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abduction	## 1. Abduction: The General Idea You happen to know that Tim and Harry have recently had a terrible row that ended their friendship. Now someone tells you that she just saw Tim and Harry jogging together. The best explanation for this that you can think of is that they made up. You conclude that they are friends ag...
abelard	## 1. Life and Works ### 1.1 Life Abelard's life is relatively well-known. In addition to events chronicled in the public record, his inner life is revealed in his autobiographical letter Historia calamitatum ["The Story of My Troubles"] and in his famous correspondence with Heloise. Abelard was born into the...
abhidharma	## 1. Abhidharma: its origins and texts The early history of Buddhism in India is remarkably little known and the attempt to construct a consistent chronology of that history still engrosses the minds of contemporary scholars. A generally accepted tradition has it that some time around the beginning of the third cen...
abilities	## 1. A taxonomy What is an ability? On one reading, this question is a demand for a theory of ability of the sort described above. On another reading, however, this question simply asks for a rough guide to what sort of things we are speaking of when we speak of 'abilities'. So understood, this question is no...
abner-burgos	## 1. Life There are not many sources on the life of Abner. The majority of the sources are autobiographical passages in his works (especially Mostrador de Justicia). Abner was born around 1260, probably in the Jewish community of Burgos, one of the major communities in Castile. While still Jewish, Abner worked as...
abrabanel	## 1. Life and Works There exists a large debate in the secondary literature concerning the place and role of Jews in Renaissance culture. One group envisages a synthesis between Jewish culture on the one hand, and the ideals of the Renaissance on the other.[2] Jews, according to this interpretation, could quite...
abstract-objects	## 1. Introduction The abstract/concrete distinction has a curious status in contemporary philosophy. It is widely agreed that the ontological distinction is of fundamental importance, but as yet, there is no standard account of how it should be drawn. There is a consensus about how to classify certain paradigm case...
essential-accidental	## 1. The Modal Characterization of the Essential/Accidental Property Distinction According to the basic modal characterization of the distinction between essential and accidental properties, which is the characterization given at the outset, \(P\) is an essential property of an object \(o\) just in case it i...
action	## 1. About the Question: What is an Action? The central question in philosophy of action is standardly taken to be: "What makes something an action?" However, we obtain different versions of the question depending on what we take as the contrast class from which actions are to be differentiated. The different quest...
shared-agency	## 1. The traditional ontological problem and the Intention Thesis Agency is sometimes exercised in concert, as when we walk together, several individuals undertake painting a house, or a football team executes a pass play.[1] It is hardly controversial that there really is a phenomenon falling under labels such a...
logic-action	## 1. The Logic of Action in Philosophy ### 1.1 Historical overview Already St. Anselm studied the concept of action in a way that must be classified as logical; had he known symbolic logic, he would certainly have made use of it (Henry 1967; Walton 1976). In modern times the subject was introduced by, among other...
action-perception	## 1. Early Action-Based Theories Two doctrines dominate philosophical and psychological discussions of the relationship between action and space perception from the 18th to the early 20th century. The first is that the immediate objects of sight are two-dimensional manifolds of light and color, lacking percepti...
qm-action-distance	## 1. Introduction The quantum realm involves curious correlations between distant events. A well-known example is David Bohm's (1951) version of the famous thought experiment that Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen proposed in 1935 (henceforth, the EPR/B experiment). Pairs of particles are emitted from a source in the s...
possibilism-actualism	## 1. The Focus of the Debate The debate between possibilists and actualists is at root ontological. It is not--fundamentally, at least--a debate about meaning, or the proper linguistic primitives of our modal discourse, or the model theory of certain formal languages, or the permissibility of certain inferences. ...
actualism-possibilism-ethics	## 1. Historical Origins of the Debate ### 1.1 Some Background Assumptions For contingent historical reasons, this debate has unfolded in such a way that the following background assumptions are made in the literature. First, likely for ease of exposition, everyone writes as if counterfactual determinism is true (...
adaptationism	## 1. History The debate over adaptationism is often traced back to a 1979 paper by Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin, called "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme," or simply the "Spandrels" paper. This paper is important but, in fact, this debate tra...
addams-jane	## 1. Life Compared to the many biographical accounts of Addams' life, relatively few comprehensively consider her philosophy. However, her philosophical insights are closely tied to her life experiences which are briefly recounted below. Laura Jane Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois, on September 6, 1860. S...
adorno	## 1. Biographical Sketch Born on September 11, 1903 as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, Adorno lived in Frankfurt am Main for the first three decades of his life and the last two (Muller-Doohm 2005, Claussen 2008). He was the only son of a wealthy German wine merchant of assimilated Jewish background and an accomplishe...
advance-directives	## 1. The orthodox legal view In legal contexts, two general standards or approaches to question Q2 have been developed: > > > The Substituted Judgment standard: > The surrogate's task is to > reconstruct what the patient himself would have wanted, in the > circumstances at hand, if the patient had deci...
giles	## 1. Life Born in Rome most probably in the fifth decade of the thirteenth century, Giles was the first outstanding theologian of the relatively recently founded Order of the Augustinian Hermits. Nothing more is known about his origins: the statement that he belonged to the famous Roman family of the Colonna seems...
skepticism-ancient	## 1. The Central Questions The core concepts of ancient skepticism are belief, suspension of judgment, criterion of truth, appearances, and investigation. Important notions of modern skepticism such as knowledge, certainty, justified belief, and doubt play no or almost no role. This is not to say that the ancients ...
aesthetic-concept	## 1. The Concept of Taste The concept of the aesthetic descends from the concept of taste. Why the concept of taste commanded so much philosophical attention during the 18th century is a complicated matter, but this much is clear: the eighteenth-century theory of taste emerged, in part, as a corrective to the rise ...
aesthetic-experience	## 1. Focus of aesthetic experience Any aesthetic experience has intentionality: it is an experience (as) of some object. Typically, that object will be a work of art--such as a sculpture, a symphony, a painting, a performance, or a movie--or some aspect of nature, such as a bird's plumage, a cliff, or a bright wi...
aesthetics-19th-romantic	## 1. The Primacy of the Aesthetic One common concern strikingly unifies otherwise different romantic contributions. Early and late, German, British and French, the romantics advocated what may legitimately be called "the primacy of the aesthetic". In romanticism, the "aesthetic"--most broadly that which concerns be...
aesthetic-judgment	## 1. The Judgment of Taste What is a judgment of taste? Kant isolated two fundamental necessary conditions for a judgment to be a judgment of taste--subjectivity and universality (Kant 1790/2000). Other conditions may also contribute to what it is to be a judgment of taste, but they are consequential on, or pre...
beardsley-aesthetics	## 1. Background In Aesthetics, Beardsley develops a philosophy of art that is sensitive to three things: 1. art itself and people's pre-philosophical interest in and opinions about art, 2. critics' pronouncements about art, and 3. developments in philosophy, especially, though not exclusively, those in the anal...
aesthetics-18th-british	## 1. Internal-Sense Theories ### 1.1 Shaftesbury Shaftesbury takes up aesthetic questions from time to time across his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (first published in 1711), particularly within its third, fourth, and fifth Treatises. But it is perhaps only within this last treatise--the d...
aesthetics-cogsci	## 1. Background Writers on aesthetics in the empiricist tradition such as Shaftsbury, Hume, and Reid thought of their contributions as broadly empirical (see Shelley 2006 [2020]), and among the very first experimental investigations in psychology were studies of aesthetic preferences and responses, for example Fech...
collingwood-aesthetics	## 1. Art as Craft, Magic, Representation and Amusement There are four concepts of human activity which are commonly called 'art', but which according to Collingwood, should be sharply distinguished from what he calls 'art proper'. The implication is that those things are improperly so-called, that is, are commonly ...
croce-aesthetics	## 1. The Four Domains of Spirit (or Mind) We are confining ourselves to Croce's aesthetics, but it will help to have at least the most rudimentary sketch in view of his rather complex general philosophy. In Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century, the prevailing philosophy or 'world-view' was not, as in ...
ethics-cultural-heritage	## 1. What is Cultural Heritage? Cultural heritage is a broad and nebulous concept, and discussions often assume an understanding meant to capture its heterogeneity. For instance, a representative definition reads as follows: > > > Heritage encompasses a broad and overarching term: "it" is > something that some...
art-definition	## 1. Constraints on Definitions of Art Any definition of art has to square with the following uncontroversial facts: (i) entities (artifacts or performances) intentionally endowed by their makers with a significant degree of aesthetic interest, often greatly surpassing that of most everyday objects, first appeared ...
dewey-aesthetics	## 1. Early Forays into Aesthetics Dewey was in his seventies when Art as Experience was published, but also his earlier work contains numerous discussions of aesthetic related themes, beginning already from his very first book, Psychology (1887), in which Dewey discusses aesthetics and the arts at various point...
environmental-aesthetics	## 1. History Although environmental aesthetics has developed as a sub-field of Western philosophical aesthetics only in the last forty years, it has historical roots in eighteenth and nineteenth century European and North American aesthetics. In these centuries, there were important advances in the aesthetics of na...
aesthetics-existentialist	## 1. Metaphysical foundations of existentialist aesthetics The term "aesthetics" as it first emerged in modern philosophy (in A. G. Baumgarten's 1750 Aesthetica) encompassed the theory of perception, the theory of beauty and the theory of art. This remained true of all classical philosophical aesthetics in the l...
feminism-aesthetics	## 1. Art and Artists: Historical Background Feminist perspectives in aesthetics first arose in the 1970s from a combination of political activism in the contemporary art world and critiques of the historical traditions of philosophy and of the arts. They have developed in conjunction with the postmodern debates abo...
aesthetics-18th-french	## 1. The Classical Legacy French thinkers considered their country as the heir to the Greek and Roman empires. Whether they strictly followed ancient models or not, they saw their work as a continuation of the classical tradition. Aristotle, Horace, and Plutarch, to name just a few writers, were major influences on...
gadamer-aesthetics	## 1. Art as Interlocutor Gadamer's aesthetics fosters an attentiveness towards the mystery of the given and its unexpected folds of meaningfulness. Gadamer's arguments are varied, ushering the reader towards an aesthetic attentiveness rather than making iconoclastic declarations about what the aesthetic is. They em...
aesthetics-18th-german	## 1. Leibniz and Wolff: Perfection and Truth The traditional idea that art is a special vehicle for the expression of important truths is the basis for the work of the philosopher who established the framework for German thought for much of the 18th century, namely, Christian Wolff (1679-1754). Wolff never devoted...
goodman-aesthetics	## 1. Biographical Sketch Goodman's personal life (August 7, 1906-November 25, 1998) was linked to art in many and important ways. From 1929 to 1941, he directed an art gallery in Boston: the Walker-Goodman Art Gallery. It is through this commitment that he met his wife, Katharine Sturgis, a skilled painter whose wo...
hegel-aesthetics	## 1. Hegel's Knowledge of Art Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) contains chapters on the ancient Greek "religion of art" (Kunstreligion) and on the world-view presented in Sophocles' Antigone and Oedipus the King. His philosophy of art proper, however, forms part of his philosophy (rather than pheno...
heidegger-aesthetics	## 1. Introduction to "Heidegger's Aesthetics": Beyond the Oxymoron Perhaps the first thing to be said about "Heidegger's aesthetics" is that Heidegger himself would consider the very topic oxymoronic, a contradiction in terms like the idea of a "square circle," "wooden iron," or a "Christian philosopher" (Heidegge...
hume-aesthetics	## 1. Context Hume's aesthetic theory received limited attention until the second half of the Twentieth Century, when interest in the full range of Hume's thought was enlivened by the gradual recognition of his importance among philosophers writing in English. Unfortunately, many discussions of Hume's aesthetics con...
japanese-aesthetics	## 1. Introduction Two preliminary observations about the Japanese cultural tradition are relevant to the arts. First, classical Japanese philosophy understands reality as constant change, or (to use a Buddhist expression) impermanence. The world of flux that presents itself to our senses is the only reality: th...
plato-aesthetics	## 1. Beauty The study of Plato on beauty must begin with one warning. The Greek adjective kalon only approximates to the English "beautiful." Not everything Plato says about a kalos, kale, or kalon thing will belong in a summary of his aesthetic theories. Readers can take this distinction between the Gr...
schopenhauer-aesthetics	## 1. Brief Background By the 1870s, Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy had gained, in Nietzsche's words "ascendency in Europe" (GM III, SS5). Indeed, late-19th and early-20th century philosophers, writers, composers and artists such as Nietzsche, Wagner, Brahms, Freud, Wittgenstein, Horkheimer, Hardy, Mann, Rilke,...
wittgenstein-aesthetics	## 1. The Critique of Traditional Aesthetics Wittgenstein's opening remark is double-barreled: he states that the field of aesthetics is both very big and entirely misunderstood. By "very big", I believe he means both that the aesthetic dimension weaves itself through all of philosophy in the manner suggested above...
aesthetics-of-everyday	## 1. Recent History With the establishment of environmental aesthetics, efforts to open the field of aesthetics beyond the fine arts started during the latter half of twentieth century. Almost all writers on everyday aesthetics derive inspiration from John Dewey's Art as Experience, first published in 1934. In pa...
aesthetic-concept	## 1. The Concept of Taste The concept of the aesthetic descends from the concept of taste. Why the concept of taste commanded so much philosophical attention during the 18th century is a complicated matter, but this much is clear: the eighteenth-century theory of taste emerged, in part, as a corrective to the rise ...
affirmative-action	## 1. In the Beginning In 1972, affirmative action became an inflammatory public issue. True enough, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already had made something called "affirmative action" a remedy federal courts could impose on violators of the Act. Likewise, after 1965 federal contractors had been subject to Presiden...
africana	## 1. The Concept of Africana Philosophy There are significant challenges to the viability of the concept Africana philosophy as well as to an effort to map out an encyclopedic overview of the extended and still expanding range of endeavors covered by the term. Foremost are the challenges to ordering through a si...
africana-contemporary	## 1. Framing themes: circumscribing the topic Early in his masterful Introduction to Africana Philosophy, Lewis R. Gordon defines his subject in a deceptively simple way that both anticipates important complexities and sets some basic boundaries. Africana philosophy, he says, is "as an area of philosophical resea...
african-ethics	## 1. On the terms 'Ethics' and 'Morality' The term 'ethics' is technically used by philosophers to mean a philosophical study of morality--morality understood as a set of social rules, principles, norms that guide or are intended to guide the conduct of people in a society, and as beliefs about right and wrong con...
african-sage	## 1. Oruka's Project The following two examples from this text illustrate the method and purpose of Oruka's questioning. When asked what he thought of his own (Luo) community's idea of communalism, Paul Mbuya Akoko responded as follows: > > Now the sense in which we may justly say that the Luo in the > traditio...
afterlife	## 1. Survival and its Alternatives In ancient Western philosophy, Plato affirmed both a pre-natal life of the soul and the soul's continued life after the death of the body. In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates presents reasons why a philosopher should even welcome death (albeit not permitting or encouraging suicide), bec...
agency	## 1. Introduction In a very broad sense, agency is virtually everywhere. Whenever entities enter into causal relationships, they can be said to act on each other and interact with each other, bringing about changes in each other. In this very broad sense, it is possible to identify agents and agency, and patients an...
shared-agency	## 1. The traditional ontological problem and the Intention Thesis Agency is sometimes exercised in concert, as when we walk together, several individuals undertake painting a house, or a football team executes a pass play.[1] It is hardly controversial that there really is a phenomenon falling under labels such a...
agent-modeling-philscience	## 1. Origins The method of agent-based modeling was originally developed in the 1970s and '80s with models of social segregation (Schelling 1971; Sakoda 1971; see also Hegselmann 2017) and cooperation (Axelrod & Hamilton 1981) in social sciences, and under the name of "individual-based modeling" in ecology (for an ...
reasons-agent	## 1. The Principle-Based Conception The principle-based version of the agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction actually predates the terminology 'agent-relative' and 'agent-neutral'. Thomas Nagel instead uses the terms 'subjective' and 'objective' to mark a version of the principle-based distinction in his classic...
atheism-agnosticism	## 1. Definitions of "Atheism" The word "atheism" is polysemous--it has multiple related meanings. In the psychological sense of the word, atheism is a psychological state, specifically the state of being an atheist, where an atheist is defined as someone who is not a theist and a theist is defined as someone who be...
skepticism-ancient	## 1. The Central Questions The core concepts of ancient skepticism are belief, suspension of judgment, criterion of truth, appearances, and investigation. Important notions of modern skepticism such as knowledge, certainty, justified belief, and doubt play no or almost no role. This is not to say that the ancients ...
agrippa-nettesheim	## 1. Biography Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was born on 14 September 1486 in Cologne. He matriculated at the University of Cologne in 1499 and graduated in 1502. The degree in medicine which he claimed to have earned was ruled out by Prost (1882: 67-74), who also raised serious doubts about his doctorates in Canon an...
akan-person	## 1. Degrees of Personhood In an attempt to express the essence of the Akan concept of persons, Kwasi Wiredu refers to former Zambian President Kaunda's praise of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as "truly a person." The concept of person to which Kaunda referred has a particular significance within...
weakness-will	## 1. Hare on the Impossibility of Weakness of Will Let us commence our examination of contemporary discussions of this issue in appropriately Socratic vein, with an account that gives expression to and builds on many of the intuitions that lead us to be sceptical about reports like (3) above. For the moral philo...
al-baghdadi	## Life and Works ### 1.1 Life 'Abd al-Latif's intellectual position comes across in his autobiography (sira). It seems to have formed part of a larger work no longer extant which he wrote for his son Sharaf al-Din Yusuf. The sira is contained in the Sources of Information on the Classes of Physicians by Ib...
al-farabi	## 1. Enumeration of the Sciences In what follows we will underline important scholarly developments of the last thirty years and add useful complements to these listings. In order to highlight these scholarly developments we will follow the traditional order of the Aristotelian sciences that al-Farabi himself off...
al-farabi-metaphysics	## 1. Farabi's project of reviving the sciences of the ancients Farabi does metaphysics, not by writing a commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, but by trying to reconstruct Aristotle's aims and demonstrative method and to write the book that Aristotle would have written had he been writing in Arabic for a largely...
al-farabi-logic	## 1. Al-Farabi's Writings and Their Background Al-Farabi's surviving works contain well over a thousand pages that are devoted to explaining the contents of Aristotle's logical writings and aimed at educated readers of Arabic. Much of this material reveals al-Farabi's strong interest in the nature of language. A...
al-farabi-soc-rel	## 1. Conceptual Background To our knowledge, al-Farabi was the first philosopher in the Islamic world who not only displayed a serious interest in philosophy of society and religion, but also developed a highly differentiated account thereof. He did not, however, start from scratch. At his time, the majority of tho...
al-farabi-psych	## 1. The Origin and Nature of the Soul In one of his best-known introductory works, Enumeration of the Sciences (Ihsa' al-Ulum), al-Farabi (ES: 87) explains that the eighth part of the science of physics is devoted to what is common to the different kinds of animals, namely, the soul, and is studied in Aristotl...
al-ghazali	## 1. Life Later Muslim medieval historians say that Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali was born in 1058 or 1059 in Tabaran-Tus (15 miles north of modern Meshed, NE Iran), yet notes about his age in his letters and his autobiography indicate that he was born in 1055 or 1056 (Griffel 2009, 23-25). Al-Ghazali ...
al-kindi	## 1. Life and Works ### 1.1 Life Al-Kindi was a member of the Arab tribe of Kinda, which had played an important role in the early history of Islam. His lineage earned him the title "philosopher of the Arabs" among later writers. We know that al-Kindi died after 866 CE, and his death date is usually put in the e...
abu-bakr-al-razi	## 1. Life and Works Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya` al-Razi made his fame mostly as a doctor. As his name "al-Razi" indicates, he hailed from the Persian city of Rayy, near modern-day Tehran. His biographers report that he ran a hospital there, and another in Baghdad. He received patronage from Abu Salih al-Mansur...
al-din-al-razi	## 1. Life and Works Fakhr al-Din al-Razi's life was shaped by the political situation in central Asia in the generations just before the Mongol conquest of that region. He was born in the Persian city of Rayy, near modern-day Tehran, in 1149 CE (544 of the Muslim calendar). The name "Razi" refers to this birthplace...
albalag	## 1. Life and Works Little is known about Isaac Albalag. All that we know about him is that he lived in the second half of the thirteenth century either in Catalonia or Provence (Sirat 1985: 238). References to Albalag in the medieval Jewish literature indicate that he was not a figure of favorable reputation. His ...
albert-saxony	## 1. Life and Works In the later Middle Ages Albert of Saxony (Albertus de Saxonia) was sometimes called Albertucius (Little Albert), to distinguish him from the thirteenth-century theologian Albert the Great. He is however a master of great importance in his own right. He was born at Rickensdorf, in the region...
albert-great	## 1. Life of Albert the Great The precise date of Albert's birth is not known. It is generally conceded that he was born into a knightly family sometime around the year 1200 in Lauingen an der Donau in Germany. He was apparently in Italy in the year 1222 where he was present when a rather terrible earthquake struc...
albo-joseph	## 1. Biographical Sketch The known details of Albo's life are sparse. As far as we know, he was born in Christian Spain in the crown of Aragon around 1380, and died in the crown of Castile around 1444. In documenting the highlights of his career, we should first mention his period of study in the school of Hasdai ...
alcmaeon	## Life and Works ### 1.1 Medical Writer or Philosopher? Alcmaeon, son of Peirithous (otherwise unknown), lived in the Greek city of Croton on the instep of the boot of Italy. Diogenes Laertius, in his brief life of Alcmaeon (VIII. 83), asserts that he wrote mostly on medical matters. There is, however, little dir...
alexander	## 1. Life Alexander was born in Sydney on 6 January 1859, to a Jewish family. He was the third son of Samuel Alexander, a British emigrant and saddler. Alexander's father died a few weeks after his birth, and five years later the remaining family moved to Melbourne. Alexander was home-educated by tutors before ente...
alexander-aphrodisias	## 1. Life and Works ### 1.1 Date, Family, Teachers, and Influence Next to nothing is known about Alexander's origin, life circumstances, and career. His native city was (probably) the Aphrodisias in Caria, an inland city of southwestern Asia Minor. His father's name was Hermias. The only direct information about ...
algebra	## 1. Elementary algebra Elementary algebra deals with numerical terms, namely constants 0, 1, 1.5, \(\pi\), variables \(x, y,\ldots\), and combinations thereof built with operations such as \(+\), \(-\), \(\times\) , \(\div\) , \(\sqrt{\phantom{x}}\), etc. to form such terms as \(x+1, x\times y\) (standardly ...
algebra-logic-tradition	## 1. Introduction Boole's The Mathematical Analysis of Logic presents many interesting logic novelties: It was the beginning of nineteenth-century mathematization of logic and provided an algorithmic alternative (via a slight modification of ordinary algebra) to the catalog approach used in traditional logic ...
alienation	## 1. The Basic Idea ### 1.1 Introduced The term 'alienation' is usually thought to have comparatively modern European origins. In English, the term had emerged by the early fifteenth century, already possessing an interesting cluster of associations. 'Alienation', and its cognates, could variously refer: to an in...
althusser	## 1. Life Louis Althusser was born on October 16th, 1918 in Bir Mourad Rais (formerly Birmandreis), a suburb of Algiers. Hailing from Alsace on his father's side of the family, his grandparents were French citizens who had chosen to settle in Algeria. At the time of his birth, Althusser's father was a lieutenant in...
altruism	## 1. What is altruism? Before proceeding, further clarification of the term "altruism" is called for. ### 1.1 Mixed motives and pure altruism Altruistic acts include not only those undertaken in order to do good to others, but also those undertaken in order to avoid or prevent harm to them. Suppose, for exampl...
altruism-biological	## 1. Altruism and the Levels of Selection The problem of altruism is intimately connected with questions about the level at which natural selection acts. If selection acts exclusively at the individual level, favouring some individual organisms over others, then it seems that altruism cannot evolve, for behaving a...
altruism-empirical	## 1. Some Philosophical Background People often behave in ways that benefit others, and they sometimes do this knowing that it will be costly, unpleasant or dangerous. But at least since Plato's classic discussion in the second Book of the Republic, debate has raged over why people behave in this way. Are their...
alyngton	## 1. Life and Works Not a great deal is known of Robert Alyngton's life. Most of the information about him comes from Emden 1957-59. From 1379 until 1386, he was fellow of Queens College (the same Oxonian college where Wyclif started his theological studies in 1363 and Johannes Sharpe taught in the 1390s); he becam...
ambiguity	## 1. Introduction Ambiguity is generally taken to be a property enjoyed by signs that bear multiple (legitimate) interpretations in a language or, more generally, some system of signs. 'legitimate' is a cover term I'm using to nod to the fact that many signs can, in principle, bear just about any interpretation. Th...
ammonius	## 1. Life and Works ### 1.1 Life Ammonius' father Hermeias, after studying in Athens under Syrianus (Head of School in Athens 431/2-437), returned to Alexandria, where he established the teaching of Platonism as an additional subject in the school of Horapollo (see below), alongside the principal curriculum in rh...
plotinus	## 1. Life and Writings Owing to the unusually fulsome biography by Plotinus' disciple Porphyry, we know more about Plotinus' life than we do about most ancient philosophers'. The main facts are these. Plotinus was born in Lycopolis, Egypt in 204 or 205 C.E. When he was 28, a growing interest in philosophy led ...
analogy-medieval	## 1. Medieval Theories of Language Medieval logicians and philosophers of language were principally concerned with the relationship between utterances, concepts, and things. Written language was only of secondary importance. They agreed that spoken language was conventional, having its origin in imposition, or the ...
reasoning-analogy	## 1. Introduction: the many roles of analogy Analogies are widely recognized as playing an important heuristic role, as aids to discovery. They have been employed, in a wide variety of settings and with considerable success, to generate insight and to formulate possible solutions to problems. According to Joseph ...
analysis	## 1. General Introduction This section provides a preliminary description of analysis--or the range of different conceptions of analysis--and a guide to this article as a whole. ### 1.1 Characterizations of Analysis If asked what 'analysis' means, most people today immediately think of breaking something ...
analytic-synthetic	## 1. The Intuitive Distinction Compare the following two sets of sentences: I. (1) All doctors that specialize on children are rich. (2) All pediatricians are rich. (3) Everyone who runs damages their bodies. (4) If Holmes killed Sikes, then Watson must be dead. II. (5) *All doctors that speciali...
anaphora	## 1. Unproblematic Anaphora The simplest sorts of anaphoric pronouns are those that "pick up" a reference from a previous referring expression whether in the same sentence or another. Consider for example: (3) John left. He said he was ill. (11) John left his wallet on the table. on the readings of these sen...
anarchism	## 1. Varieties of Anarchism There are various forms of anarchism. Uniting this variety is the general critique of centralized, hierarchical power and authority. Given that authority, centralization, and hierarchy show up in various ways and in different discourses, institutions, and practices, it is not surprising ...
anaxagoras	## 1. Life and Work Anaxagoras, son of Hegesibulus (or Eubulus), was a native of Clazomenae, on the west coast of what is now Turkey. According to Diogenes Laertius (see the article on Doxography of Ancient Philosophy) (Diels-Kranz [DK] 59 A1), Anaxagoras came from an aristocratic and landed family, but abandoned...
pyrrho	## 1. Life Pyrrho appears to have lived from around 365-360 BCE until around 275-270 BCE (for the evidence see von Fritz (1963), 90). We have several reports of philosophers from whom he learned, the most significant (and the most reliable) of which concern his association with Anaxarchus of Abdera. Alongside Anaxar...

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