Cambridge Platonism was an intellectual movement broadly inspired by the Platonic tradition, centred in Cambridge from the 1630s to the 1680s. Its hallmark was a devotion to reason ...
Cantor’s theorem states that the cardinal number (‘size’) of the set of subsets of any set is greater than the cardinal number of the set itself. So once ...
The ‘Carolingian renaissance’ is the name given to the cultural revival in northern Europe during the late eighth and ninth centuries, instigated by Charlemagne and his court scholars. ...
Categories are hard to describe, and even harder to define. This is in part a consequence of their complicated history, and in part because category theory must grapple ...
Even though categories play an important role in philosophy (especially in ontology and metaphysics), it is clear that not all categories play such a role. Philosophers are ...
Since the 1960s Lawvere has distinguished two senses of the foundations of mathematics. Logical foundations use formal axioms to organize the subject. The other sense aims to survey ...
A ‘category’, in the mathematical sense, is a universe of structures and transformations. Category theory treats such a universe simply in terms of the network of transformations. For ...
An explanation is an answer to a why-question, and so a causal explanation is an answer to ‘Why X?’ that says something about the causes of X. For ...
Discussions of causality and necessity in Islamic thought were the result of attempts to incorporate the wisdom of the Greeks into the legacy of the Qur‘‘an, and specifically ...
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 ...
Physicalism appears to undermine the autonomy of ‘special sciences’ such as biology, and to leave little room for proprietary biological laws or causation. Mendel’s ‘Laws’ are so-called because ...
The traditional focus of philosophical interest in causation has been token causation: the kind of causation that relates particular dated events. There has been controversy in recent times ...
Recent work in the philosophy of causation has explored a number of issues relating to the objectivity of causation, including the place of causation in metaphysics and science, ...
The new science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sparked intense reflection and theorizing on the nature of causation. Philosophers attempted to account for the nature of causation ...
Causal language is pervasive in the law, especially in those areas, such as contract law, tort law and criminal law, that deal with legal responsibility for the adverse ...
Causation was acknowledged as one of the central problems in Indian philosophy. The classical Indian philosophers’ concern with the problem basically arose from two sources: first, the cosmogonic ...
‘Certainty’ is not a univocal term. It is predicated of people, and it is predicated of propositions. When certainty is predicated of a person, as in ‘Sally is ...
The Chaldaean Oracles were a collection of revelatory verses purportedly compiled in the second century ad. Along with the Orphic texts, Neoplatonists regarded them as divine words. ...
Change in general may be defined as the variation of properties (whether of things or of regions of space) over time. But this definition is incomplete in a ...
Chaos theory is the name given to the scientific investigation of mathematically simple systems that exhibit complex and unpredictable behaviour. Since the 1970s these systems have been used ...
Within at least some branches of Christianity, the term ‘charity’ has been used to mean the love mandated by Jesus. In recent theological writings, however, there has been ...
The principle of charity governs the interpretation of the beliefs and utterances of others. It urges charitable interpretation, meaning interpretation that maximizes the truth or rationality of what ...
In the first half of the twelfth century, the most advanced work in teaching and discussion of logic, philosophy and theology took place in the schools attached to ...
Chemistry, like all theoretical sciences, is deeply rooted in philosophical inquiry. Early Greek atomism was a response to Parmenides’ argument that the very concept of change is unintelligible. ...
In early Confucian writings, cheng describes the quality of authentically realizing or ‘completing’ a given thing’s true nature. It appears together with xin (trustworthiness), a character ...