Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

[Revised entry by Andreas Føllesdal on March 9, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Federalism is the theory or advocacy of federal principles for dividing powers between member units and common institutions. Unlike in a unitary state, sovereignty in federal political orders is non-centralized, often constitutionally, between at least two levels so that units at each level have final authority and can be self governing in some issue area. Citizens thus have political obligations...

[Revised entry by Richard Kraut on March 8, 2010. Changes to: Bibliography] Aristotle conceives of ethical theory as a field distinct from the theoretical sciences. Its methodology must match its subject matter - good action - and must respect the fact that in this field many generalizations hold only for the most part. We study ethics in order to improve our lives, and therefore its principal concern is the nature of human well-being. Aristotle follows Socrates...

[Revised entry by Jean-Pierre Marquis on February 25, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, bib.html] Category theory has come to occupy a central position in contemporary mathematics and theoretical computer science, and is also applied to mathematical physics. Roughly, it is a general mathematical theory of structures and of systems of structures. As category theory is still evolving, its functions are correspondingly developing, expanding and multiplying. At minimum, it is a powerful language, or conceptual...

[Revised entry by Alan Baker on February 25, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Most philosophers believe that, other things being equal, simpler theories are better. But what exactly does theoretical simplicity amount to? Syntactic simplicity, or elegance, measures the number and conciseness of the theories basic principles. Ontological simplicity, or parsimony, measures the number of kinds of entities postulated by the theory. One issue concerns how these two forms of simplicity relate...

[Revised entry by Katja Vogt on February 24, 2010. Changes to: 0] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Katja Vogt replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.]...

[Revised entry by Brian Bix on February 23, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] John Austin is considered by many to be the creator of the school of analytical jurisprudence, as well as, more specifically, the approach to law known as "legal positivism." Austin's particular command theory of law has been subject to pervasive criticism, but its simplicity gives it an evocative power that continues to attract adherents....

[Revised entry by Christian Perring on February 22, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Psychiatry involves theories of the mind, theories of the causes of mental disorders, classification schemes for those disorders, research about the disorders, proven treatments and research into new treatments, and a number of professions whose job it is to work with or on behalf of people with mental disorders. The philosophical study of psychiatry discusses conceptual, ethical, metaphysical, social, and...

[Revised entry by Hugo Adam Bedau and Erin Kelly on February 19, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, Internet resources] The concept of punishment - its definition - and its practical application and justification during the past half-century have shown a marked drift away from efforts to reform and rehabilitate offenders in favor of retribution and incarceration. Punishment in its very conception is now acknowledged to be an inherently retributive practice, whatever may be the further role of retribution as a (or the)...

[Revised entry by Jan Faye on February 16, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Sometimes also called retro-causation. A common feature of our world seems to be that in all cases of causation, the cause and the effect are placed in time so that the cause precedes its effect temporally. Our normal understanding of causation assumes this feature to such a degree that we intuitively have great difficulty imagining things differently. The notion of backward causation, however, stands for the...

[Revised entry by Elizabeth Anderson on February 15, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] John Dewey (1859 - 1952) lived from the Civil War to the Cold War, a period of extraordinary social, economic, demographic, political and technological change. During his lifetime the United States changed from a rural to an urban society, from an agricultural to an industrial economy, from a regional to a world power. It emancipated its slaves, but subjected them to white supremacy. It absorbed...

[Revised entry by James T. Robinson on February 10, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Samuel Ibn Tibbon (c. 1165 - 1232) was a translator, philosopher, and philosophical commentator on the Bible. He is most famous for his translation of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed from Arabic into Hebrew. But he translated other works by Maimonides, and produced the first Hebrew versions of Aristotle and Averroes. In addition to his work as translator, Ibn Tibbon was an original...

[New Entry by Jan Christoph Westerhoff on February 10, 2010.] There is unanimous agreement that Nāgārjuna (ca 150 - 250 AD) is the most important Buddhist philosopher after the historical Buddha himself and one of the most original and influential thinkers in the history of Indian philosophy. His philosophy of the "middle way" (madhyamaka) based around the central notion of "emptiness" (śūnyatā) influenced the Indian philosophical...

[Revised entry by Julie Dickson on February 10, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The subject of legal reasoning appears to occupy the more practical end of the spectrum of jurisprudential theorising. Surely if anything matters in our attempts to understand law, it matters how judges do and/or should decide cases, and that we have an account which adequately explains and can perhaps be used to guide or justify their activities. The recent history of legal philosophy abounds with many and various...

[Revised entry by Jerome Gellman on February 9, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The term 'mysticism,' comes from the Greek muo, meaning "to conceal." In the Hellenistic world, 'mystical' referred to "secret" religious rituals. In early Christianity the term came to refer to "hidden" allegorical interpretations of Scriptures and to hidden presences, such as that of Jesus at the...

[Revised entry by Frederic Portoraro on February 8, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, Internet resources] Reasoning is the ability to make inferences, and automated reasoning is concerned with the building of computing systems that automate this process. Although the overall goal is to mechanize different forms of reasoning, the term has largely been identified with valid deductive reasoning as practiced in mathematics and formal logic. In this respect, automated reasoning is akin to mechanical theorem proving....

[Revised entry by Graeme Forbes on February 5, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] A verb is transitive iff it usually occurs with a direct object, and in such occurrences it is said to occur transitively. Thus 'ate' occurs transitively in 'I ate the meat and left the vegetables', but not in 'I ate then left' (perhaps it is not the same verb 'left' in these two examples, but it seems to be the same...

[Revised entry by Paul Helm on February 4, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Concepts of eternity have developed in a way that is, as a matter of fact, closely connected to the development of the concept of God in Western thought, beginning with ancient Greek philosophers; particularly to the idea of God's relation to time, the idea of divine perfection, and the Creator-creature distinction. Eternity as timelessness, and eternity as everlastingness, have been...

[New Entry by Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa on February 4, 2010.] Causal theories of mental content attempt to explain how thoughts can be about things. They attempt to explain how one can think about, for example, dogs. These theories begin with the idea that there are mental representations and that thoughts are meaningful in virtue of a causal connection between a mental representation and some part of the world that is represented. In other words, the point of...

[New Entry by Iain Thomson on February 4, 2010.] Heidegger is against the modern tradition of philosophical "aesthetics" because he is for the true "work of art" which, he argues, the aesthetic approach to art eclipses. Heidegger's critique of aesthetics and his advocacy of art thus form a complimentary whole. Section 1 orients the reader by providing a brief overview of Heidegger's philosophical stand...

[Revised entry by John Sutton on February 3, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] 'Memory' labels a diverse set of cognitive capacities by which we retain information and reconstruct past experiences, usually for present purposes. Memory is one of the most important ways by which our histories animate our current actions and experiences. Most notably, the human ability to conjure up long-gone but specific episodes of our lives is both familiar and puzzling, and is a key...