Epistemology and ethics

By Feldman, Richard

Epistemology and ethics are both concerned with evaluations: ethics with evaluations of conduct, epistemology with evaluations of beliefs and other cognitive acts. Of considerable interest to philosophers are ...

Political philosophy

By Miller, David

Political philosophy can be defined as philosophical reflection on how best to arrange our collective life - our political institutions and our social practices, such as our economic ...

Toletus, Franciscus (1533–96)

By Doyle, John P.

Toletus had an independent, somewhat eclectic, but fundamentally Thomistic outlook. In philosophy his most important works were his commentaries on Aristotle in the areas of logic and natural ...

Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859–1941)

Bergson’s thinking focuses on the major questions of philosophy: What is time? What is the nature of consciousness? What is the significance of evolution? What are the sources ...

Ancient philosophy

By Sedley, David

The philosophy of the Greco-Roman world from the sixth century bc to the sixth century ad laid the foundations for all subsequent Western philosophy. Its greatest ...

Moral sentimentalism

By Gert, Joshua

‘Sentimentalism’ is a name for a wide class of views in value theory. Sentimentalist views are unified by their commitment to the idea that normative or evaluative properties ...

Open question argument

By McPherson, Tristram

The open question argument is the heart of G.E. Moore’s case against ethical naturalism. Ethical naturalism is the view that goodness, rightness, etc. are natural properties; roughly, the ...

Green, Thomas Hill (1836–82)

By Bellamy, Richard

Green was a prominent Oxford idealist philosopher, who criticized both the epistemological and ethical implications of the dominant empiricist and utilitarian theories of the time. He contended that ...

John of St Thomas (1589–1644)

By Doyle, John P.

The seventeenth-century Portuguese Dominican, John of St Thomas or John Poinsot, was a major figure in late scholastic philosophy and theology. Educated at Coimbra and Louvain, he taught ...

Education, philosophy of

By Curren, Randall R.

The philosophy of education is primarily concerned with the nature, aims and means of education, and also with the character and structure of educational theory, and its own ...

Neoplatonism

By Siorvanes, Lucas

Neoplatonism was the final flowering of ancient Greek thought, from the third to the sixth or seventh century ad. Building on eight centuries of unbroken philosophical debate, ...

Expressivism

By van Roojen, Mark

Expressivism is a kind of noncognitivism, usually about morality. And noncognitivism is a metaethical theory, that is a theory about the subject matter of morality, about the nature ...

Fallibilism

By Rescher, Nicholas

Fallibilism is a philosophical doctrine regarding natural science, most closely associated with Charles Sanders Peirce, which maintains that our scientific knowledge claims are invariably vulnerable and may turn ...

Epistemology

Epistemology is one of the core areas of philosophy. It is concerned with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge. Epistemology has been primarily concerned with propositional knowledge, ...

Intuitionism in ethics

By Frazier, Robert L.

To intuit something is to apprehend it directly, without recourse to reasoning processes such as deduction or induction. Intuitionism in ethics proposes that we have a capacity for ...

Experimental epistemology

By Beebe, James

Experimental epistemology is the branch of experimental philosophy devoted to the empirical study of our shared practices of reasoning and making judgments about knowledge, evidence, and justified belief. ...

Wang Fuzhi (1619–92)

By Black, Alison H.

A seventeenth-century neo-Confucian and Ming loyalist, Wang Fuzhi is best known for his nationalism and his theories of historical and metaphysical change. His classical commentaries and other writings, ...

Thomism

By Haldane, John J.

Deriving from Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, Thomism is a body of philosophical and theological ideas that seeks to articulate the intellectual content of Catholic Christianity. In ...

Epistemology

By Klein, Peter D.

Epistemology is one of the core areas of philosophy. It is concerned with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge (see Knowledge, concept of). There is a vast ...

Spinoza, Benedict de (1632–77)

By Allison, Henry E.

A Dutch philosopher of Jewish origin, Spinoza was born Baruch de Spinoza in Amsterdam. Initially given a traditional Talmudic education, he was encouraged by some of his teachers ...

Twentieth-century philosophy

By Livingston, Paul M.

Although it is difficult to generalize, twentieth-century philosophy has a number of broadly characteristic and widely shared concerns. These include the ambition to clarify the nature and foundations ...

Ethics

By Crisp, Roger

What is ethics? First, the systems of value and custom instantiated in the lives of particular groups of human beings are described as the ethics of these groups. ...

Justification, epistemic

By Foley, Richard

The term ‘justification’ belongs to a cluster of normative terms that also includes ‘rational’, ‘reasonable’ and ‘warranted’. All these are commonly used in epistemology, but there is no ...

Johnson, Samuel (1696–1772)

By McCracken, Charles J.

Johnson was the first important philosopher in colonial America and author of the first philosophy textbook published there. He derived his views largely from others, combining in one ...

Normative epistemology

By Conee, Earl

There are three kinds of normative work in epistemology. The first is the provision of epistemic advice, which offers guidance towards improving the cognitive condition of an individual ...