Personal identity

By Garrett, Brian

What is it to be the same person today as one was in the past, or will be in the future? How are we to describe cases in ...

Personal identity

By Schechtman, Marya

The ‘problem of personal identity’ as it is usually construed in philosophy is a special case of more general questions about the identity of objects over time. There ...

Personal identity

While many areas of philosophy are concerned with issues of personal identity, the investigation most usually referred to as ‘the problem of personal identity’ within analytic philosophy centers ...

Butler, Joseph (1692–1752)

By Frey, R.G.

Joseph Butler the moral philosopher is in that long line of eighteenth-century thinkers who sought to answer Thomas Hobbes on human nature and moral motivation. Following the Third ...

Reid, Thomas (1710–1796)

By Rysiew, Patrick

Thomas Reid (1710–96) was a contemporary of both Hume and Kant. He was born in Strachan, near Aberdeen, and was a founder and central figure in the Scottish ...

Hume, David (1711–76)

By Garrett, Don

David Hume, one of the most prominent philosophers of the eighteenth century, was an empiricist, a naturalist and a sceptic. His aim, as stated in his early masterpiece, ...

Morality and identity

By Singer, Ira

Philosophers have drawn connections between morality and identity in two ways. First, some have argued that metaphysical theories about personal identity – theories about what makes one the ...

Williams, Bernard Arthur Owen (1929–2003)

By Harrison, Ross; Craig, Edward

Bernard Williams wrote on the philosophy of mind, especially personal identity, and political philosophy; but the larger and later part of his published work is on ethics. He ...

Williams, Bernard Arthur Owen (1929–2003)

Bernard Williams wrote on the philosophy of mind, especially personal identity, and political philosophy, where his position is staunchly liberal; but the larger and later part of his ...

Reincarnation

By Yandell, Keith E.

The doctrine of reincarnation teaches that each human being has been born and died, and again been born and died, over and over again in a beginningless process ...

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 ...

Persons

By Garrett, Brian

We are all persons. But what are persons? This question is central to philosophy and virtually every major philosopher has offered an answer to it. For two thousand ...

Mind, bundle theory of

By Candlish, Stewart

This theory owes its name to Hume, who described the self or person (which he assumed to be the mind) as ’nothing but a bundle or collection of ...

Mind, Indian philosophy of

By Laine, Joy

Despite the enormous complexity of the Indian philosophical tradition, all the different schools developed within a common worldview mapped out by the three ideas of saṃsāra, ...

Persons

By Olson, Eric

A person, as most philosophers use the term, is something with certain special mental properties. Locke, for example, defined ‘person’ as ‘a thinking intelligent being, that has reason ...

Nozick, Robert (1938–2002)

By Wolff, Jonathan

Although Robert Nozick published on an enormous range of topics, he is best known as a political philosopher, and especially for his powerful and entertaining statement of libertarianism. ...

Nozick, Robert (1938–2002)

By Wolff, Jonathan; Blackburn, Simon

Although Robert Nozick published on an enormous range of topics, he is best known as a political philosopher, and especially for his powerful and entertaining statement of libertarianism. ...

Salvation

By Yandell, Keith E.

For there to be such a thing as salvation, there must be someone to be saved, something from which they need to be saved, and some way in ...

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 ...

Particulars

By Bigelow, John C.

Particulars are to be understood by contrasting them with universals, that term being used to comprise both properties and relations. Often the term ‘individuals’ is used interchangeably with ...

Artificial intelligence, recent work on

By Walmsley, Joel

The two main philosophical questions with which artificial intelligence (AI) has been traditionally concerned are (1) 'Could a machine think?’ and (2) 'Are we (humans) thinking machines?’ (see ...

Split brains

The largest fibre tract in the human brain connects the two cerebral hemispheres. A ‘split-brain’ surgery severs this structure, sometimes together with other white matter tracts connecting the ...

Eschatology

By Davis, Stephen T.

Eschatology is the study of or doctrine about the end of history or the last things. Eschatology is a branch of Christian theology, and the term still finds ...

Hell

By Adams, Marilyn McCord

The ancient idea that the dead go to a dark subterranean place gradually evolved into the notion of divinely instituted separate postmortem destinies for the wicked and the ...

Self-deception, ethics of

By Martin, Mike W.

Self-deception is complicated and perplexing because it concerns all major aspects of human nature, including consciousness, rationality, motivation, freedom, happiness, and value commitments. In a wide sense, ‘self-deception’ ...