Kotarbiński, Tadeusz (1886–1981)

By Stanosz, B.

Kotarbiński was one of the founders and main representatives of the Polish philosophical school known as the Lwów–Warsaw School and akin to, though independent of (and less radical ...

Quantum logic

By Forrest, Peter

The topic of quantum logic was introduced by Birkhoff and von Neumann (1936), who described the formal properties of a certain algebraic system associated with quantum theory. To ...

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716)

By Garber, Daniel

Leibniz was one of the central figures of seventeenth-century philosophy, indeed, one of the central intellectual figures of his age. Born and educated in Germany, he travelled to ...

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834)

By Milnes, Timothy

In addition to being one of the finest poets of the Romantic generation, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was a philosopher, theologian, and literary theorist whose work exerted a ...

Statistics

By Woodward, James

The discipline of statistics encompasses an extremely broad and heterogeneous set of problems and techniques. We deal here with the problems of statistical inference, which have to do ...

Averroism, Jewish

By Leaman, Oliver

Averroism was enthusiastically taken up by many Jewish philosophers and adapted in a number of ways that extended its scope beyond mere repetition of Averroes’ own arguments. Jewish ...

Relevance logic and entailment

By Read, Stephen

‘Relevance logic’ came into being in the late 1950s, inspired by Wilhelm Ackermann, who rejected certain formulas of the form A→B on the grounds that ‘the truth of ...

Duhem, Pierre Maurice Marie (1861–1916)

By Howard, Don

Duhem was a French Catholic physicist, historian of science and philosopher of science. Champion of a programme of generalized thermodynamics as a unifying framework for physical science, he ...

Kautsky, Karl Johann (1854–1938)

By Tudor, H.

Karl Johann Kautsky became the leading German socialist theoretician at the time of the Second International and the authoritative exponent of ’orthodox Marxism’. He was a close associate ...

Evolution, theory of

By Lloyd, Elisabeth A.

The biological theory of evolution advances the view that the variety and forms of life on earth are the result of descent with modification from the earliest forms ...

Archaeology, philosophy of

By Wylie, Alison

Questions about the scientific status of archaeology have been central to field-defining debates since the late nineteenth century and have frequently involved appeals to philosophical sources. With the ...

Effective field theories

An effective field theory is a quantum field theory that is taken to describe the physical world in a limited range of length scales. While a fabled final ...

Descartes, René (1596–1650)

By Garber, Daniel

René Descartes, often called the father of modern philosophy, attempted to break with the philosophical traditions of his day and start philosophy anew. Rejecting the Aristotelian philosophy of ...

Relativity theory, philosophical significance of

By Redhead, Michael

There are two parts to Albert Einstein’s relativity theory, the special theory published in 1905 and the general theory published in its final mathematical form in 1915. The ...

Abstract objects

By Hale, Bob

The central philosophical question about abstract objects is: Are there any? An affirmative answer – given by Platonists or Realists – draws support from the fact that while ...

Duns Scotus, John (c.1266–1308)

By Dumont, Stephen D.

Duns Scotus was one of the most important thinkers of the entire scholastic period. Of Scottish origin, he was a member of the Franciscan order and undertook theological ...

Intuitionism

By McCarty, David Charles

Ultimately, mathematical intuitionism gets its name and its epistemological parentage from a conviction of Kant: that intuition reveals basic mathematical principles as true a priori. Intuitionism’s mathematical lineage ...

Mechanism, in modern philosophy

By MacIntosh, Jack

Mechanism is the view that the material world is composed of small particles (corpuscles, or atoms), whose motion, size, shape, and various arrangements and clusterings provide the theoretical ...

God, concepts of

By Leftow, Brian

We think of God as an ultimate reality, the source or ground of all else, perfect and deserving of worship. Such a conception is common to both Eastern ...

God, concepts of

Those whose conceptions of God stem from the major Eastern and Western religions think of God as an ultimate reality, the source or ground of all else, perfect ...

The Bildung tradition

By Herdt, Jennifer A.

Bildung was a central concept in the ethical and aesthetic thought of many late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century German thinkers associated with Weimar classicism, romanticism, and idealism, notably Johann ...

Psychologism

By Porta, Mario González

Psychologism is a form of reductionism, either of a certain discipline to psychology, or of a certain type of objects to psychological entities, whereby a certain consensus believes ...

Vienna Circle

By Stadler, Friedrich
Translated by Piller, C.

The Vienna Circle was a group of about three dozen thinkers drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics who met regularly in Vienna between the ...

Vico, Giambattista (1668–1744)

By Pompa, Leon

Vico lived in a period in which the successes of the natural sciences were frequently attributed to the Cartesian method of a priori demonstration. His own first interest, ...

Dialectical materialism

By Wood, Allen W.

Dialectical materialism is the official name given to Marxist-Leninist philosophy by its proponents in the Soviet Union and their affiliates elsewhere. The term, never used by either Karl ...