Events

By Mellor, D.H.

Events are entities like collisions and speeches, as opposed to things like planets and people. Many are changes, for example things being first hot and then cold. All ...

Events

By Goswick, Dana

Events are happenings, occurrences and changes objects undergo, e.g. Kate’s singing, Jane’s pouring the milk, John’s walking. Events are typically understood in contrast to objects – where events ...

Latin America, philosophy in

By Oliver, Amy A.

Geographically, Latin America extends from the Mexican–US border to those regions of Antarctica to which various Latin American countries have laid claim. It includes the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Philosophy ...

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 ...

Indian and Tibetan philosophy

By Hayes, Richard P.

The people of South Asia have been grappling with philosophical issues, and writing down their thoughts, for at least as long as the Europeans and the Chinese. When ...

Buddhist philosophy, Indian

By Hayes, Richard P.

Buddhism was an important ingredient in the philosophical melange of the Indian subcontinent for over a millennium. From an inconspicuous beginning a few centuries before Christ, Buddhist scholasticism ...

Davidson, Donald (1917–2003)

By Lepore, Ernie

Donald Davidson’s views about the relationship between our conceptions of ourselves as people and as complex physical objects have had significant impact on contemporary discussions of such topics ...

Processes

By Emmet, Dorothy

A process is a course of change with a direction and internal order, where one stage leads on to the next. Processes can be physical (such as atomic ...

Anomalous monism

By McLaughlin, Brian P.

Anomalous monism, proposed by Donald Davidson in 1970, implies that all events are of one fundamental kind, namely physical. But it does not deny that there are mental ...

Mental causation

By Loewer, Barry

Both folk and scientific psychology assume that mental events and properties participate in causal relations. However, considerations involving the causal completeness of physics and the apparent non-reducibility of ...

Randomness

By Dembski, William A.

The fundamental intuition underlying randomness is the absence of order or pattern. To cash out this intuition philosophers and scientists employ five approaches to randomness. ...

Time, metaphysics of

Perhaps the most important dispute in the metaphysics of time is over the passage of time. There are two basic metaphysical theories of time in this dispute. There ...

Davidson, Donald (1917–2003)

Donald Davidson is a central figure in twentieth-century American philosophy. Of the five volumes that make up Davidson’s collected essays, the best known are the first two, ...

Dualism

By Rosenthal, David M.

Dualism is the view that mental phenomena are, in some respect, nonphysical. The best-known version is due to Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a nonphysical ...

Time, metaphysics of

By Deng, Natalja

Metaphysics is the part of philosophy that asks questions about the nature of reality – about what there is, and what it is like. The metaphysics of time ...

Time, metaphysics of

By Dyke, Heather

Perhaps the most important dispute in the metaphysics of time is over the passage of time. There are two basic metaphysical theories of time in this dispute. There ...

Revelation

By Swinburne, Richard

All major theistic religions have claimed that God has revealed himself in some way, both by showing something of himself in events and also by providing some true, ...

Memory

Memory is central to every way in which we deal with things. One might subsume memory under the category of intellect, since it is our capacity to retain ...

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 ...

Miracles

By Basinger, David

Does God at times miraculously intervene in earthly affairs? That is, do some events occur because God has entered our space-time continuum and directly modified or circumvented the ...

Spacetime

By Torretti, Roberto

Spacetime is the four-dimensional manifold proposed by current physics as the arena for Nature’s show. Although Newtonian physics can very well be reformulated in a spacetime setting, the ...

Whitehead, Alfred North (1861–1947)

By Bradley, James

Whitehead made fundamental contributions to modern logic and created one of the most controversial metaphysical systems of the twentieth century. He drew out what he took to be ...

Causation, further themes

By Menzies, Peter

The traditional focus of philosophical interest in causation has been token causation: the kind of causation that relates particular dated events. There has been controversy in recent times ...

Epistemic Luck

By Broncano-Berrocal, Fernando; Carter, J. Adam

In almost any domain of endeavour, successes can be attained through skill, but also by dumb luck. An archer’s wildest shots occasionally hit the target. Against enormous odds, ...

Prior, Arthur Norman (1914–69)

By Williams, C.J.F.

Prior is most often thought of as the creator of tense logic. (Tense logic examines operators such as ‘It will be the case that’ in the way that ...