SEP (Stanford Encyc.)

[Revised entry by Bret W. Davis on July 3, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] The Kyoto School (Kyōto-gakuha) is a group of 20th century Japanese philosophers who drew on the intellectual and spiritual traditions of East Asia, those of Mahāyāna Buddhism in particular, as well as on the methods and content of Western philosophy. After an introductory section, this entry will focus on four...

[Revised entry by Hannes Leitgeb and André Carus on July 2, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, aufbau.html, carnap-quine.html, inductive-logic.html, methodology.html, reconstruct-sci-theories.html, semantics.html, syntax.html, tolerance-metaphysics.html] Rudolf Carnap (1891 - 1970) was one of the best-known philosophers of the twentieth century. Notorious as one of the founders, and perhaps the leading philosophical representative, of the movement known as logical positivism or logical

[Revised entry by Robert van Rooij and Michael Franke on July 2, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Linguistic pragmatics studies the context-dependent use and interpretation of expressions. Perhaps the most important notion in pragmatics is Grice's (1967) conversational implicature. It is based on the insight that by means of general principles of rational cooperative behavior we can communicate more with the use of a sentence than the conventional semantic meaning associated with it.

[New Entry by Megan Delehanty and Anya Plutynski on July 2, 2026.] In 1895, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud published Studien Uber Hysterie (Studies on Hysteria), a series of case studies describing a new method of treatment for patients suffering from various psychological and somatic symptoms (Breuer and Freud 1895). One of the subjects, Breuer's patient "Anna O." (Bertha Pappenheim), characterized this method as the "talking cure." Today, "psychotherapy" is the preferred term for a wide array

[New Entry by Shane Ryan and Sharon Ryan on July 2, 2026.] What is wisdom? Despite receiving less attention than other epistemic goods in contemporary analytic epistemology, wisdom is affirmed by philosophers across different traditions and cultures as the highest epistemic good. Such philosophers include the Christian thinkers Boethius and Anselm, the Muslim thinkers Avicenna and Averroes, and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (O'Grady 2019: 416). This entry provides a general overview of the

[Revised entry by Tristram McPherson on July 2, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] We sometimes think about the ethical significance of merely possible circumstances. People sometimes wonder, for example, if it would have been wrong to break certain promises that they in fact kept. Examples like this do not exhaust the significance of possibility - or modality more generally - in our ethical thinking. Rather, we also seem to be committed to a certain modal structure in our ethical comm

[Revised entry by Corey Dyck and Brigitte Sassen on July 1, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Kant undoubtedly casts a long shadow in the history of eighteenth century German philosophy. Not only did he initiate a revolution in philosophy, but in the course of doing so he thoroughly exposed the metaphysical systems of his predecessors as rationalistic castles in the air. This latter, negative part of his project was in fact so successful that the pre-Kantian period of German philosoph

[Revised entry by Bruce Reichenbach on July 1, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, argument-strong.html, complexity.html, notes.html] The cosmological argument is less a specific argument than an argument type. It uses a general pattern of argumentation (logos) that makes an inference from particular, alleged facts about the universe (cosmos) to the existence of a unique being, generally identified with or referred to as God or Allah. Among these initial facts are that beings or events

[Revised entry by Katarzyna M. Jaszczolt on June 30, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] 'Default' can mean many different things in theories of meaning. It is so not only because of the multiplicity of approaches and dimensions from which meaning can be studied, but also due to the fact the theoretical landscape, as well as the societal implementations that are in the focus of public interest, are changing swiftly. First, there is the dimension of the ongoing debates concerning the del

[New Entry by Gabe Dupre on June 29, 2026.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Gabe Dupre replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.]...

[Revised entry by Ian Carter and Ilkin Huseynli on June 28, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting - or the fact of acting - in such a way as to take control of one's life and realize one's fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individu

[Revised entry by Chris Gowans on June 28, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Moral relativism is an important topic in metaethics. It is also widely discussed outside philosophy (for example, by political and religious leaders), and it is controversial among philosophers and nonphilosophers alike. This is perhaps not surprising in view of recent evidence that people's intuitions about moral relativism vary widely. Though many philosophers are quite critical of moral relativism, there

[Revised entry by Achille Varzi on June 27, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Mereology (from the Greek meros, 'part') is a field of inquiry devoted to the study of parthood relations: of the relations of part to whole and the relations of part to part within a whole.[1] Its roots can be traced back to the early days of philosophy, beginning with the Presocratic disputes on the divisibility of being and continuing throughout the writings of Plato (the one and the...

[Revised entry by Thaddeus Metz on June 26, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Many major historical figures in philosophy have provided an answer to the question of what, if anything, makes life meaningful, although they typically have not put it in these terms (with such talk having arisen only in the past 250 years or so, on which see Landau 1997; Cassedy 2022). Consider, for instance, Aristotle on the human function, Aquinas on the beatific vision, and Kant on the highest good. Rel

[Revised entry by R. Lanier Anderson on June 25, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) was a German philosopher and cultural critic who published intensively in the 1870s and 1880s. He is famous for uncompromising criticisms of traditional European morality and religion, as well as of conventional philosophical ideas and social and political pieties associated with modernity. Many of these criticisms rely on psychological diagnoses that expose false consc

[Revised entry by Kristen Rundle and Jeremy Waldron on June 17, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The phrase "the rule of law" has to be distinguished from the phrase "a rule of law". The latter phrase is used to designate some particular legal rule like the rule against perpetuities or the rule that says we must file our taxes by a certain date. Those are rules of law, but the rule of law is one of the ideals of our political morality and it refers to the ascendancy of law as such an

[Revised entry by Stewart Shapiro and Teresa Kouri Kissel on June 17, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Typically, a logic consists of a formal or informal language together with a deductive system and/or a model-theoretic semantics. The language has components that correspond to a part of a natural language like English or Greek. The deductive system is to capture, codify, or simply record arguments that are valid for the given language, and the semantics is to capture, codify, or re

[Revised entry by Crispin Sartwell on June 17, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The nature of beauty is one of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy, and is - with the nature of art - one of the two fundamental issues in the history of philosophical aesthetics. Beauty has traditionally been counted among the ultimate values, with goodness, truth, and justice. It is a primary theme among ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and medieval philosophers, and was central

[Revised entry by Lev Vaidman on June 17, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics holds that there are numerous parallel worlds existing in the same space and time as our own. Recognizing the existence of these additional worlds makes it possible to remove fundamental randomness and action at a distance from quantum theory, and consequently, from all of physics. The MWI provides a solution to the measurement problem of quantum mechan

[New Entry by Hsueh Qu and Elizabeth S. Radcliffe on June 16, 2026.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Hsueh Qu and Elizabeth S. Radcliffe replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous authors.]...