The word Akan refers to the Twi-speaking people of southern and central Ghana. Akan traditional philosophy is essentially a philosophy of the person. It has cosmological ramifications, ...
The Greek word ‘akrasia’ is usually said to translate literally as ‘lack of self-control’, but it has come to be used as a general term for the phenomenon ...
Alchemy is the quest for an agent of material perfection, produced through a creative activity (opus), in which humans and nature collaborate. It exists in many cultures (China, ...
‘Alienation’ is a prominent term in twentieth-century social theory and social criticism, referring to any of various social or psychological evils which are characterized by a harmful separation, ...
Theories of alterity and identity can be said to be ‘postmodern’ if they challenge at least two key features of modern philosophy: (1) the Cartesian attempt to secure ...
A word, phrase or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. The word ‘light’, for example, can mean not very heavy or not very dark. ...
Jonathan Edwards, the first great American philosopher, interpreted Calvinist theology within the newer framework of Newtonian physics and Lockean empiricism in his Freedom of the Will (1754). However, ...
Nonstandard analysis is an important application of mathematical logic to the rest of mathematics. Invented in 1960, it provided a long-sought-for rigorous justification for the use of infinitely ...
The term ‘mathematical analysis’ refers to the major branch of mathematics which is concerned with the theory of functions and includes the differential and integral calculus. Analysis and ...
Moral philosophy has traditionally been divided into normative ethics and meta-ethics. Normative ethics concerns judgments about what is good and how we should act. Meta-ethics, with which ’analytic ...
Philosophical analysis is a method of inquiry in which one seeks to assess complex systems of thought by ‘analysing’ them into simpler elements whose relationships are thereby brought ...
In Latin America, philosophical analysis has been portrayed as an intellectual revolution. Its avowed goal has been to replace the abstruseness and obscurantism of scholastic and metaphysical jargon ...
In Critique of Pure ReasonKant introduced the term ‘analytic’ for judgments whose truth is guaranteed by a certain relation of ‘containment’ between the constituent concepts, and ‘synthetic’ for ...
Anaphora describes a dependence of the interpretation of one natural language expression on the interpretation of another natural language expression. For example, the pronoun ‘her’ in (1) below ...
Anarchism is the view that a society without the state, or government, is both possible and desirable. Although there have been intimations of the anarchist outlook throughout history, ...
The question of animal language and thought has been debated since ancient times. Some have held that humans are exceptional in these respects, others that humans and animals ...
By examining the mind across species, we can make better progress on questions about the nature of the mind generally. While this has been acknowledged since ancient times, ...
In recent years there has been a good deal of experimental work on the question of animal cognition, much of it modelled on recent experiments in infant cognition. ...
Does morality require that we respect the lives and interests of nonhuman animals? The traditional doctrine was that animals were made for human use, and so we may ...
Animal ethics is the study of ethical issues pertaining to human beings’ use of (nonhuman) animals. Its recently earned status as a significant area of academic inquiry (see, ...
Anomalous monism, proposed by Donald Davidson in 1970, implies that all events are of one fundamental kind, namely physical. But it does not deny that there are mental ...
Anthropology, like philosophy, is multifaceted. It studies humans’ physical, social, cultural and linguistic development, as well as their material culture, from prehistoric times up to the present, in ...
Anti-positivist philosophy arose in Latin America at the turn of the twentieth century in response to the dominance of closed positivistic systems of historical development in the climate ...
Realism in the philosophy of mathematics is the position that takes mathematics at face value. According to realists, mathematics is the science of mathematical objects (numbers, sets, lines ...
Anti-Semitism is a form of racism which sees Jews as a dangerous and despicable group in society. It has solid philosophical sources in the work of German Idealism ...