Innateness

By Mameli, Matteo

The notion of innateness plays a significant role in various important debates in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, linguistics, ethology, and biology. These debates are about whether some ...

Innateness of language

see Language, innateness of.

Knowledge, innate

see Innate knowledge.

Innate knowledge

By Sober, Elliott

If innate knowledge exists, there must be innate beliefs and those beliefs must count as knowledge. In consequence, the problem of clarifying the concept of innate knowledge divides ...

Language, innateness of

By Cowie, Fiona

Is there any innate knowledge? What is it to speak and understand a language? These are old questions, but it was the twentieth-century linguist, Noam Chomsky, who forged ...

Innateness in ancient philosophy

By Scott, Dominic

The idea that knowledge exists latently in the mind, independently of sense experience, is put forward in three of Plato’s dialogues: the Meno, the Phaedo and the Phaedrus. ...

Rationalism

By Markie, Peter J.

Rationalism is the view that reason, as opposed to, say, sense experience, divine revelation or reliance on institutional authority, plays a dominant role in our attempt to gain ...

Locke, John (1632–1704)

John Locke was the leading English philosopher of the late seventeenth century. His two major works, An Essay concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of ...

Nativism

By Samet, Jerry

Traditional empiricism claims that the mind is initially equipped only with the capacity for experience and the mechanisms that make it possible for us to learn from experience. ...

Wang Yangming (1472–1529)

By Kwong-Loi, Shun

Wang Yangming was an influential Confucian thinker in sixteenth-century China who, like other Confucian thinkers, emphasized social and political responsibilities and regarded cultivation of the self as the ...

Biology, philosophy of

By Lewens, Tim

Biologists sometimes look perplexed when they are told of the existence of a subject called ‘The Philosophy of Biology’. What, they ask, is there to philosophise about in ...

Linguistics, philosophy of

By Rey, Georges; Blair, Dan

Although related to issues in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of linguistics is a largely distinct topic, being concerned not so much with language itself but with ...

A priori

By Moser, Paul K.

An important term in epistemology since the seventeenth century, ‘a priori’ typically connotes a kind of knowledge or justification that does not depend on evidence, or warrant, from ...

A priori

An important term in epistemology since the seventeenth century, ‘a priori’ typically connotes a kind of knowledge or justification that does not depend on evidence, or justification, from ...

More, Henry (1614–87)

By Winkler, Kenneth P.

The English philosopher Henry More was one of the leaders of the movement known as Cambridge Platonism. Like his Cambridge colleague Ralph Cudworth, More elaborated a constructive metaphysics ...

Cognition, infant

By Gopnik, Alison; Meltzoff, Andrew N.

In the past thirty years developmental psychologists have developed techniques for investigating the cognitive resources of infants. These techniques show that an infant’s initial representation of the world ...

Learning

By Glymour, Clark

Learning is the acquisition of some true belief or skill through experience. Rationalist/idealist philosophers held that the very constitution of thought guarantees that fundamental laws hold of the ...

Mind, philosophy of

By Jackson, Frank; Rey, Georges

‘Philosophy of mind’, and ‘philosophy of psychology’ are two terms for the same general area of philosophical inquiry: the nature of mental phenomena and their connection with behaviour ...

Semantics

By Crimmins, Mark

Semantics is the systematic study of meaning. Current work in this field builds on the work of logicians and linguists as well as of philosophers. Philosophers are interested ...

Logic in China

By Hansen, Chad

Technically, classical China had semantic theory but no logic. Western historians, confusing logic and theory of language, used the term ‘logicians’ to describe those philosophers whom the Chinese ...

Locke, John (1632–1704)

By Ayers, Michael

John Locke was the first of the empiricist opponents of Descartes to achieve comparable authority among his European contemporaries. Together with Newton’s physics, the philosophy of An Essay ...

Cambridge Platonism

By Beiser, Frederick

Cambridge Platonism was an intellectual movement broadly inspired by the Platonic tradition, centred in Cambridge from the 1630s to the 1680s. Its hallmark was a devotion to reason ...

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716)

By Garber, Daniel

Leibniz was one of the central figures of seventeenth-century philosophy, indeed, one of the central intellectual figures of his age. Born and educated in Germany, he travelled to ...

Chinul (1158–1210)

By Buswell, Robert E.

Chinul was the founder of the Korean Chogye school of Buddhism. He sought to reconcile the bifurcation between Kyo (doctrinal) thought and Sôn (Zen) practice that rent the ...

Herbart, Johann Friedrich (1776–1841)

Johann Friedrich Herbart was born on 4 May 1776 in Oldenburg and died on 14 August 1841 in Göttingen. He was a German philosopher, educator, and psychologist who ...