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Jean Buridan
Jean Buridan (; ; Latin: ''Johannes Buridanus''; – ) was an influential 14thcentury French scholastic philosopher. Buridan taught in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris for his entire career and focused in particular on logic and on the works of Aristotle. Buridan sowed the seeds of the Copernican Revolution in Europe. He developed the concept of impetus, the first step toward the modern concept of inertia and an important development in the history of medieval science. His name is most familiar through the thought experiment known as Buridan's ass, but the thought experiment does not appear in his extant writings. Life Education and career Buridan was born sometime before 1301, perhaps at or near the town of Béthune in Picardy, France,Zupko 2015, §1 or perhaps elsewhere in the diocese of Arras. He received his education in Paris, first at the Collège du Cardinal Lemoine and then at the University of Paris, receiving his Master of Arts degree and formal l ... [...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(the nature and origin of the universe), while rejecting unargued fables in place for argued theory, i.e., dogma superseded reason, ...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] |
Buridan's Bridge
Buridan's Bridge (also known as Sophism 17) is described by Jean Buridan, one of the most famous and influential Philosophy, philosophers of the Late Middle Ages, in his book ''Sophismata''. It is a self-referential paradox that involves a proposition pronounced about an event that might or might not happen in the future. The sophism The sophism is: Socrates' response puts Plato in a difficult situation. He could not throw Socrates into the water, because if he did he would violate his promise to let Socrates cross the bridge if he speaks the truth. On the other hand, if Plato allows Socrates to cross the bridge it would mean that Socrates spoke untruth when he replied: "You are going to throw me into the water." In that case Socrates should have been thrown into the water. In other words, Socrates could be allowed to cross the bridge if and only if he could not be. Buridan's solution In order to solve the paradox Buridan proposes three questions: #Is the proposition uttered ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free Will
Free will is generally understood as the capacity or ability of people to (a) choice, choose between different possible courses of Action (philosophy), action, (b) exercise control over their actions in a way that is necessary for moral responsibility, or (c) be the ultimate source or originator of their actions. There are different theories as to its nature, and these aspects are often emphasized differently depending on philosophical tradition, with debates focusing on whether and how such freedom can coexist with determinism, divine foreknowledge, and other constraints. Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, culpability, and other judgements which apply only to actions that are freely chosen. It is also connected with the concepts of Advice (opinion), advice, persuasion, deliberation, and Prohibitionism, prohibition. Traditionally, only actions that are freely Will (philosophy), willed are seen as deserving credit or blame. Whether free ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pierre Duhem
Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem (; 9 June 1861 – 14 September 1916) was a French theoretical physicist who made significant contributions to thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and the theory of Elasticity (physics), elasticity. Duhem was also a prolific history of science, historian of science, noted especially for his pioneering work on the European Middle Ages. As a philosophy of science, philosopher of science, Duhem is credited with the "Duhem–Quine thesis" on the indeterminacy of experimental criteria. Duhem's opposition to positivism was partly informed by his traditionalist Catholic Church, Catholicism, an outlook that put him at odds with the dominant academic currents in France during his lifetime. Early life and education Pierre Duhem was born in Paris on 10 June 1861. He was the son of Pierre-Joseph Duhem, who was of Flemish people, Flemish origins, and Marie Alexandrine ''née'' Fabre, whose family hailed from Languedoc. Pierre-Joseph worked as a sales representative ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Buridan's Ass
Buridan's ass is an illustration of a paradox in philosophy in the conception of free will. It refers to a hypothetical situation wherein an ass (or donkey) that is equally hungry and thirsty is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. Since the paradox assumes the ass will always go to whichever is closer, it dies of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision between the hay and water. A common variant of the paradox substitutes the hay and water for two identical piles of hay; the ass, unable to choose between the two, dies of hunger. The paradox is named after the 14th-century French philosopher Jean Buridan, whose philosophy of moral determinism it satirizes. Although the illustration is named after Buridan, philosophers have discussed the concept before him, notably Aristotle, who put forward the example of a man equally hungry and thirsty, and Al-Ghazali, who used a man faced with the choice of equally good dates. A ve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thought Experiment
A thought experiment is an imaginary scenario that is meant to elucidate or test an argument or theory. It is often an experiment that would be hard, impossible, or unethical to actually perform. It can also be an abstract hypothetical that is meant to test our intuitions about morality or other fundamental philosophical questions. History The ancient Greek , "was the most ancient pattern of mathematical proof", and existed before Euclidean geometry, Euclidean mathematics, where the emphasis was on the conceptual, rather than on the experimental part of a thought experiment. Johann Witt-Hansen established that Hans Christian Ørsted was the first to use the equivalent German term . Ørsted was also the first to use the equivalent term in 1820. By 1883, Ernst Mach used in a different sense, to denote exclusively the conduct of a experiment that would be subsequently performed as a by his students. Physical and mental experimentation could then be contrasted: Mach asked hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of Science In The Middle Ages
The history of science covers the development of science from ancient times to the present. It encompasses all three major branches of science: natural, social, and formal. Protoscience, early sciences, and natural philosophies such as alchemy and astrology that existed during the Bronze Age, Iron Age, classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, declined during the early modern period after the establishment of formal disciplines of science in the Age of Enlightenment. The earliest roots of scientific thinking and practice can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia during the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE. These civilizations' contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine influenced later Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, wherein formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Latin-speakin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inertia
Inertia is the natural tendency of objects in motion to stay in motion and objects at rest to stay at rest, unless a force causes the velocity to change. It is one of the fundamental principles in classical physics, and described by Isaac Newton in his Newton%27s_laws_of_motion#First, first law of motion (also known as The Principle of Inertia). It is one of the primary manifestations of mass, one of the core quantitative properties of physical systems. Newton writes: In his 1687 work ''Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica'', Newton defined inertia as a property: History and development Early understanding of inertial motion Joseph NeedhamProfessor John H. Lienhard points out the Mozi (book), Mozi – based on a Chinese text from the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) – as having given the first description of inertia. Before the European Renaissance, the prevailing theory of motion in western philosophy was that of Aristotle (384–322 BCE). On the surface ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn (; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American History and philosophy of science, historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term ''paradigm shift'', which has since become an English-language idiom. Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of science, scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by Objectivity (philosophy), objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently Commensurability (philosophy of science), incommensurable; that is, there is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Copernican Revolution
The term "Copernican Revolution" was coined by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his 1781 work ''Critique of Pure Reason''. It was the paradigm shift from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, which described the cosmos as having Earth stationary at the center of the universe, to the heliocentric model with the Sun at the center of the Solar System. This revolution consisted of two phases; the first being extremely mathematical in nature and beginning with the 1543 publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s ''De revolutionibus orbium coelestium'', and the second phase starting in 1610 with the publication of a pamphlet by Galileo. Contributions to the "revolution" continued until finally ending with Isaac Newton's 1687 work . Heliocentrism Before Copernicus The "Copernican Revolution" is named for Nicolaus Copernicus, whose '' Commentariolus'', written before 1514, was the first explicit presentation of the heliocentric model in Renaissance scholarship. The idea of helioce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aristotle
Aristotle (; 384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosophy, Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, and the arts. As the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy in the Lyceum (classical), Lyceum in Athens, he began the wider Aristotelianism, Aristotelian tradition that followed, which set the groundwork for the development of modern science. Little is known about Aristotle's life. He was born in the city of Stagira (ancient city), Stagira in northern Greece during the Classical Greece, Classical period. His father, Nicomachus (father of Aristotle), Nicomachus, died when Aristotle was a child, and he was brought up by a guardian. At around eighteen years old, he joined Plato's Platonic Academy, Academy in Athens and remained there until the age of thirty seven (). Shortly after Plato died, Aristotle left Athens and, at the request ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the study of deductively valid inferences or logical truths. It examines how conclusions follow from premises based on the structure of arguments alone, independent of their topic and content. Informal logic is associated with informal fallacies, critical thinking, and argumentation theory. Informal logic examines arguments expressed in natural language whereas formal logic uses formal language. When used as a countable noun, the term "a logic" refers to a specific logical formal system that articulates a proof system. Logic plays a central role in many fields, such as philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics. Logic studies arguments, which consist of a set of premises that leads to a conclusion. An example is the argument from the premises "it's Sunday" and "if it's Sunday then I don't have to work" leading to the conclusion "I don't have to wor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
