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D.M. Armstrong
David Malet Armstrong (8 July 1926 – 13 May 2014), often D. M. Armstrong, was an Australian philosopher. He is well known for his work on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, and for his defence of a factualist ontology, a functionalist theory of the mind, an externalist epistemology, and a necessitarian conception of the laws of nature. Keith Campbell said that Armstrong's contributions to metaphysics and epistemology "helped to shape philosophy's agenda and terms of debate", and that Armstrong's work "always concerned to elaborate and defend a philosophy which is ontically economical, synoptic, and compatibly continuous with established results in the natural sciences". Life and career After studying at the University of Sydney, Armstrong undertook a B.Phil. at the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. at the University of Melbourne. He taught at Birkbeck College in 1954–55, then at the University of Melbourne from 1956 to 1963. In 1964, he became Challis Prof ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Western Philosophy
Western philosophy refers to the Philosophy, philosophical thought, traditions and works of the Western world. Historically, the term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy of the Pre-Socratic philosophy, pre-Socratics. The word ''philosophy'' itself originated from the Ancient Greek (φιλοσοφία), literally, "the love of wisdom" , "to love" and σοφία ''Sophia (wisdom), sophía'', "wisdom". History Ancient The scope of ancient Western philosophy included the problems of philosophy as they are understood today; but it also included many other disciplines, such as pure mathematics and natural sciences such as physics, astronomy, and biology (Aristotle, for example, wrote on all of these topics). Pre-Socratics The pre-Socratic philosophers were interested in cosmology (the nature and origin of the universe), while rejecting unargued fables in place for argued theory, i.e., dogma superseded reason, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Australian Philosophy
Australian philosophy refers to the philosophical tradition of the people of Australia and of its citizens abroad. Academic philosophy has been mostly pursued in universities (and sometimes seminaries). It has been broadly in the tradition of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, but has also had representatives of a diverse range of other schools, such as idealism, Catholic neo-scholasticism, Marxism, and continental, feminist and Asian philosophy. Indigenous perspectives Australian indigenous traditions attribute moral authority outside the individual to The Dreaming, which is bound up with the relation of human society to land. Idealism The earliest academic philosophers in Australia were appointed in the late nineteenth century. Then and in the early twentieth century, most were like their European contemporaries idealists. They included Sir Francis Anderson, professor of philosophy at Sydney University from 1890 to 1921, W. R. Boyce Gibson in Melbourne, and (to a degree) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Birkbeck College
Birkbeck, University of London (formally Birkbeck College, University of London), is a public research university located in London, England, and a member institution of the University of London. Established in 1823 as the London Mechanics' Institute by its founder Joseph Clinton Robertson and its supporters George Birkbeck, Jeremy Bentham, J. C. Hobhouse and Henry Brougham, Birkbeck is one of the few universities to specialise in evening higher education in the United Kingdom. Birkbeck's main building is in Bloomsbury, in the London Borough of Camden in Central London. Birkbeck offers more than 200 undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Birkbeck's academic activities are organised into five constituent faculties, which are subdivided into nineteen departments. The university is a member of academic organisations such as the Association of Commonwealth Universities and the European University Association. The university is also a member of the Screen Studies Group, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
University Of Melbourne
The University of Melbourne (colloquially known as Melbourne University) is a public university, public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in the state of Victoria (Australia), Victoria. Its Parkville Campus (University of Melbourne), main campus is located in Parkville, Victoria, Parkville, an inner suburb north of Melbourne central business district, Melbourne's central business district, with several other campuses located across the state of Victoria (Australia), Victoria. Incorporated in the 19th century by the State of Victoria, colony of Victoria, the University of Melbourne is one of Australia's six sandstone universities and a member of the Group of Eight (Australian universities), Group of Eight, Universitas 21, Washington University in St. Louis, Washington University's McDonnell International Scholars Academy, and the Association of Pacific Rim Universities. Since 1872, many ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
University Of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, second-oldest continuously operating university globally. It expanded rapidly from 1167, when Henry II of England, Henry II prohibited English students from attending the University of Paris. When disputes erupted between students and the Oxford townspeople, some Oxford academics fled northeast to Cambridge, where they established the University of Cambridge in 1209. The two English Ancient university, ancient universities share many common features and are jointly referred to as ''Oxbridge''. The University of Oxford comprises 43 constituent colleges, consisting of 36 Colleges of the University of Oxford, semi-autonomous colleges, four permanent private halls and three societies (colleges that are depar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Keith Campbell (philosopher)
Keith Campbell (1938 – 12 October 2024) was an Australian philosopher working in metaphysics. Biography With D. M. Armstrong, Campbell was one of the founders of so-called '' Australian materialism'' and, within it, of a variety of trope theory. He also had a distinctive view of concrete and abstract objects: the former can exist by themselves, and the latter are incapable of independent existence. He refused, following Frank P. Ramsey, the necessity of choice between realism and nominalism in the problem of universals, because they both share "a false presupposition being that any quality or relation must be a universal" (Campbell 1991, preface). The separation between the University of Sydney's Departments of Traditional and Modern Philosophy and of General Philosophy is attributed to his organising the proposal in 1973. He was a senior lecturer in the "Traditional and Modern" one and later became an emeritus professor in the recombined Department of Philosophy (part of t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Physical Law
Scientific laws or laws of science are statements, based on repeated experiments or observations, that describe or predict a range of natural phenomena. The term ''law'' has diverse usage in many cases (approximate, accurate, broad, or narrow) across all fields of natural science (physics, chemistry, astronomy, geoscience, biology). Laws are developed from data and can be further developed through mathematics; in all cases they are directly or indirectly based on empirical evidence. It is generally understood that they implicitly reflect, though they do not explicitly assert, causal relationships fundamental to reality, and are discovered rather than invented. Scientific laws summarize the results of experiments or observations, usually within a certain range of application. In general, the accuracy of a law does not change when a new theory of the relevant phenomenon is worked out, but rather the scope of the law's application, since the mathematics or statement representing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modal Logic
Modal logic is a kind of logic used to represent statements about Modality (natural language), necessity and possibility. In philosophy and related fields it is used as a tool for understanding concepts such as knowledge, obligation, and causality, causation. For instance, in epistemic modal logic, the well-formed_formula, formula \Box P can be used to represent the statement that P is known. In deontic modal logic, that same formula can represent that P is a moral obligation. Modal logic considers the inferences that modal statements give rise to. For instance, most epistemic modal logics treat the formula \Box P \rightarrow P as a Tautology_(logic), tautology, representing the principle that only true statements can count as knowledge. However, this formula is not a tautology in deontic modal logic, since what ought to be true can be false. Modal logics are formal systems that include unary operation, unary operators such as \Diamond and \Box, representing possibility and necessi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Epistemology
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called "the theory of knowledge", it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowledge in the form of skills, and knowledge by acquaintance as a familiarity through experience. Epistemologists study the concepts of belief, truth, and justification to understand the nature of knowledge. To discover how knowledge arises, they investigate sources of justification, such as perception, introspection, memory, reason, and testimony. The school of skepticism questions the human ability to attain knowledge while fallibilism says that knowledge is never certain. Empiricists hold that all knowledge comes from sense experience, whereas rationalists believe that some knowledge does not depend on it. Coherentists argue that a belief is justified if it coheres with other beliefs. Foundationalists, by contrast, maintain th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Internalism And Externalism
Internalism and externalism are two opposite ways of integrating and explaining various subjects in several areas of philosophy. These include human motivation, knowledge, justification, meaning, and truth. The distinction arises in many areas of debate with similar but distinct meanings. Internal–external distinction is a distinction used in philosophy to divide an ontology into two parts: an internal part concerning observation related to philosophy, and an external part concerning question related to philosophy. Internalism is the thesis that no fact about the world can provide reasons for action independently of desires and beliefs.Giuseppina D'Oro"Collingwood, psychologism and internalism,"''European Journal of Philosophy'' 12(2):163–177 (2004). Externalism is the thesis that reasons are to be identified with objective features of the world. Moral philosophy Motivation In contemporary moral philosophy, motivational internalism (or moral internalism) is the view that ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mind
The mind is that which thinks, feels, perceives, imagines, remembers, and wills. It covers the totality of mental phenomena, including both conscious processes, through which an individual is aware of external and internal circumstances, and unconscious processes, which can influence an individual without intention or awareness. The mind plays a central role in most aspects of human life, but its exact nature is disputed. Some characterizations focus on internal aspects, saying that the mind transforms information and is not directly accessible to outside observers. Others stress its relation to outward conduct, understanding mental phenomena as dispositions to engage in observable behavior. The mind–body problem is the challenge of explaining the relation between matter and mind. Traditionally, mind and matter were often thought of as distinct substances that could exist independently from one another. The dominant philosophical position since the 20th century has ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Functionalism (philosophy Of Mind)
In the philosophy of mind, functionalism is the thesis that each and every mental state (for example, the state of having a belief, of having a desire, or of being in pain) is constituted solely by its functional role, which means its causal relation to other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs.Block, Ned. (1996), "What is functionalism?" a revised version of the entry on functionalism in ''The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Supplement'', Macmillan. PDF online Functionalism developed largely as an alternative to the identity theory of mind and behaviorism. Functionalism is a theoretical level between the physical implementation and behavioral output.Marr, D. (1982). ''Vision: A Computational Approach''. San Francisco: Freeman & Co. Therefore, it is different from its predecessors of Cartesian dualism (advocating independent mental and physical substances) and Skinnerian behaviorism and physicalism (declaring only physical substances) because it is only concerned with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
