Sometimes we specify a structure by giving a description and counting anything that satisfies the description as just another model of it. But at other times we start ...
The Lushi chunqiu (Spring and Autumn Annals of Master Lu Buwei), composed 241–238 bc, marks a firm beginning for the eclectic movement in Qin and Han philosophy. ...
Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk who found the theology and penitential practices of his times inadequate for overcoming fears about his salvation. He turned first to a ...
Magic is the art of influencing the workings of nature through occult powers. It can be found in most societies throughout history. It is often defined by contrast ...
Manicheism is a defunct religion, born in Mesopotamia in the third century ad and last attested in the sixteenth century in China. Its founder, Mani (c.216–76), had ...
The Sanskrit term anekāntavāda literally means ‘not-one-sided doctrine’, and refers to the Jaina epistemological theory of manifold standpoints from which an object may be considered and the ...
Many-valued logics may be distinguished from classical logic on purely semantic grounds. One of the simplifying assumptions on which classical logic is based is the thesis of bivalence, ...
The first philosophically-motivated use of many-valued truth tables arose with Jan Łukasiewicz in the 1920s. What exercised Łukasiewicz was a worry that the principle of bivalence, ‘every statement ...
Traditional definitions of marginal persons include those who live in two worlds, but do not feel well integrated into either and those who live in societies which are ...
Markets are systems of exchange in which people with money or commodities to sell voluntarily trade these for other items which they prefer to have. Most economic transactions ...
Chinese Marxism is a mixture of elements from Confucianism, German Marxism, Soviet Leninism and China’s own guerrilla experience. Because Mao Zedong (1893–1976) was in power longer than any ...
Western Marxism is used here as an umbrella term for the various schools of Marxist thought that have flourished in Western Europe since Marx’s death in 1883. It ...
‘Marxist Aesthetics’ reviews several Marxist approaches to the analysis of art, including the basic or traditional Marxist approach as well as approaches by Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, and ...
Marx’s approach to science is an intriguing combination of respect for the natural sciences and empirical inquiry, determination to go beyond the description of regularities among observable phenomena, ...
The history of Russian Marxism involves a dramatic interplay of philosophy and politics. Though Marx’s ideas were taken up selectively by Russian populists in the 1870s, the first ...
Marxism is a theory offering a critique of capitalist political economy. Marxism also views itself as an instrument or means of changing the world from a capitalist to ...
Mass terms are words and phrases such as ‘water’, ‘wood’ and ‘white wallpaper’. They are contrasted with count terms such as ‘woman’, ‘word’ and ‘wild wildebeest’. Intuitively, mass ...
Materialism is a set of related theories which hold that all entities and processes are composed of – or are reducible to – matter, material forces or physical ...
Materialism – which, for almost all purposes, is the same as physicalism – is the theory that everything that exists is material. Natural science shows that most things ...
‘Materialism’ stands here for the Sanskrit term Lokāyata, the most common designation for the materialistic school of classical Indian philosophy. However, at the outset ‘materialism’ and ‘Lokāyata’ were ...
Mathematical facts appear in many scientific explanations, since (paraphrasing Galileo) the universe’s laws are written in the language of mathematics. But some scientific explanations are distinctively mathematical in ...
Viewed as arising within the framework of a more general theory of substance, philosophical treatments of matter have traditionally revolved around two issues: (1) The nature of ...
During the long and complex history of Indian philosophy, a number of divergent conceptions of matter have been developed and explored. These conceptions diverge both with respect to ...
The two fundamental facts about language are that we use it to mean things and we use it to communicate. So the philosophy of language tries to explain ...
Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules and rule-following, and the recent responses to it, have been widely regarded as providing the deepest and most challenging issues surrounding the notions of ...