Irenaeus' Friends

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/duns-scotus/

[Revised entry by Thomas Williams on December 23, 2009.
Changes to: Internet resources]
John Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308) was one of the most important and influential philosopher-theologians of the High Middle Ages. His brilliantly complex and nuanced thought, which earned him the nickname "the Subtle Doctor," left a mark on discussions of such disparate topics as the semantics of religious language, the problem of universals, divine illumination, and the nature of human freedom. This...

Time Travel and Modern Physics

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel-phys/

[Revised entry by Frank Arntzenius and Tim Maudlin on December 23, 2009.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Time travel has been a staple of science fiction. With the advent of general relativity it has been entertained by serious physicists. But, especially in the philosophy literature, there have been arguments that time travel is inherently paradoxical. The most famous paradox is the grandfather paradox: you travel back in time and kill your grandfather, thereby preventing your own existence. To avoid inconsistency some...

Ludwig Wittgenstein

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/

[Revised entry by Anat Biletzki and Anat Matar on December 23, 2009.
Changes to: Bibliography]
Considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein played a central, if controversial, role in 20th-century analytic philosophy. He continues to influence current philosophical thought in topics as diverse as logic and language, perception and intention, ethics and religion, aesthetics and culture. There are two commonly recognized stages of Wittgenstein's thought -...

Civil Disobedience

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/

[Revised entry by Kimberley Brownlee on December 23, 2009.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
What makes a breach of law an act of civil disobedience? When is civil disobedience morally justified? How should the law respond to people who engage in civil disobedience? Discussions of civil disobedience have tended to focus on the first two of these questions. On the most widely accepted account of civil disobedience, famously defended by John Rawls (1971), civil disobedience is a public,...

Medieval Philosophy

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-philosophy/

[Revised entry by Paul Vincent Spade on December 23, 2009.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Medieval philosophy is conventionally construed as the philosophy of Western Europe between the decline of classical pagan culture and the Renaissance. Such a broad topic cannot be covered in detail in a single article, and fortunately there is no need to do so, since other articles in this Encyclopedia treat individual medieval philosophers and topics. The present article will confine itself to...

Virtue Epistemology

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-virtue/

[Revised entry by John Greco and John Turri on December 23, 2009.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Contemporary virtue epistemology (hereafter 'VE') is a diverse collection of approaches to epistemology. Two commitments unify them. First, epistemology is a normative discipline. Second, intellectual agents and communities are the primary source of epistemic value and the primary focus of epistemic evaluation. This entry introduces you to many of the most important results of the contemporary VE research program. These include novel attempts to...

Feminist Perspectives on Science

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-science/

[New Entry by Alison Wylie, Elizabeth Potter, and Wenda K. Bauchspies on December 23, 2009.]
Feminists have a number of distinct interests in, and perspectives on, science. The tools of science have been a crucial resource for understanding the nature, impact, and prospects for changing gender-based forms of oppression; in this spirit, feminists actively draw on, and contribute to, the research programs of a wide range of sciences. At the same time, feminists have identified the sciences as a...

Many-Valued Logic

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-manyvalued/

[Revised entry by Siegfried Gottwald on December 23, 2009.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Many-valued logics are non-classical logics. They are similar to classical logic because they accept the principle of truth-functionality, namely, that the truth of a compound sentence is determined by the truth values of its component sentences (and so remains unaffected when one of its component sentences is replaced by another sentence with the same truth value). But they differ from...

Dante Alighieri

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dante/

[Revised entry by Winthrop Wetherbee on December 18, 2009.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Dante's engagement with philosophy cannot be studied apart from his vocation as a writer, in which he sought to raise the level of public discourse by educating his countrymen and inspiring them to pursue happiness in the contemplative life. He was one of the most learned Italian laymen of his day, intimately familiar with Aristotelian logic and natural philosophy, theology (he had a special affinity for the...

Watsuji Tetsurô

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/watsuji-tetsuro/

[Revised entry by Robert Carter on December 17, 2009.
Changes to: Bibliography]
Watsuji Tetsuro (1889 - 1960) was one of a small group of philosophers in Japan during the twentieth century who brought Japanese philosophy to the world. He wrote important works on both Eastern and Western philosophy and philosophers, from ancient Greek, to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and from primitive Buddhism and ancient Japanese culture, to Dogen (whose...

Substance

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/

[Revised entry by Howard Robinson on December 16, 2009.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Many of the concepts analysed by philosophers have their origin in ordinary - or at least extra-philosophical - language. Perception, knowledge, causation, and mind would be examples of this. But the concept of substance is essentially a philosophical term of art. Its uses in ordinary language tend to derive, often in a rather distorted way, from the philosophical senses. (Such expressions as...

Hegel's Aesthetics

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-aesthetics/

[Revised entry by Stephen Houlgate on December 15, 2009.
Changes to: Bibliography]
G.W.F. Hegel's aesthetics, or philosophy of art, forms part of the extraordinarily rich German aesthetic tradition that stretches from J.J. Winckelmann's Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755) and G.E. Lessing's Laocoon (1766) through Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and Friedrich Schiller's...

Pierre Gassendi

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gassendi/

[Revised entry by Saul Fisher on December 15, 2009.
Changes to: Bibliography]
Pierre Gassendi (b. 1592, d. 1655) was a French philosopher, scientific chronicler, observer, and experimentalist, scholar of ancient texts and debates, and active participant in contemporary deliberations of the first half of the seventeenth century. His significance in early modern thought has in recent years been rediscovered and explored, towards a better understanding of the dawn...

Leibniz's Ethics

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-ethics/

[Revised entry by Andrew Youpa on December 15, 2009.
Changes to: Bibliography]
It is often remarked that Leibniz never wrote a systematic ethical treatise. However, in his view theology is a sort of jurisprudence, a type of science of law (NE, p. 526). And Leibniz contributed a systematic work to the field of theology, namely, the Theodicy (1710), the only large-scale philosophical work that he published during his lifetime. Given that Leibniz the natural theologian and...

Respect

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/respect/

[Revised entry by Robin S. Dillon on December 14, 2009.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Respect has great importance in everyday life. As children we are taught (one hopes) to respect our parents, teachers, and elders, school rules and traffic laws, family and cultural traditions, other people's feelings and rights, our country's flag and leaders, the truth and people's differing opinions. And we come to value respect for such things; when we're older, we may shake our heads (or fists)...

Defeasible Reasoning

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-defeasible/

[Revised entry by Robert Koons on December 11, 2009.
Changes to: suppl6.html]
Reasoning is defeasible when the corresponding argument is rationally compelling but not deductively valid. The truth of the premises of a good defeasible argument provide support for the conclusion, even though it is possible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. In other words, the relationship of support between premises and conclusion is a tentative one, potentially...

Bruno Bauer

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bauer/

[Revised entry by Douglas Moggach on December 11, 2009.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Bruno Bauer (1809 - 1882), philosopher, historian, and theologian. His career falls into two main phases, divided by the Revolutions of 1848. In the 1840s, the period known as the Vormarz or the prelude to the German revolutions of March 1848, Bauer was a leader of the Left-Hegelian movement, developing a republican interpretation of Hegel, which combined ethical and aesthetic motifs. His theory of...

The Computational Theory of Mind

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/

[Revised entry by Steven Horst on December 10, 2009.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Over the past thirty years, it is been common to hear the mind likened to a digital computer. This essay is concerned with a particular philosophical view that holds that the mind literally is a digital computer (in a specific sense of "computer" to be developed), and that thought literally is a kind of computation. This view - which will be called the "Computational Theory of...

John M. E. McTaggart

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mctaggart/

[New Entry by Kris McDaniel on December 10, 2009.]
John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, henceforth simply "McTaggart", was one of the most important systematic metaphysicians of the early 20th century. His greatest work is The Nature of Existence, the first volume of which was published in 1921 while the second volume was published posthumously in 1927 with C.D. Broad as the editor of the manuscript. In addition,...

Moral Realism

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/

[Revised entry by Geoff Sayre-McCord on December 10, 2009.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Taken at face value, the claim that Nigel has a moral obligation to keep his promise, like the claim that Nyx is a black cat, purports to report a fact and is true if things are as the claim purports. Moral realists are those who think that, in these respects, things should be taken at face value - moral claims do purport to report facts and are true if they get the facts right. Moreover, they hold, at least...

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