Stanford University centers and institutes
Stanford University has many centers and institutes dedicated to the study of various specific topics. These centers and institutes may be within a department, within a school but across departments, an independent laboratory, institute or center reporting directly to the Dean of Research and outside any school, or semi-independent of the University itself; these report directly to the Vice-Provost and Dean of Research and are outside any school though any faculty involved in them must belong to a department in one of the schools. These include Spectrum in the area of Biological and Life Sciences; the Center for the Study of Language and Information is an independent research center at Stanford University. Founded in 1983 by philosophers, computer scientists and psychologists from Stanford, SRI International, Xerox PARC, it strives to study all forms of information and improve how humans and computers acquire and process it. CSLI was funded by a US$15 million grant from the System Development Foundation for the Situated Language Project, the name of which reflects the strong influence of the work on situation semantics by philosophers John Perry and Jon Barwise, two of the initial leaders of CSLI.
This funding supported operations for the first few years as well as the construction of Cordura Hall. Subsequent funding has come from an industrial affiliates program. CSLI's publications branch and still headed by Dikran Karagueuzian, has grown into an important publisher of work in linguistics and related fields. Researchers associated with CSLI include Ronald Kaplan, Patrick Suppes, the mathematicians Keith Devlin, Solomon Feferman, the linguists Ivan Sag and Joan Bresnan, Annie Zaenen, Lauri Karttunen, psychologists Herb Clark, B. J. Fogg and Clifford Nass. CSLI houses the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it housed the Reuters Digital Vision Program. Jon Barwise 1983–1985 John Perry 1985–1986, 1993–1999 Thomas Wasow 1986–1987, 2006–2007 John Etchemendy 1990–1993 David Israel c. 1999-2000 Byron Reeves c. 2001–2005 Stanley Peters 2008–2013 Chris Potts 2013–present The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies is a university-wide research and teaching organization at Stanford devoted to understanding international and cross-border policies and institutions.
FSI's core and affiliated faculty represent a range of academic backgrounds and perspectives, including medicine, engineering, political science and sociology. The faculty's research and teaching focus on a variety of issues, including governance and international health policy, migration and security, their work examines regional dynamics in areas such as Asia, Europe and Latin America. FSI faculty conduct research, lead interdisciplinary research programs, educate graduate and undergraduate students, organize policy outreach that engages Stanford in addressing some of the world's most pressing problems; the institute is composed of 12 centers and programs, including six major research centers: Center on Democracy and the Rule of Law Center on Food Security and the Environment Center for Health Policy, Primary Care and Outcomes Research Center for International Security and Cooperation The Europe Center Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center The institute was founded in 1987 following a faculty committee review that concluded Stanford "should be leading the way in International Studies as we do in science and technology", encompassing interdisciplinary teaching, public service and administrative functions.
It was first called the institute for International Studies, was created under the direction of former Stanford President Richard Wall Lyman. The institute was renamed the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies in 2005 following a $50 million gift made by Stanford alumni Bradford M. Freeman and Ronald P. Spogli; the immediate past director of FSI was Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, the former Stanley Morrison Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, a former official in the Obama and Clinton presidential administrations, current Justice of the California Supreme Court. Previous Directors include Stanford President Emeritus Gerhard Casper. FSI appoints faculty and research staff, funds research and scholarly initiatives, directs research projects, sponsors lectures, policy seminars and conferences. By tradition, FSI undertakes joint faculty appointments with Stanford's seven schools and draws faculty togethe
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental questions about existence, values, reason and language. Such questions are posed as problems to be studied or resolved; the term was coined by Pythagoras. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument, systematic presentation. Classic philosophical questions include: Is it possible to know anything and to prove it? What is most real? Philosophers pose more practical and concrete questions such as: Is there a best way to live? Is it better to be just or unjust? Do humans have free will? "philosophy" encompassed any body of knowledge. From the time of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to the 19th century, "natural philosophy" encompassed astronomy and physics. For example, Newton's 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy became classified as a book of physics. In the 19th century, the growth of modern research universities led academic philosophy and other disciplines to professionalize and specialize.
In the modern era, some investigations that were traditionally part of philosophy became separate academic disciplines, including psychology, sociology and economics. Other investigations related to art, politics, or other pursuits remained part of philosophy. For example, is beauty objective or subjective? Are there many scientific methods or just one? Is political utopia a hopeful dream or hopeless fantasy? Major sub-fields of academic philosophy include metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of science. Traditionally, the term "philosophy" referred to any body of knowledge. In this sense, philosophy is related to religion, natural science and politics. Newton's 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy is classified in the 2000s as a book of physics. In the first part of the first book of his Academics, Cicero introduced the division of philosophy into logic and ethics. Metaphysical philosophy was the study of existence, God, logic and other abstract objects; this division has changed.
Natural philosophy has split into the various natural sciences astronomy, chemistry and cosmology. Moral philosophy still includes value theory. Metaphysical philosophy has birthed formal sciences such as logic and philosophy of science, but still includes epistemology and others. Many philosophical debates that began in ancient times are still debated today. Colin McGinn and others claim. Chalmers and others, by contrast, see progress in philosophy similar to that in science, while Talbot Brewer argued that "progress" is the wrong standard by which to judge philosophical activity. In one general sense, philosophy is associated with wisdom, intellectual culture and a search for knowledge. In that sense, all cultures and literate societies ask philosophical questions such as "how are we to live" and "what is the nature of reality". A broad and impartial conception of philosophy finds a reasoned inquiry into such matters as reality and life in all world civilizations. Western philosophy is the philosophical tradition of the Western world and dates to Pre-Socratic thinkers who were active in Ancient Greece in the 6th century BCE such as Thales and Pythagoras who practiced a "love of wisdom" and were termed physiologoi.
Socrates was a influential philosopher, who insisted that he possessed no wisdom but was a pursuer of wisdom. Western philosophy can be divided into three eras: Ancient, Medieval philosophy, Modern philosophy; the Ancient era was dominated by Greek philosophical schools which arose out of the various pupils of Socrates, such as Plato, who founded the Platonic Academy and his student Aristotle, founding the Peripatetic school, who were both influential in Western tradition. Other traditions include Cynicism, Greek Skepticism and Epicureanism. Important topics covered by the Greeks included metaphysics, the nature of the well-lived life, the possibility of knowledge and the nature of reason. With the rise of the Roman empire, Greek philosophy was increasingly discussed in Latin by Romans such as Cicero and Seneca. Medieval philosophy is the period following the fall of the Western Roman Empire and was dominated by the ris
Western philosophy
Western philosophy is the philosophical thought and work of the Western world. The term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with Greek philosophy of the pre-Socratics such as Thales and Pythagoras, covering a large area of the globe; the word philosophy itself originated from the Ancient Greek: philosophia "the love of wisdom". The scope of philosophy in the ancient understanding, the writings of the ancient philosophers, were all intellectual endeavors; this included the problems of philosophy. In the pre-Socratic period, ancient philosophers first articulated questions about the "arche" of the universe. Western philosophy is said to begin in the Greek cities of western Asia Minor with Thales of Miletus, active c. 585 BC and was responsible for the opaque dictum, "all is water." His most noted students were Anaximander and Anaximenes of Miletus Pythagoras, from the island of Samos off the coast of Ionia lived in Croton in southern Italy. Pythagoreans hold that "all is number," giving formal accounts in contrast to the previous material of the Ionians.
They believe in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, or reincarnation. A key figure in Greek philosophy is Socrates. Socrates studied under several Sophists but transformed Greek philosophy into a branch of philosophy, still pursued today, it is said that following a visit to the Oracle of Delphi he spent much of his life questioning anyone in Athens who would engage him, in order to disprove the oracular prophecy that there would be no man wiser than Socrates. Socrates used a critical approach called the "elenchus" or Socratic method to examine people's views, he aimed to study human things: the good life, justice and virtue. Although Socrates wrote nothing himself, some of his many disciples wrote down his conversations, he was tried for corrupting the impiety by the Greek democracy. He was sentenced to death. Although his friends offered to help him escape from prison, he chose to remain in Athens and abide by his principles, his execution consisted of drinking the poison hemlock and he died in 399 BC.
Plato was a student of Socrates. Plato founded the Academy of Athens and wrote a number of dialogues, which applied the Socratic method of inquiry to examine philosophical problems; some central ideas of Plato's dialogues are the immortality of the soul, the benefits of being just, that evil is ignorance, the Theory of Forms. Forms are universal properties that constitute true reality and contrast with the changeable material things he called "becoming". Aristotle was a pupil of Plato. Aristotle was the first systematic philosopher and scientist, he wrote about physics, zoology, aesthetics, theater, rhetoric and logic. Aristotelian logic was the first type of logic to attempt to categorize every valid syllogism. Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great, who in turn conquered much of the ancient world at a rapid pace. Hellenization and Aristotelian philosophy exercised considerable influence on all subsequent Western and Middle Eastern philosophers, including Hellenistic, Byzantine, Western medieval and Islamic thinkers.
Medieval philosophy is the philosophy of Western Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages extending from the Christianization of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance. Medieval philosophy is defined by the rediscovery and further development of classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, by the need to address theological problems and to integrate the widespread sacred doctrines of Abrahamic religion with secular learning. Early medieval philosophy was influenced by the likes of Stoicism, but, above all, the philosophy of Plato himself; some problems discussed throughout this period are the relation of faith to reason, the existence and unity of God, the object of theology and metaphysics, the problems of knowledge, of universals, of individuation. The prominent figure of this period was Augustine of Hippo who adopted Plato's thought and Christianized it in the 4th century and whose influence dominated medieval philosophy up to end of the era but was checked with the arrival of Aristotle's texts.
Augustinianism was the preferred starting point for most philosophers up until the 13th century. The Carolingian Renaissance of the 8th/9th century was fed by Church missionaries travelling from Ireland, most notably John Scotus Eriugena, a Neoplatonic philosopher; the modern university system has roots in the European medieval university, created in Italy and evolved from Catholic Cathedral schools for the clergy during the High Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas, an academic philosopher and the father of Thomism, was immensely influential in Catholic Europe. Philosophers from the Middle Ages include the Christian philosophers Augustine of Hippo, Anselm, Gilbert de la Porrée, Peter Abelard, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aq
Philosophy of mathematics
The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the assumptions and implications of mathematics, purports to provide a viewpoint of the nature and methodology of mathematics, to understand the place of mathematics in people's lives. The logical and structural nature of mathematics itself makes this study both broad and unique among its philosophical counterparts. Recurrent themes include: What is the role of humankind in developing mathematics? What are the sources of mathematical subject matter? What is the ontological status of mathematical entities? What does it mean to refer to a mathematical object? What is the character of a mathematical proposition? What is the relation between logic and mathematics? What is the role of hermeneutics in mathematics? What kinds of inquiry play a role in mathematics? What are the objectives of mathematical inquiry? What gives mathematics its hold on experience? What are the human traits behind mathematics? What is mathematical beauty? What is the source and nature of mathematical truth?
What is the relationship between the abstract world of mathematics and the material universe? The origin of mathematics is subject to argument. Whether the birth of mathematics was a random happening or induced by necessity duly contingent upon other subjects, say for example physics, is still a matter of prolific debates. Many thinkers have contributed their ideas concerning the nature of mathematics. Today, some philosophers of mathematics aim to give accounts of this form of inquiry and its products as they stand, while others emphasize a role for themselves that goes beyond simple interpretation to critical analysis. There are traditions of mathematical philosophy in Eastern philosophy. Western philosophies of mathematics go as far back as Pythagoras, who described the theory "everything is mathematics", who paraphrased Pythagoras, studied the ontological status of mathematical objects, Aristotle, who studied logic and issues related to infinity. Greek philosophy on mathematics was influenced by their study of geometry.
For example, at one time, the Greeks held the opinion that 1 was not a number, but rather a unit of arbitrary length. A number was defined as a multitude. Therefore, 3, for example, represented a certain multitude of units, was thus not "truly" a number. At another point, a similar argument was made that 2 was not a number but a fundamental notion of a pair; these views come from the geometric straight-edge-and-compass viewpoint of the Greeks: just as lines drawn in a geometric problem are measured in proportion to the first arbitrarily drawn line, so too are the numbers on a number line measured in proportion to the arbitrary first "number" or "one". These earlier Greek ideas of numbers were upended by the discovery of the irrationality of the square root of two. Hippasus, a disciple of Pythagoras, showed that the diagonal of a unit square was incommensurable with its edge: in other words he proved there was no existing number that depicts the proportion of the diagonal of the unit square to its edge.
This caused a significant re-evaluation of Greek philosophy of mathematics. According to legend, fellow Pythagoreans were so traumatized by this discovery that they murdered Hippasus to stop him from spreading his heretical idea. Simon Stevin was one of the first in Europe to challenge Greek ideas in the 16th century. Beginning with Leibniz, the focus shifted to the relationship between mathematics and logic; this perspective dominated the philosophy of mathematics through the time of Frege and of Russell, but was brought into question by developments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A perennial issue in the philosophy of mathematics concerns the relationship between logic and mathematics at their joint foundations. While 20th-century philosophers continued to ask the questions mentioned at the outset of this article, the philosophy of mathematics in the 20th century was characterized by a predominant interest in formal logic, set theory, foundational issues, it is a profound puzzle that on the one hand mathematical truths seem to have a compelling inevitability, but on the other hand the source of their "truthfulness" remains elusive.
Investigations into this issue are known as the foundations of mathematics program. At the start of the 20th century, philosophers of mathematics were beginning to divide into various schools of thought about all these questions, broadly distinguished by their pictures of mathematical epistemology and ontology. Three schools, formalism and logicism, emerged at this time in response to the widespread worry that mathematics as it stood, analysis in particular, did not live up to the standards of certainty and rigor, taken for granted; each school addressed the issues that came to the fore at that time, either attempting to resolve them or claiming that mathematics is not entitled to its status as our most trusted knowledge. Surprising and counter-intuitive developments in formal logic and set theory early in the 20th century led to new questions concerning what was traditionally called the foundations of mathematics; as the century unfolded, the initial focus of concern expanded to an open exploration of the fundamental axioms of mathematics, the axiomatic approach having been taken for granted since the time of Euclid around 300 BCE as the natural basis for mathematics.
Notions of axiom and proof, as well as the notion of a proposition being true of a mathematical object, were formalized, allowing them to be treated mathematically. The Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms for set theory were formulated whi
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, between possibility and actuality. The word "metaphysics" comes from two Greek words that, together mean "after or behind or among the natural", it has been suggested that the term might have been coined by a first century CE editor who assembled various small selections of Aristotle’s works into the treatise we now know by the name Metaphysics. Metaphysics studies questions related to what it is for something to exist and what types of existence there are. Metaphysics seeks to answer, in an abstract and general manner, the questions: What is there? What is it like? Topics of metaphysical investigation include existence and their properties and time, cause and effect, possibility. Metaphysics study, conducted using deduction from that, known a priori. Like foundational mathematics, it tries to give a coherent account of the structure of the world, capable of explaining our everyday and scientific perception of the world, being free from contradictions.
In mathematics, there are many different ways. While metaphysics may, as a special case, study the entities postulated by fundamental science such as atoms and superstrings, its core topic is the set of categories such as object and causality which those scientific theories assume. For example: claiming that "electrons have charge" is a scientific theory. There are two broad stances about; the strong, classical view assumes that the objects studied by metaphysics exist independently of any observer, so that the subject is the most fundamental of all sciences. The weak, modern view assumes that the objects studied by metaphysics exist inside the mind of an observer, so the subject becomes a form of introspection and conceptual analysis; some philosophers, notably Kant, discuss both of these "worlds" and what can be inferred about each one. Some philosophers, such as the logical positivists, many scientists, reject the strong view of metaphysics as meaningless and unverifiable. Others reply that this criticism applies to any type of knowledge, including hard science, which claims to describe anything other than the contents of human perception, thus that the world of perception is the objective world in some sense.
Metaphysics itself assumes that some stance has been taken on these questions and that it may proceed independently of the choice—the question of which stance to take belongs instead to another branch of philosophy, epistemology. Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as the core of metaphysics, ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or may be said to exist and how such entities may be grouped, related within a hierarchy, subdivided according to similarities and differences. Identity is a fundamental metaphysical issue. Metaphysicians investigating identity are tasked with the question of what it means for something to be identical to itself, or — more controversially — to something else. Issues of identity arise in the context of time: what does it mean for something to be itself across two moments in time? How do we account for this? Another question of identity arises when we ask what our criteria ought to be for determining identity?
And how does the reality of identity interface with linguistic expressions? The metaphysical positions one takes on identity have far-reaching implications on issues such as the mind-body problem, personal identity and law; the ancient Greeks took extreme positions on the nature of change. Parmenides denied change altogether, while Heraclitus argued that change was ubiquitous: "ou cannot step into the same river twice." Identity, sometimes called Numerical Identity, is the relation that a "thing" bears to itself, which no "thing" bears to anything other than itself. A modern philosopher who made a lasting impact on the philosophy of identity was Leibniz, whose Law of the Indiscernibility of Identicals is still in wide use today, it states that if some object x is identical to some object y any property that x has, y will have as well. Put formally, it states ∀ x ∀ y However, it seems, that objects can change over time. If one were to look at a tree one day, the tree lost a leaf, it would seem that one could still be looking at that same tree.
Two rival theories to account for the relationship between change and identity are perdurantism, which treats the tree as a series of tree-stages, endurantism, which maintains that the organism—the same tree—is present at every stage in its history. Objects appear to us in space and time, while abstract entities such as classes, r
Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on April 4, 2012; the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original records, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month; as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC
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