Globalization

By Scholte, Jan Aart

Globalization is one of the most hotly contested issues in contemporary social inquiry and public discussion. The debates mainly revolve around six points: definition, measurement, chronology, causes, consequences, ...

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, ...

Global justice, recent work on

By Caney, Simon

Until recently the prevailing view among many political philosophers was that global justice required that states honour each other’s independence, keep their treaties, and comply with the rules ...

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 ...

Cosmopolitanism

By Held, David; Maffettone, Pietro

Cosmopolitanism, in the broadest sense, is a way of thinking about the human condition. It portrays humanity as a universal fellowship. The unity to which cosmopolitans refer can ...

Scepticism

By Schönbaumsfeld, Genia

Radical scepticism is the contention that little or no knowledge of one’s ‘external’ surroundings might be possible. Most modern forms of scepticism have their roots in René Descartes’ ...

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 ...

Quine, Willard Van Orman (1908–2000)

By Orenstein, Alex

Quine is the foremost representative of naturalism in the second half of the twentieth century. His naturalism consists of an insistence upon a close connection or alliance between ...

Islamic philosophy, modern

By Morewedge, Parviz; Leaman, Oliver

There are a number of major trends in modern Islamic philosophy. First, there is the challenge of the West to traditional Islamic philosophical and cultural principles and the ...

African feminism

By Chioma Steady, Filomina

The distinctiveness of African feminism lies in its social and humanistic thrust, which recognizes that unequal power relations can be based not only on gender, but also on ...

Integrity

By Davis, Ann

The possession (or lack) of integrity is something that all morally serious people care about and think important. In both personal relationships and public life, to describe someone ...

Territorial rights

By Catala, Amandine

Inherent in the notion of territorial rights is the idea of exercising control over a geographically bounded area of land. The question of territorial rights as a philosophical, ...

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, ...

Naturalized epistemology

By Luper, Steven

The term ‘naturalized epistemology’ was coined by W.V. Quine to refer to an approach to epistemology which he introduced in his 1969 essay ‘Epistemology Naturalized’. Many of the ...

Naturalized epistemology

Epistemology, the theory of knowledge, is one of the central areas of philosophy. The questions addressed by epistemology have historically included what knowledge is, how we can or ...

Impartiality

By Cottingham, John

On the one hand, most of us feel that we are permitted, even required, to give special consideration to the interests of ourselves and our loved ones; on ...

International law, philosophy of

By Buchanan, Allen

The philosophy of international law has a long history, reaching back on some accounts beyond the Medieval period to late Hellenistic philosophy. In the twentieth century work in ...

Feminist bioethics

By Lindemann, Hilde

Bioethics, the study of moral and social issues rising from advances in medical technology, first entered the academy in the United States with the 1969 founding of the ...

Liberation philosophy

By Cerutti-Guldberg, Horacio

Philosophy of liberation emerged in Argentina early in the 1970s with the explicit intention of proposing a liberating alternative to the diagnosis of structural dependence offered by the ...

Knowledge, concept of

By Klein, Peter D.

The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and extent of human knowledge is called epistemology (from the Greek epistēmē meaning knowledge, and logos meaning theory). ...

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 ...

Computability and information

By Calude, Cristian S.

The standard definition of randomness as considered in probability theory and used, for example, in quantum mechanics, allows one to speak of a process (such as tossing a ...

Human rights

By Jones, Peter

Human rights are rights ascribed to human beings simply as human beings. While people may possess some rights only if they occupy a special position or role, such ...

Nāgārjuna (c. AD 150–200)

By Siderits, Mark

Nāgārjuna was the first Buddhist philosopher to articulate and seek to defend the claim that all things are empty, that is, devoid of their own essential nature. A ...

Connectionism

By McLaughlin, Brian P.

Connectionism is an approach to computation that uses connectionist networks. A connectionist network is composed of information-processing units (or nodes); typically, many units process information simultaneously, giving rise ...