|
Humean Flea
Humeanism refers to the philosophy of David Hume and to the tradition of thought inspired by him. Hume was an influential eighteenth century Scottish philosopher well known for his empirical approach, which he applied to various fields in philosophy. In the philosophy of science, he is notable for developing the ''regularity theory of causation'', which in its strongest form states that causation is nothing but constant conjunction of certain types of events without any underlying forces responsible for this regularity of conjunction. This is closely connected to his metaphysical thesis that there are ''no necessary connections between distinct entities''. The Humean theory of action defines actions as ''bodily behavior caused by mental states and processes'' without the need to refer to an agent responsible for this. The slogan of Hume's theory of practical reason is that "reason is...the slave of the passions". It restricts the sphere of practical reason to ''instrumental rational ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hume's Dictum
In philosophy, metaphysical necessity, sometimes called broad logical necessity, is one of many different kinds of necessity, which sits between logical necessity and nomological (or physical) necessity, in the sense that logical necessity entails metaphysical necessity, but not vice versa, and metaphysical necessity entails physical necessity, but not vice versa. A proposition is said to be ''necessary'' if it could not have failed to be the case. Nomological necessity is necessity according to the laws of physics and logical necessity is necessity according to the laws of logic, while metaphysical necessities are necessary in the sense that the world could not possibly have been otherwise. What facts are metaphysically necessary, and on what basis we might view certain facts as metaphysically but not logically necessary are subjects of substantial discussion in contemporary philosophy. The concept of a metaphysically necessary being plays an important role in certain arguments for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Donald Davidson (philosopher)
Donald Herbert Davidson (March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher. He served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. Davidson was known for his charismatic personality and difficult writing style, as well as the systematic nature of his philosophy. His work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, particularly in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and Action theory (philosophy), action theory. While Davidson was an analytic philosophy, analytic philosopher, with most of his influence lying in that tradition, his work has attracted attention in continental philosophy as well, particularly in literary theory and related areas. Early life and education Donald Herbert Davidson was born on March 6, 1917 in Springfield ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intention
An intention is a mental state in which a person commits themselves to a course of action. Having the plan to visit the zoo tomorrow is an example of an intention. The action plan is the ''content'' of the intention while the commitment is the ''attitude'' towards this content. Other mental states can have action plans as their content, as when one admires a plan, but differ from intentions since they do not involve a practical commitment to realizing this plan. Successful intentions bring about the intended course of action while unsuccessful intentions fail to do so. Intentions, like many other mental states, have intentionality: they represent possible states of affairs. Theories of intention try to capture the characteristic features of intentions. The ''belief-desire theory'' is the traditionally dominant approach. According to a simple version of it, having an intention is nothing but having a desire to perform a certain action and a belief that one will perform this act ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theory Of Action
Action theory may refer to: * Action theory (philosophy), an area in philosophy concerned with the processes causing intentional human movement * Action theory (sociology), a sociological theory established by the American theorist Talcott Parsons * Social action, an approach to the study of social interaction outlined by the German sociologist Max Weber and taken further by G. H. Mead It may also refer to a number of different types of social interactions and associations, including: * Affectional action * Instrumental action * Traditional action * Value-rational action * Communicative action * Dramaturgical action Dramaturgy is a sociological perspective that analyzes micro-sociological accounts of everyday social interactions through the analogy of performativity and theatrical dramaturgy, dividing such interactions between "actors", "audience" members, a ... * Group action (sociology) {{disambiguation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philosophical Realism
Philosophical realismusually not treated as a position of its own but as a stance towards other subject mattersis the view that a certain kind of thing (ranging widely from abstract objects like numbers to moral statements to the physical world itself) has ''mind-independent existence'', i.e. that it exists even in the absence of any mind perceiving it or that its existence is not just a mere appearance in the eye of the beholder. This includes a number of positions within epistemology and metaphysics which express that a given thing instead exists independently of knowledge, thought, or understanding. This can apply to items such as the physical world, the past and future, other minds, and the self, though may also apply less directly to things such as universals, mathematical truths, moral truths, and thought itself. However, realism may also include various positions which instead reject metaphysical treatments of reality altogether. Realism can also be a view about the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Supervene
In philosophy, supervenience refers to a relation between sets of properties or sets of facts. X is said to ''supervene'' on Y if and only if some difference in Y is necessary for any difference in X to be possible. Examples of supervenience, in which case the truth values of some propositions cannot vary unless the truth values of some other propositions vary, include: * Whether there is a table in the living room supervenes on the positions of molecules in the living room. * The truth value of (A) supervenes on the truth value of its negation, (¬A), and vice versa. Supervenience is of interest to philosophers because it differs from other nearby relations, for example ''entailment''. Some philosophers believe it possible for some A to supervene on some B without being entailed by B. In such cases it may seem puzzling why A should supervene on B and equivalently why changes in A should require changes in B. Two important applications of supervenience involve cases like this. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Humean Supervenience
Humeanism refers to the philosophy of David Hume and to the tradition of thought inspired by him. Hume was an influential eighteenth century Scottish philosopher well known for his empirical approach, which he applied to various fields in philosophy. In the philosophy of science, he is notable for developing the ''regularity theory of causation'', which in its strongest form states that causation is nothing but constant conjunction of certain types of events without any underlying forces responsible for this regularity of conjunction. This is closely connected to his metaphysical thesis that there are ''no necessary connections between distinct entities''. The Humean theory of action defines actions as ''bodily behavior caused by mental states and processes'' without the need to refer to an agent responsible for this. The slogan of Hume's theory of practical reason is that "reason is...the slave of the passions". It restricts the sphere of practical reason to ''instrumental rational ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Lewis (philosopher)
David Kellogg Lewis (September 28, 1941– October 14, 2001) was an American philosopher. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton University from 1970 until his death. He is closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years. Lewis made significant contributions in philosophy of mind, philosophy of probability, epistemology, philosophical logic, aesthetics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of time and philosophy of science. In most of these fields he is considered among the most important figures of recent decades. Lewis is most famous for his work in metaphysics, philosophy of language and semantics, in which his books ''On the Plurality of Worlds'' (1986) and ''Counterfactuals'' (1973) are considered classics. His works on the logic and semantics of counterfactual conditionals are broadly used by philosophers and linguists along with a competing account from Robert Stalnaker; together the Stal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Possible World
A possible world is a complete and consistent way the world is or could have been. Possible worlds are widely used as a formal device in logic, philosophy, and linguistics in order to provide a semantics for intensional and modal logic. Their metaphysical status has been a subject of controversy in philosophy, with modal realists such as David Lewis arguing that they are literally existing alternate realities, and others such as Robert Stalnaker arguing that they are not. Logic Possible worlds are one of the foundational concepts in modal and intensional logics. Formulas in these logics are used to represent statements about what ''might'' be true, what ''should'' be true, what one ''believes'' to be true and so forth. To give these statements a formal interpretation, logicians use structures containing possible worlds. For instance, in the relational semantics for classical propositional modal logic, the formula \Diamond P (read as "possibly P") is actually true if and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Law Of Nature (science)
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 th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Necessitarianism
Necessitarianism is a metaphysical principle that denies all mere possibility; there is exactly one way for the world to be. It is the strongest member of a family of principles, including hard determinism, each of which deny libertarian free will, reasoning that human actions are predetermined by external or internal antecedents. Necessitarianism is stronger than hard determinism, because even the hard determinist would grant that the causal chain constituting the world might have been different as a whole, even though each member of that series could not have been different, given its antecedent causes. The most famous defender of necessitarianism in the history of philosophy is Spinoza. Anthony Collins was also known for his defense of necessitarianism. His brief ''Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty'' (1715) was a key statement of the necessitarianist standpoint. The ''Century Dictionary'' defined it in 1889–91 as belief that the will is not free, but instead subject to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
