Realism and antirealism

By Craig, Edward

The basic idea of realism is that the kinds of thing which exist, and what they are like, are independent of us and the way in which we ...

Realism and antirealism, scientific

see Scientific realism and antirealism.

Scientific realism and antirealism

By Fine, Arthur

Traditionally, scientific realism asserts that the objects of scientific knowledge exist independently of the minds or acts of scientists and that scientific theories are true of that objective ...

Putnam, Hilary (1926–2016)

By Ben-Menahem, Yemima

Putnam’s work spans a broad spectrum of philosophical interests, yet nonetheless reflects thematic unity in its concern over the question of realism. A critic of logical positivism, Putnam ...

Conventionalism

By Horwich, Paul

How is it known that every number has a successor, that straight lines can intersect each other no more than once, that causes precede their events, and that ...

Idealizations

By Laymon, Ronald

Scientific analyses of particular phenomena are invariably simplified or idealized. The universe does not contain only two bodies as assumed in Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s laws, or only ...

Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann (1889–1951)

By Heal, Jane

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889 and died in Cambridge on 29 April 1951. He spent his childhood and youth in Austria and Germany, ...

Rorty, Richard McKay (1931–2007)

By Rohr, Michael David; Voparil, Christopher

Richard Rorty is a leading US philosopher and public intellectual, and the best-known contemporary advocate of pragmatism. Trained in both analytic and traditional philosophy, he has followed Dewey ...

Dummett, Michael Anthony Eardley (1925–2011)

By Taylor, Barry

For Michael Dummett, the core of philosophy lies in the theory of meaning. His exploration of meaning begins with the model proposed by Gottlob Frege, of whose work ...

Language, medieval theories of

By Ebbesen, Sten

A great deal of theorizing about language took place in western Europe between 1100 and 1400. The usual social context of this theorizing was the teaching of grammar, ...

Idealism

By Sprigge, T.L.S.

Idealism is now usually understood in philosophy as the view that mind is the most basic reality and that the physical world exists only as an appearance to ...

Nagel, Thomas (1937–)

By Sedivy, Sonia

The comprehensiveness of Thomas Nagel’s approach to philosophy sets him apart among late-twentieth-century analytic philosophers. Nagel develops a compelling analysis of the fundamental philosophical problems, showing how they ...

Nagel, Thomas (1937–)

Thomas Nagel offers a distinctive realist framework across metaphysics, theory of mind, epistemology, and moral theory that shows how fundamental philosophical problems in these areas result from our ...

Pragmatism

By Rorty, Richard

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition founded by three American philosophers: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey. Starting from Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as a rule ...

Metaphysics

By Craig, Edward

Metaphysics is a broad area of philosophy marked out by two types of inquiry. The first aims to be the most general investigation possible into the nature of ...

Putnam, Hilary (1926–2016)

Putnam’s work spans a broad spectrum of philosophical interests, yet nonetheless reflects thematic unity in its concern over the question of realism. The dynamic nature of Putnam's thought ...

Computer simulations in science

Since the advent of digital computers around 1950, the method of computer simulation (simulation, for short) has enriched the repertoire of scientific methods. A computer simulation traces the ...

Demarcation problem

By Achinstein, Peter

The problem of demarcation is to distinguish science from nonscientific disciplines that also purport to make true claims about the world. Various criteria have been proposed by philosophers ...

Genetics

By Darden, Lindley

Genetics studies the problem of heredity, namely why offspring resemble their parents. The field emerged in 1900 with the rediscovery of the 1865 work of Gregor Mendel. William ...

Maxwell, James Clerk (1831–79)

By Everitt, C.W.F.

For his two achievements of unifying electricity, magnetism and light, and of inventing statistical dynamics, Maxwell stands as the founding mind of modern theoretical physics. More than any ...

Nagel, Ernest (1901–85)

By Levi, Isaac

Ernest Nagel was arguably the pre-eminent American philosopher of science from the mid 1930s to the 1960s. He taught at Columbia University for virtually his entire career. Although ...

Reichenbach, Hans (1891–1953)

By Salmon, Wesley C.

Philosophy of science flourished in the twentieth century, partly as a result of extraordinary progress in the sciences themselves, but mainly because of the efforts of philosophers who ...

Scientific realism and social science

By Keat, Russell

A central issue in the philosophy of the social sciences is the possibility of naturalism: whether disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, economics and psychology can be ‘scientific’ in ...

Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann (1889–1951)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889 and died in Cambridge on 29 April 1951. He spent his childhood and youth in Austria and Germany, ...

Heideggerian philosophy of science

By Rouse, Joseph

Heidegger’s importance in the philosophy of science stems less from his scattered remarks about science than from the larger conception of intentionality and ontology that informs them. Heidegger’s ...