Islamic Neoplatonism developed in a milieu already saturated with the thought of Plotinus and Aristotle. The former studied in Alexandria, and the Alexandrine philosophical syllabus included such figures ...
Neo-Pythagoreanism is a term used by modern scholars to refer to the revival of Pythagorean philosophy and way of life in the first century bc. It coincides ...
Neuroenhancement is generally defined as the improvement of mental capacities. Such an improvement can be effected via traditional (e.g. education) or biomedical means. The use of the ...
The neuron doctrine refers to the idea that neurons are the fundamental units of the nervous system and that understanding the activity of these cells is all that ...
Neutral monism is a theory of the relation of mind and matter. It holds that both are complex constructions out of more primitive elements that are ‘neutral’ in ...
The principle of political neutrality, which requires the state to remain neutral on disputed questions about the good, is an extension of traditional liberal principles of toleration and ...
Philosophy as an academic discipline in New Zealand came into its own during the late 1930s under the influence of J.N. Findlay and Karl Popper. Arthur Prior was ...
Nietzsche’s thought had a massive influence on Russian literature and the arts, religious philosophy and political culture. His popularizers were writers, artists and political radicals who read his ...
As its name implies (from Latin nihil, ‘nothing’), philosophical nihilism is a philosophy of negation, rejection, or denial of some or all aspects of thought or life. ...
Metaphysical nihilism is an answer to the question ‘could there have been nothing?’ In recent analytic philosophy this tends to be interpreted as ‘could there have been no ...
The term ’Nihilist’, although it was first used in Russian as early as 1829, only acquired its present significance in Turgenev’s novel Ottsy i deti (Fathers and Sons) ...
The aim of the spiritual life was already described as nirvāṇa before the rise of Buddhism around the fifth century bc, but it is in the ...
‘Nominalism’ refers to a reductionist approach to problems about the existence and nature of abstract entities; it thus stands opposed to Platonism and realism. Whereas the Platonist defends ...
‘Nominalism’ refers to a family of views about what there is. The objects we are familiar with (e.g. hands, laptops, cookies, and trees) can be characterized as concrete ...
Buddhist nominalism refers to the nominalist ontology and semantics developed especially by the Indian Buddhist philosophers Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. Elaborating on the arguments of their Buddhist predecessor Vasubandhu, ...
For some theoretical purposes, generalized deductive systems (or, ‘semi-formal’ systems) are considered, having rules with an infinite number of premises. The best-known of these rules is the ‘ω-rule’, ...
A relation of inference is ‘monotonic’ if the addition of premises does not undermine previously reached conclusions; otherwise the relation is non-monotonic. Deductive inference, at least according to ...
There are three kinds of normative work in epistemology. The first is the provision of epistemic advice, which offers guidance towards improving the cognitive condition of an individual ...
Something is said by philosophers to have ‘normativity’ when it entails that some action, attitude or mental state of some other kind is justified, an action one ought ...
A legal norm sets a standard of behaviour. As a norm, it thus can remain in existence even though it is broken. Norms can be distinguished from causal ...
Commonly translated as ‘mind’ or ‘intellect’, the Greek word nous is a key term in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus. What gives nous its ...
Numbers are, in general, mathematical entities whose function is to express the size, order or magnitude of something or other. Historically, starting from the most basic kind of ...
Nursing ethics may be defined simply in relation to what nurses do that doctors and others do not characteristically do; or in relation to the nursing perspective on ...
The Nyāya school of philosophy developed out of the ancient Indian tradition of debate; its name, often translated as ‘logic’, relates to its original and primary concern with ...
Objectivity is one of the central concepts of metaphysics. Philosophers distinguish between objectivity and agreement: ‘Ice-cream tastes nice’ is not objective merely because there is widespread agreement that ...