Equality

By Weale, Albert

Equality has long been a source of political and philosophical controversy. A central question about equality is how one might link empirical or moral claims about the extent ...

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 ...

Logic, philosophy of

By Forbes, Graeme

Philosophy of logic can be roughly characterized as those philosophical topics which have emerged either from the technical development of symbolic (mathematical) logic, or from the motivations that ...

Renaissance philosophy

By Ashworth, E.J.

The term ‘Renaissance’ means rebirth, and was originally used to designate a rebirth of the arts and literature that began in mid-fourteenth century Italy (see Humanism, Renaissance). Here ...

Buddhist philosophy, Japanese

By Maraldo, John C.

Buddhism transformed Japanese culture and in turn was transformed in Japan. Mahāyāna Buddhist thought entered Japan from the East Asian continent as part of a cultural complex that ...

Global Justice

By Tan, Kok-Chor

For introductions to the current debate on global justice, the obvious entries to start with are Simon Caney’s Global Justice, recent work on and Charles Beitz’s International Relations, ...

Economics and ethics

By Hausman, Daniel; McPherson, Michael S.

Unlike many other sciences, economics is linked both to ethics and to the theory of rationality. Although many economists regard economics as a ‘positive’ science of one sort ...

Democracy

By Harrison, Ross

Democracy means rule by the people, as contrasted with rule by a special person or group. It is a system of decision making in which everyone who belongs ...

Democracy

Democracy means rule by the people, as contrasted with rule by a special person or group. It is a system of decision making in which everyone who belongs ...

Justice, corrective

By Weinrib, Ernest J.

In his treatment of justice Aristotle articulated a contrast between two forms of justice, corrective and distributive. The former deals with the rectification of an injustice inflicted by ...

Political philosophy, Confucian

By Chan, Joseph

Confucianism is a tradition of ethical and political thought in which ethics and politics are tightly connected. Confucianism endorses a politics of virtue that can be understood in ...

Forms, Platonic

By Brennan, Tad

Plato thought that in addition to the changeable, extended bodies we perceive around us, there are also unchangeable, extensionless entities, not perceptible by the senses, that structure the ...

Perfectionism

By Hurka, Thomas

Perfectionism is a moral theory according to which certain states or activities of human beings, such as knowledge, achievement and artistic creation, are good apart from any pleasure ...

Climate change justice

By Boran, Idil; Katz, Corey

Climate change justice is a branch of philosophical inquiry concerned with fair terms of cooperation for addressing global climate change. Global climate change refers to the adverse effects ...

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 ...

Rancière, Jacques (1940–)

By Davis, Oliver

Jacques Rancière was born in Algiers in 1940 and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he participated in French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s seminar reading ...

Sen, Amartya (1933–)

By Qizilbash, Mozaffar

Amartya Sen is one of the leading economists of the twentieth century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998. His influence extends well beyond economics ...

Feminist political philosophy

By Mendus, Susan

In all its forms, feminism asserts that social and political structures in society discriminate against women. Feminist political philosophy aims to show how traditional political philosophy is implicated ...

Incommensurability in ethics

By Carlson, Erik

In ethics and neighbouring subjects, incommensurability has been attributed to at least three different kinds of entities, namely moral theories or traditions, abstract values, and particular bearers of ...

Lambda calculus

By McCarty, David Charles

The lambda calculus presents a delimited formal setting for expressing and studying properties of mathematical operations and computer programs. Its syntactical unit is the term. Application terms tu ...

Justice

The idea of justice lies at the heart of moral and political philosophy. It is a necessary virtue of individuals in their interactions with others, and the principal ...

The ethics of war

By Frowe, Helen

Philosophical work on the ethics of war is often labelled ‘just war theory’. Despite the label, there is no single accepted theory of when and how one can ...

Contractarianism

By Freeman, Samuel

The idea that political relations originate in contract or agreement has been applied in several ways. In Plato’s Republic Glaucon suggests that justice is but a pact among ...

Self-respect

By Stark, Cynthia A.

Persons are said to respect themselves when they have an appropriate sense of their own worth either as persons generally or as individuals occupying particular roles. In respecting ...

Taylor, Harriet (1807–58)

By McCabe, Helen

Harriet Taylor (1807–58) was a British philosopher and political reformer, most famous (to posterity) for marrying John Stuart Mill. Her best-known single-authored work is Enfranchisement of Women ...