Peter Abelard

Ideas – Universals, while not real in and of themselves, have a linguistic and intellectual reality that derives from their participation in particulars. – Authority, while essential, is by itself insufficient to an understanding of dogma; reason must understand dogma by analogies from the material world. – The classics of pre-Christian philosophy are informed

4 Comments

Peter Frederick Strawson

Peter Frederick Strawson, British philosopher, a graduate of Oxford, was born in 1919. An influential spokesman for so-called ordinary language philosophy, he began teaching at Oxford in 1947 and from 1968 to 1987 was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics. In an early article, “On Referring” (Mind, 1950), he disputed Bertrand Russell’s theory of definite descriptions, drawing

1 Comments

Psychophysical parallelism

Doctrine that mental and physical events are of entirely different kinds, so that while mental events can cause other mental events and physical events can cause other physical events they cannot cause each other but occur in parallel series. If I touch a hot stove, feel a pain, withdraw my hand, and decide to

2 Comments

Ptolemy

Major Ideas – The position of the celestial bodies can be determined with the help of a kinematic model: These bodies move on eccentric and epicyclic circles with uniform velocities, even though their velocities are not uniform when viewed from the earth; these circles lie inside the sphere of the fixed stars; carefully made

3 Comments

Redundancy theory of truth

Also called the no-truth theory. Influenced by the difficulties in formulating a correspondence theory of truth, Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903-1930) proposed in 1927 that to call a proposition true is to do no more than assert the proposition. One objection is that this seems too thin a theory to cover all our uses of the notion of

7 Comments

Regularity theory of causation

Theory – primarily associated with, and originated by, David Hume (1711-1776) – which analyzes causation in terms of nothing but regular sequence (together, in Hume’s case, with priority in time and contiguity in time and, where relevant, space). The basic form of the theory says that one event causes another if it is followed by it

1 Comments

Relevance logics

Logical systems based on the principle that logical consequence, or entailment, only holds between propositions which are relevant to each other. They were developed, notably by Alan Ross Anderson and Nuel D Belnap (1920- ), as a reaction to the claim of Clarence Irving Lewis and Cooper H. Langford (in Symbolic Logic (1932), chapter

1 Comments

Theory of relevant alternatives

Theory used in defending fallibilism against the charge that it leads to skepticism. Where P and Q are propositions, P counts for this purpose as an alternative to Q if it is inconsistent with Q, and counts as a relevant alternative if to know that Q we must also know that not-P. Variant formulations exist, but the

2 Comments

Reliabilism

Theory that a belief can be called justified if it is formed by a process that is reliable, that is normally produces true beliefs. This is an externalist account of justification if it is not insisted that the believer be aware of the method’s reliability. This appeal to reliability may also contribute to an

2 Comments

Rene Descartes

Ideas – The method for the discovery of truth is analytic and consists of four rules: 1. Accept nothing as true except what can be clearly perceived to be so and nothing more than can be perceived so clearly and distinctly that one cannot have occasion to doubt it, 2. Divide up each problem

1 Comments

Representationalism

Also called representativism or representative theories of perception, memory, thinking, and so on. Any theory holding that these activities (perception is usually meant) involve the existence of mental objects (such as images or ‘sense-data’) which facilitate the activity by representing the external object. We may be said to perceive the representative instead of perceiving

3 Comments

Resemblance theories of universals

Some nominalists dispense with substantive universals (see Platonism) in treating the one over many principle by saying that what unites a group of objects of the same kind is that they resemble one of their number taken as a standard. Objections to this are that resemblance itself seems to be an eliminable liversal, and so does the

1 Comments

Retributivism

Theory of punishment whereby all or part of the purpose of punishment is the infliction of pain or disadvantage on an offender which is in some sense commensurate with his offence and which is inflicted independently of reform or deterrence. For a weak theory the commensurate amount need not be inflicted but may be,

5 Comments

Richard Avenarius

Richard Avenarius, a German philosopher, was born in Paris. He taught in Zurich, where he became a professor in 1877. He founded the epistemological theory of knowledge known as empiriocriticism, in many parts touching upon ERICH MACH’s views. According to empiriocriticism, the major task of philosophy is to develop a “natural concept of the world” based

Richard von Mises

Richard von Mises, Austrian-born American mathematician, engineer, and positivist philosopher, was born in Lvov when it was under Austrian control and known as Lemberg. His father, Arthur Edler von Mises, worked for the Austrian State Railways as a technical expert and his mother was Adele von Landau. Richard was the second son of the

1 Comments

Robin George Collingwood

Ideas – ‘Mind’ and ‘body’ do not represent two ontologically different substances; these terms denote diverse ways of considering, historically and physiologically, a human being. – The psychological theory of faculties understood as the capacity of parts of mind to work independently and in separation from one another is incorrect; the human spirit is

1 Comments

Roy Wood Sellars

Roy Wood Sellars was born in Seaforth, Ontario, in 1880. He is the second son of Ford Wylis and Mary Stalker Sellars, he had a notable, predominantly Scottish ancestry. The Sellars came originally from the Glasgow region of Scotland, migrating first to Nova Scotia and then to Upper Canada (Ontario). They married into the

3 Comments

Rudolf Carnap

Rudolf Carnap was born on May 18, 1891, in Ronsdorf, Germany. In 1898, after his father’s death, his family moved to Barmen, where Carnap studied at the Gymnasium. From 1910 to1914 he studied philosophy, physics and mathematics at the universities of Jena and Freiburg. He studied Kantunder Bruno Bauch and later recalled how a whole

1 Comments

Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861 and died in 1925. In his autobiography, The Course of My Life, he makes quite clear that the problems dealt with in The Philosophy of Freedom played a leading part in his life. His childhood was spent in the Austrian countryside, where his father was a stationmaster. At

1 Comments

Rudolph Hermann Lotze

Rudolf Hermann Lotze was born on May 21, 1817. He was a German philosopher and psychologist who studied medicine and philosophy in Leipzig. He attempted to reconcile the concepts of mechanistic science with the principles of romantic idealism. He started with the idea that all phenomena are determined by the interaction of substance. By analogy

8 Comments