The Greek word in the New Testament that is translated in English as "sin" is hamartia, which literally means missing the target. 1 John 3:4 states: "Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is ...
Paul Boghossian is Silver professor of philosophy at New York University, where he was Chair of the Department for ten years (1994–2004) and responsible for building it into one of the very top philo ...
Social constructivism is closely related to social constructionism in the sense that people are working together to construct artifacts. However, there is an important difference: social constructioni ...
In his 1989 book Laws and Symmetry, van Fraassen, a philosopher of science, attempted to lay the ground-work for explaining physical phenomena without assuming that such phenomena are caused by rules ...
Scientific realism involves two basic positions. First, it is a set of claims about the features of an ideal scientific theory; an ideal theory is the sort of theory science aims to produce. Second, i ...
While the standards for determining whether a body of knowledge, methodology, or practice is scientific can vary from field to field, a number of basic principles are widely agreed upon by scientists. ...
The word "metaphysics" derives from the Greek words μετ? (metá, "beyond", "upon" or "after") and φυσικ? (physiká, "physics"). It was first used as the title for several of Aristotle's work ...
Karl Popper was born in Vienna (then in Austria-Hungary) in 1902, to upper middle-class parents. All of Karl Popper's grandparents were Jewish, but the Popper family converted to Lutheranism before Ka ...
An early attempt at demarcation can be seen in the efforts of Greek natural philosophers and medical practitioners to distinguish their methods and their accounts of nature from the mythological or my ...
In inductive reasoning, one makes a series of observations and infers a new claim based on them. For instance, from a series of observations that a woman walks her dog by the market at 8am on Monday, ...
The "efficient cause" of an object is equivalent to that which causes change and motion to start or stop (such as a painter painting a house) (see Aristotle, Physics II 3, 194b29). In many cases, this ...
Francis Bacon wrote in his Advancement of Learning (1605) that natural science "doth make inquiry, and take consideration of the same natures : but how? Only as to the material and efficient causes of ...
Though philosophical zombies are widely used in thought experiments, the detailed articulation of the concept is not always the same. P-zombies were introduced primarily to argue against specific type ...
In Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, Chalmers wrote:“ It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experi ...
An important part of some accounts of functionalism is the idea of multiple realizability. Since, according to standard functionalist theories, mental states are the corresponding functional role, men ...
