Presupposition

By Rumfitt, Ian

There are various senses in which one statement may be said to ‘presuppose’ another, senses which are in permanent danger of being confused. Prominent among them are Strawsonian ...

Epistemology

By Klein, Peter D.

Epistemology is one of the core areas of philosophy. It is concerned with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge (see Knowledge, concept of). There is a vast ...

Epistemology

Epistemology is one of the core areas of philosophy. It is concerned with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge. Epistemology has been primarily concerned with propositional knowledge, ...

Jaina philosophy

By Soni, Jayandra

The issues in Jaina philosophy developed concurrently with those that emerged in Buddhist and Hindu philosophy. The period from the second century bc to about the tenth ...

Pragmatics

By Recanati, Francois

Analytic philosophers have made lasting contributions to the scientific study of language. Semantics (the study of meaning) and pragmatics (the study of language in use) are two important ...

Focus

By Glanzberg, Michael

Focus is the name of the phenomenon we typically see marked in English by putting stress on a word or phrase, as in: ...

Implicature

By Davis, Wayne A.

A term used in philosophy, logic and linguistics (especially pragmatics) to denote the act of meaning or implying something by saying something else. A girl who says ‘I ...

Strawson, Peter Frederick (1919–2006)

By Snowdon, Paul F.

Strawson taught at the University of Oxford from 1947, becoming Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1968, and retiring in 1987. A sequence of influential books and articles ...

Intuitionism

By McCarty, David Charles

Ultimately, mathematical intuitionism gets its name and its epistemological parentage from a conviction of Kant: that intuition reveals basic mathematical principles as true a priori. Intuitionism’s mathematical lineage ...

Sociology, theories of

By Alexander, Jeffrey C.

Throughout the history of sociology, three types of theorizing have co-existed, sometimes uneasily. ‘Theories of’ provide abstract models of empirical processes; they function both as guides for sociological ...

Hindu philosophy

By Clear, Edeltraud Harzer

Hindu philosophy is the longest surviving philosophical tradition in India. We can recognize several historical stages. The earliest, from around 700 bc, was the proto-philosophical period, when ...

Questions

By Harrah, David

Some theorists hold that a question is an interrogative sentence; others that a question is what is meant or expressed by an interrogative sentence. Most theorists hold that ...

Causation

By Cartwright, Nancy

Two opposed viewpoints raise complementary problems about causation. The first is from Hume: watch the child kick the ball. You see the foot touch the ball and the ...

Induction, epistemic issues in

By Kaplan, Mark

Consider the following: ...

Phenomenology in Latin America

By Bertelloni, Maria Teresa

The Latin American struggle against the positivism of the nineteenth century was the primordial endeavour of the founders of Latin American thought, such as José Enrique Rodó (1872–1917), ...

Critical theory

The term ‘critical theory’ designates the approach to the study of society developed between 1930 and 1970 by the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’. A group of theorists associated with ...

Hermeneutics

By Inwood, Michael

Hermeneutics, the ‘art of interpretation’, was originally the theory and method of interpreting the Bible and other difficult texts. Wilhelm Dilthey extended it to the interpretation of all ...

Descriptions

By Neale, Stephen

‘Definite descriptions’ are noun phrases of the form ‘the’ + noun complex (for example, ‘the finest Greek poet’, ‘the cube of five’) or of the form possessive + ...

Phenomenology, epistemic issues in

By Howarth, Jane

Phenomenology is not a unified doctrine. Its main proponents – Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – interpret it differently. However, it is possible to present a broad characterization ...

Hägerström, Axel Anders Theodor (1868–1939)

By Dahlquist, Thorild; Henschen-Dahlquist, Ann-Mari

Hägerström was professor of philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden, from 1911 until 1933, and together with his pupil Adolf Phalén founded the Uppsala school of conceptual analysis. He ...

Religion, history of philosophy of

By Alston, William P.

The philosophy of religion comprises any philosophical discussion of questions arising from religion. This has primarily consisted in the clarification and critical evaluation of fundamental beliefs and concepts ...

Bradley, Francis Herbert (1846–1924)

By Candlish, Stewart

Bradley was the most famous and philosophically the most influential of the British Idealists, who had a marked impact on British philosophy in the later nineteenth and earlier ...

Logical positivism

By Friedman, Michael

Logical positivism (logical empiricism, neo-positivism) originated in Austria and Germany in the 1920s. Inspired by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revolutions in logic, mathematics and mathematical physics, it ...

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 ...

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81)

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