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Ontological Argument
In the philosophy of religion, an ontological argument is a deductive philosophical argument, made from an ontological basis, that is advanced in support of the existence of God. Such arguments tend to refer to the state of being or existing. More specifically, ontological arguments are commonly conceived ''a priori'' in regard to the organization of the universe, whereby, if such organizational structure is true, God must exist. The first ontological argument in Western Christian traditionSzatkowski, Miroslaw, ed. 2012. ''Ontological Proofs Today''. Ontos Verlag. "There are three main periods in the history of ontological arguments. The first was in 11th century, when St. Anselm of Canterbury came up with the first ontological argument" (p. 22). was proposed by Saint Anselm of Canterbury in his 1078 work, '' Proslogion'' (), in which he defines God as "a being than which no greater can be conceived," and argues that such a being must exist in the mind, even in that of the pe ...
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Philosophy Of Religion
Philosophy of religion is "the philosophical examination of the central themes and concepts involved in religious traditions". Philosophical discussions on such topics date from ancient times, and appear in the earliest known Text (literary theory), texts concerning philosophy. The field involves many other branches of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"Philosophy of Religion." The philosophy of religion differs from religious philosophy in that it seeks to discuss questions regarding the nature of religion as a whole, rather than examining the problems brought forth by a particular belief system, belief-system. The philosophy of religion differs from theology in that it aims to examine religious concepts from an objective philosophical perspective rather than from the perspective of a specific religious tradition. The philosophy of religion also differs ...
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Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (or Leibnitz; – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat who is credited, alongside Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton, with the creation of calculus in addition to many other branches of mathematics, such as binary arithmetic and statistics. Leibniz has been called the "last universal genius" due to his vast expertise across fields, which became a rarity after his lifetime with the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the spread of specialized labor. He is a prominent figure in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history, philology, games, music, and other studies. Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics and computer science. Leibniz contributed to the ...
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Empirical Evidence
Empirical evidence is evidence obtained through sense experience or experimental procedure. It is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law. There is no general agreement on how the terms ''evidence'' and ''empirical'' are to be defined. Often different fields work with quite different conceptions. In epistemology, evidence is what Justification (epistemology), justifies beliefs or what determines whether holding a certain belief is rational. This is only possible if the evidence is possessed by the person, which has prompted various epistemologists to conceive evidence as private mental states like experiences or other beliefs. In philosophy of science, on the other hand, evidence is understood as that which ''Scientific method#Confirmation, confirms'' or ''disconfirms'' Hypothesis#Scientific hypothesis, scientific hypotheses and arbitrates between competing theories. For this role, evidence must be public and uncont ...
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David Hume
David Hume (; born David Home; – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist who was best known for his highly influential system of empiricism, philosophical scepticism and metaphysical naturalism. Beginning with '' A Treatise of Human Nature'' (1739–40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as an empiricist. Cranston, Maurice, and Thomas Edmund Jessop. 2020 999br>David Hume" ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Retrieved 18 May 2020. Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified rationally; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. We never actually perceive that one event causes another but only experience ...
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Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas ( ; ; – 7 March 1274) was an Italian Dominican Order, Dominican friar and Catholic priest, priest, the foremost Scholasticism, Scholastic thinker, as well as one of the most influential philosophers and theologians in the Western tradition. A Doctor of the Church, he was from the county of Aquino, Italy, Aquino in the Kingdom of Sicily. Thomas was a proponent of natural theology and the father of a school of thought (encompassing both theology and philosophy) known as Thomism. Central to his thought was the doctrine of natural law, which he argued was accessible to Reason, human reason and grounded in the very nature of human beings, providing a basis for understanding individual rights and Moral duty, moral duties. He argued that God is the source of the light of natural reason and the light of faith. He embraced several ideas put forward by Aristotle and attempted to synthesize Aristotelianism, Aristotelian philosophy with the principles of Christianity. A ...
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Reductio Ad Absurdum
In logic, (Latin for "reduction to absurdity"), also known as (Latin for "argument to absurdity") or ''apagogical argument'', is the form of argument that attempts to establish a claim by showing that the opposite scenario would lead to absurdity or contradiction. This argument form traces back to Ancient Greek philosophy and has been used throughout history in both formal mathematical and philosophical reasoning, as well as in debate. In mathematics, the technique is called ''proof by contradiction''. In formal logic, this technique is captured by an axiom for "Reductio ad Absurdum", normally given the abbreviation RAA, which is expressible in propositional logic. This axiom is the introduction rule for negation (see ''negation introduction''). Examples The "absurd" conclusion of a ''reductio ad absurdum'' argument can take a range of forms, as these examples show: * The Earth cannot be flat; otherwise, since the Earth is assumed to be finite in extent, we would find peo ...
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Gaunilo Of Marmoutiers
Gaunilo or Gaunillon ( century) was a Benedictine monk of Marmoutier Abbey in Tours, France. He is best known for his contemporary criticism of the ontological argument for the existence of God which appeared in St. Anselm's ''Proslogion''. In his work ''In Behalf of the Fool'', Gaunilo contends that St. Anselm's ontological argument fails because logic of the same kind would force one to conclude many things exist which certainly do not. An empiricist, Gaunilo thought that the human intellect is only able to comprehend information provided by the senses. Little beyond this essay is known of Gaunilo; no other extant writings bear his name. Anselm wrote a reply to it, essentially arguing that Gaunilo had definitely missed his point. The "Lost Island" refutation Anselm claimed his ontological argument as proof of the existence of God, whom he described as that being for which no greater can be conceived. A god that does not exist cannot be that than which no greater can be conc ...
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Allama Tabatabai
Muhammad Husayn Tabataba'i (; 16 March 1903 – 15 November 1981) was an Iranian scholar, theorist, philosopher and one of the most prominent thinkers of modern Shia Islam. He is perhaps best known for his '' Tafsir al-Mizan'', a twenty-seven-volume work of tafsir (Quranic exegesis), which he produced between 1954 and 1972. He is commonly known as Allameh Tabataba'i and the Allameh Tabataba'i University in Tehran is named after him. Biography He received his earlier education in his native Tabriz, mastering the elements of Arabic and the religious sciences, and at about the age of twenty set out for the Shiite seminary of Najaf to continue more advanced studies. He studied under masters such as Ali Tabatabaei (in gnosis), Mirza Muhammad Husain Na'ini, Sheykh Muhammad Hossein Qaravi Esfahani (in Fiqh and Jurisprudence), Sayyid Abu'l-Qasim Khwansari (in Mathematics), as well as studying the standard texts of Avicenna's ''Shifa'', the ''Asfar'' of Sadr al-Din Shirazi, and the ...
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Mulla Sadra
Ṣadr ad-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī, more commonly known as Mullā Ṣadrā (; ; c. 1571/2 – c. 1635/40 CE / 980 – 1050 AH), was a Persians, Persian Twelver Shi'a, Shi'i Islamic philosophy, Islamic mystic, philosopher, Kalam, theologian, and Ulema, ‘Ālim who led the Iranian cultural renaissance in the 17th century. According to Oliver Leaman, Mulla Sadra is arguably the single most important and influential philosopher in the Muslim world in the last four hundred years. Though not its founder, he is considered the master of the Illuminationism, Illuminationist (or, Ishraghi or Illuminationist philosophy, Ishraqi) school of Philosophy, a seminal figure who synthesized the many tracts of the Islamic Golden Age philosophies into what he called the Transcendent Theosophy or ''al-hikmah al-muta’āliyah''. Mulla Sadra brought "a new philosophical insight in dealing with the nature of reality" and created "a major transition from essentialism to existentialism" in Islamic ph ...
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Automated Theorem Prover
Automated theorem proving (also known as ATP or automated deduction) is a subfield of automated reasoning and mathematical logic dealing with proving mathematical theorems by computer programs. Automated reasoning over mathematical proof was a major motivating factor for the development of computer science. Logical foundations While the roots of formalized logic go back to Aristotle, the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries saw the development of modern logic and formalized mathematics. Frege's ''Begriffsschrift'' (1879) introduced both a complete propositional calculus and what is essentially modern predicate logic. His '' Foundations of Arithmetic'', published in 1884, expressed (parts of) mathematics in formal logic. This approach was continued by Russell and Whitehead in their influential ''Principia Mathematica'', first published 1910–1913, and with a revised second edition in 1927. Russell and Whitehead thought they could derive all mathematical truth using axioms ...
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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 ...
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Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Carl Plantinga (born November 15, 1932) is an American analytic philosophy, analytic philosopher who works primarily in the fields of philosophy of religion, epistemology (particularly on issues involving theory of justification, epistemic justification), and logic. From 1963 to 1982, Plantinga taught at Calvin University before accepting an appointment as the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He later returned to Calvin University to become the inaugural holder of the Jellema Chair in Philosophy. A prominent Christian philosopher, Plantinga served as president of the Society of Christian Philosophers from 1983 to 1986. He has delivered the Gifford Lectures twice and was described by ''Time (magazine), Time'' magazine as "America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God". In 2014, Plantinga was the 30th most-cited contemporary author in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Scienc ...
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