Most of the great philosophers have expressed views on property, its justification and limits, and especially on the justification of having private property; generally, one must understand these ...
Traditionally, a property theory is a theory of abstract entities that can be predicated of things. A theory of properties in this sense is a theory of predication ...
Most people associate prophecy with prognostication. However, an understanding of philosophical theories of prophecy requires that we recognize the full range of functions that a prophet may serve: ...
Propositional attitude statements – statements about our beliefs, desires, hopes and fears – exhibit certain logical peculiarities. For example, in apparent violation of Leibniz’s law of the indiscernibility ...
Examples of propositional attitudes include the belief that snow is white, the hope that Mt Rosea is twelve miles high, the desire that there should be snow at ...
A sentence is a string of words formed according to the syntactic rules of a language. But a sentence has semantic as well as syntactic properties: the words ...
Central to Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem is his discovery that, in a sense, a formal system can talk about itself. Provability logic is a branch of modal logic ...
Divine providence is God’s care, provision, foresight and direction of the universe in such a way that the universe as a whole and individual creatures within it fulfil ...
The word ‘prudence’ is used in several ways in contemporary English, and its different philosophical senses to some extent reflect that variety. Traditionally, prudence is the ability to ...
Conventionally translated ‘soul’, psychē is the standard word in classical Greek for the centre of an animal’s, and especially a human being’s, ‘life’. In its earliest usage ...
Philosophers have subjected psychoanalysis to an unusual degree of methodological scrutiny for several interconnected reasons. Even a cursory look at the Freudian corpus reveals a slender base of ...
The basic concepts of psychoanalysis are due to Sigmund Freud. After establishing psychoanalysis Freud worked in Vienna until he and other analysts fled the Nazi occupation. Post-Freudian psychoanalysis ...
Psychologism is a form of reductionism, either of a certain discipline to psychology, or of a certain type of objects to psychological entities, whereby a certain consensus believes ...
Explanations in psychology are described as personal when they attribute psychological phenomena to the person, as when we attribute beliefs and thought processes to each other, for example. ...
The object of study in psychology is the experience and behaviour of organisms, particularly human organisms. Psychology resembles the other sciences in employing methods appropriate to material phenomena ...
Public health ethics is the branch of bioethics that is concerned with behaviours and policies affecting not only (or even not primarily or not at all) the ...
The concept of the public interest can be used in a wide variety of ways, and this has led many to say that it is devoid of meaning. ...
According to Roman Catholic teaching, purgatory is the place or state of purification after death in which those who die in a state of grace (and hence are ...
Pyrrhonism was the name given by the Greeks to one particular brand of scepticism, that identified (albeit tenuously) with Pyrrho of Elis, who was said (by his disciple ...
Pythagoreanism refers to a Greek religious-philosophical movement that originated with Pythagoras in the sixth century bc. Although Pythagoreanism in its historical development embraced a wide range of ...
A difficult term to contextualize within Western conceptual frameworks, qi is variously rendered as ‘hylozoistic vapours’, ‘psychophysical stuff’, ‘the activating fluids in the atmosphere and body’, and, ...
The terms ‘quale’ and ‘qualia’ (plural) are most commonly understood to mean the qualitative, phenomenal or ‘felt’ properties of our mental states, such as the throbbing pain of ...
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In contemporary discussions in the philosophy of mind, the terms quale and qualia (plural) are most commonly used to denote features of our conscious mental states ...
Quantificational reasoning in natural languages contains occurrences of expressions which, though name-like from a syntactic perspective, intuitively seem to be importantly different from ordinary names. For example, in ...
The quantifiers ‘some’ and ‘every’ were the object of the very first logical theory, Aristotelian syllogistic. An example of a syllogism is ‘Every Spartan is Greek, every Greek ...