, whose parts only are what they are because of, and can only be understood in terms of, their contributions to the whole. Also see: organic unities Organicism is the philosophical position which states that the universe and its

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Principle of organic unities

Principle that a whole may have a value which is different from, and not predictable on the basis of, the values of its parts. The attractiveness, for example, of a picture cannot normally be predicted from that of each color-patch taken separately. The principle was made much of by George Edward Moore (1873-1958), who distinguished his

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Origen

Ideas – God as the Ground of Being (the First God) is unknowable except to the Logos-Son and Spirit eternally generated by God. – God, however, has communicated throught the Logos-Son (Christ: Wisdom, Power) not only in the incarnation in Jesus but in Moses and the prophets and, in a qualified way, in Greek

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Origins of life (Antiquity- )

The theory or theories that seek to explain how biomolecules, subcellular structures, and ultimately living cells came into existence. Many myths, stories and hypotheses have been proposed. Some are still under investigation, while others remain contested or persist as statements of religious faith. Also see: DYNAMIC STATE THEORY, ‘LITTLE BAGS’ THEORY OF EVOLUTION, MINERAL

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Orphism

Name for a complex strand in Ancient Greek religious thought, contrasting with the more familiar strand of the Olympian deities (Zeus, Apollo, and so on). A body of religious writings from the 7th and succeeding centuries BC was attributed to the mythical singer Orpheus and his followers. In Classical times, Orphic ideas were connected

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Panpsychism

Literally, ‘all-soulism’. The view that matter is intrinsically alive, or is made up from basic entities which are so. Various forms of such a view are found in the philosophies of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), and John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (1866-1925) among others. Also see: hylozoism Overview Etymology For a definition of the word “panpsychism”,

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Pantheism

Literally, ‘all-godism’. The view that God and the universe are identical; or that there is no transcendent God outside the universe who created it, but the universe itself is divine. Among philosophers, Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677) is a prominent exponent of such a view, and it appears also in Stoicism. The term itself was coined in 1705

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Paraconsistency

View that there are important paraconsistent logical theories; that is theories that do not allow (as classical logic does: see relevance logics) that a contradiction has every proposition among its logical consequences. A system which contains contradictory proposition is inconsistent. But if it does not also contain every proposition (as it would for classical logic)

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Paradigmatism

View that where one or more objects are of a certain kind or have a certain property, this is to be explained by postulating a non-material abstract entity to serve as a paradigm of which they are copies; in other words, universals (see Platonism) are to be regarded as (or replaced by) paradigms. The term

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Parmenides of Elea

Major Ideas – A contrast must be made by philosophy between ‘the way of truth’, concerning the oneness and changelessness of being, and ‘the way of seeming’, concerning our perception of change. – Being or ‘it is’ is the fullness of all that exists; non-being, or ‘it is not’ cannot exist. – Being cannot

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Principle of parsimony

Also called Ockham’s Razor. Principle that one should not multiply entities unnecessarily, or make further assumptions than are needed, and in general that one should pursue the simplest hypothesis. Adoption of this principle, though seemingly obvious, leads to problems about the role of simplicity in science, especially when we are choosing between hypotheses that are

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Particularism

The view that only particulars exist, and more specifically that the properties and relations of particulars are themselves particulars, not universals (see Platonism). A particular has a certain unity in space and time. It cannot appear as a whole at separated places simultaneously (though its parts may be scattered, as when an object is dismantled

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Pascal’s wager

Argument for adopting a divinely favoured way of life -named after French philosopher, mathematician, physicist and pious gambler Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) who stated it in his Pensees (§233) – but apparently stemming from Islam. One statement of it (not Pascal’s) is this. Let the utility of a policy be the gain it promises multiplied by the

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Paul Tillich

Ideas – Human beings are ultimately concerned with the fundamentals of being and meaning. – The nominalist dichotomy of subject and object leads both to naturalism and supernaturalism; naturalism fails to appreciate the dynamic power and purpose of all being. while supernaturalism fails to appreciate the interpenetration of the sacred and the secular. –

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Principle of perfection

Also called the principle of the best. Principle of German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) argued that Leibniz did not fully distinguish this principle from that of sufficient reason. Source: B Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (1900), §§14-15 Term

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Performative (or ditto) theory of truth

Theory developed by English philosopher Peter Frederick Strawson (1919- ) in and after 1949 from Frank Ramsey’s redundancy theory of truth, and in opposition to the correspondence theory. To call something true is to perform the act of agreeing with it, endorsing it, appraising it and so on. Like the emotive theory of truth this is a speech act theory, and like

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Personalism

The view that persons, divine or human, play the primary role in the structure of the universe. Personalism exists in a wide variety of forms, and is closely related to idealism (the term personal idealism is often used) or to theism. What they have in common is that the notion of a person is treated as

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Perspective realism

Form of realism holding that the nature of an object depends on its relations to other objects. For example, a penny not only looks round from one perspective and elliptical from another but is round with respect to one and elliptical with respect to the other, no perspective having any special privilege. This enables us to

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Perspectivism

Theory associated especially with Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), who named it, Edward Sapir (1884-1939), BENJAMIN LEE WHORF (1897-1941), Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) and Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996). Perspectivism says that there can be radically different and incommensurable conceptual schemes (ultimate ways of looking at the world) or perspectives, one of which we must (consciously or unconsciously)

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