1.
Philosophy of mind
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Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind. The mind–body problem is an issue in philosophy of mind, although other issues are addressed, such as the hard problem of consciousness. Dualism and monism are the two schools of thought on the mind–body problem, although nuanced views have arisen that do not fit one or the other category neatly. Dualism is seen even in the Eastern tradition, in the Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy, and Plato, monism is the position that mind and body are not ontologically distinct kinds of entities. This view was first advocated in Western philosophy by Parmenides in the 5th century BC and was later espoused by the 17th century rationalist Baruch Spinoza. Physicalists argue that only entities postulated by physical theory exist, physicalists maintain various positions on the prospects of reducing mental properties to physical properties, and the ontological status of such mental properties remains unclear. Idealists maintain that the mind is all that exists and that the world is either mental itself. The most common monisms in the 20th and 21st centuries have all been variations of physicalism, these positions include behaviorism, most modern philosophers of mind adopt either a reductive or non-reductive physicalist position, maintaining in their different ways that the mind is not something separate from the body. These approaches have been influential in the sciences, especially in the fields of sociobiology, computer science, evolutionary psychology. Reductive physicalists assert that all states and properties will eventually be explained by scientific accounts of physiological processes and states. Continued neuroscientific progress has helped to some of these issues, however. Modern philosophers of mind continue to ask how the subjective qualities, the mind–body problem concerns the explanation of the relationship that exists between minds, or mental processes, and bodily states or processes. The main aim of working in this area is to determine the nature of the mind and mental states/processes. Someones desire for a slice of pizza, for example, will tend to cause that person to move his or her body in a specific manner and in a specific direction to obtain what he or she wants. The question, then, is how it can be possible for conscious experiences to arise out of a lump of gray matter endowed with nothing, a related problem is how someones propositional attitudes cause that individuals neurons to fire and his muscles to contract. These comprise some of the puzzles that have confronted epistemologists and philosophers of mind from at least the time of René Descartes, Dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter. It begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, One of the earliest known formulations of mind–body dualism was expressed in the eastern Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy, which divided the world into purusha and prakriti. Specifically, the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali presents an approach to the nature of the mind
2.
Baruch Spinoza
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Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of Sephardi/Portuguese origin. Spinozas magnum opus, Ethics, was published posthumously in 1677, the work opposed René Descartes philosophy on mind–body dualism, and earned Spinoza recognition as one of Western philosophys most important thinkers. In the Ethics, Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, hegel said, You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all. His philosophical accomplishments and moral character prompted 20th-century philosopher Gilles Deleuze to name him the prince of philosophers, Spinozas given name, which means Blessed, varies among different languages. In Hebrew, it is written ברוך שפינוזה, in Portuguese, hes called Benedito Bento de Espinosa and in Latin, Benedictus de Spinoza. Spinoza was raised in a Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam and he developed highly controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of the Divine. Jewish religious authorities issued a herem against him, causing him to be shunned by Jewish society at age 23. His books were later put on the Catholic Churchs Index of Forbidden Books. Spinoza lived a simple life as a lens grinder, turning down rewards and honours throughout his life. He died at the age of 44 allegedly of a lung illness and he is buried in the churchyard of the Christian Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague. The Spinoza family probably had its origins in Espinosa de los Monteros, near Burgos, or in Espinosa de Cerrato, near Palencia, the family was expelled from Spain in 1492 and fled to Portugal. Portugal compelled them to convert to Catholicism in 1498, attracted by the Decree of Toleration issued in 1579 by the Union of Utrecht, Portuguese conversos first sailed to Amsterdam in 1593 and promptly reconverted to Judaism. In 1598 permission was granted to build a synagogue, and in 1615 an ordinance for the admission, as a community of exiles, the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam were highly proud of their identity. Spinozas father was born roughly a century after this conversion in the small Portuguese city of Vidigueira. When Spinozas father was still a child, Spinozas grandfather, Isaac de Spinoza and they were expelled in 1615 and moved to Rotterdam, where Isaac died in 1627. Spinozas father, Miguel, and his uncle, Manuel, then moved to Amsterdam where they resumed the practice of Judaism, Miguel was a successful merchant and became a warden of the synagogue and of the Amsterdam Jewish school. He buried three wives and three of his six children died before reaching adulthood, Amsterdam and Rotterdam operated as important cosmopolitan centres where merchant ships from many parts of the world brought people of various customs and beliefs. This flourishing commercial activity encouraged a relatively tolerant of the play of new ideas
3.
David Hume
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David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of radical philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Humes empiricist approach to philosophy places him with John Locke, Francis Bacon, beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume strove to create a total naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Humes compatibilist theory of free will takes causal determinism as fully compatible with human freedom, Kant himself credited Hume as the spur to his philosophical thought who had awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers. Arthur Schopenhauer once declared there is more to be learned from each page of David Hume than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart. Hume is thus regarded as a pivotal figure in the history of philosophical thought. David Hume was the second of two born to Joseph Home of Ninewells, an advocate, and his wife The Hon. Katherine. He was born on 26 April 1711 in a tenement on the side of the Lawnmarket in Edinburgh. Humes father died when Hume was a child, just after his birthday, and he was raised by his mother. He changed the spelling of his name in 1734, because of the fact that his surname Home, throughout his life Hume, who never married, spent time occasionally at his family home at Ninewells in Berwickshire, which had belonged to his family since the sixteenth century. His finances as a man were very slender. His family was not rich and, as a younger son and he was therefore forced to make a living somehow. Hume attended the University of Edinburgh at the early age of twelve at a time when fourteen was normal. He had little respect for the professors of his time, telling a friend in 1735 that there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books. Aged around 18, he made a discovery that opened up to him a new Scene of Thought. He did not recount what this scene was, and commentators have offered a variety of speculations, due to this inspiration, Hume set out to spend a minimum of ten years reading and writing. He soon came to the verge of a breakdown, suffering from what a doctor diagnosed as the Disease of the Learned. Hume wrote that it started with a coldness, which he attributed to a Laziness of Temper, later, some scurvy spots broke out on his fingers. This was what persuaded Humes physician to make his diagnosis, Hume wrote that he went under a Course of Bitters and Anti-Hysteric Pills, taken along with a pint of claret every day
4.
Ernst Mach
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Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, noted for his contributions to physics such as study of shock waves. The ratio of speed to that of sound is named the Mach number in his honor. Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach was born in Brno-Chrlice, Moravia and his father, who had graduated from Charles University in Prague, acted as tutor to the noble Brethon family in Zlín, eastern Moravia. His grandfather, Wenzl Lanhaus, an administrator of the estate Chirlitz, was master builder of the streets there. His activities in that later influenced the theoretical work of Ernst Mach. Some sources give Machs birthplace as Turas/Tuřany, the site of the Chirlitz registry-office, peregrin Weiss baptized Ernst Mach into the Roman Catholic Church in Turas/Tuřany. Despite his Catholic background, he became an atheist and his theory. Up to the age of 14, Mach received his education at home from his parents and he then entered a Gymnasium in Kroměříž, where he studied for three years. In 1855 he became a student at the University of Vienna and his early work focused on the Doppler effect in optics and acoustics. During that period, Mach continued his work in psycho-physics and in sensory perception, in 1867, he took the chair of Experimental Physics at the Charles University, Prague, where he stayed for 28 years before returning to Vienna. Machs main contribution to physics involved his description and photographs of spark shock-waves and he described how when a bullet or shell moved faster than the speed of sound, it created a compression of air in front of it. Using schlieren photography, he and his son Ludwig were able to photograph the shadows of the shock waves. During the early 1890s Ludwig was able to invent an interferometer which allowed for much clearer photographs, one of the best-known of Machs ideas is the so-called Mach principle, concerning the physical origin of inertia. This was never written down by Mach, but was given a verbal form, attributed by Philipp Frank to Mach himself, as, When the subway jerks. Mach also became known for his philosophy developed in close interplay with his science. Mach defended a type of phenomenalism recognizing only sensations as real and this position seemed incompatible with the view of atoms and molecules as external, mind-independent things. He famously declared, after an 1897 lecture by Ludwig Boltzmann at the Imperial Academy of Science in Vienna, from about 1908 to 1911 Machs reluctance to acknowledge the reality of atoms was criticized by Max Planck as being incompatible with physics. In 1898 Mach suffered from cardiac arrest and in 1901 retired from the University of Vienna and was appointed to the chamber of the Austrian parliament
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Richard Avenarius
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Richard Ludwig Heinrich Avenarius was a German-Swiss philosopher. He formulated the radical positivist doctrine of criticism or empirio-criticism. Avenarius attended the Nicolaischule in Leipzig and studied athe University of Zurich, Berlin, at the University of Leipzig, he received the Doctor of Philosophy in 1868 with his thesis on Baruch Spinoza and his pantheism, obtained the habilitation in 1876 and taught there as Privatdozent. One year later, he became professor at the University of Zurich and he died in Zurich in 1896. Avenarius believed that philosophy must be concerned with purely descriptive definitions of experience. His opposition to the materialist assertions of Karl Vogt resulted in an attack upon empirio-criticism by Vladimir Lenin in the latters Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Avenarius principal works are the famously difficult Kritik der reinen Erfahrung and Der menschliche Weltbegriff which influenced Ernst Mach, Ber Borochov and, to a lesser extent and he taught Anatoly Lunacharsky and was also influential on Alexander Bogdanov. Avenarius was the son of the German publisher Eduard Avenarius and Cäcilie née Geyer, a daughter of the actor and painter Ludwig Geyer. However, there are speculations in science that her father was the father of Richard Wagner too. Richards brother, Ferdinand Avenarius, led the cultural organization Dürerbund, ueber die beiden ersten Phasen des Spinozischen Pantheismus und das Verhältnis der zweiten zur dritten Phase. Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäß dem Prinzip des kleinsten Kraftmaßes, prolegomena zu einer Kritik der reinen Erfahrung. Fues, Leipzig 1876, 2nd ed.1903, Kritik der reinen Erfahrung,2 vols. Fues, Leipzig 1888/1890, 2nd ed. 1907/1908, reisland, Leipzig 1891, 2nd ed.1905, 3rd ed.1912. ^ See John Deathridge, Introduction p. XXXIII in Richard Wagner, the Family Letters of Richard Wagner, University of Michigan Press,1991
6.
William James
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William James was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked James as the 14th most cited psychologist of the 20th century and he also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James work has influenced intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B, du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty, and has even influenced Presidents, such as Jimmy Carter. Born into a family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr. James wrote widely on topics, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion. William James was born at the Astor House in New York City and he was the son of Henry James Sr. a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. William James received an eclectic trans-Atlantic education, developing fluency in both German and French, education in the James household encouraged cosmopolitanism. The family made two trips to Europe while William James was still a child, setting a pattern that resulted in thirteen more European journeys during his life. In his early adulthood, James suffered from a variety of ailments, including those of the eyes, back, stomach. Two younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson and Robertson, fought in the Civil War, the other three siblings all suffered from periods of invalidism. He took up studies at Harvard Medical School in 1864. His studies were interrupted once again due to illness in April 1867 and he traveled to Germany in search of a cure and remained there until November 1868, at that time he was 26 years old. During this period, he began to publish, reviews of his works appeared in periodicals such as the North American Review. James finally earned his M. D. degree in June 1869, what he called his soul-sickness would only be resolved in 1872, after an extended period of philosophical searching. He married Alice Gibbens in 1878, in 1882 he joined the Theosophical Society. Jamess time in Germany proved intellectually fertile, helping him find that his interests lay not in medicine but in philosophy. Later, in 1902 he would write, I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave. In 1875–1876, James, Henry Pickering Bowditch, Charles Pickering Putnam, G. Stanley Hall, Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud
7.
Consciousness
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Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. Despite the difficulty in definition, many believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. Western philosophers, since the time of Descartes and Locke, have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness, the majority of experimental studies assess consciousness in humans by asking subjects for a verbal report of their experiences. The origin of the concept of consciousness is often attributed to John Lockes Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke defined consciousness as the perception of what passes in a mans own mind and his essay influenced the 18th-century view of consciousness, and his definition appeared in Samuel Johnsons celebrated Dictionary. Consciousness is also defined in the 1753 volume of Diderot and dAlemberts Encyclopédie, the earliest English language uses of conscious and consciousness date back, however, to the 1500s. This phrase had the meaning of knowing that one knows. In its earliest uses in the 1500s, the English word conscious retained the meaning of the Latin conscius. For example, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan wrote, Where two, or more men, know of one and the fact, they are said to be Conscious of it one to another. The Latin phrase conscius sibi, whose meaning was more related to the current concept of consciousness, was rendered in English as conscious to oneself or conscious unto oneself. For example, Archbishop Ussher wrote in 1613 of being so conscious unto myself of my great weakness, Lockes definition from 1690 illustrates that a gradual shift in meaning had taken place. A related word was conscientia, which primarily means moral conscience, in the literal sense, conscientia means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge. The word first appears in Latin juridical texts by such as Cicero. Here, conscientia is the knowledge that a witness has of the deed of someone else, rené Descartes is generally taken to be the first philosopher to use conscientia in a way that does not fit this traditional meaning. Descartes used conscientia the way modern speakers would use conscience, in Search after Truth he says conscience or internal testimony. The dictionary meaning of the word consciousness extends through several centuries, B. inward awareness of an external object, state, or fact. The philosophy of mind has given rise to many stances regarding consciousness, something within ones mind is introspectively conscious just in case one introspects it. Introspection is often thought to deliver ones primary knowledge of ones mental life, an experience or other mental entity is phenomenally conscious just in case there is something it is like for one to have it
8.
Stephen Stich
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Stephen Stich is a professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Scientist at Rutgers University, as well as an Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Stichs main philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology and his 1983 book, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science, The Case Against Belief, received much attention as he argued for a form of eliminative materialism about the mind. He changed his mind, in years, as indicated in his 1996 book Deconstructing the Mind. Stephen Stich was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania from 1960-1964 where he was a member of the Philomathean Society and he received his B. A. in 1964. He did graduate work at Princeton University from 1964–1968, he received his Ph. D. in 1968 and he has held teaching positions at University of Michigan, University of Maryland, College Park, University of California, San Diego, University of Sheffield, and Rutgers University. Stich joined the University of Sheffield as a professor in their philosophy department in February 2005. He remains primarily at Rutgers, but visits Sheffield periodically, where he teaches, in 2007 he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize and gave a series of lectures in Paris titled Moral Theory Meets Cognitive Science, How the Cognitive Science Can Transform Traditional Debates. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts, Stich is primarily known in philosophy for his work in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, and moral psychology. In philosophy of mind and cognitive science, Stich has argued for a form of eliminative materialism—the view that talk of the mental should be replaced with talk of its physical substrate, since then, however, he has changed some of his views on the mind. See Deconstructing the Mind for his more recent views, in epistemology, he has explored the nature of intuitions using the techniques of experimental philosophy, especially epistemic intuitions that vary among cultures—see Stich and Stich, et al. This work reflects a general skepticism about conceptual analysis and the methods of analytic philosophy. In The Fragmentation of Reason he briefly sketched a form of relativism in the spirit of pragmatism. He and Shaun Nichols are responsible for a theory of how humans understand the mental states of ourselves and others, or mindreading, which they present in Nichols and Stich. Their theory is a hybrid, containing elements of both the theory and theory theory, and also aims to explain the mental architecture that enables pretence. 1972, Grammar, Psychology and Indeterminacy, Journal of Philosophy, LXIX,22,1978, Empiricism, Innateness and Linguistic Universals, Philosophical Studies, Vol.33, No. 1978, Beliefs and Sub-Doxastic States, Philosophy of Science, Vol.45, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol.57, No. 1983, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science, The Case Against Belief,1985, Could Man Be An Irrational Animal. 1988, Reflective Equilibrium, Analytic Epistemology and the Problem of Cognitive Diversity, Synthese, Vol.74,1990, Connectionism, Eliminativism and the Future of Folk Psychology, Philosophical Perspectives, Vol.4, pp. 499–533
9.
Bertrand Russell
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Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist and Nobel laureate. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist and he was born in Monmouthshire into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in the United Kingdom. In the early 20th century, Russell led the British revolt against idealism and he is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, colleague G. E. Moore, and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is widely held to be one of the 20th centurys premier logicians, with A. N. Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, an attempt to create a logical basis for mathematics. His philosophical essay On Denoting has been considered a paradigm of philosophy, Russell mostly was a prominent anti-war activist, he championed anti-imperialism. Occasionally, he advocated preventive nuclear war, before the opportunity provided by the monopoly is gone. He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I, in 1950 Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought. Bertrand Russell was born on 18 May 1872 at Ravenscroft, Trellech, Monmouthshire and his parents, Viscount and Viscountess Amberley, were radical for their times. Lord Amberley consented to his wifes affair with their childrens tutor, both were early advocates of birth control at a time when this was considered scandalous. Lord Amberley was an atheist and his atheism was evident when he asked the philosopher John Stuart Mill to act as Russells secular godfather, Mill died the year after Russells birth, but his writings had a great effect on Russells life. His paternal grandfather, the Earl Russell, had asked twice by Queen Victoria to form a government. The Russells had been prominent in England for several centuries before this, coming to power, Lady Amberley was the daughter of Lord and Lady Stanley of Alderley. Russell often feared the ridicule of his grandmother, one of the campaigners for education of women. Russell had two siblings, brother Frank, and sister Rachel, in June 1874 Russells mother died of diphtheria, followed shortly by Rachels death. In January 1876, his father died of bronchitis following a period of depression. Frank and Bertrand were placed in the care of their staunchly Victorian paternal grandparents and his grandfather, former Prime Minister Earl Russell, died in 1878, and was remembered by Russell as a kindly old man in a wheelchair. His grandmother, the Countess Russell, was the dominant family figure for the rest of Russells childhood, the countess was from a Scottish Presbyterian family, and successfully petitioned the Court of Chancery to set aside a provision in Amberleys will requiring the children to be raised as agnostics. Her favourite Bible verse, Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil, the atmosphere at Pembroke Lodge was one of frequent prayer, emotional repression, and formality, Frank reacted to this with open rebellion, but the young Bertrand learned to hide his feelings
10.
David Chalmers
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David John Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University and he is also a University Professor, Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science, and a Director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, since 2004, Chalmers has been Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Centre for Consciousness, and an ARC Federation Fellow at the Australian National University. Chalmers received his degree in pure mathematics from the University of Adelaide in Australia and continued his studies at the University of Oxford. Chalmers received his PhD in philosophy and cognitive science from Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter, after appearing as a plenary speaker at the first meeting, Chalmers has subsequently taken the role of co-organizer, alongside Stuart Hameroff, of this conference. Chalmers 1996 book, The Conscious Mind, was described by The Sunday Times as one of the best science books of the year. In the book, Chalmers argues that all forms of physicalism that have dominated modern philosophy and he proposes an alternative dualistic view he calls naturalistic dualism. He is the singer of the Zombie Blues band which performed at the Qualia Fest in 2012 in New York. Chalmers is an editor on topics in the philosophy of mind for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on 14 June 2016 David Chalmers visited Moscow to hold a lecture at Moscow State University focused on solving the Hard problem of consciousness. He also gave an interview about before holding a lecture at the Moscow State University, Chalmers is best known for his formulation of the notion of a hard problem of consciousness in both his 1996 book and in the 1995 paper Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. The essential difference between the easy problems and the problem is that the former are at least theoretically answerable via the standard strategy in philosophy of mind. Chalmers argues for a gap from the objective to the subjective. In support of this, Chalmers is famous for his commitment to the possibility of philosophical zombies. These zombies, unlike the zombie of popular fiction, are complete physical duplicates of human beings, Chalmers argues that since such zombies are conceivable to us, they must therefore be logically possible. Since they are possible, then qualia and sentience are not fully explained by physical properties alone. He further speculates that all information-bearing systems may be conscious, leading him to entertain the possibility of conscious thermostats, Chalmers maintains a formal agnosticism on the issue, even conceding that the viability of panpsychism places him at odds with the majority of his contemporaries. After the publication of Chalmerss landmark paper, more than twenty papers in response were published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and these papers were collected and published in the book Explaining Consciousness, The Hard Problem. John Searle critiqued Chalmerss views in The New York Review of Books, with Andy Clark, Chalmers has written The Extended Mind, an article about the borders of the mind
11.
Panpsychism
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In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that consciousness, mind or soul is a universal and primordial feature of all things. Panpsychists see themselves as minds in a world of mind, Panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers like Thales, Parmenides, Plato, Averroes, Spinoza, Leibniz and William James. Panpsychism can also be seen in ancient philosophies such as Stoicism, Taoism, Vedanta, during the 19th century, panpsychism was the default theory in philosophy of mind, but it saw a decline during the middle years of the 20th century with the rise of logical positivism. The recent interest in the problem of consciousness has revived interest in panpsychism. The term panpsychism has its origins with the Greek term pan and psyche as the center of the mental life of us humans. Psyche comes from the Greek word ψύχω and can mean life, soul, mind, spirit, heart, early forms of panpsychism can be found in pre-modern animistic beliefs in religions such as Shinto, Taoism, Paganism and shamanism. Panpsychist views are also a theme in pre-Socratic Greek philosophy. According to Aristotle, Thales the first Greek philosopher, posited a theory which held that everything is full of gods, Thales believed that this was demonstrated by magnets. This has been interpreted as a panpsychist doctrine, other Greek thinkers that have been associated with Panpsychism include Anaxagoras, Anaximenes and Heraclitus. Plato argues for Panpsychism in his Sophist, in which he writes that all things participate in the form of Being, in the Philebus and Timaeus, Plato argues for the idea of a world soul or anima mundi. According to Plato, This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul, a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related. Stoicism developed a cosmology which held that the world was infused with a divine fiery essence called Pneuma. The relationship of the individual Logos of beings with the universal Logos was a concern of the Roman Stoic Marcus Aurelius. The Metaphysics of Stoicism was based on Hellenistic philosophies such as Neoplatonism and Gnosticism also made use of the Platonic idea of the Anima mundi, after the closing of Platos Academy by the Emperor Justinian in 529 CE, Neoplatonism declined. Though there were mediaeval Christian thinkers who ventured what might be called panpsychist ideas, cardano argued for the view that soul or anima was a fundamental part of the world and Patrizi introduced the actual term panpsychism into the philosophical vocabulary. According to Giordano Bruno, There is nothing that does not possess a soul, platonist ideas like the anima mundi also resurfaced in the work of esoteric thinkers like Paracelsus, Robert Fludd and Cornelius Agrippa. In the 17th century, two rationalists can be said to be panpsychists, Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, in Spinozas monism, the one single infinite and eternal substance was God, or Nature which has the aspects of mind and matter. Leibniz view is there are an infinite number of absolutely simple mental substances called monads which make up the fundamental structure of the universe
12.
Dialectical monism
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For the dialectical monist, the essential unity is that of complementary polarities, which, while opposed in the realm of experience and perception, are co-substantial in a transcendent sense. To establish its premises, dialectical monism may posit a Universal Dialectic, the concept is similar to that of the Taiji or Supreme Ultimate in Taoism, the Purusha-Prakriti in Samkhya, and duality-in-unity of Shiva-Shakti in Tantra. Advocates assert that Taoism as well as forms of Buddhism are based on an approach consistent with or identical to dialectical monism. Ideas relating to teleological evolution are important in progressive interpretations of dialectical monism. However, this element has not always been present historically, and is not present in contemporary dialectical monisms such as Taoism. However, non-materialistic philosophies exist that also are dialectical monisms, such as Actual Idealism, some variants of dialectical monism adhere to the view that all conditions exist at all times in unity, and our consciousness separates them into dualistic forms. For these dialectical monists, this explains the fact of physical self-organization in Nature and these teleological variants may be referred to as progressive dialectical monism. As a monism, dialectical monism is opposed to traditional dualism despite its emphasis on twoness, in dialectical monism, the appearance of duality is seen as arising from the minds need to impose divisions and boundaries upon an essentially unified whole. Thus, for the dialectical monist, reality is ultimately one, furthermore, dialectical monism might also be termed plural monism, for it recognizes the dependently originated existence of a multiplicity of entities, which Taoism calls the ten thousand things. Dialectical monism does not deny that the plurality of things in existence are real, Dialectical monism has been mentioned in Western literature, although infrequently. Jean-Paul Sartre used the term on at least one occasion, although the term has never been used outside the West, advocates maintain that dialectical monism has a much greater presence in Eastern traditions. A wide number of Taoist sources are cited, especially those that relate to the Taiji or yin-yang concepts, in addition, several Buddhist works are seen as containing strong elements of dialectical monism. The Heart Sutra provides an expression of dialectical monism, Form is emptiness, emptiness also is form. Emptiness is no other form, form is no other than emptiness. See the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness, in response, dialectical monists might reply that theirs is a positive expression of nondualism, as opposed to the negative expression implied by the qualifier non in nondualism. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, when one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, existence with reference to the world does not occur to one. - Saṃyutta Nikāya 12,15 Heraclitus is a notable exception to the Eastern monopoly on dialectical monism, By cosmic rule, as day yields night, so winter summer, war peace. Fire penetrates the lump of myrrh, until the joining bodies die, men do not know how that which is drawn in different directions harmonises with itself
13.
Double-aspect theory
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In the philosophy of mind, double-aspect theory is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of, or perspectives on, the same substance. It is also called dual-aspect monism, there is a dual-aspect interpretation of Immanuel Kants noumenon. Arthur Schopenhauer, who considered the fundamental aspects of reality to be Will, david Chalmers who explores a double-aspect view of information, with similarities to Kenneth Sayres information-based neutral monism. From the work of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl G and that is, the Pauli-Jung conjecture implies that with regard to mental and physical states there may be incompatible descriptions of different parts that emerge from the whole. This stands in close analogy to quantum physics, where complementary properties cannot be determined jointly with accuracy, anomalous monism Property dualism Neutral Monism in Relation to Dual Aspect Theory
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Monadology
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The Monadology is one of Gottfried Leibniz’s best known works representing his later philosophy. It is a text which sketches in some 90 paragraphs a metaphysics of simple substances. During his last stay in Vienna from 1712 to September 1714, after his death Principes de la nature et de la grâce fondé en raison, which was intended for prince Eugene of Savoy, appeared in French in the Netherlands. Christian Wolff and collaborators published translations in German and Latin of the text which came to be known as The Monadology. Without having seen the Dutch publication of the Principes they had assumed that it was the French original of the Monadology, the German translation appeared in 1720 as Lehrsätze über die Monadologie and the following year the Acta Eruditorum printed the Latin version as Principia philosophiae. Leibniz himself inserted references to the paragraphs of his Théodicée, sending the interested reader there for more details, the monad, the word and the idea, belongs to the western philosophical tradition and has been used by various authors. Leibniz, who was well read, could not have ignored this. Apparently he found with it a convenient way to expose his own philosophy as it was elaborated in this period, what he proposed can be seen as a modification of occasionalism developed by latter-day Cartesians. Leibniz surmised that there are many substances individually programmed to act in a predetermined way. This is the harmony which solved the mind body problem. As far as Leibniz allows just one type of element in the building of the universe his system is monistic, the unique element has been given the general name monad or entelechy and described as a simple substance. When Leibniz says that monads are simple, he means that which is one, has no parts and is therefore indivisible, relying on the Greek etymology of the word entelechie, Leibniz posits quantitative differences in perfection between monads which leads to a hierarchical ordering. The basic order is three-tiered, entelechies or created monads, souls or entelechies with perception and memory, whatever is said about the lower ones is valid for the higher but not vice versa. As none of them is without a body, there is a hierarchy of living beings and animals. The degree of perfection in each case corresponds to cognitive abilities, some monads have power over others because they can perceive with greater clarity, but primarily, one monad is said to dominate another if it contains the reasons for the actions of other. Leibniz believed that any body, such as the body of an animal or man, has one dominant monad which controls the others within it and this dominant monad is often referred to as the soul. God is also said to be a substance but it is the only one which is necessary. Monads perceive others “with varying degrees of clarity, except for God, God could take any and all perspectives, knowing of both potentiality and actuality
15.
International Standard Book Number
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The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
16.
Analytic philosophy
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Analytic philosophy is a style of philosophy that became dominant in English-speaking countries at the beginning of the 20th century. In the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, as a historical development, analytical philosophy refers to certain developments in early 20th-century philosophy that were the historical antecedents of the current practice. Central figures in historical development are Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore, Gottlob Frege. This may be contrasted with the traditional foundationalism, which considers philosophy to be a science that investigates the fundamental reasons. Consequently, many philosophers have considered their inquiries as continuous with, or subordinate to. This is an attitude that begins with John Locke, who described his work as that of an underlabourer to the achievements of scientists such as Newton. During the twentieth century, the most influential advocate of the continuity of philosophy with science was Willard Van Orman Quine, the principle that the logical clarification of thoughts can be achieved only by analysis of the logical form of philosophical propositions. The logical form of a proposition is a way of representing it, to reduce it to simpler components if necessary, however, analytic philosophers disagree widely about the correct logical form of ordinary language. The neglect of generalized philosophical systems in favour of more restricted inquiries stated rigorously and it is thus able, in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy. Its methods, in respect, resemble those of science. Analytic philosophy is often understood in contrast to other traditions, most notably continental philosophies such as existentialism and phenomenology. British idealism, as taught by such as F. H. Bradley and Thomas Hill Green. With reference to this basis the initiators of analytic philosophy, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. Inspired by developments in logic, the early Russell claimed that the problems of philosophy can be solved by showing the simple constituents of complex notions. An important aspect of British idealism was logical holism — the opinion that the aspects of the world cannot be wholly without also knowing the whole world. This is closely related to the opinion that relations between items are actually internal relations, that is, properties internal to the nature of those items. Russell, along with Wittgenstein, in response promulgated logical atomism, Frege was also influential as a philosopher of mathematics in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Like Frege, Russell attempted to show that mathematics is reducible to logical fundamentals in The Principles of Mathematics, later, his book written with Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, encouraged many philosophers to renew their interest in the development of symbolic logic
17.
A. J. Ayer
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He was educated at Eton College and Oxford University, after which he studied the philosophy of logical positivism at the University of Vienna. From 1933 to 1940 he lectured on philosophy at Christ Church, during the Second World War Ayer was a Special Operations Executive and MI6 agent. He was Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London from 1946 until 1959 and he was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1951 to 1952 and knighted in 1970. Ayer was born in St Johns Wood, in north west London and his mother, Reine Citroën, was from the Dutch-Jewish family who founded the Citroën car company in France. His father, Jules Ayer, was a Swiss Calvinist financier who worked for the Rothschild family and it was at Eton that Ayer first became known for his characteristic bravado and precocity. Although primarily interested in furthering his intellectual pursuits, he was keen on sports, particularly rugby. In the final examinations at Eton, Ayer came second in his year, in his final year, as a member of Etons senior council, he unsuccessfully campaigned for the abolition of corporal punishment at the school. He won a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford. After graduation from Oxford University Ayer spent a year in Vienna, returned to England and published his first book, Language, Truth and Logic in 1936. The first exposition in English of Logical Positivism as newly developed by the Vienna Circle, in the Second World War he served as an officer in the Welsh Guards, chiefly in intelligence. He thereafter taught philosophy at London University from 1946 until 1959 and he was an extrovert and social mixer who liked dancing and attending the clubs in London and New York. He was also obsessed with sport, he had played rugby for Eton, and was a noted cricketer, for an academic, Ayer was an unusually well-connected figure in his time, with close links to high society and the establishment. Presiding over Oxford high-tables, he is described as charming. Ayer was married four times to three women and his first marriage was from 1932–1941 to Renée, who subsequently married philosopher Stuart Hampshire, Ayers friend and colleague. In 1960 he married Alberta Constance Wells, with whom he had one son, Ayers marriage to Wells was dissolved in 1983 and that same year he married Vanessa Salmon, former wife of politician Nigel Lawson. She died in 1985 and in 1989 he remarried Dee Wells, Ayer also had a daughter with Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham Westbrook. From 1959 to his retirement in 1978, Sir Alfred held the Wykeham Chair, Ayer died on 27 June 1989. From 1980 to 1989, Ayer lived at 51 York Street, Marylebone, in Language, Truth and Logic, Ayer presents the verification principle as the only valid basis for philosophy
18.
G. E. M. Anscombe
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Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, FBA, usually cited as G. E. M. Anscombe or Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher. She wrote on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophical logic, philosophy of language and she was a prominent figure of analytical Thomism. Anscombe was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein and became an authority on his work and edited and translated many books drawn from his writings, Anscombes 1958 article Modern Moral Philosophy introduced the term consequentialism into the language of analytic philosophy, and had a seminal influence on contemporary virtue ethics. Both her mother and father were involved with education and her mother was a headmistress and her father went on to head a department at Dulwich College. She graduated from Sydenham High School in 1937, and went on to read Mods & Greats at St Hughs College, Oxford, graduating with a second degree in 1939. During her first undergraduate year she converted to Roman Catholicism, and she garnered controversy when she publicly opposed Britains entry into World War II, although her father had been a soldier, and one of her brothers was to serve during the war. In 1941 she married Peter Geach, like her a Roman Catholic convert, a student of Wittgenstein, together they had three sons and four daughters. After graduating from Oxford, Anscombe was awarded a fellowship for postgraduate study at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her purpose was to attend Ludwig Wittgensteins lectures and her interest in Wittgensteins philosophy arose from reading the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as an undergraduate. Difference of objects I express by difference of signs, as she wrote For years, I would spend time, in cafés, for example, staring at objects saying to myself, I see a packet. But what do I really see, how can I say that I see here anything more than a yellow expanse. I always hated phenomenalism and felt trapped by it. I couldnt see my way out of it but I didnt believe it and it was no good pointing to difficulties about it, things which Russell found wrong with it, for example. The strength, the nerve of it remained alive and raged achingly. It was only in Wittgensteins classes in 1944 that I saw the nerve being extracted, the central thought I have got this and she became one of Wittgensteins favourite students and one of his closest friends. Wittgenstein affectionately referred to her by the pet name old man – an exception to his dislike of academic women. Anscombe visited Wittgenstein many times after he left Cambridge in 1947 and she scandalised liberal colleagues with articles defending the Roman Catholic Churchs opposition to contraception in the 1960s and early 1970s. Later in life, she was arrested twice while protesting outside a clinic in Britain. Anscombe remained at Somerville College from 1946 to 1970 and she was also known for her willingness to face fierce public controversy in the name of her Catholic faith
19.
Nick Bostrom
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In 2011, he founded the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, and he is currently the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. In 2009 and 2015, he was included in Foreign Policys Top 100 Global Thinkers list, Bostroms work on superintelligence – and his concern for its existential risk to humanity over the coming century – has brought both Elon Musk and Bill Gates to similar thinking. Bostrom was born in 1973 in Helsingborg, Sweden, at a young age, he disliked school, and he ended up spending his last year of high school learning from home. He sought to educate himself in a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, art, literature. Despite what has called a serious mien, he once did some turns on Londons stand-up comedy circuit. During his time at Stockholm University, he researched the relationship between language and reality by studying the analytic philosopher W. V. Quine, in 2000, he was awarded a PhD in philosophy from the London School of Economics. He held a position at Yale University, and he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford. Aspects of Bostroms research concern the future of humanity and long-term outcomes, in 2005, Bostrom founded the Future of Humanity Institute, which researches the far future of human civilization. He is also an adviser to the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, in January 2015, Bostrom joined Stephen Hawking among others in signing the Future of Life Institutes open letter warning of the potential dangers of AI. The signatories. believe that research on how to make AI systems robust, Bostrom has published numerous articles on anthropic reasoning, as well as the book Anthropic Bias, Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy. In the book, he criticizes previous formulations of the principle, including those of Brandon Carter, John Leslie, John Barrow. Bostrom believes that the mishandling of information is a common flaw in many areas of inquiry. He argues that a theory of anthropics is needed to deal with these and he introduced the Self-Sampling Assumption and the Self-Indication Assumption and showed how they lead to different conclusions in a number of cases. He pointed out that each is affected by paradoxes or counterintuitive implications in certain thought experiments and he suggested that a way forward may involve extending SSA into the Strong Self-Sampling Assumption, which replaces observers in the SSA definition by observer-moments. This could allow for the class to be relativized. Catastrophe types that lie in the shadow are likely to be underestimated unless statistical corrections are made. The idea has influenced the views of Elon Musk, Bostrom is favorable towards human enhancement, or self-improvement and human perfectibility through the ethical application of science, as well as a critic of bio-conservative views. In 1998, Bostrom co-founded the World Transhumanist Association, in 2004, he co-founded the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, although he is no longer involved in either of these organisations
20.
Robert Brandom
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Robert Boyce Brandom is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophical logic, Brandom is broadly considered to be part of the American pragmatist tradition in philosophy. Brandom earned his B. A. in 1972 from Yale University and his Ph. D. in 1977 from Princeton University, under Richard Rorty and his doctoral thesis was titled Practice and Object. Brandoms work is heavily influenced the by that of Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Rorty, Michael Dummett and he also draws heavily on the works of Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Gottlob Frege, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is best known for his investigations of linguistic meanings, or semantics and he advocates the view that the meaning of an expression is fixed by how it is used in inferences. Brandom has also published a collection of essays on the history of philosophy, Tales of the Mighty Dead and he is the editor of a collection of papers about Richard Rortys philosophy, Rorty and His Critics. He delivered the 2006 John Locke lectures at Oxford University, and they have published by Oxford University Press under the title Between Saying and Doing. Brandom is currently working on a book dealing with Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, ISBN 978-0-674-05808-8 Reason in Philosophy, Animating Ideas, Harvard University Belknap Press,2009. ISBN9780674053618 Between Saying and Doing, Towards an Analytic Pragmatism, ISBN 0-199-54287-2 In the Space of Reasons, Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, edited with an introduction by Kevin Scharp and Robert Brandom. ISBN 0-674-02498-2 Tales of the Mighty Dead, Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality, original essays by, Rorty, Habermas, Davidson, Putnam, Dennett, McDowell, Bouveresse, Brandom, Williams, Allen, Bilgrami, Conant, and Ramberg. Blackwells Publishers, Oxford, July 2000 ISBN 0-631-20981-6 Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, by Wilfrid Sellars, with an introduction by Richard Rorty and Study Guide by Robert Brandom ISBN 0-674-25154-7 Making It Explicit, Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment, Harvard University Press 1994. ISBN 0-674-54319-X The Logic of Inconsistency, with Nicholas Rescher, bernd Prien and David P. Schweikard, Robert Brandom, Analytic Pragmatist, Ontos,2008, 194pp. Jeremy Wanderer, Robert Brandom, Acumen Publishing, McGill-Queens University Press,2008,256 pp.256 ISBN 978-0-7735-3486-5, bernhard Weiss and Jeremy Wanderer, Reading Brandom, On Making It Explicit, Routledge 2010,371 pp, ISBN 978-0-415-38037-9. Home page 2005-2006 John Locke Lectures Interview 1999 Presentation in Sydney 20052010 interview with Brandom about pragmatism, Part 1, Part 2
21.
Patricia Churchland
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Patricia Smith Churchland is a Canadian-American analytical philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She is UC Presidents Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, San Diego and she has also held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since 1989. She is a member of the Board of Trustees Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies of Philosophy Department, in 2015, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The New Yorker magazine observed regarding the philosophical couple that, Their work is so similar that they are discussed, in journals and books. Churchland was born Patricia Smith in Oliver, British Columbia, both of her parents lacked a high-school education, her father and mother left school after grades 6 and 8 respectively. Her mother was a nurse and her father worked in publishing in addition to running the family farm. In spite of their education, Churchland has described her parents as interested in the sciences. She took her degree at the University of British Columbia. She received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at the University of Pittsburgh, thereafter she studied at Oxford University as a British Council and Canada Council Fellow, obtaining a B. It was here that she began to make a study of neuroscience with the help and encouragement of Larry Jordan. From 1982-1983 she was a Visiting Member in Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in 1984, she was invited to take up a professorship in the department of philosophy at UCSD, and relocated there with her husband Paul, where both have remained since. Since 1989, she has held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute adjacent to UCSDs campus. Another important supporter Churchland found at the Salk Institute was Francis Crick, at the Salk Institute, Churchland has worked with Terrence Sejnowskis lab as a research collaborator. Her collaboration with Sejnowski culminated in a book, The Computational Brain, Churchland was named the UC Presidents Professor of Philosophy in 1999, and served as Chair of the Philosophy Department at UCSD from 2000-2007. She attended and was a speaker at the secularist Beyond Belief symposia in 2006,2007 and their children are Mark M. Churchland and Anne K. Churchland, both of whom are neuroscientists. Churchland has focused on the interface between neuroscience and philosophy, according to her, philosophers are increasingly realizing that to understand the mind one must understand the brain. 2014 saw an exchange of views on these topics with Colin McGinn in the pages of the New York Review Of Books. Braintrust, What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality, eBook ISBN9781400838080 Touching A Nerve, The Self As Brain
22.
Noam Chomsky
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Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as the father of modern linguistics, Chomsky is also a figure in analytic philosophy. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, born to middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. At the age of sixteen he began studies at the University of Pennsylvania, taking courses in linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. From 1951 to 1955 he was appointed to Harvard Universitys Society of Fellows and he is credited as the creator or co-creator of the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a role in the decline of behaviorism. Associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism, while expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the Linguistics Wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later co-wrote an analysis articulating the propaganda model of media criticism, however, his defense of unconditional freedom of speech—including for Holocaust deniers—generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the early 1980s. Following his retirement from teaching, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the War on Terror. One of the most cited scholars in history, Chomsky has influenced an array of academic fields. Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7,1928, in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and his father was William Zev Chomsky, an Ashkenazi Jew originally from Ukraine who had fled to the United States in 1913. Chomskys mother was the Belarusian-born Elsie Simonofsky, a teacher and activist whom William had met while working at Mikveh Israel, Noam was the Chomsky familys first child. His younger brother, David Eli Chomsky, was five years later. The brothers were close, although David was more easygoing while Noam could be very competitive, as a Jew, Chomsky faced anti-semitism as a child, particularly from the Irish and German communities living in Philadelphia. He was substantially influenced by his uncle who owned a newspaper stand in New York City, whenever visiting his uncle, Chomsky frequented left-wing and anarchist bookstores in the city, voraciously reading political literature. He later described his discovery of anarchism as an accident, because it allowed him to become critical of other far-left ideologies, namely Stalinism. Chomskys primary education was at Oak Lane Country Day School, an independent Deweyite institution that focused on allowing its pupils to pursue their own interests in a non-competitive atmosphere. It was here, at age 10, that he wrote his first article, on the spread of fascism, from the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics
23.
Alice Crary
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She is well known for her numerous scholarly works on the moral dimension of language, as well as edited collections on Wittgenstein, Cora Diamond, and Stanley Cavell. Crary is the author of two monographs on ethics, Beyond Moral Judgment and Inside Ethics, On the Demands of Moral Thought, Crary currently directs eleven PhD theses in the Department of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research. In July 2016, she served on the faculty of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at the 25th anniversary NSSR Europe Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclow, Poland. Her commentary, with W. Stephen Wilson, on the faulty logic behind the K-12 education Math Wars appeared in The New York Times philosophy blog, books – monographs Inside Ethics, On the Demands of Moral Thought. The books philosophical content and linkage with liberal arts education are discussed in recent interviews at the APA blog, books – edited volumes Wittgenstein and the Moral Life, Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond. Selected articles Feminist thought and rational authority, Getting things in perspective, New Literary History, Vol.46, no.2, pp. 287–308. A Radical Perfectionist, Revisiting Cavell in the Light of Kant, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol.48, no.3, “Dogs and Concepts, ” Philosophy, vol.87, no.2, pp. 215–237. “W. G. Sebald and the Ethics of Narrative, ” Constellations, Vol.19, “A Brilliant Perspective, Diamondian Ethics, ” Philosophical Investigations, vol.34, no.4, pp. 331–352. “Minding What Already Matters, A Critique of Moral Individualism, ” Philosophical Topics, vol.38, no.1, “J. M. Coetzee, Moral Thinker, ” in Anton Leist and Peter Singer, eds. Coetzee and Ethics, Philosophical Perspectives on Literature New York, Columbia University Press, 2010), “Ethics and the Logic of Life, ” in SATS, The Nordic Journal of Philosophy, vol.10, no.2, pp. 5–34. “Wittgenstein’s Commonsense Realism about the Mind” in Ilva Gustafsson, Camilla Kronqvist and Michael McEachrane, emotions and Understanding, Wittgensteinian Perspectives, pp. 12–26. “Humans, Animals, Right and Wrong, ” in Alice Crary, ed. Wittgenstein, “Wittgenstein and Ethics, a discussion in reference to On Certainty” in Daniele Moyal-Sharrock and William Brenner, eds. Readings of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, pp. 275–301, “What Do Feminists Want in an Epistemology. ” in Peg O’Connor and Naomi Scheman, eds. Re-Reading the Canon, Feminist Interpretations of Wittgenstein, pp. 97–118, “The Happy Truth, J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things With Words, ” Inquiry, vol.45, no.1, pp. 1–22. “A Question of Silence, Feminist Theory and Women’s Voices, ” Philosophy, vol.76, no.96, “Wittgensteins Philosophy in Relation to Political Thought” in Alice Crary and Rupert Read, eds. “Does the Study of Literature Belong in Moral Philosophy, some Reflections in the Light of Ryles Thought, ” Philosophical Investigations, vol.23, no.4, pp. 315–350
24.
Donald Davidson (philosopher)
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Donald Herbert Davidson was an American philosopher. Davidson was known for his personality and the depth and difficulty of his thought. His work exerted influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, particularly in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered and his philosophical work, as a whole, is said to be concerned with how human beings communicate and interact with one another. Davidson was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on March 6,1917, to Clarence Herbert Davidson, the family lived in the Philippines from shortly after Davidsons birth until he was about 4. Then, having lived in Amherst and Philadelphia, the family settled on Staten Island when Davidson was 9 or 10. He then began to attend school and had to begin in first grade with much younger children. He then attended the Staten Island Academy, starting in fourth grade, at Harvard University, he switched his major from English and comparative literature to classics and philosophy. He graduated in 1939, with a B. A. magna cum laude, Davidson was a pianist and always had an interest in music, later teaching philosophy of music at Stanford. At Harvard, he was in the class as the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein wrote and conducted the score for the production which Davidson mounted of Aristophanes play The Birds in the original Greek. Some of the music was later to be reused in Bernsteins ballet Fancy Free, after graduation, he went to California, where he wrote radio scripts for the private-eye drama Big Town, starring Edward G. Robinson. He returned to Harvard on a scholarship in classical philosophy, teaching philosophy, before he had the opportunity to graduate from Harvard Business School, Davidson was called up by the US Navy, for which he had volunteered. He trained pilots to enemy planes and participated in the invasions of Sicily, Salerno. After three and a half years in the Navy, he tried unsuccessfully to write a novel before returning to his philosophy studies, platos Philebus was the topic of his dissertation. Under the influence of W. V. Quine, whom he credited as his mentor, he began to gradually turn toward the more formal methods. In the 1950s, Davidson worked with Patrick Suppes on developing an approach to Decision Theory. That result was comparable to Quines thesis on the indeterminacy of translation, Davidson was widely traveled and had a great range of interests he pursued with enormous energy
25.
Daniel Dennett
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As of 2017 he is the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, Dennett is referred to as one of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens. Dennett is a member of the board for The Rutherford Journal. Dennett was born on March 28,1942 in Boston, Massachusetts, when he was five, his mother took him back to Massachusetts after his father died in an unexplained plane crash. Dennetts sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett, Dennett says that he was first introduced to the notion of philosophy while attending summer camp at age 11, when a camp counselor said to him, You know what you are, Daniel. Dennett graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1959, and spent one year at Wesleyan University before receiving his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy at Harvard University in 1963, at Harvard University he was a student of W. V. Quine. In 1965, he received his Doctor of Philosophy in philosophy at the University of Oxford and he is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism and he was named 2004 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. In February 2010, he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundations Honorary Board of distinguished achievers, the intelligent selection, rejection, and weighing of the considerations that do occur to the subject is a matter of intelligence making the difference. Second, I think it installs indeterminism in the place for the libertarian. From the point of view of engineering, it is just more efficient. A fourth observation in favor of the model is that it permits moral education to make a difference, without making all of the difference. Fifth—and I think this is perhaps the most important thing to be said in favor of this provides some account of our important intuition that we are the authors of our moral decisions. They claim that, if chance is the cause of decisions. Kane says, a causal indeterminist view of this kind does not give us everything libertarians have wanted from free will. For does not have control over what chance images and other thoughts enter his mind or influence his deliberation. They simply come as they please, does have some control after the chance considerations have occurred. But then there is no more chance involved, what happens from then on, how he reacts, is determined by desires and beliefs he already has
26.
Paul Feyerabend
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Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades. At various different points in his life, he lived in England, the United States, New Zealand, Italy, Germany and his major works include Against Method, Science in a Free Society and Farewell to Reason. Feyerabend became famous for his purportedly anarchistic view of science and his rejection of the existence of universal methodological rules and he was an influential figure in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Asteroid Feyerabend is named in his honour, Paul Feyerabend was born in 1924 in Vienna, where he attended primary and high school. In this period he got into the habit of frequent reading, developed an interest in theatre, after graduating from high school in April 1942 he was drafted into the German Arbeitsdienst. After basic training in Pirmasens, Germany, he was assigned to a unit in Quelern en Bas, Feyerabend described the work he did during that period as monotonous, we moved around in the countryside, dug ditches, and filled them up again. After a short leave he joined the army and volunteered for officer school, in his autobiography he writes that he hoped the war would be over by the time he had finished his education as an officer. This turned out not to be the case, from December 1943 on, he served as an officer on the northern part of the Eastern Front, was decorated with an Iron cross, and attained the rank of lieutenant. When the German army started its retreat from the advancing Red Army, one bullet hit him in the spine. As a consequence he needed to walk with a stick for the rest of his life and he spent the rest of the war recovering from his wounds. When the war was over, Feyerabend first got a job in Apolda where he wrote plays. He was influenced by the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht and was invited by Brecht to be his assistant at the East Berlin State Opera, Feyerabend took various classes at the Weimar Academy, and returned to Vienna to study history and sociology. He became dissatisfied, however, and soon transferred to physics, where he met Felix Ehrenhaft, Feyerabend changed his course of studies to philosophy and submitted his final thesis on observation sentences. In his autobiography, he described his views during this time as staunchly empiricist. In 1948 he visited the first Alpbach Forum in Alpbach, there Feyerabend first met Karl Popper, who had a positive, as well as negative effect on him. In 1949 he was a member of the Kraft Circle. In 1951, Feyerabend was granted a British Council scholarship to study under Wittgenstein, however, Wittgenstein died before Feyerabend moved to England. Feyerabend then chose Popper as his supervisor instead, and went to study at the London School of Economics in 1952, in his autobiography, Feyerabend explains that during this time, he was influenced by Popper, I had fallen for
27.
Antony Flew
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Antony Garrard Newton Flew was an English philosopher. Belonging to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought, Flew was most notable for his work related to the philosophy of religion, during the course of his career he taught at the universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele and Reading, and at York University in Toronto. For much of his career Flew was known as an advocate of atheism. He also criticised the idea of life after death, the free will defence to the problem of evil, in 2003 he was one of the signatories of the Humanist Manifesto III. However, in 2004 he stated an allegiance to deism, more specifically a belief in the Aristotelian God and he stated that in keeping his lifelong commitment to go where the evidence leads, he now believed in the existence of a God. In 2007 a book outlining his reasons for changing his position, There is a God and he was also known for the development of the no true Scotsman fallacy, and his debate on retrocausality with Michael Dummett. Flew, the son of Methodist minister/theologian Robert Newton Flew and his wife Winifred née Garrard, was born in London and he was educated at St Faiths School, Cambridge followed by Kingswood School, Bath. He is said to have concluded by the age of 15 that there was no God, during the Second World War he studied Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and was a Royal Air Force intelligence officer. After a period with the Inter-Services Topographical Department in Oxford, he was posted to Bletchley Park in June 1944, after the war, Flew achieved a first class degree in Literae Humaniores at St Johns College, Oxford. He also won the John Locke Scholarship in Mental Philosophy in the following year, Flew was a graduate student of Gilbert Ryle, prominent in ordinary language philosophy. Both Flew and Ryle were among many Oxford philosophers fiercely criticised in Ernest Gellners book Words, a 1954 debate with Michael Dummett over backward causation was an early highlight in Flews career. For a year, 1949–50, Flew was a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church, from 1950 to 1954 he was a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, and from 1954 to 1971 he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Keele. He held a professorship at the University of Calgary, 1972–73, between 1973 and 1983 he was professor of philosophy at the University of Reading. At this time, he developed one of his most famous arguments, upon his retirement, Flew took up a half-time post for a few years at York University, Toronto. Politically Flew was a conservative and wrote articles for The Journal of Libertarian Studies. His name appears on letterheads into 1992 as a Vice-President of the Conservative Monday Club and he was one of the signatories to a letter in The Times along with Lord Sudeley, Sir Alfred Sherman, and Dr. Flew married on 28 June 1952. Flew died on 8 April 2010, while nursed in an Extended Care Facility in Reading, England, while an undergraduate, Flew attended the weekly meetings of C. S. Lewiss Socratic Club fairly regularly. Flew also criticised several of the other philosophical proofs for Gods existence and he concluded that the ontological argument in particular failed because it is based on the premise that the concept of Being can be derived from the concept of Goodness
28.
Gottlob Frege
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Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. Considered a major figure in mathematics, he is responsible for the development of modern logic and he is also understood by many to be the father of analytic philosophy, where he concentrated on the philosophy of language and mathematics. Though largely ignored during his lifetime, Giuseppe Peano and Bertrand Russell introduced his work to generations of logicians. Frege was born in 1848 in Wismar, Mecklenburg-Schwerin and his father Carl Alexander Frege was the co-founder and headmaster of a girls high school until his death. In childhood, Frege encountered philosophies that would guide his future scientific career, Frege studied at a gymnasium in Wismar and graduated in 1869. His teacher Gustav Adolf Leo Sachse, who was a poet, played the most important role in determining Freges future scientific career, Frege matriculated at the University of Jena in the spring of 1869 as a citizen of the North German Confederation. In the four semesters of his studies he attended approximately twenty courses of lectures and his most important teacher was Ernst Karl Abbe. Abbe was more than a teacher to Frege, he was a trusted friend, after Freges graduation, they came into closer correspondence. His other notable university teachers were Christian Philipp Karl Snell, Hermann Karl Julius Traugott Schaeffer, Frege married Margarete Katharina Sophia Anna Lieseberg on 14 March 1887. Though his education and early work focused primarily on geometry. His Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens, Halle a/S, the Begriffsschrift broke new ground, including a rigorous treatment of the ideas of functions and variables. Previous logic had dealt with the constants and, or. Freges conceptual notation however can represent such inferences, one of Freges stated purposes was to isolate genuinely logical principles of inference, so that in the proper representation of mathematical proof, one would at no point appeal to intuition. If there was an element, it was to be isolated and represented separately as an axiom, from there on. Already in the 1879 Begriffsschrift important preliminary theorems, for example a generalized form of law of trichotomy, were derived within what Frege understood to be pure logic and this idea was formulated in non-symbolic terms in his The Foundations of Arithmetic. Later, in his Basic Laws of Arithmetic, Frege attempted to derive, by use of his symbolism, most of these axioms were carried over from his Begriffsschrift, though not without some significant changes. The one truly new principle was one he called the Basic Law V, the crucial case of the law may be formulated in modern notation as follows. Let denote the extension of the predicate Fx, i. e. the set of all Fs, then Basic Law V says that the predicates Fx and Gx have the same extension iff ∀x
29.
Jerry Fodor
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Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He is known for his provocative and sometimes polemical style of argumentation and as one of the philosophers of mind of the late twentieth. Fodor argues that states, such as beliefs and desires, are relations between individuals and mental representations. He maintains that these representations can only be explained in terms of a language of thought in the mind. Furthermore, this language of thought itself is an existing thing that is codified in the brain. For Fodor, significant parts of the mind, such as perceptual and linguistic processes, are structured in terms of modules, or organs, which he defines by their causal and functional roles. These modules are independent of each other and of the central processing part of the mind. Fodor suggests that the character of these modules permits the possibility of causal relations with external objects and this, in turn, makes it possible for mental states to have contents that are about things in the world. The central processing part, on the hand, takes care of the logical relations between the various contents and inputs and outputs. His contributions in this include the so-called asymmetric causal theory of reference. Fodor strongly opposes reductive accounts of the mind and he has also emerged as a prominent critic of what he characterizes as the ill-grounded Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theory of natural selection. Jerry Fodor was born in New York City in 1935, of Jewish descent, from 1959 to 1986 Fodor was on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1986 to 1988 he was a professor at the City University of New York. From 1988 until his retirement in 2016 he was State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he is now emeritus. Besides his interest in philosophy, Fodor passionately follows opera and regularly writes columns for the London Review of Books on that. Philosopher Colin McGinn, who taught with Fodor at Rutgers, described him in words, Fodor is a gentle man inside a burly body. He is shy and voluble at the same time, a formidable polemicist burdened with a sensitive soul. Disagreeing with Jerry on an issue, especially one dear to his heart can be a chastening experience
30.
Ian Hacking
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Ian MacDougall Hacking, born February 18,1936, is a Canadian philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Hacking also earned his PhD at Cambridge, under the direction of Casimir Lewy and he started his teaching career as an instructor at Princeton University in 1960 but, after just one year, moved to the University of Virginia as an assistant professor. After working as a fellow at Cambridge from 1962 to 1964, he taught at his alma mater, UBC, first as an assistant professor. He became a lecturer at Cambridge in 1969 before shifting to Stanford University in 1974, after teaching for several years at Stanford, he spent a year at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld, Germany, from 1982 to 1983. Hacking was promoted to Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1983 and University Professor, from 2000 to 2006, he held the Chair of Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts at the Collège de France. Hacking is the first Anglophone to be elected to a permanent chair in the Collèges history, after retiring from the Collège de France, Hacking was a Professor of Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz, from 2008 to 2010. He concluded his career in 2011 as a visiting professor at the University of Cape Town and currently spends his days tending to his inner-city garden in Toronto with his wife. Influenced by debates involving Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend and others, the fourth edition of Feyerabends 1975 book Against Method, and the 50th anniversary edition of Kuhns The Structure of Scientific Revolutions include an Introduction by Hacking. He is sometimes described as a member of the Stanford School in philosophy of science, Hacking himself still identifies as a Cambridge analytic philosopher. Hacking has been a proponent of a realism about science called entity realism. This form of realism encourages a realistic stance towards answers to the scientific unknowns hypothesized by mature sciences, Hacking has also been influential in directing attention to the experimental and even engineering practices of science, and their relative autonomy from theory. Because of this, Hacking moved philosophical thinking a step further than the initial historical, after 1990, Hacking shifted his focus somewhat from the natural sciences to the human sciences, partly under the influence of the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault was an influence as early as 1975 when Hacking wrote Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy. as history, the idea of a sharp break has been criticized, but competing frequentist and subjective interpretations of probability still remain today. In Mad Travelers Hacking provided an account of the effects of a medical condition known as fugue in the late 1890s. Fugue, also known as mad travel, is a type of insanity in which European men would walk in a trance for hundreds of miles without knowledge of their identities. In 2002, Hacking was awarded the first Killam Prize for the Humanities and he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2004. Hacking was appointed visiting professor at University of California, Santa Cruz for the Winters of 2008 and 2009. On August 25,2009, Hacking was named winner of the Holberg International Memorial Prize, Hacking was chosen for his work on how statistics and the theory of probability have shaped society
