Modality, as it is usually understood in contemporary philosophy, has to do with necessities and possibilities. Deontic modality is a kind of modality which has to do with ...
Deontology asserts that there are several distinct duties. Certain kinds of act are intrinsically right and other kinds intrinsically wrong. The rightness or wrongness of any particular act ...
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Deontology is often defined by contrasting it with one of its chief competitors, consequentialism. In its simplest form, consequentialism claims that we only have one moral duty: to ...
How do pictures work? How are they able to represent what they do? A picture of a goat, for example, is a flat surface covered with marks, yet ...
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How do pictures work? How are they able to represent what they do? A picture of a goat, for example, is a flat surface covered with marks, depicting ...
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‘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 + ...
The ideas of desert and merit are fundamental to the way we normally think about our personal relationships and our social institutions. We believe that people who perform ...
If an agent is to be moved to action, then two requirements have to be fulfilled: first, the agent must possess beliefs about the way things actually are, ...
Over the centuries, the doctrine of determinism has been understood, and assessed, in different ways. Since the seventeenth century, it has been commonly understood as the doctrine that ...
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Over the centuries, the doctrine of determinism has been understood, and assessed, in different ways. Since the seventeenth century, it has been commonly understood as the doctrine that ...
Development ethics is ethical reflection on the ends and means of socioeconomic change in poor countries and regions. It has several sources: criticism of colonialism and post-Second World ...
Dialectical materialism is the official name given to Marxist-Leninist philosophy by its proponents in the Soviet Union and their affiliates elsewhere. The term, never used by either Karl ...
An offshoot of the Megarian school, and active c.350–250 bc, the Dialectical school was an important precursor of Stoic logic. Its leading members were Diodorus Cronus ...
Dialogical logic characterizes logical constants (such as ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘for all’) by their use in a critical dialogue between two parties: a proponent who has asserted a thesis ...
Discourse and its interpretation have interested philosophers since ancient times, and have been studied in different areas of philosophy such as rhetoric, the philosophy of language and the ...
Bacon, Descartes, Newton and other makers of the Scientific Revolution claimed to have found and even used powerful logics or methods of discovery, step-by-step procedures for systematically generating ...
A principle forbidding discrimination is widely used to criticize and prohibit actions and policies that disadvantage racial, ethnic and religious groups, women and homosexuals. Discriminatory actions often rely ...
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The disjunctivist claims that the mental states involved in a case of successful – “veridical” – perception of an object differ from those involved in a hallucinatory experience ...
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 ...
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‘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 ...
Dissoi logoi (‘Twofold Arguments’) is the title scholars apply to a short anonymous collection of arguments for and against various theses. The work, in Greek, is (questionably) dated ...
‘Double effect’ refers to the good and bad effects which may foreseeably follow from one and the same act. The principle of double effect originates in Aquinas’ ethics, ...
Doubt is often defined as a state of indecision or hesitancy with respect to accepting or rejecting a given proposition. Thus, doubt is opposed to belief. But doubt ...