Cultural evolution

By Mameli, Matteo; Sterelny, Kim

Cultural traits are those phenotypic traits whose development depends on social learning. These include practices, skills, beliefs, desires, values, and artefacts. The distribution of cultural traits in the ...

Biology, philosophy of

By Lewens, Tim

Biologists sometimes look perplexed when they are told of the existence of a subject called ‘The Philosophy of Biology’. What, they ask, is there to philosophise about in ...

Evolutionary theory and social science

By Sober, Elliott

Ideas from evolutionary theory impinge on the social sciences in two ways. First, there is the research programme of sociobiology, which attempts to demonstrate the impact of biological ...

Evolution and religion

By Kitcher, Philip

Ever since the seventeenth century, there has been debate about the compatibility of scientific findings and religious doctrines. During this period, many devout people have held that science ...

Moral epistemology

By Wedgwood, Ralph

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. So moral epistemology is the study of what would be involved in knowing, or being justified in believing, moral ...

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 ...

Slovakia, philosophy in

By Zumr, Josef

Until as late as 1918, social and national circumstances were not favourable to the development of philosophy in Slovakia. The enforced retardation of the country had an obviously ...

Wundt, Wilhelm (1832–1920)

By Brockmeier, Jens

The German philosopher, psychologist and physician Wilhelm Wundt founded the world’s first psychological laboratory in Leipzig in 1879 – at a time when psychology was still generally regarded ...

Degeneration

Degeneration (French: dégénérescence; German: Entartung) was an influential theory of biological and cultural decline that, once associated with Darwinism, attained wide currency in the later nineteenth ...

Empathy in Ethics

By Schramme, Thomas

It is often said that empathy means to share the feelings of others, although what exactly this amounts to is a moot point. More generally, understanding other minds ...

Legal idealism

By Attwooll, Elspeth

The term ‘legal idealism’ has various meanings. These include: the notion that laws, and the rights and duties they confer, genuinely exist, in which legal idealism is opposed ...

Semantics, teleological (teleosemantics)

By Godfrey-Smith, Peter

Teleological/biological theories of meaning use a biological concept of function to explain how the internal states of organisms like ourselves can represent conditions in the world. These theories ...

Evolutionary aesthetics

By Killin, Anton

Evolutionary aesthetics is the multidisciplinary investigation of the origins and evolution of our artistic and aesthetic behaviours and the capacities underwriting those behaviours. Key research questions include when, ...