Philosophy tree. Philosophy. Philosophy. Philosophy. Philosophy. Philosophy. Philosophy. Philosopy. Philosophy. Philosophy. MindPapers: Contents. Search tips There are two kinds of search you can perform on MindPapers: All fields This mode searches for entries containing the entered words in their title, author, date, comment field, or in any of many other fields showing on MindPapers pages. Entries are ranked by their relevance as calculated from the informativeness of the words they contain and their numbers. You may search for a literal string composed of several words by putting them in double quotation marks (") Surname This mode searches for entries containing the text string you entered in their author field. Remember: viewing options in the menu above affect the results you get when searching.
Note that short and / or common words are ignored by the search engine. Tim van Gelder. Welcome to the GRL Philosophy Site. Reference. Philosophy Research Base. Philosophy Wiki. Philosophers. Theories. Subject:Philosophy. Metaphysics. Metaphysics is a traditional branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world that encompasses it,[1] although the term is not easily defined.[2] Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:[3] Ultimately, what is there?
What is it like? Prior to the modern history of science, scientific questions were addressed as a part of metaphysics known as natural philosophy. Originally, the term "science" (Latin scientia) simply meant "knowledge". Etymology[edit] However, once the name was given, the commentators sought to find intrinsic reasons for its appropriateness. There is a widespread use of the term in current popular literature which replicates this understanding, i.e. that the metaphysical equates to the non-physical: thus, "metaphysical healing" means healing by means of remedies that are not physical.[8] Central questions[edit] Cosmology and cosmogony[edit] Determinism and free will[edit] [edit] Philosophy of science. Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions concern what counts as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the purpose of science. This discipline overlaps with metaphysics, ontology and epistemology, for example, when it explores the relationship between science and truth.
There is no consensus on many central problems in philosophy of science, including whether science can reveal the truth about unobservable things and whether scientific reasoning can be justified at all. In addition to these general questions about science as a whole, philosophers of science consider problems that apply to particular sciences such as biology or physics. Today, some thinkers seek to ground science in axiomatic assumptions such as the uniformity of nature. Introduction[edit] Defining science[edit] Karl Popper c. 1980s Scientific explanation[edit] Justifying science[edit] The purpose of science[edit]
Thomas Kuhn. Thomas Samuel Kuhn (/ˈkuːn/; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was deeply influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift", which has since become an English-language staple. Life[edit] Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He graduated from The Taft School in Watertown, CT, in 1940, where he became aware of his serious interest in mathematics and physics. He obtained his B.S. degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943, where he also obtained M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949, respectively.
Thomas Kuhn was married twice, first to Kathryn Muhs with whom he had three children, then to Jehane Barton Burns (Jehane R. Kuhn was an agnostic.[4] His family was Jewish on both sides. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions[edit] Honors[edit] Rudolf Carnap. Rudolf Carnap (May 18, 1891 – September 14, 1970) was a German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism. Life and work[edit] Carnap's Birthplace in Wuppertal Carnap's father had risen from the status of a poor ribbon-weaver to become the owner of a ribbon-making factory. In 1928, Carnap published two important books: The Logical Structure of the World (German: "Der logische Aufbau der Welt"), in which he developed a rigorous formal version of empiricism, defining all scientific terms in phenomenalistic terms.
In February 1930 Tarski lectured in Vienna, and during November 1930 Carnap visited Warsaw. Carnap, whose socialist and pacifist beliefs put him at risk in Nazi Germany, emigrated to the United States in 1935 and became a naturalized citizen in 1941. Carnap taught himself Esperanto when he was 14 years of age, and remained sympathetic to it (Carnap 1963). Reductionism. Descartes held that non-human animals could be reductively explained as automata — De homine, 1662. Reductionism strongly reflects a certain perspective on causality. In a reductionist framework, the phenomena that can be explained completely in terms of relations between other more fundamental phenomena, are called epiphenomena. Often there is an implication that the epiphenomenon exerts no causal agency on the fundamental phenomena that explain it. Reductionism does not preclude the existence of what might be called emergent phenomena, but it does imply the ability to understand those phenomena completely in terms of the processes from which they are composed.
Religious reductionism generally attempts to explain religion by boiling it down to certain nonreligious causes. Types[edit] Richard H. Theoretical reductionism[edit] Theoretical reduction is the process by which one theory absorbs another. Methodological reductionism[edit] Ontological reductionism[edit] In mathematics[edit] Paul Feyerabend. Paul Karl Feyerabend (German: [ˈfaɪɐˌaːbɛnt]; January 13, 1924 – February 11, 1994) was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades (1958–1989). He lived at various times in England, the United States, New Zealand, Italy, Germany, and finally Switzerland.
His major works include Against Method (published in 1975), Science in a Free Society (published in 1978) and Farewell to Reason (a collection of papers published in 1987). Feyerabend became famous for his purportedly anarchistic view of science and his rejection of the existence of universal methodological rules.[1] He is an influential figure in the philosophy of science, and also in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Biography[edit] Early life[edit] Post–WWII and university[edit] When the war was over, Feyerabend first got a temporary job in Apolda where he wrote pieces for the theatre. Academia[edit] Willard Van Orman Quine. Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) (known to intimates as "Van")[1] was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continually affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor of philosophy and a teacher of logic and set theory, and finally as a professor emeritus who published or revised several books in retirement.
He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978. A recent poll conducted among analytic philosophers named Quine as the fifth most important philosopher of the past two centuries.[2] He won the first Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 1993, for "his systematical and penetrating discussions of how learning of language and communication are based on socially available evidence and of the consequences of this for theories on knowledge and linguistic meaning.
Biography[edit] Political beliefs[edit] . Karl Popper. Karl Raimund Popper CH FBA FRS[4] (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British[5] philosopher and professor at the London School of Economics.[6] He is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century.[7][8] Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favour of empirical falsification: A theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments.
If the outcome of an experiment contradicts the theory, one should refrain from ad hoc manoeuvres that evade the contradiction merely by making it less falsifiable. Personal life[edit] Family and training[edit] Karl Popper was born in Vienna (then in Austria-Hungary) in 1902, to upper middle-class parents. He worked in street construction for a short amount of time, but was unable to cope with the heavy labour. Academic life[edit] Honours and awards[edit]
Epistemology. Branch of philosophy concerning knowledge In these debates and others, epistemology aims to answer questions such as "What do people know? ", "What does it mean to say that people know something? ", "What makes justified beliefs justified? ", and "How do people know that they know? "[4][1][5][6] Specialties in epistemology ask questions such as "How can people create formal models about issues related to knowledge? " (in formal epistemology), "What are the historical conditions of changes in different kinds of knowledge? " Etymology[edit] The etymology of the word epistemology is derived from the ancient Greek epistēmē, meaning "knowledge, understanding, skill, scientific knowledge",[7][note 1] and the English suffix -ology, meaning "the science or discipline of (what is indicated by the first element)".[9] The word "epistemology" first appeared in 1847, in a review in New York's Eclectic Magazine : Historical and philosophical context[edit] Contemporary historiography[edit] Knowledge[edit] [edit]
Philosophy of mind. A phrenological mapping[1] of the brain – phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness, and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind–body problem, i.e. the relationship of the mind to the body, is commonly seen as one key issue in philosophy of mind, although there are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to the physical body, such as how consciousness is possible and the nature of particular mental states.[2][3][4] Mind–body problem[edit] Our perceptual experiences depend on stimuli that arrive at our various sensory organs from the external world, and these stimuli cause changes in our mental states, ultimately causing us to feel a sensation, which may be pleasant or unpleasant.
Arguments for dualism[edit] Phenomenology (philosophy) Phenomenology (from Greek: phainómenon "that which appears" and lógos "study") is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany.
It then spread to France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work.[1] Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness. This ontology (study of reality) can be clearly differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis which sees the world as objects, sets of objects, and objects acting and reacting upon one another. There are several assumptions behind phenomenology that help explain its foundations. Intentionality. Intentionality is a philosophical concept defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as "the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs".[1] The term refers to the ability of the mind to form representations and has nothing to do with intention.
The term dates from medieval Scholastic philosophy, but was resurrected by Franz Brentano and adopted by Edmund Husserl. The earliest theory of intentionality is associated with St. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God and his tenets distinguishing between objects that exist in the understanding and objects that exist in reality.[2] Intentionality should not be confused with intensionality, a related concept from logic and semantics. Modern overview[edit] The concept of intentionality was reintroduced in 19th-century contemporary philosophy by the philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano in his work Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874).
See also[edit] Robert Welsh Jordan -- Philosophical & Phenomenological Works. SCREEN DISPLAY. Browsers that display pages on this site with something very like the originally intended colors are Opera and Google. The others that I am familiar with convert the pages to standard black foreground on light background. Even Microsoft's Internet Explorer does that although the pages were generated using Microsoft's Front Page 2003.
Among word processors, Open Office will display pretty much as meant, Word will not. PRINTING. Pages should print in the usual manner: black foreground on light background despite the screen display colors. Welcome to the web site of Robert Welsh Jordan, that is to say, to my web site or sub-site, at Colorado State University. The web's content is work I have done over some forty-six years. The site will be continually under revision and construction through the generous assistance of James Peterson in the Department of Computer Science. CONTACT: I may be reached by email at Robert.Jordan@colostate.edu. Supervenience. The upper levels on this chart can be considered to supervene on the lower levels. In philosophy, supervenience is an ontological relation that is used to describe cases where (roughly speaking) the lower-level properties of a system determine its higher level properties.
Some philosophers hold that the world is structured in to a kind of hierarchy of properties, where the higher level properties supervene on the lower level properties. According to this type of view, social properties supervene on psychological properties, psychological properties supervene on biological properties, biological properties supervene on chemical properties, etc. That is, the chemical properties of the world determine a distribution of biological properties, those biological properties determine a distribution of psychological properties, and so forth. It is useful to know both when supervenience does and does not obtain. History[edit] Definitions[edit] Varieties of supervenience[edit] Value properties[edit] Emergence. Consciousness / Philosophy. Cognitive Philosophy.
Theory of Mind. My account. It's All InYour Mind. Artificial intelligence. Malcolm R Forster. Philosophy. Lifeboat.