Properties

see Abstract objects. Natural kinds. Universals.

Properties

By Daly, Chris

Asked to describe a given tomato, you might cite its redness, its size, and its age. In doing so, some philosophers would claim, you have cited some of ...

Properties

Asked to describe a given tomato, you might cite its redness, its size and its age. In doing so, some philosophers would claim, you have cited some of ...

Property

By Munzer, Stephen R.

Most of the great philosophers have expressed views on property, its justification and limits, and especially on the justification of having private property; generally, one must understand these ...

Property theory

By Cocchiarella, Nino B.

Traditionally, a property theory is a theory of abstract entities that can be predicated of things. A theory of properties in this sense is a theory of predication ...

Relations (properties of)

Paradoxes of set and property

By Moore, Gregory H.

Emerging around 1900, the paradoxes of set and property have greatly influenced logic and generated a vast literature. A distinction due to Ramsey in 1926 separates them into ...

Aesthetics

By Budd, Malcolm

Aesthetics owes its name to Alexander Baumgarten who derived it from the Greek aisthanomai, which means perception by means of the senses (see Baumgarten, A.G.). As the ...

Metaethics

By Finlay, Stephen

A tripartite distinction is often drawn in moral philosophy between (i) applied ethics, (ii) normative ethical theory, and (iii) metaethics. Applied ethics seeks answers to moral questions about ...

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 ...

Physicalism

By Melnyk, Andrew

Physicalism is a view about the relationship between people’s mental properties and their physical properties. It claims that people’s mental properties are nothing over and above – nothing ...

Haecceity and thisness

By Ingram, David

A ‘haecceity’ (from the Latin, haecceitas, which translates literally as ‘thisness’) is a certain kind of property. In broad outline, a thisness is a primitive, particular, nonqualitative ...

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 ...

Mental causation

By Loewer, Barry

Both folk and scientific psychology assume that mental events and properties participate in causal relations. However, considerations involving the causal completeness of physics and the apparent non-reducibility of ...

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 ...

Dualism

By Rosenthal, David M.

Dualism is the view that mental phenomena are, in some respect, nonphysical. The best-known version is due to Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a nonphysical ...

Theory of types

By Cocchiarella, Nino B.

The theory of types was first described by Bertrand Russell in 1908. He was seeking a logical theory that could serve as a framework for mathematics, and, in ...

Colour and qualia

There are two basic philosophical problems about colour. The first concerns the nature of colour itself. That is, what sort of property is it? When I say of ...

Definition, Indian concepts of

By Bhattacharyya, Sibajiban

Definitions in Indian philosophy are conceived very differently from definitions in Western philosophy. In Western philosophy and logic, it is usual to define a term or a linguistic ...

Events

By Goswick, Dana

Events are happenings, occurrences and changes objects undergo, e.g. Kate’s singing, Jane’s pouring the milk, John’s walking. Events are typically understood in contrast to objects – where events ...

Colour and qualia

By Levine, Joseph

There are two basic philosophical problems about colour. The first concerns the nature of colour itself. That is, what sort of property is it? When I say of ...

Universals

By Bigelow, John C.

In metaphysics, the term ‘universals’ is applied to things of two sorts: properties (such as redness or roundness), and relations (such as kinship relations like sisterhood, or the ...

Supervenience of the mental

By Loewer, Barry

Phenomena of one kind ‘supervene on’ phenomena of another kind just in case differences with respect to the first kind require differences with respect to the second. G.E. ...

Dispositions

By Mumford, Stephen

Disposition is a term used in metaphysics usually to indicate a type of property, state or condition. Such a property is one that provides for the possibility of ...

Aesthetic concepts

By Eaton, Marcia

Aesthetic concepts are the concepts associated with the terms that pick out aesthetic properties referred to in descriptions and evaluations of experiences involving artistic and aesthetic objects and ...