Discrimination

By Nickel, James W.

A principle forbidding discrimination is widely used to criticize and prohibit actions and policies that disadvantage racial, ethnic and religious groups, women and homosexuals. Discriminatory actions often rely ...

Discrimination and language

see Linguistic discrimination.

Language and discrimination

see Linguistic discrimination.

Linguistic discrimination

By Scheman, Naomi

‘Linguistic discrimination’ is a redundancy. Discriminating is at the heart of what languages do. The question, of course, is when they can be said to do it invidiously, ...

Telesio, Bernardino (1509–88)

By Kessler, Eckhard

Bernardino Telesio was a philosopher from southern Italy. He was one of the Renaissance philosophers who developed a new philosophy of nature: his most important book was called ...

Corporations and justice

By Hughes, Robert; Strudler, Alan

For the past half century, there has been a large controversy within academic business ethics, in legal scholarship, and in the larger public about the role that corporations ...

Equality of opportunity

By Navin, Mark

Equality of opportunity is a political ideal according to which participants in some cooperative systems should possess equal access to some advantages at some point in time. According ...

Privacy

By Olsen, Frances

The distinction between private and public is both central to much legal and political thought and subject to serious challenge on philosophical, practical and political grounds by critics ...

Williamson, Timothy (1955–)

By Ball, Brian

Timothy Williamson is a British analytic philosopher, who has made major contributions in philosophical logic, epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of language and philosophical methodology. ...

Affirmative action

By Boxill, Bernard R.

The term ‘affirmative action’ originated in the USA under President Kennedy. Originally it was designed to ensure that employees and applicants for jobs with government contractors did not ...

Feminist philosophy

By Mason, Elinor

Feminist philosophy is philosophy that is aimed at understanding and challenging the oppression of women. Feminist philosophy examines issues that are traditionally found in practical ethics and political ...

Genetics and ethics

By Chadwick, Ruth

The identification of human genes poses problems about the use of resources, and about ownership and use of genetic information, and could lead to overemphasis of the importance ...

Daoist philosophy

By Hall, David L.; Ames, Roger T.

Early Daoist philosophy has had an incalculable influence on the development of Chinese philosophy and culture. Philosophical Daoism is often called ‘Lao–Zhuang’ philosophy, referring directly to the two ...

Animal thought, recent work on

By Rey, Georges; Hauser, Marc

In recent years there has been a good deal of experimental work on the question of animal cognition, much of it modelled on recent experiments in infant cognition. ...

Kim Iryŏp (1896–1971)

Philosophy and women have been an odd couple. In both the East and the West, thought traditions have been dominated by male thinkers. Buddhism is no exception. The ...

Race, theories of

By Banton, Michael

The first theories of race were attempts to explain why the peoples of Europe (or sometimes particular peoples within Europe) had developed a higher civilization than the peoples ...

Deductive closure principle

By Brueckner, Anthony

It seems that one can expand one’s body of knowledge by making deductive inferences from propositions one knows. The ‘deductive closure principle’ captures this idea: if S knows ...

Desert and merit

By Miller, David

The ideas of desert and merit are fundamental to the way we normally think about our personal relationships and our social institutions. We believe that people who perform ...

Ethics of policing

By Nathan, Christopher

Policing is, historically, relatively new. Accordingly, the study of the proper norms governing the police is also a novel endeavour, especially in comparison with the study of the ...

Feminist jurisprudence

By Kingdom, E.F.

The diversity of feminist philosophy and theory is represented in feminist jurisprudence, but two models of feminist jurisprudence predominate: the parity model, according to which women should be ...

Beauty

By Brown, John H.

On the subject of beauty, theorists generally agree only on rudimentary points about the term: that it commends on aesthetic grounds, has absolute and comparative forms, and so ...

Knowledge, causal theory of

By Swain, Marshall

Epistemologists have always recognized the importance of causal processes in accounting for our knowledge of things. In discussions of perception, memory and reasoning, for example, it is commonly ...

Counter-terrorism, ethics of

Counterterrorist efforts by states are sometimes thought to be subject to different moral principles than superficially similar practices. For example, while the search for peaceful solutions is normally ...

Perception, epistemic issues in

By McLaughlin, Brian P.

We learn about the world through our five senses: by seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling. Sense perception is a primary means by which we acquire knowledge of ...

Photography, aesthetics of

Photography and painting are sometimes thought of as different processes with a common goal: the creation of a depiction of an object or scene. One way to characterize ...