Philosophers have used the term ‘consciousness’ for four main topics: knowledge in general, intentionality, introspection (and the knowledge it specifically generates) and phenomenal experience. This entry discusses the ...
Higher-order theories are theories of phenomenal consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is the property of there being something that it is like for one to have an experience. Something that ...
Phenomenology is an approach to consciousness that originates at the beginning of the twentieth century in the work of Edmund Husserl. A phenomenological account of consciousness begins from ...
A concept of central importance in moral, political and legal philosophy, consent is widely recognized as justifying or legitimating acts, arrangements or expectations. In standard cases, a person’s ...
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Permissive consent releases people from duties. As well as playing a role in a theory of right action, this type of consent is at the centre of sexual ...
The idea of one proposition’s following from others – of their implying it – is central to argument. It is, however, an idea that comes with a history ...
Consequentialism assesses the rightness or wrongness of actions in terms of the value of their consequences. The most popular version is act-consequentialism, which states that, of all the ...
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Consequentialism is sometimes taken to be a moral view according to which acts are to be assessed solely by the value of their consequences, in contrast to deontological ...
The term ‘conservation’ is used, in roughly the same sense, across a wide range of applications, including nature, the environment, wildlife, ancient buildings, ruins, monuments, paintings, sculptures, and ...
In antiquity ‘self-evident’ principles were used to argue for the conservation of certain quantities. The concept of quantitative conservation laws, such as those of mass and energy, is ...
Conservatism is an approach to human affairs which mistrusts both a priori reasoning and revolution, preferring to put its trust in experience and in the gradual improvement of ...
Constitutionalism comprises a set of ideas, principles and rules, all of which deal with the question of how to develop a political system which excludes as far as ...
Originally proposed by sociologists of science, constructivism or social constructivism is a view about the nature of scientific knowledge held by many philosophers of science. Constructivists maintain that ...
There have been many forms of the idea that there are no distinctively ethical properties, and that ethical claims are composed or constructed out of other considerations. In ...
Constructivism is not a matter of principles: there are no specifically constructive mathematical axioms which all constructivists accept. Even so, it is traditional to view constructivists as insisting, ...
Many of our thoughts are about particular individuals (persons, things, places,…). For example, one can spot a certain Ferrari and think that it is red. What enables this ...
To say that a mental state has intentional content is to say that it represents features of the world. The intentional content of a belief can be characterized ...
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A mental state has intentional content when it represents features of the world. The intentional content of a belief can be characterized in terms of concepts: the content ...
A central problem in philosophy is to explain, in a way consistent with their causal efficacy, how mental states can represent states of affairs in the world. Consider, ...
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Debates about wide and narrow content concern the representational contents of psychological states such as beliefs and desires. In the mid-twentieth century, it became common among philosophers to ...
What you know at a given time depends of course on features of your context. You can’t know you see a fire, for example, unless there is a ...
The idea that norms vary with social setting has long been recognized, but it is only in the late twentieth century that philosophers have developed precise versions of ...
People are often puzzled about the apparent contingency of the world. To say that something happens contingently is to say that it might not have happened, and to ...
There is a common-sense distinction between terms such as ‘statue’ or ‘chair’ on the one hand, and ‘concert’ or ‘war’ on the other. A long-standing tradition in metaphysics ...
The ‘continuum hypothesis’ (CH) asserts that there is no set intermediate in cardinality (‘size’) between the set of real numbers (the ‘continuum’) and the set of natural numbers. ...