42 résultats pour "philosophical"
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Chemistry, philosophical aspects of
only in size or shape. The processes we observe around us are the result of changing groupings or arrangements of atoms; the qualitative aspects of experience are the results of their collisions with the atoms of our soul or mind. However, Democritus is very explicit that we cannot expect to have knowledge of qualities. By convention are sweet and bitter, hot and cold, by convention is colour; in truth are atoms and the void. …There are two forms of knowledge, one genuine, one obscure. To the o...
- Aberdeen Philosophical Society
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Western Philosophy.
the popular belief in personal deities, but he failed to explain the way in which the familiar objects of experience could develop out of elements that are totally differentfrom them. Anaxagoras therefore suggested that all things are composed of very small particles, or “seeds,” which exist in infinite variety. To explain the way in whichthese particles combine to form the objects that constitute the familiar world, Anaxagoras developed a theory of cosmic evolution. He maintained that the activ...
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Herman Melville
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INTRODUCTION
Herman Melville
These lines (recited by an actor) begin the novel Moby Dick (1851), by Herman Melville.
short novel Billy Budd in manuscript form. Melville’s death in New York City on September 28, 1891, went virtually unnoticed. None of his books was still in print. VI MELVILLE’S EARLY WORKS With the exception of Mardi , all of Melville’s early books are narratives of maritime adventure based upon his own experiences and on his wide reading. Although London publisher John Murray accepted Typee for his Home and Colonial Library as a strictly factual account of South Seas travel, he was lar...
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Herman Melville.
information in Omoo , but various religious groups condemned both books for their unfavorable comments on the work and insensitivity of missionaries in the South Seas. Mardi is a philosophical allegory framed by another adventure at sea. The book’s hero, accompanied by characters representing the intellect, poetry, history, and philosophy, searches the world for universal truth. The book is filled with descriptions—intended as allegories—of human customs, religions, governments, and historical...
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Anselm of Canterbury
twenty-six years old. After his father's death (presumably in 1060), Anselm chose to enter the monastic order atBec rather than return to the family estate. In 1063 he was elected prior of Bec, succeeding Lanfranc, who hadbeen called to the abbey of St.-Etienne in Caen; in 1078 he was chosen abbot, in spite of his disinclination toassume the office. He showed even more reluctance and protestation when selected as archbishop of Canterbury in1093, again in succession to Lanfranc. Eadmer tells...
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Conceptual analysis
Kant's important idea that conceptual truths can be either analytic a priori or synthetic a priori is effectively erased by Gottlob Frege in his Foundations of Arithmetic (1884). Frege's overriding philosophical aim is to put mathematical proof on a firm footing by reducing the truths of arithmetic to analytic truths of logic. In view of this, the proper goal of an analysis is the production of non-circular, explanatory, yet meaning-preserving general definitions of fundamental concepts -...
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Confucian philosophy, Korean
neglected by more traditional Confucianism. Read with new eyes, an entirely new level of meaning was uncovered in the ancient texts: they discovered a Confucian foundation for the meditative cultivation of consciousness that had been a particular strength of the Buddhists, and to frame it and provide an account of sagehood equal to Buddhist talk of enlightenment, they found a complete metaphysical system, a Confucian version of the kind of thinking that had been elaborated mainly under Daoist au...
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Aquinas, Thomas
part in an academic disputation. Having failed in his efforts to shake his best student's arguments on this occasion, Albert declared, 'We call him the dumb ox, but in his teaching he will one day produce such a bellowing that it will be heard throughout the world' . In 1252 Aquinas returned to Paris for the course of study leading to the degree of master in theology, roughly the equivalent of a twentieth-century PhD. During the first academic year he studied and lectured on the Bible; the...
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Atheism.
with the philosophical ideas of materialism, which holds that only matter exists; communism, which asserts that religion impedes human progress; and rationalism,which emphasizes analytic reasoning over other sources of knowledge. However, there is no necessary connection between atheism and these positions. Some atheistshave opposed communism and some have rejected materialism. Although nearly all contemporary materialists are atheists, the ancient Greek materialist Epicurusbelieved the gods wer...
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theories of Common-sense reasoning
formulas of some logical language, and that the reasoning tasks underlying this intelligence can then be accomplished by means of logical deduction. Both the idea of using logic as an underlying representation language for artificial intelligence and the emphasis on formalizing common-sense knowledge are present even in McCarthy's very early work (for example, McCarthy 1959 ), but the project receives its clearest articulation in a paper jointly authored by McCarthy and Patrick Hayes (1969 )...
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God.
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INTRODUCTION
God, the center and focus of religious faith, a holy
C Islam Islam arose as a powerful reaction against the ancient pagan cults of Arabia, and as a consequence it is the most starkly monotheistic of the three biblically rootedreligions. The name Allah means simply “the God.” He is personal, transcendent, and unique, and Muslims are forbidden to depict him in any creaturely form. The primary creed is that “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the apostle of Allah.” Allah has seven basic attributes: life, knowledge, power, will, hearing, se...
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Medical Ethics.
medical profession. In recent years, however, the field of medical ethics has struggled to keep pace with the many complex issues raised by new technologies for creating and sustaininglife. Artificial-respiration devices, kidney dialysis, and other machines can keep patients alive who previously would have succumbed to their illnesses or injuries.Advances in organ transplantation have brought new hope to those afflicted with diseased organs. New techniques have enabled prospective parents to con...
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Baumgardt, David
In his unpublished History of Modern Ethics Baumgardt essayed a synoptic view of the ethical theories of the past two hundred and fifty years. He was especially drawn to the utilitarianism of Bentham , which he came to know well in England. His book Bentham and the Ethics of Today (1952) included hitherto unpublished writings of Bentham, and Bentham's utilitarianism provided the point of departure for his own ethical hedonism. Seeking to rehabilitate a philosophical tradition stigmati...
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Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Charles Darwin
cousins, descended from a common ancestor.The case for Darwin's theory was enormously strengthened in the twentieth century with the discovery of themechanisms of heredity and the development of molecular genetics. It would not be to my purpose, and would bebeyond my competence, to evaluate the scientific evidence for Darwinism. But it is necessary to spend some timeon the philosophical implications of his theory, assuming that it is well established.From Darwin's time until the present, ev...
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Ancient philosophy
divine - were themselves an integral part of both physics and ethics, never a mere adjunct of philosophy. Thedominant philosophical creeds of the Hellenistic age (officially 323-31 BC) were Stoicism (founded by Zeno of Citium ) and Epicureanism (founded by Epicurus ) (see Stoicism ; Epicureanism ). Scepticism was also a powerful force, largely through the Academy (see Arcesilaus ; Carneades ), which in this period functioned as a critical rather than a doctrinal school, and also, st...
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Confucian philosophy, Chinese
occupies a pre-eminent place in the history of Chinese philosophy. The core of Confucian thought lies in the teachings of Confucius (551-479 BC) contained in the Analects ( Lunyu ), along with the brilliant and divergent contributions of Mencius (372?-289 BC) and Xunzi ( fl. 298-238 BC), as well as the Daxue (Great Learning) and the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean), originally chapters in the Liji (Book of Rites). Significant and original developments, particularly along a quasi-metaphysica...
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La Psychiatrie est elle une science?
distinguish science from non-science. Philosophers of science now generally agree that the search for a demarcation criterion has failed. However, in other disciplines the search for a means of distinguishing science from pseudoscience continues. I review the current debate in psychology and psychiatry. Then, returning to philosophical work, I discuss and support accounts according to which 'science' is best considered a family resemblance term. This suggests that whether psychiatric research is...
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Asmus, Valentin Ferdinandovich
Schelling, Fichte and Hegel. He argues that it was Kant who first grasped the significance of dialecticalcontradiction, though he mistakenly confined its influence to the realm of thought. Hegel, in contrast, correctlydiscerned that the development of being itself is dialectical, but his account is belied by his idealist metaphysics andteleological conception of history. It was Marx and Engels, Asmus argues, who identified the true empirical contentof Hegel's system and turned dialecti...
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Consciousness
view faces several serious objections. Rival views of introspective consciousness fall into three categories, according to whether they treat introspective access (1) as epistemically looser or less direct than inner perception, (2) as tighter or more direct, or (3) as fundamentally non-epistemic or nonrepresentational. Theories in category (1) explain introspection as always retrospective, or as typically based on self-directed theoretical inferences. Rivals from category (2) maintain that an i...
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Encyclopedia of Philosophy: AL-R-Z/ AND AL-F-R-B/
cultural particularities. Political philosophy includes consideration of the relations between philosophy and religion,which for al-F&r&b( meant the defence of philosophy. A number of his works fit into this class. The Enumeration ofthe Sciences surveys the encyclopaedia of scientific knowledge which the Arabs have built up through theirphilology, their translations from the Greek and their own creative work: grammar and linguistics, logic, mathematics(in the broad sense of the quadrivium...
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Cicero, Marcus Tullius
Cicero's extant works, although only part of his enormous output, comprise over fifty speeches, nearly a thousand letters to friends and associates, several works on rhetorical theory and practice, and twelve on philosophical topics. This vast corpus, besides displaying great intellectual range and stylistic virtuosity, embodies Cicero's conviction that philosophy and rhetoric are interdependent and both essential for the improvement of human life and society. His oratory bears the stamp of...
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Burke, Edmund
The description of his writings as philosophical is further called into question by their occasional, polemical and often party-political character. However, these early mature writings - and a surviving notebook - reveal a pervasive sceptical epistemological position which is entirely consistent with, and arguably underpins his later political theory. In A Vindication of Natural Society Burke satirized the confident rationalism which the First Viscount Bolingbroke, in his posthumously publis...
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Plato
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INTRODUCTION
Plato (428?
one of the individuals escapes from the cave into the light of day. With the aid of the sun, that person sees for the first time the real world and returns to the cave withthe message that the only things they have seen heretofore are shadows and appearances and that the real world awaits them if they are willing to struggle free oftheir bonds. The shadowy environment of the cave symbolizes for Plato the physical world of appearances. Escape into the sun-filled setting outside the cave symbolize...
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Plato.
one of the individuals escapes from the cave into the light of day. With the aid of the sun, that person sees for the first time the real world and returns to the cave withthe message that the only things they have seen heretofore are shadows and appearances and that the real world awaits them if they are willing to struggle free oftheir bonds. The shadowy environment of the cave symbolizes for Plato the physical world of appearances. Escape into the sun-filled setting outside the cave symbolize...
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Mythology.
Across cultures, mythologies tend to describe similar characters. A common character is the trickster. The trickster is recklessly bold and even immoral, but through hisinventiveness he often helps human beings. In Greek mythology, Hermes (best known as the messenger of the gods) was a famous trickster. In one version of acharacteristic tale, Hermes, while still an infant, stole the cattle of his half-brother Apollo. To avoid leaving a trail that could be followed, Hermes made shoes from thebark...
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Cohen, Hermann
foundation of being in thought: thought as the origin of being. Reflecting the constantly progressing sciences withtheir shifting paradigms, the system of categories and judgments represented in Cohen's logic is open-ended - quitea contrast to Kant's efforts to find fixed normative patterns in our thinking as earnest of its objectivity. There areother deviations: most strikingly, Kant's ‘thing-in-itself' (noumena) (see Kant, I. §3) is eliminated as a superfluousdogmatic prejudice. In another not...
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Berlin, Isaiah
assumption. The denial of a fixed human nature comes to saying first, that there are many different and no canonically correct expressions of these potentialities; second, that what expressions these potentialities might receive cannot be recognized in advance of historical experience; third, that these two points hold good for the future, so that there can be no Hegelian (or - more particularly for Berlin's concerns - Marxist) total realization of human possibilities (see Hegel, G.W.F. ; Ma...
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Bulgakov, Sergei Nikolaevich ?
collection, Ot Marksizma k idealizmu (From Marxism to Idealism) (1903). One essay asked the question 'What does the philosophy of Solov'ëv give to the contemporary consciousness? ' 'Positive all unity' and fusion of Christian theory and Christian practice ( Solov'ëv , V.S. ) was Bulgakov's answer. Already critical of abstract German Idealism, he believed that philosophy must encompass 'living experience' . In 1904 he became a co-editor of Merezhkovskii 's journal Novyi Put' (New...
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Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Alchemy
to enrol themselves in the philosophical tradition, albeit awkwardly. Texts were attributed to pagan gods,mythological and biblical figures, ancient and medieval philosophers. Such attributions assured secrecy, while raisingthe prestige of writings of obscure authors; they might even be a subtle indication of affiliation. 4 Alchemical doctrines The basic idea of alchemy is the identity of nature and first matter as a dynamic unity: elements can pass one into another, in a circular mo...
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science - Biologiste / Naturaliste.
Les méthodes et résultats scientifiques modernes apparaissent au XVII e siècle grâce à la combinaison des capacités de théoricien et d'artisan de Galilée. Aux anciennes méthodes fondées sur l'induction et la déduction, Galilée ajoute la vérification systématique par l'expérience, en utilisant les outils scientifiques nouvellement inventés telsque le télescope, le microscope et le thermomètre. Vers la fin du XVII e siècle, l'expérimentation est élargie par l'utilisation du baromètre découvert p...
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Buddhism.
Although never actually denying the existence of the gods, Buddhism denies them any special role. Their lives in heaven are long and pleasurable, but they are in thesame predicament as other creatures, being subject eventually to death and further rebirth in lower states of existence. They are not creators of the universe or incontrol of human destiny, and Buddhism denies the value of prayer and sacrifice to them. Of the possible modes of rebirth, human existence is preferable, because thedeitie...
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Indian Literature
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INTRODUCTION
Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
Indian author Arundhati Roy poses with a copy of her acclaimed first novel, The God of Small Things (1997).
Mathura BuddhaMany of the earliest texts of Indian literature were religious writings of Buddhism. This Buddha figure carved out ofsandstone is from Mathura, a city in northern India that was at the center of Buddhist sculptural activity from the 2ndcentury bc to the 6th century ad.Angelo Hornak/Corbis The sacred Vedas were composed in Old Sanskrit by Aryan poet-seers between about 1500 BC and about 1000 BC. The Vedas are compilations of two major literary forms: hymns of praise to nature deit...
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Campbell, George
Campbell's philosophy was influenced by that of David Hume , though Campbell employed much effort in correcting Hume. Campbell followed Hume in equating experience with the habitual associations of ideas in the mind, but thought that Hume's extreme emphasis on personal experience seriously undervalued the importance of memory (the only voucher for the past evidence of the senses) and of testimony to human knowledge as a whole. He therefore employed Common Sense philosophy to defend the nec...
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Althusser, Louis Pierre
social life reflected a single informing centre. Taken over in a Marxist framework, this totality leads to economicreductionism; everything becomes an expression of the fundamental economic contradiction, in the way that,according to Lukács, reification pervades the whole of capitalist society (see Marxism, Western §2 ). For Marx, by contrast, each social formation is a complex, structured totality composed of a plurality of practices irreducible toone another. The economy is 'determinan...
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Han Dynasty - history.
of merit rather than birth. Written examinations were adopted as a means of determining the best qualified people, although use of the examinations in actually makingappointments was limited. A school was established at the capital for training government officials. The administrative bureaucracy was systematized, and a career civilservice was created and extended through much of the empire. Although personally interested in the magical side of Daoism, Wudi made a descendent of Confucius the sup...
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Han Dynasty - history.
of merit rather than birth. Written examinations were adopted as a means of determining the best qualified people, although use of the examinations in actually makingappointments was limited. A school was established at the capital for training government officials. The administrative bureaucracy was systematized, and a career civilservice was created and extended through much of the empire. Although personally interested in the magical side of Daoism, Wudi made a descendent of Confucius the sup...
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Geoffrey Chaucer
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INTRODUCTION
Geoffrey Chaucer
Fourteenth-century English poet and public servant Geoffrey Chaucer wrote verse renowned for its humor, understanding
of human character, and innovations in poetic vocabulary and meter.
Tale of the Wife of BathThe Canterbury Tales by English poet Geoffrey Chaucer contains 22 verse tales and 2 prose tales presumably told bypilgrims to pass the time on their way to visit a shrine in Canterbury, England. An excerpt from the tale of the Wife ofBath is heard here. The wife relates that she has been married and widowed five times but the church has recognized onlyone marriage. You can follow the Middle English text and modern translation as you listen to the audio excerpt.The Wife of...
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Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de
years he also came under the influence of Euler, Fontaine, the Bernouillis and, above all, of the distinguished mathematician and academician, Jean Le Rond D'Alembert , who became his patron. He was elected Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Sciences in 1773, and in 1782 became a member of the French Academy. An enthusiastic supporter and theorist of the Revolution, he played an important role in the drafting of the Déclaration des droits in 1789. Suspected later of being a Girondin, he w...
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Aristotle
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INTRODUCTION
Aristotle (384-322
BC),
Greek philosopher and scientist, who shares with Plato and Socrates the distinction of being the most famous of ancient philosophers.
succession of individuals. These processes are therefore intermediate between the changeless circles of the heavens and the simple linear movements of the terrestrialelements. The species form a scale from simple (worms and flies at the bottom) to complex (human beings at the top), but evolution is not possible. C Aristotelian Psychology For Aristotle, psychology was a study of the soul. Insisting that form (the essence, or unchanging characteristic element in an object) and matter (the commonu...
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Aristotle.
succession of individuals. These processes are therefore intermediate between the changeless circles of the heavens and the simple linear movements of the terrestrialelements. The species form a scale from simple (worms and flies at the bottom) to complex (human beings at the top), but evolution is not possible. C Aristotelian Psychology For Aristotle, psychology was a study of the soul. Insisting that form (the essence, or unchanging characteristic element in an object) and matter (the commonu...
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Fascism.
values as coming before a radical political transformation. Others argue that a radical political transformation will then be followed by a change in values. Fascists claimthat the nation has entered a dangerous age of mediocrity, weakness, and decline. They are convinced that through their timely action they can save the nation fromitself. Fascists may assert the need to take drastic action against a nation's 'inner' enemies. Fascists promise that with their help the national crisis will end an...