Reality would appear to contain many different kinds of things: peonies, storms, facts, numbers, heartaches, and then some. And the contents of this reality would seem to stand ...
Composition occurs when one or more objects are parts of another object. The metaphysics of composition concerns the nature of composition – i.e. what it is, and how ...
Epistemology has traditionally been concerned with the scope, sources and structure of knowledge and other epistemic statuses such as justified belief. Metaphysics of knowledge seeks to answer metaphysical ...
Methodological individualism (MI) is the thesis that certain psychological properties are intrinsic properties, such as ‘being made out of iron’, rather than externally relational properties, such ...
Philosophy has been practised in Mexico for centuries, beginning with Nahuatl thought. Such thinking was rediscovered through laborious translation of surviving fragments of a document of exceptional value ...
Midrash, a Hebrew word meaning ‘investigation’ or ‘study’, denotes both the method used by the Jewish rabbis of the second to sixth centuries ad to interpret the ...
The school of Mīmāṃsā or Pūrva Mīmāṃsā was one of the six systems of classical Hindu philosophy. It grew out of the Indian science of exegesis and was ...
A crucial term in the literary theories of Plato and Aristotle, mimesis describes the relation between the words of a literary work and the actions and events ...
European philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proposed a wide range of views about the nature of the mind and its relation to the body. ...
This theory owes its name to Hume, who described the self or person (which he assumed to be the mind) as ’nothing but a bundle or collection of ...
Knowledge of other minds poses a variety of unusual problems due to the peculiarly private nature of mental states. Some current views, impressed by the contrast between the ...
The computational theory of mind (CTM) is the theory that the mind can be understood as a computer or, roughly, as the ‘software program’ of the brain. It ...
We know that the brain is intimately connected with mental activity. Indeed, doctors now define death in terms of the cessation of the relevant brain activity. The identity ...
The doctrine that mental states are identical with physical states has long played a prominent role in theories of mind and consciousness. The most widely discussed version of ...
Despite the enormous complexity of the Indian philosophical tradition, all the different schools developed within a common worldview mapped out by the three ideas of saṃsāra, ...
Does God at times miraculously intervene in earthly affairs? That is, do some events occur because God has entered our space-time continuum and directly modified or circumvented the ...
Mirror self-recognition (MSR) refers to the empirical investigation of self-awareness, also known as the ‘mirror and mark test’ introduced by psychologist Gordon G. Gallup (1970). The ability to ...
Modal epistemologies maintain that a belief counts as knowledge only if there is an appropriate modal connection between that belief and the facts of the matter that make ...
Modal logic, narrowly conceived, is the study of principles of reasoning involving necessity and possibility. More broadly, it encompasses a number of structurally similar inferential systems. In this ...
In reasoning we often use words such as ‘necessarily’, ‘possibly’, ‘can’, ‘could’, ‘must’ and so on. For example, if we know that an argument is valid, then we ...
Modal logic is principally concerned with the alethic modalities of necessity and possibility, although this branch of logic is applied to a wide range of linguistic and conceptual ...
Model theory studies the relations between sentences of a formal language and the interpretations (or ‘structures’) which make these sentences true or false. It offers precise definitions of ...
Of the many kinds of things that serve as ‘models’, all function fundamentally as representations of what we wish to understand or to be or to do. Model ...
In recent years, much attention has been given by philosophers to the ubiquitous role of models and modelling in the biological sciences. Philosophical debate has focused on several ...
In its most common use, the term ‘model’ refers to a simplified and stylised version of the so-called target system, the part or aspect of the world that ...