1509 - 1588) belongs to a group of independent philosophers of the late Renaissance who left the universities in order to develop philosophical and scientific ideas beyond the restrictions of the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition. Authors in the early modern period referred

Revised entry by Robert DiSalle on November 4, 2009. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] A "frame of reference" is a standard relative to which motion and rest may be measured; any set of points or objects that are at rest

Revised entry by Stewart Shapiro on November 2, 2009. Changes to: Main text] Typically, a logic consists of a formal or informal language together with a deductive system and/or a model-theoretic semantics. The language is, or corresponds to, a part

Revised entry by Kevin Klement on October 30, 2009. Changes to: Bibliography] Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) described his philosophy as a kind of "logical atomism", by which he meant to endorse both a metaphysical view and a certain methodology

Revised entry by William Wainwright on October 26, 2009. Changes to: Bibliography] Theists believe that reality's ultimate principle is God - an omnipotent, omniscient, goodness that is the creative ground of everything other than itself. Monotheism is the view that

New Entry by William Lewis on October 16, 2009.] Louis Pierre Althusser (1918 - 1990) was one of the most influential Marxist philosophers of the 20th Century. As they seemed to offer a renewal of Marxist thought as well as

was a philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction-writer, and playwright who lived in the Seventeenth Century. Her work is important for a number of reasons. One is that it lays out an early and very compelling version of the naturalism that is

in the "Wade-Giles" system of romanization) names the focal development in early "medieval" Chinese philosophy, from the third to the sixth century C.E. In Chinese sources, this development is called xuanxue (hsuan-hsueh, in Wade-Giles), literally the "learning" or study (xue)

Revised entry by David Wong on October 1, 2009. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Comparative philosophy brings together philosophical traditions that have developed in relative isolation from one another and that are defined quite broadly along cultural and regional lines

Revised entry by Ralph McInerny and John O'Callaghan on September 30, 2009. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1274) lived at a critical juncture of western culture when the arrival of the Aristotelian corpus in Latin translation

Revised entry by Jeff Jordan on September 29, 2009. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Pragmatic arguments have often been employed in support of theistic belief. Theistic pragmatic arguments are not arguments for the proposition that God exists; they are arguments

was an original thinker in and between the disciplines of physiology, psychology and philosophy. His twelve-hundred page masterwork, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a rich blend of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and personal reflection that has given us such ideas

New Entry by Talia Bettcher on September 26, 2009.] The relationship between feminism and transgender theory and politics is surprisingly fraught. The goal in this entry is to outline some of the key philosophical issues at the intersections, and this

devised by John Searle, is an argument against the possibility of true artificial intelligence. The argument centers on a thought experiment in which someone who knows only English sits alone in a room following English instructions for manipulating strings of

New Entry by Francesco Berto on September 17, 2009.] It is a venerable slogan due to David Hume, and inherited by the empiricist tradition, that the impossible cannot be believed, or even conceived. In Positivismus und Realismus, Moritz Schlick claimed

1919 - 2006) was an Oxford-based philosopher whose career spanned the second half of the twentieth century. He wrote most notably about the philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology and the history of philosophy, especially Kant....

New Entry by Owen Maroney on September 15, 2009.] Are principles of information processing necessary to demonstrate the consistency of statistical mechanics? Does the physical implementation of a computational operation have a fundamental thermodynamic cost, purely by virtue of its

are immediately evident: they are widely regarded as central to Kant's so-called critical philosophy, and there is no consensus on how they ought to be characterized and explicated. The overarching goal of this entry is to bring some clarity to

New Entry by James Shelley on September 11, 2009.] Introduced into the philosophical lexicon during the Eighteenth Century, the term "aesthetic" has come to be used to designate, among other things, a kind of object, a kind of judgment, a

were a response to problems in three areas: logic, theology, and metaphysics. Logicians were concerned with the use of words having more than one sense, whether completely different, or related in some way. Theologians were concerned with language about God.