SEP (Stanford Encyc.)

[Revised entry by William Sweet on September 19, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Bernard Bosanquet (1848 - 1923), British philosopher, political theorist and social reformer, was one of the principal exponents (with F.H. Bradley) of late nineteenth and early twentieth century 'Absolute Idealism.'...

[Revised entry by Eva Del Soldato on September 18, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Basil Bessarion (d. 1472) was, before Marsilio Ficino (1433 - 1499), the not so grey eminence responsible for the return of Plato in the Western world. Defending Plato's reputation from the attacks of the arch-Aristotelian George of Trebizond - attacks which were founded in a long anti-Platonic tradition - Bessarion introduced Christianized readings of Plato's dialogues, characterizing him as the paga

[Revised entry by Helen Frowe and Jonathan Parry on September 18, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Killing and harming others are paradigmatic wrongs. And yet there is at least one intuitive exception to this prohibition - namely, killing or harming in self-defense, or in defense of others. Consider:...

[Revised entry by Tobias Hoffmann and John Wippel on September 18, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Godfrey of Fontaines was one of the major philosopher-theologians to serve as Regent Master (a Master in active service) at the University of Paris in the final quarter of the thirteenth century, along with Henry of Ghent and Giles of Rome, among others. After completing philosophical studies in the Faculty of Arts and beginning to study theology probably by August, 1274, he became Reg

[Revised entry by Troy Jollimore on September 17, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Impartiality is sometimes treated by philosophers as if it were equivalent to moral impartiality. Or, at the very least, the former word is often used, without the qualifying adjective 'moral', even when it is the particularly moral concept that is intended. This is potentially misleading, since impartiality in its broadest sense is best understood as a formal notion that can be applied in a number of

[Revised entry by Anat Biletzki and Anat Matar on September 17, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein played a central, if controversial, role in mid-20th-century analytic philosophy. He continues to influence, and incur debate in, current philosophical thought in topics as diverse as logic and language, perception and intention, ethics and religion, aesthetics and culture, and even political though

[Revised entry by J. Adam Carter and Ernest Sosa on September 17, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Whereas epistemology is (broadly speaking) the philosophical theory of knowledge, its nature and scope, metaepistemology takes a step back from particular substantive debates in epistemology in order to inquire into the assumptions and commitments made by those who engage in these debates. This entry will focus on a selection of these assumptions and commitments, including (s1) whether

[Revised entry by Daniel Stoljar on September 16, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Physicalism is, in slogan form, the thesis that everything is physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything

[Revised entry by Sophie Horowitz on September 16, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Higher-order evidence is evidence which bears on a believer's rational capacities, epistemic performance, or evidential situation. Many epistemologists hold that this kind of evidence can rationally affect our "first-order" beliefs as well: that is, those beliefs about the world that we form using the relevant rational capacities, or in the relevant evidential situation. It is easiest to get a grip on

[New Entry by Pietro Gori and Luca Guzzardi on September 15, 2026.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Pietro Gori and Luca Guzzardi replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.] The work of Ernst Mach (1838 - 1916) has been influential in...

[Revised entry by Cian Dorr on September 13, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Consider the following pairs of properties. (As is common in the literature on this topic, this entry will use the words 'property' and 'relation' interchangeably. Properties in the usual sense are distinguished as "monadic", and relations in the usual sense as "polyadic".)...

[Revised entry by Brian Treanor and Brendan Sweetman on September 13, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Gabriel Marcel (1889 - 1973) was a philosopher, drama critic, playwright and musician. He converted to Catholicism in 1929 and his philosophy was later described as "Christian Existentialism" (most famously in Jean-Paul Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism") a term he initially endorsed but later repudiated. In addition to his numerous philosophical publications, he was the author

[New Entry by Tamar Kushnir and Shaun Nichols on September 12, 2026.] In this piece moral learning is taken to comprise the acquisition of norms and values in the moral domain. The investigation of the acquisition of such norms and values stretches back to antiquity, and it has received focused attention in contemporary moral psychology. Moral prohibitions are found in virtually every culture (Brown 1991)....

[Revised entry by John Krummel on September 10, 2026. Changes to: Bibliography] Kūkai (774 - 835CE) is one of the intellectual giants of Japan, who ought not to be ignored in any account of the history of Japanese thought. Among the traditional Buddhist thinkers of Japan, and perhaps even of the whole of East Asia, he is one of the most systematic and philosophical. He is most famous for being the founder of Shingon esoteric Buddhism in Japan. But he is also remembered not only for his contrib

[Revised entry by Richard Healey on September 8, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Quantum theory is fundamental to contemporary physics.[1] It is natural to view a fundamental physical theory as describing or representing the physical world. But many physicists and some philosophers have questioned or rejected this view of quantum theory. They have viewed the theory as concerned with our observation and description of, knowledge or beliefs about, or interactions with the

[Revised entry by Richard Jones and Jerome Gellman on September 4, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Under the influence of William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, philosophical interest in mysticism has primarily focused on distinctive, allegedly knowledge-giving "mystical experiences." Philosophers have dealt with such topics as the classification of mystical experiences, their nature, to what extent mystical experiences are conditioned by a mystic's language and culture,

[Revised entry by Jean De Groot on September 3, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Chauncey Wright was an American philosopher of science of the second half of the nineteenth century and an early proponent of Darwinism in the United States. Sometimes cited as a founder of pragmatism, he is more appropriately remembered as an original thinker in the tradition of J. S. Mill's utilitarianism.[1] Wright's primary interest and originality lay in philosophy of science, but his in

[Revised entry by David Braun and Alexandru Radulescu on September 3, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] An indexical is, roughly speaking, a linguistic expression whose reference can shift from context to context. For example, the indexical 'you' may refer to one person in one context and to another person in another context. Other paradigmatic examples of indexicals are 'I', 'here', 'today', 'yesterday', 'he', 'she', and 'that'. Two speakers who utter a single sentence that contains

[Revised entry by Jan-Erik Jones on September 1, 2026. Changes to: Bibliography] The technical term 'real essence' is heavily utilized by the English philosopher John Locke (1632 - 1704) in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding[1] (hereafter "Essay") that was first published in London, in December of 1689. In order to understand a great many of Locke's arguments in Books III and IV of the Essay, it is important to understand what a real essence is. Thus, the purpose...

[Revised entry by Leonard Levin, R. David Walker, and Shalom Sadik on August 31, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Isaac ben Solomon Israeli (ca. 855 - 955 CE), not to be confused with Isaac Israeli the Younger (an astronomer of Spain, d. 1322 CE), served as physician to the founder of the Fatimid Dynasty in North Africa and wrote several philosophical and medical treatises in Arabic which were subsequently translated and widely read in Latin and Hebrew. Israeli was one of the earlies