Reasons and causes

By Smith, Michael

Imagine being told that someone is doing something for a reason. Perhaps they are reading a spy novel, and we are told that their reason for doing so ...

Desire

By Pettit, Philip

If an agent is to be moved to action, then two requirements have to be fulfilled: first, the agent must possess beliefs about the way things actually are, ...

Social science, methodology of

By Rosenberg, Alex

Each of the sciences, the physical, biological, social and behavioural, have emerged from philosophy in a process that began in the time of Euclid and Plato. These sciences ...

Action

Philosophical study of human action owes its importance to concerns of two sorts. There are concerns addressed in metaphysics and philosophy of mind about the status of reasoning ...

Sociobiology

By Rosenberg, Alex

Following Darwin, biologists and social scientists have periodically been drawn to the theory of natural selection as the source of explanatory insights about human behaviour and social institutions. ...

Functionalism

By Papineau, David

The term ‘functionalism’ means different things in many different disciplines from architectural theory to zoology. In contemporary philosophy of mind, however, it is uniformly understood to stand for ...

Animal minds

By Andrews, Kristin

By examining the mind across species, we can make better progress on questions about the nature of the mind generally. While this has been acknowledged since ancient times, ...

Emotions, philosophy of

By Solomon, Robert C.

Emotions have always played a role in philosophy, even if philosophers have usually denied them centre stage. Because philosophy has so often been described as first and foremost ...

Metaethical theories, hybrid

By Ridge, Michael; Köhler, Sebastian

Hybrid theories in metaethics hold at least one of the following theses: Moral claims express both belief-like and desire-like mental states. Moral judgments ...

Personal identity

By Garrett, Brian

What is it to be the same person today as one was in the past, or will be in the future? How are we to describe cases in ...

Moral standing

By Kuflik, Arthur

Towards whom is it appropriate to direct fundamental moral consideration? This is the question of moral standing. Many different answers have been offered: all and only those creatures ...