AAPT Members American Association of Philosophy Teachers

[New Entry by Michael Seidler on September 3, 2010.] Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf (1632 - 1694) was almost as unfamiliar during most of the 19th and 20th centuries as he had been familiar during the preceding hundred years and more. His fate shows well how philosophical interests shape historical background narratives. More or less consciously, individual thinkers and the traditions they spawn frame themselves in terms of an edited past...

[Revised entry by Kristin Andrews on September 3, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The philosophical issues that relate to research on animal cognition can be categorized into three groups: questions about the assumptions on which the research is based; questions that arise about the methods used in the research programs; and questions that arise from the specific research programs themselves....

[Revised entry by Pierre Jacob on August 31, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Intentionality is the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. The puzzles of intentionality lie at the interface between the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. The word itself, which is of medieval Scholastic origin, was rehabilitated by the philosopher Franz Brentano towards the end of the nineteenth century....

[Revised entry by Christian Coseru on August 27, 2010. Changes to: Main text] Perhaps no other classical philosophical tradition, East or West, offers a more complex and counter-intuitive account of mind and mental phenomena than Buddhism. While Buddhists share with other Indian philosophers the view that the domain of the mental encompasses a set of interrelated faculties and processes, they do not associate mental phenomena with the activity of a substantial,...

[Revised entry by Rachel Cohon on August 27, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Hume's position in ethics, which is based on his empiricist theory of the mind, is best known for asserting four theses: (1) Reason alone cannot be a motive to the will, but rather is the "slave of the passions" (see Section 3)...

[Revised entry by Michel Bourdeau on August 27, 2010. Changes to: Internet resources] Auguste Comte (1798 - 1857) is the founder of positivism, a philosophical and political movement which enjoyed a very wide diffusion in the second half of the nineteenth century. It sank into an almost complete oblivion during the twentieth, when it was eclipsed by neopositivism. However, Comte's decision to develop successively a philosophy of mathematics, a philosophy of physics, a philosophy of...

[Revised entry by Jeffrey Bub on August 26, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Quantum entanglement is a physical resource, like energy, associated with the peculiar nonclassical correlations that are possible between separated quantum systems. Entanglement can be measured, transformed, and purified. A pair of quantum systems in an entangled state can be used as a quantum information channel to perform computational and cryptographic tasks that are impossible for classical systems. The...

[Revised entry by Jules Coleman and Gabriel Mendlow on August 26, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, Internet resources] Tort is a branch of private law. The other main branches are contract, property, and restitution (sometimes known as unjust enrichment)....

[Revised entry by Michael LeBuffe on August 25, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach was a philosopher, translator, and prominent social figure of the French Enlightenment. In his philosophical writings Holbach developed a deterministic and materialistic metaphysics which grounded his polemics against organized religion and his utilitarian ethical and political theory. As a translator, Holbach made significant contributions to the European...

[Revised entry by Sylvia Berryman on August 25, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The Greek tradition regarded Leucippus as the founder of atomism in ancient Greek philosophy. Little is known about him, and his views are hard to distinguish from those of his associate Democritus. He is sometimes said to have been a student of Zeno of Elea, and to have devised the atomist philosophy in order to escape from the problems raised by Parmenides and his followers....

[Revised entry by Sylvia Berryman on August 25, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Democritus, known in antiquity as the 'laughing philosopher' because of his emphasis on the value of 'cheerfulness,' was one of the two founders of ancient atomist theory. He elaborated a system originated by his teacher Leucippus into a materialist account of the natural world. The atomists held that there are smallest indivisible bodies from which...

[Revised entry by James Nickel on August 24, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Human rights are international norms that help to protect all people everywhere from severe political, legal, and social abuses. Examples of human rights are the right to freedom of religion, the right to a fair trial when charged with a crime, the right not to be tortured, and the right to engage in political activity. These rights exist in morality and in law at the national and international...

[New Entry by Jan van Eijck and Albert Visser on August 23, 2010.] Dynamic semantics is a perspective on natural language semantics that emphasises the growth of information in time. It is an approach to meaning representation where pieces of text or discourse are viewed as instructions to update an existing context with new information, with an updated context as result. In a slogan: meaning is context change potential. A prime source of inspiration for this dynamic turn is the...

[Revised entry by William Seager and Sean Allen-Hermanson on August 23, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Panpsychism is the doctrine that mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe. Unsurprisingly, each of the key terms, "mind", "fundamental" and "throughout the universe" is subject to a variety of interpretations by panpsychists, leading to a range of possible philosophical positions. For example, an important distinction is that...

[Revised entry by Christopher Shields on August 23, 2010. Changes to: Bibliography, active-mind.html, notes.html] Aristotle (384 - 322 BC) was born in Macedon, in what is now northern Greece, but spent most of his adult life in Athens. His life in Athens divides into two periods, first as a member of Plato's Academy (367 - 347) and later as director of his own school, the Lyceum (334 - 323). The intervening years were spent mainly in Assos and Lesbos, and briefly back in Macedon. His years away from Athens were...

[New Entry by William Bristow on August 20, 2010.] The Enlightenment is the period in the history of western thought and culture, stretching roughly from the mid-decades of the seventeenth century through the eighteenth century, characterized by dramatic revolutions in science, philosophy, society and politics; these revolutions swept away the medieval world-view and ushered in our modern western world. Enlightenment thought culminates...

[Revised entry by Andrew Brook and Paul Raymont on August 20, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Human consciousness usually displays a striking unity. When one experiences a noise and, say, a pain, one is not conscious of the noise and then, separately, of the pain. One is conscious of the noise and pain together, as aspects of a single conscious experience. Since at least the time of Immanuel Kant (1781/7), this phenomenon has been called the unity of consciousness. More...

[New Entry by Madhav Deshpande on August 20, 2010.] Speculations about the nature and function of language in India can be traced to its earliest period. These speculations are multi-faceted in that one detects many different strands of thought regarding language. Some of these speculations are about what one may call the principle of language, but others are about specific languages or specific uses of these languages. One sees speculations regarding the...

[Revised entry by John Bishop on August 20, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] What is faith? This entry focusses on the nature of faith, although issues about the justifiability of faith are also implicated....

[Revised entry by Frank Arntzenius on August 18, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Suppose that two geysers, about one mile apart, erupt at irregular intervals, but usually erupt almost exactly at the same time. One would suspect that they come from a common source, or at least that there is a common cause of their eruptions. And this common cause surely acts before both eruptions take place. This idea, that simultaneous correlated events must have prior common causes, was first made precise...