SEP (Stanford Encyc.)

[New Entry by Marc Alspector-Kelly on November 4, 2026.] [Editor's Note: The following new entry by Marc Alspector-Kelly replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.] A set is closed under a relation when members of that set...

[Revised entry by Neera K. Badhwar and Roderick T. Long on November 4, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Ayn Rand (1905 - 1982) was a novelist-philosopher who outlined a comprehensive philosophy, including an epistemology and a theory of art, in her novels and essays. Early in her career she also wrote short stories, plays, and screenplays. Rand's first and most autobiographical novel, We the Living (1936), set in the Soviet Union, was published only after many rejections,

[Revised entry by Barbara C. Scholz, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Ryan Nefdt on October 30, 2026. Changes to: Main text] Philosophy of linguistics is the philosophy of science as applied to linguistics. This differentiates it sharply from the philosophy of language, traditionally concerned with matters of meaning and reference. As with the philosophy of other special sciences, there are general topics relating to matters like methodology and explanation (e.g., the...

[Revised entry by Douglas W. Portmore on October 30, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Act-consequentialism is one of today's leading moral theories. Broadly construed, it holds that the ultimate right-making feature of an act is that its outcome is not evaluatively outranked by that of any available alternative. To evaluatively rank (hereafter, simply "rank") a set of outcomes is to rank them along some evaluative dimension, such as their overall goodness, their goodness for the agen

[Revised entry by Curtis Brown on October 29, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Narrow mental content is a kind of mental content that does not depend on an individual's environment. Narrow content contrasts with "broad" or "wide" content, which depends on features of the individual's environment as well as on features of the individual. It is controversial whether there is any such thing as narrow content. Assuming that there is, it is also controversial what sort of content it is, w

[Revised entry by Henry Jackman on October 28, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The term "meaning holism" is generally applied to views that treat the meanings of all of the words in a language as interdependent. Holism draws much of its appeal from the way in which the usage of all our words seems interconnected, and runs into many problems because the resultant view can seem to conflict with (among other things) the intuition that the meanings of individual words are by and large s

[Revised entry by David Brink on October 28, 2026. Changes to: Bibliography] Thomas Hill Green (1836 - 82) is widely regarded as the founding and most influential figure in the tradition of British idealism that flourished in England, especially Oxford, and Scotland, especially Glasgow and Edinburgh, in the second half of the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth century (see, e.g., Mander 2011). Green's idealism was systematic, embracing metaphysics and epistemology, ethical theory, p

[Revised entry by Josep Puig Montada on October 26, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Philosophy in Al-Andalus developed later than in the East; it grew among Muslims and Jews, since both communities were nurtured by a common Arabic. The Muslim community was much larger and it defined the cultural space, a significant part of which was made by Arabic translations of Greek scientifical and philosophical works. The earliest Arab philosopher al-Kindi (d. c. 853) was possibly

[Revised entry by Ross Cameron on October 26, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] An infinite regress is a series of appropriately related elements with a first member but no last member, where each element leads to or generates the next in some sense.[1] An infinite regress argument is an argument that makes appeal to an infinite regress. Usually such arguments take the form of objections to a theory, with the fact that the theory implies an infinite regress being taken to

[Revised entry by Derk Pereboom on October 22, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Among Immanuel Kant's (1724 - 1804) most influential contributions to philosophy is his development of the transcendental argument. In Kant's conception, an argument of this kind begins with a compelling premise about our thought, experience, or knowledge, and then reasons to a conclusion that is a substantive and unobvious presupposition and necessary condition of this premise. The crucial steps in this

[Revised entry by Patricia Sheridan on October 20, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Locke's greatest philosophical work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, is generally seen as a defining work of seventeenth-century empiricist epistemology and metaphysics. The moral philosophy developed in this work is rarely taken up for critical analysis, considered by many scholars of Locke's thought to be too obscure and confusing to be taken too seriously. The view is not only seen by many

[New Entry by Jacob T. Levy on October 17, 2026.] The organizational form that came to be called "universities" developed over the course of the 11th - 13th centuries in western Europe. From an early date they differed from other forms of educational institutions such as cathedral schools by virtue of their corporate self-governance, a degree of independence from both the Catholic Church and political authorities. That degree varied and was always contested, but the normative commitment to it (

[Revised entry by Heidi Grasswick on October 16, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Many of the significant contributors to the continually developing field of social epistemology have been feminist epistemologists, theorists who investigate the role of gender and other social identity markers within the practices of knowledge production. Motivated by the political project of eliminating the oppression of women, feminist epistemologists are interested in how the norms and practices of

[New Entry by Claus Beisbart on October 16, 2026.] Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used to obtain knowledge and understanding. For example, it is employed to detect objects in images, make predictions, examine mathematical conjectures, and infer causal connections. Indeed, over the last few years, many people have become accustomed to consulting chatbots powered by large language models when they have a question. However, are humans really justified in basing their beliefs on

[Revised entry by Rebecca Whisnant on October 15, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Although the proper definition of 'rape' is itself a matter of some dispute, rape is generally understood to involve sexual penetration of a person by force and/or without that person's consent. Rape is committed overwhelmingly by men and boys, usually against women and girls, and sometimes against other men and boys. (For the most part, this entry will assume male perpetrators and female victims.)...

[Revised entry by John Marenbon on October 14, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (born: circa 475 - 7 C.E., died: 526? C.E.) has long been recognized as one of the most important intermediaries between ancient philosophy and the Latin Middle Ages and, through his Consolation of Philosophy, as a talented literary writer, with a gift for making philosophical ideas dramatic and accessible to a wider public. He had previously translated Aristotle's logic

[Revised entry by Sarah Hutton on October 8, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The Cambridge Platonists were a cluster of English seventeenth-century thinkers associated with the University of Cambridge. The most important philosophers among them were Henry More (1614 - 1687) and Ralph Cudworth (1617 - 1688). The group also included Benjamin Whichcote...

[Revised entry by Paul Studtmann on October 7, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Aristotle's Categories is a singularly important work of philosophy. It not only presents the backbone of Aristotle's own philosophical theorizing but has exerted an unparalleled influence on the systems of many of the greatest philosophers in the western tradition. The set of doctrines in the Categories, which will henceforth be called categorialism, provides the framework of inquiry for a wide variety o

[Revised entry by Emily A. E. Thomas on October 6, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Australian-born philosopher Samuel Alexander (1859 - 1938) was a prominent figure in early twentieth-century British philosophy. He is best known for advancing "British Emergentism", a movement that held mind "emerges" from matter. Alexander rejected idealism, and accordingly can be labelled a "new realist" alongside the likes of Bertrand Russell; however, unlike other new realists, Alexander maintain

[Revised entry by Andrew Brenner, Anna-Sofia Maurin, Alexander Skiles, Robin Stenwall, and Naomi Thompson on October 5, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Explanation comes in many forms. Scientific explanations typically concern the natural world, and typically proceed by citing causes of natural phenomena or subsuming them under empirical laws in some illuminating way. Mathematical explanations typically concern the world of quantity and abstract structure, and typically proceed by p