AAPT Members American Association of Philosophy Teachers

[Revised entry by Timothy Endicott on August 9, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Political philosophers are not generally preoccupied with questions in the philosophy of language. But legal philosophers are political philosophers with a specialization that gives language (and philosophy of language) a special fascination....

[New Entry by Lars Vinx on August 7, 2010.] Carl Schmitt (1888 - 1985) was a conservative German legal, constitutional, and political theorist. Schmitt is often considered to be one of the most important critics of liberalism, parliamentary democracy, and liberal cosmopolitanism. But the value and significance of Schmitt's work is subject to controversy, mainly due to his intellectual support for and active involvement with National...

[New Entry by Barry Dainton on August 6, 2010.] In ordinary conscious experience, consciousness of time seems to be ubiquitous. For example, we seem to be directly aware of change, movement, and succession across brief temporal intervals. How is this possible? Many different models of temporal consciousness have been proposed. Some philosophers have argued that consciousness is confined to a momentary interval and that...

[Revised entry by Lorne Falkenstein on August 6, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Etienne Bonnot, Abbe de Condillac, was the chief exponent of a radically empiricist account of the workings of the mind that has since come to be referred to as "sensationism." Whereas John Locke's empiricism followed upon a rejection of innate principles and innate ideas, Condillac went further and rejected innate abilities as well. On his version of empiricism, experience not only provides us with "ideas"...

[Revised entry by John Marenbon on August 5, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (born: circa 475 - 7 C.E., died: 526? C.E.) has long been recognized as one of the most important intermediaries between ancient philosophy and the Latin Middle Ages and, through his Consolation of Philosophy, as a talented literary writer, with a gift for making philosophical ideas dramatic and accessible to a wider public. He had previously translated...

[Revised entry by Henry Laycock on August 4, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] It is standard practice to introduce the entries in a work of reference with a definition of the topic. However, the concept of object - that concept of object which is of fundamental interest within philosophy - is among the most general concepts (or categories) which we possess. It seems very doubtful that it can be defined in more general terms; the best that seems possible is to trace...

[Revised entry by Steven Luper on August 4, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Most of us think we can always enlarge our knowledge base by accepting things that are entailed by (or logically implied by) things we know. The set of things we know is closed under entailment (or under deduction or logical implication), which means that we know that a given claim is true upon recognizing, and accepting thereby, that it follows from what we know. However, some theorists deny that knowledge...

[Revised entry by Petr Hajek on August 4, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The term "fuzzy logic" emerged in the development of the theory of fuzzy sets by Lotfi Zadeh (1965). A fuzzy subset A of a (crisp) set X is characterized by assigning to each element x of X the degree of membership of x in A (e.g., X is a group of people, A the fuzzy set of...

[Revised entry by Robert Burch on August 3, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, Internet resources] Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 - 1914) was the founder of American pragmatism (later called by Peirce "pragmaticism" in order to differentiate his views from others being labelled "pragmatism"), a theorist of logic, language, communication, and the general theory of signs (which was often called by Peirce "semeiotic"), an extraordinarily prolific...

[Revised entry by Richard Cross on July 30, 2010. Changes to: Main text] First proposed by John Duns Scotus (1266 - 1308), a haecceity is a non-qualitative property responsible for individuation. As understood by Scotus, a haecceity is not a bare particular in the sense of something underlying qualities. It is, rather, a non-qualitative property of a substance or thing: it is a "thisness" (a haecceitas, from the Latin haec,...

[Revised entry by Allen Carlson on July 29, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Environmental aesthetics is a relatively new sub-field of philosophical aesthetics. It arose within analytic aesthetics in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to its emergence, aesthetics within the analytic tradition was largely concerned with philosophy of art. Environmental aesthetics originated as a reaction to this emphasis, pursuing instead the investigation of the aesthetic...

[Revised entry by Alex Tuckness on July 29, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] John Locke (1632 - 1704) is among the most influential political philosophers of the modern period. In the Two Treatises of Government, he defended the claim that men are by nature free and equal against claims that God had made all people naturally subject to a monarch. He argued that people have rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and property, that have a foundation independent of the...

[New Entry by Larry M. Jorgensen on July 29, 2010.] In the seventeenth century, "consciousness" began to take on a uniquely modern sense. This transition was sparked by new theories of mind and ideas, and it connected with other important issues of debate during the seventeenth century, including debates over the transparency of the mental, animal consciousness, and innate ideas. Additionally, consciousness was tied closely to moral...

[Revised entry by Christine Sypnowich on July 28, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] If law is a system of enforceable rules governing social relations and legislated by a political system, it might seem obvious that law is connected to ideology. Ideology refers, in a general sense, to a system of political ideas, and law and politics seem inextricably intertwined. Just as ideologies are dotted across the political spectrum, so too are legal systems. Thus we speak of both legal systems and ideologies as...

[New Entry by Dominic Murphy on July 28, 2010.] Philosophical discussions of mental illness fall into three families. First, there are topics that arise when we treat psychiatry as a special science and deal with it using the methods and concepts of philosophy of science. This includes discussion of such issues as explanation, reduction and classification. Second, there are conceptual issues that arise when we try to understand the very idea of mental...

[Revised entry by George Graham on July 27, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] It has sometimes been said that "behave is what organisms do." Behaviorism is built on this assumption, and its goal is to promote the scientific study of behavior. In this entry I consider different types of behaviorism. I outline...

[Revised entry by James Garson on July 27, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Connectionism is a movement in cognitive science which hopes to explain human intellectual abilities using artificial neural networks (also known as 'neural networks' or 'neural nets'). Neural networks are simplified models of the brain composed of large numbers of units (the analogs of neurons) together with weights that measure the strength of connections between the...

[New Entry by W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz on July 26, 2010.] In the discipline of international relations there are contending general theories or theoretical perspectives. Realism, also known as political realism, is a view of international politics that stresses its competitive and conflictual side. It is usually contrasted with idealism or liberalism, which tends to emphasize cooperation. Realists consider the principal actors in the international arena to be states,...

[Revised entry by Jan Woleński on July 23, 2010. Changes to: Bibliography] The Lvov-Warsaw School (LWS) was the most important movement in the history of Polish philosophy. It was established by Kazimierz Twardowski at the end of the 19th century in Lvov, a city at that time belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The LWS flourished in the years 1918 - 1939. Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Stanisław Leśniewski, Jan Łukasiewicz...

[Revised entry by Nick Zangwill on July 22, 2010. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Beauty is an important part of our lives. Ugliness too. It is no surprise then that philosophers since antiquity have been interested in our experiences of and judgments about beauty and ugliness. They have tried to understand the nature of these experiences and judgments, and they have also wanted to know whether these experiences and judgments were legitimate. Both these projects took a sharpened...