Pierre Bayle

Ideas – All theories – philosophical, theological, and even scientific – can be challenged by arguments that show they are contradictory and/or unbelievable. – Since no beliefs can be proved to be true or false, all should be tolerated. – Morality is completely separate from religious belief; a society of atheists could be more

1 Comments

Picture theory of meaning

Theory which treats declarative sentences (as against commands and so on) as pictures of facts (if true) or possible facts (otherwise). A notable example of the theory is Tractates (1921) by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Each element in the sentence (bar certain connectives and so on) stands for something, be it an object or a quality or

1 Comments

Physicalism

Term variously used. For Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), a member of the Vienna circle, it said that all scientific statements could be reduced to statements about ordinary physical objects (or else spatiotemporal points), such sentences having to be publically verifiable. For others it has meant that any meaningful statement can be translated into the language of physics. Currently,

1 Comments

Phenomenology

Literally, ‘the description or study of appearances’. Any detailed study of a phenomenon can be called a phenomenology, but the theory normally so called is associated with Franz Brentano (1838-1917) and (especially) Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and their followers, including several existentialists. ‘Phenomena’ for Husserl were the objects of experience or attitudes (in the sense in which even a non-existent fortune

1 Comments

Phenomenalism

Literally, ‘appearanceism’. Any theory which explains a given subject-matter in terms of appearances, without needing to postulate anything else (see also reductionism), much as facts about the average man are reduced to facts about ordinary men. The most notable 19th century phenomenalist was John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Phenomenalists in the 20th century (for example, Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)) usually

1 Comments

Law or principle of bivalence

Theory that every proposition is either true or false. Possible objections are of two kinds. First, can we decide what counts as a proposition in the relevant sense? Second, might not the principle fail for some presumably genuine propositions; for example, ‘Jones was brave’ (where Jones died peacefully after a life entirely devoid of

1 Comments

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

Ideas – True happiness is found in pursuit of the highest good, which is God. – Temporal possessions, honor, fame, pleasure and power are inadequate and disappointing goals; only the happiness that comes from loving God cannot be taken away by misfortune. – Even though God foresees the free acts of the human will,

2 Comments

Boo Hurrah theory

Slightly disrespectful title for emotivism as a theory of ethics, because it analyzes moral judgments as expressions of unfavorable or favorable emotion. History David Hume’s statements on ethics foreshadowed those of 20th century emotivists. Emotivism reached prominence in the early 20th century, but it was born centuries earlier. In 1710, George Berkeley wrote that language in general often

2 Comments

British empiricists

Name applied primarily to John Locke (1632-1704), George Berkeley (1685-1753), and David Hume (1711-1776), with lesser figures such as Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Thomas Reid (1710-1796). Also see: empiricism, subjective idealism, regulatory theory of causation, bundle theories, continental rationalists In philosophy, empiricism is a theory that states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience.[1] It is one of several views of epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empiricism emphasizes the role of empirical evidence in the formation of ideas, rather

4 Comments

Bundle theories

Theories that analyze a given item as a mere bundle of items of some other kind; where the first item would normally be thought of as something substantive and independent, the other items being somehow related to it, or dependent on it and owing their existence to it. There are two main examples. The

3 Comments

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Ideas – Mathematics requires a new rigor in which Greek standards of precision are applied to the subject matter of contemporary mathematics. – The goal of science is the pursuit of truth ‘for its own sake’. – Due to its intrinsic independence from the material and the practical, ‘mathematics is the queen of the

1 Comments

Carl Gustav Hempel

Carl Gustav Hempel, a leading member of logical positivism, was born in Orianenburg, Germany, in 1905. Carl G. Hempel studied at the Realgymnasium at Berlin and, in 1923, he was admitted at the University of Gottingen where he studied mathematics with David Hilbert and Edmund Landau and symbolic logic with Heinrich Behmann. Hempel was very

3 Comments

Carl Gustav Jung

Ideas – There are particular personality types characterized by extraversion or introversion, and four personality functions: sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition. – Within each individual is found a personal unconscious, which is composed of one’s personal history, and a collective unconscious, which is composed of images or archetypes common to all people; these images

1 Comments

Category mistake

Term introduced by English philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) for cases where we talk of something in terms appropriate only to something of a radically different kind. For example, ‘The Prime Minister is in London, and the Foreign Secretary is in Paris, and the Home Secretary is in Bristol, but where is the Government?’ The Government is

1 Comments

Causal realism

The view that substantive causal connections exist in reality, as opposed to the reductionist approach of the regularity theory of causation. Abstract Causal realism is the view that causation is a structural feature of reality; a power inherent in the world to produce effects, independently of the existence of minds or observers. This article suggests

1 Comments

Causal theories of meaning

Theories which explain the meaning of a word or sentence in terms of its effect on the hearer, or in terms of the cause of its utterance by the speaker. Such theories are also sometimes called ‘stimulus/response theories’, and they have some kinship with behaviorism. An objection is that most such views ignore the roles

1 Comments

Causal theories of perception

Any theory which says that the object of perception plays a causal role in the perception itself. The object may cause us to have a certain experience without itself being perceived (we may have to infer its existence, or ‘construct’ it from experiences rather as we ‘construct’ the average man from real men: also

3 Comments

Causal theory of knowledge

Any theory which says that to know a truth one must believe it and one’s belief must stand in a certain causal relation to the truth itself. For example, I know that Caesar crossed the Rubicon if his doing so caused some historian to write a book saying so, which caused my local library

1 Comments

Causal theory of names

Theory advanced especially by American philosophers Saul Kripke (1940- ) and Hilary Putnam (1926- ) that whether a currently used name names a certain object depends on whether current use of the name causally depends on its use by people who originally dubbed the object with that name. ‘Homer’ names whatever person the Greeks used it (or a

1 Comments

Chain of being (4TH CENTURY BC – 18TH CENTURY)

Also called the great chain of being and scala natura. Based on ideas of Plato (c.427-c.347 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC), but popularized in biology in the writings of German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), French naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1720-1788), and Swiss philosopher Charles Bonnet (1720-1793). This is the influential concept that all of nature – from non-living matter

2 Comments