Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

[Revised entry by Charles L. Griswold on January 30, 2012. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Plato's discussions of rhetoric and poetry are both extensive and influential. As in so many other cases, he sets the agenda for the subsequent tradition. And yet understanding his remarks about each of these topics - rhetoric and poetry - presents us with significant philosophical and interpretive challenges. Further, it is not initially clear why he links the two topics together so closely...

[Revised entry by Edgar Morscher on January 30, 2012. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, bolzano-logical-truth.html] Bernard Bolzano (1781 - 1848) was a Catholic priest, a professor of the doctrine of Catholic religion at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Prague, an outstanding mathematician and one of the greatest logicians or even (as some would have it) the greatest logician who lived in the long stretch of time between Leibniz and Frege. As far as logic is concerned, Bolzano anticipated...

[Revised entry by Richard Manning on January 30, 2012. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Spinoza's thought stands at an uneasy and volatile period in the development of physical theory. His physical science is largely Cartesian, both in content and rationalistic method. It is harshly dismissive of the "occult qualities, intentional species, substantial forms, and a thousand other trifles" (letter 60, to Boxel) of pre-revolutionary scholastic natural philosophy. It is...

[Revised entry by Elizabeth Brake and Joseph Millum on January 26, 2012. Changes to: 0] The ethics of parenthood and procreation apply not only to daily acts of decision-making by parents and prospective procreators, but also to law, public policy, and medicine. Two recent social and technological shifts make this topic especially pressing. First, changing family demographics in North America and Europe mean that children are increasingly reared in blended families, by single...

[New Entry by Jacqueline Broad on January 26, 2012.] On the strength of her 1666 pamphlet, Womens Speaking Justified, the Quaker writer Margaret Fell has been hailed as a feminist pioneer. In this short tract, Fell puts forward several arguments in favour of women's preaching. She asserts the spiritual equality of the sexes, she appeals to female exempla in the Bible, and she reinterprets key scriptural passages that appear to...

[Revised entry by Geoff Sayre-McCord on January 26, 2012. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Metaethics is the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice. As such, it counts within its domain a broad range of questions and puzzles, including: Is morality more a matter of taste than truth? Are moral standards culturally relative? Are there moral facts? If there are moral facts,...

[Revised entry by Daniel Bell on January 25, 2012. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, Internet resources] Modern-day communitarianism began in the upper reaches of Anglo-American academia in the form of a critical reaction to John Rawls' landmark 1971 book A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971). Drawing primarily upon the insights of Aristotle and Hegel, political philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer disputed Rawls' assumption that the...

[Revised entry by Istvan Bodnar on January 16, 2012. Changes to: Bibliography, Internet resources, notes.html] Aristotle had a lifelong interest in the study of nature. He investigated a variety of different topics, ranging from general issues like motion, causation, place and time, to systematic explorations and explanations of natural phenomena across different kinds of natural entities. These different inquiries are integrated into the framework of a single overarching enterprise describing the...

[Revised entry by Joshua Hoffman and Gary Rosenkrantz on January 12, 2012. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Omnipotence is maximal power. Maximal greatness (or perfection) includes omnipotence. According to traditional Western theism, God is maximally great (or perfect), and therefore is omnipotent. Omnipotence seems puzzling, even paradoxical, to many philosophers. They wonder, for example, whether God can create a spherical cube, or make a stone so massive that he cannot move it. Is there a consistent analysis of...

[Revised entry by Tom Christiano on January 11, 2012. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] When is political authority legitimate? This is one of the fundamental questions of political philosophy. Depending on how one understands political authority this question may be the same as, when is coercion by the state legitimate? Or, when we do have duties to obey the state? Or, when and who has a right to rule through the state?...

[Revised entry by John Palmer on January 11, 2012. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Zeno of Elea, 5th c. B.C.E. thinker, is known exclusively for propounding a number of ingenious paradoxes. The most famous of these purport to show that motion is impossible by bringing to light apparent or latent contradictions in ordinary assumptions regarding its occurrence. Zeno also argued against the commonsense assumption that there are many things by showing in various ways how it, too,...

[Revised entry by Sungho Choi and Michael Fara on January 5, 2012. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, supplement.html] A glass has certain dispositions, for example the disposition to shatter when struck. But what is this disposition? It seems on the one hand to be a perfectly real property, a genuine respect of similarity common to glasses, china cups, and anything else fragile. Yet on the other hand, the glass's disposition seems mysterious, 'ethereal' (as Goodman (1954) put it) in a way that, say,...

[Revised entry by Michael Bradie and William Harms on January 5, 2012. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, Internet resources] Evolutionary Epistemology is a naturalistic approach to epistemology, which emphasizes the importance of natural selection in two primary roles. In the first role, selection is the generator and maintainer of the reliability of our senses and cognitive mechanisms, as well as the "fit" between those mechanisms and the world. In the second role, trial and error learning and the evolution of scientific theories are...

[New Entry by Ehud Lamm on January 4, 2012.] Organisms inherit various kinds of developmental information and cues from their parents. The study of inheritance systems is aimed at identifying and classifying the various mechanisms and processes of heredity, the types of hereditary information that is passed on by each, the functional interaction between the different systems, and the evolutionary consequences of these properties....

[Revised entry by Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore on January 4, 2012. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Starting with Frege, the semantics (and pragmatics) of quotation has received a steady flow of attention over the last one hundred years. It has not, however, been subject to the same kind of intense debate and scrutiny as, for example, both the semantics of definite descriptions and propositional attitude verbs. Many philosophers probably share Davidson's experience: 'When I was...

[New Entry by Shalom Sadik on January 4, 2012.] Rabbi Hasdai Crescas (ca. 1340 - 1410/11) was the head of the Jewish community of Aragon, and in some ways all of Hispanic Jewry, during one of its most critical periods. Crescas was one of the leading rabbinic authorities of his time,[1] the political leader of the Jews of Aragon, and a philosophical polemicist against Christianity. As one of the main medieval Jewish philosophers,...

[Revised entry by Karen Neander on January 3, 2012. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Teleological theories of mental content try to explain the contents of mental representations by appealing to a teleological notion of function. Take, for example, the thought that blossoms are forming. On a representational theory of thought, this thought involves a representation of blossoms forming. A theory of content aims among other things to tell us why this representation has that content; it...

[Revised entry by Fred D'Agostino, Gerald Gaus, and John Thrasher on December 20, 2011. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, Internet resources] The idea of the social contract goes back, in a recognizably modern form, to Thomas Hobbes; it was developed in different ways by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. After Kant the idea largely fell into disrepute until it was resurrected by John Rawls. It is now at the heart of the work of a number of moral and political philosophers. The basic idea seems simple: in some way, the agreement (or consent) of all individuals subject to collectively enforced social arrangements shows that those arrangements have some normative property (they are legitimate, just, obligating, etc.). Even this vague basic idea,...

[Revised entry by Frances Howard-Snyder on December 20, 2011. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Is doing harm worse than allowing harm? If not, there should be no moral objection to active euthanasia in circumstances where passive euthanasia is permissible; and there should be no objection to bombing innocent civilians where doing so will minimize the overall number of deaths in war. There should, however, be an objection - indeed, an outcry - at our failure to prevent the deaths of millions of...

[Revised entry by Alan Hájek on December 19, 2011. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, Internet resources, notes.html] 'Interpreting probability' is a commonly used but misleading characterization of a worthy enterprise. The so-called 'interpretations of probability' would be better called 'analyses of various concepts of probability', and 'interpreting probability' is the task of providing such analyses. Or perhaps better still, if our goal is to transform inexact...