The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries inherited, and were witness to, the decline of the metaphysics of substance, mode, and accident of the Aristotelian tradition. The causes of this ...
Although sometimes identified with pain, suffering is better understood as a highly unpleasant emotional state associated with considerable pain or distress. Whether and how much one suffers can ...
The Sanskrit term pratītyasamutpāda (Pāli, paṭiccasamuppāda) literally translates as ‘arising [of a thing] after encountering [its causes and conditions]’. This term, conventionally translated as ‘dependent origination’, ...
Sufficientarianism is a theory of distributive justice. Rather than being concerned with inequalities as such or with making the situation of the least well off as good as ...
Suicide has been condemned as necessarily immoral by most Western religions and also by many philosophers. It is argued that suicide defies the will of God, that it ...
Sunzi: The Art of Warfare (or Sunzi bingfa), a text traditionally ascribed to Sun Wu, a contemporary of Confucius, is the most widely read military classic in human ...
Supererogatory actions are usually characterized as ‘actions above and beyond the call of duty’. Historically, Catholic thinkers defended the doctrine of supererogation by distinguishing what God commands from ...
A supererogatory act is an act that is beyond the call of duty. In other words, it is an act that is morally good to perform but that ...
Supervenience is used of the relationship between two kinds of properties that things may have. It refers to the way in which one kind of property may only ...
Supervenience is a concept developed by philosophers to capture a way in which certain facts, events or properties rely or depend on others in a noncausal way. It ...
Phenomena of one kind ‘supervene on’ phenomena of another kind just in case differences with respect to the first kind require differences with respect to the second. G.E. ...
This entry contains two parts. The first and larger section is devoted to an account of Surrealism as an artistic/philosophical movement that emerged in the early twentieth century ...
Sustainability is a property of any activity, practice, process or institution that has the capacity to be continued in more or less the same way indefinitely. The concept ...
Symbolic interactionism is in the main a US sociological and social psychological perspective that has focused on the reciprocal relationship between language, identity and society. Philosophically it has ...
Syntax (more loosely, ‘grammar’) is the study of the properties of expressions that distinguish them as members of different linguistic categories, and ‘well-formedness’, that is, the ways in ...
‘Systems theory’ is a label for two very different approaches to social analysis. The first was a post-1945 successor to traditional organicist theories of society that for some ...
Alfred Tarski’s definition of truth is unlike any that philosophers have given in their long struggle to understand the concept of truth. Tarski’s definition is more clear and ...
The fundamental elements of any classification are its theoretical commitments, basic units and the criteria for ordering these basic units into a classification. Two fundamentally different sorts of ...
Technē (plural technai) is the ancient Greek term for an art or craft; examples include carpentry, sculpting and medicine. Philosophical interest in the technai stems from ...
Only within the modern period have philosophers made a direct and sustained study of ethics and technology. Their work follows two philosophical traditions, each marked by distinct styles: ...
Research on ethics and technology investigates how technologies (human-made physical entities, often called tools or artifacts) directly or indirectly affect voluntary human behaviour. The scope of these studies ...
The philosophy of technology deals with the nature of technology and its effects on human life and society. The increasing influence of modern technology on human existence has ...
Tel Quel was a review published in Paris from 1960 to 1982. Under the direction of Philippe Sollers, it became a key source of avant-garde work in literature ...
The Greek telos means final purpose; a teleological ethical theory explains and justifies ethical values by reference to some final purpose or good. Two different types of ...
Teleology is the study of purposes, goals, ends and functions. Intrinsic or immanent teleology is concerned with cases of aiming or striving towards goals; extrinsic teleology covers cases ...