Moore, George Edward (1873–1958)

By Baldwin, Thomas

G.E. Moore was one of the most influential British philosophers of the twentieth century. His early writings are renowned for his rejection of idealist metaphysics and his insistence ...

Language, philosophy of

By Crimmins, Mark

Philosophical interest in language, while ancient and enduring (see Language, ancient philosophy of; Language, medieval theories of; Language, Renaissance philosophy of; Language, early modern philosophy of), has blossomed ...

Deductive closure principle

The deductive closure principle is based on the thought that one straightforward way to extend one’s knowledge is to competently deduce some proposition from one or more propositions ...

Fact/value distinction

By Crisp, Roger

According to proponents of the fact/value distinction, no states of affairs in the world can be said to be values, and evaluative judgments are best understood not to ...

Honour

By Roberts, Julian

Honour consists in living up to the expectations of a group – in particular, in keeping faith, observing promises, and telling truth. This restriction to a particular group ...

Value, ontological status of

By Oliver, Alex

We evaluate persons, characters, mental states, actions, inanimate objects and situations using very abstract terms such as ‘good’, ‘unjust’ and ‘beautiful’, and more concrete terms, such as ‘courageous’, ...

Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (Lewis Carroll) (1832–98)

By Heath, Peter

Dodgson, an Oxford teacher of mathematics, is best known under his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll. Although not an exceptional mathematician, his standing has risen somewhat in the light of ...

Ross, William David (1877–1971)

By McNaughton, David

W.D. Ross was a British ancient and moral philosopher. In terms of his moral thinking, he was a pluralist, who held that there are several distinct moral considerations ...

Values

By Thomas, Alan

The theory of value has three main traditions: subjectivism, which holds that the only valuable goods are subjective states of sentient beings; objectivism, which claims that while values ...

Assertion

By Yang, Guiming; Goldberg, Sanford C.

In the past two to three decades, most of the philosophical attention that has been paid to the speech act of assertion aims to characterize the nature of ...

Common Sense School

By Wood, Paul

The school of common sense philosophy originated in the mid-1730s in Aberdeen in the circle of clergymen and academics associated with Thomas Reid. During the 1750s and 1760s ...