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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 ...
The problem of political obligation has been one of the central concerns of political philosophy throughout the history of the subject. Political obligations are the moral obligations of ...
REVISED
The problem of political obligation has been one of the central concerns of political philosophy throughout the history of the subject. Political obligations are the moral obligations of ...
Observation is of undeniable importance in the empirical sciences. As the source of information from the world itself, observation has the role of both motivating and testing theories. ...
Occasionalism is often thought of primarily as a rather desperate solution to the problem of mind–body interaction. Mind and body, it maintains, do not in fact causally affect ...
Occasionalism was a theory of causation that played an important role in early modern metaphysics. In its most radical form, this theory holds that God is the only ...
Ockhamism, so named because it was developed and defended by the fourteenth-century philosopher William of Ockham, is a long-enduring response to fatalist arguments. Fatalism, the thesis that ...
Traditional theism understands God to be the greatest being possible. According to the traditional conception, God possesses certain great-making properties or perfections, including necessary existence, omniscience, perfect goodness, ...
Western Scripture and religious experience find God present everywhere. Western thinkers make sense of this as their concepts of God dictate. Pantheists hold that God’s being everywhere is ...
The concept of omniscience has received great attention in the history of Western philosophy, principally because of its connections with the Western religious tradition, which views God as ...
A person may believe in the existence of God, or numbers or ghosts. Such beliefs may be asserted, perhaps in a theory. Assertions of the existence of specific ...
The word ‘ontology’ is used to refer to philosophical investigation of existence, or being. Such investigation may be directed towards the concept of being, asking what ‘being’ means, ...
All Indian philosophical traditions are deeply engaged with ontology, the study of being, since clarity about the nature of reality is at the heart of three intimately connected ...
‘Ontotheology’ has two main meanings, one arising from its usage by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and a second from its usage by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Though Kant’s influence on ...
There seems to be an objective asymmetry between the past and the future. The past has already happened, and is thus settled, determinate, and ‘closed’. Instead, the future ...
The open question argument is the heart of G.E. Moore’s case against ethical naturalism. Ethical naturalism is the view that goodness, rightness, etc. are natural properties; roughly, the ...
Open theism is the name for a model of God which emphasizes divine love and responsiveness to creatures. It arises from a family of theologies known as free-will ...
Opera, which may be defined as a dramatic action set in large part to music, is an inherently unstable art form, more so than any other. It has ...
‘Operationalism’, coined by the physicist Percy W. Bridgman (1927), has come to designate a loosely connected body of similar but conflicting views about how scientific theories or concepts ...
Optics as physics concerned with the manipulation and study of light and, more recently, the general study of electromagnetic radiation, has a history back to ancient Egypt, and ...
By an ordinal logic is meant any uniform effective means of associating a logic (that is, an effectively generated formal system) with each effective ordinal representation. This notion ...
Ordinary language philosophy is a method of doing philosophy, rather than a set of doctrines. It is diverse in its methods and attitudes. It belongs to the general ...
The label ‘ordinary language philosophy’ was more often used by the enemies than by the alleged practitioners of what it was intended to designate. It was supposed to ...
Orientalism is the concept that there is something very special and different about the thought of those living in the East, which can be discovered through the methods ...
Orphism, a speculative trend within Greek religion, claimed the mythical singer Orpheus as founder and prophet. In changing forms, it is in evidence from the 6th century ...