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49 Philosophical Idea topics matching:
Filter this Collection| x name | x image | x Attributed Philosopher | x article |
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| x Chinese room |
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John Searle |
The Chinese room is a thought experiment presented by John Searle. Suppose that there is a program that gives a computer the ability to carry on an intelligent conversation in written Chinese. If we give the program to someone who speaks only...
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| x Schrödinger's cat |
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Erwin Schrödinger |
Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday...
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| x Pascal's Wager |
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Pascal’s Wager (also known as Pascal’s Gambit) is an argument in apologetic philosophy which was devised by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist, Blaise Pascal. It posits that there's more to be gained from...
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| x Mary's room |
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Mary's room (also known as Mary the super-scientist) is a philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson in his article "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (1982) and extended in "What Mary Didn't Know" (1986). The argument is intended to motivate...
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| x Personal identity |
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John Locke |
Personal identity is the unique numerical identity of persons through time. That is to say, the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the same person, persisting through...
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| David Hume | |||
| Derek Parfit | |||
| x Intentional stance | Daniel Dennett |
The intentional stance is a term coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett for the level of abstraction in which we view the behavior of a thing in terms of mental properties. It is part of a theory of mental content proposed by Dennett, which provides...
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| x Tao |
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Tao or Dao (Chinese: 道; pinyin: Dào (help·info)) is a Chinese word meaning 'way', 'path', 'route', or sometimes more loosely, 'doctrine' or 'principle'. Within the context of traditional Chinese philosophy and religion, Tao is a metaphysical...
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| x Secularization | Gianni Vattimo |
Secularization (or secularisation) is the transformation of a society from close identification with religious values and institutions toward nonreligious (or irreligious) values and secular institutions. The secularization thesis refers to the...
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| x Nihilism | Gianni Vattimo |
Nihilism ( /ˈnaɪ.ɨlɪzəm/ or /ˈniː.ɨlɪzəm/; from the Latin nihil, nothing) is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential...
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| Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi | |||
| x Weak theology | Gianni Vattimo |
Weak theology -- in close association with postmodern a/theology -- is a school of thought within continental philosophical theology that has been heavily influenced by Jacques Derrida's style of theorizing known as deconstruction.
Weak theology...
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| x All products of a tradition stand within that tradition | Hans-Georg Gadamer | ||
| x Russell's paradox |
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Bertrand Russell |
In the foundations of mathematics, Russell's paradox (also known as Russell's antinomy), discovered by Bertrand Russell in 1901, showed that the naive set theory created by Georg Cantor leads to a contradiction. The same paradox had been discovered...
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| x Logical atomism |
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Bertrand Russell |
Logical atomism is a philosophical belief that originated in the early 20th century with the development of analytic philosophy. Its principal exponents were the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, the early work of his Austrian-born pupil and...
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| x Generative grammar |
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Noam Chomsky |
In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical...
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| x Universal grammar | Noam Chomsky |
Universal grammar is a theory in linguistics, usually credited to Noam Chomsky, that the ability to learn grammar is hard-wired into the brain. The theory suggests that linguistic ability manifests itself without being taught, and that there are...
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| x Transformational grammar | Noam Chomsky |
In linguistics, a transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in the Chomskyan tradition of phrase structure grammars (as opposed to...
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| x Government and binding theory |
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Noam Chomsky |
Government and binding is a theory of syntax and a phrase structure grammar (as opposed to a dependency grammar) in the tradition of transformational grammar developed principally by Noam Chomsky in the 1980s. This theory is a radical revision of...
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| x X-bar theory |
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Noam Chomsky |
X-bar theory is a component of linguistic theory which attempts to identify syntactic features presumably common to all those human languages that fit in a presupposed (1965) framework. It claims that among their phrasal categories, all those...
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| x Chomsky hierarchy | Noam Chomsky |
Within the field of computer science, specifically in the area of formal languages, the Chomsky hierarchy (occasionally referred to as Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy) is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars.
This hierarchy of...
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| x Context-free grammar | Noam Chomsky |
In formal language theory, a context-free grammar (CFG) is a formal grammar in which every production rule is of the form
where V is a single nonterminal symbol, and w is a string of terminals and/or nonterminals (w can be empty).
The languages...
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| x Principles and parameters | Noam Chomsky |
Principles and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles (i.e. abstract rules or grammars) and specific parameters (i.e. markers, switches)...
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| x Linguistic minimalism | Noam Chomsky |
In linguistics, the Minimalist Program (MP) is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky presents MP as a program, not as a theory, following...
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| x Language acquisition device | Noam Chomsky |
The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a postulated "organ" of the brain that is supposed to function as a congenital device in language acquisition. First proposed by Noam Chomsky, the LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which enables...
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| x Poverty of the stimulus | Noam Chomsky |
In linguistics, the poverty of the stimulus (POTS) is the assertion that natural language grammar is unlearnable given the relatively limited data available to children learning a language, and therefore that this knowledge is supplemented with some...
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| x Chomsky normal form | Noam Chomsky |
In formal language theory, a context-free grammar is said to be in Chomsky normal form if all of its production rules are of the form:
where , and are nonterminal symbols, α is a terminal symbol (a symbol that represents a constant value), is the...
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| x Propaganda model |
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Noam Chomsky |
The propaganda model is a conceptual model in political economy advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky that states how propaganda, including systemic biases, function in mass media. The model seeks to explain how populations are manipulated...
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| x Bricolage |
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Claude Lévi-Strauss |
Bricolage ( /ˌbriːkɵˈlɑːʒ/ or /ˌbrɪkɵˈlɑːʒ/) is a term used in several disciplines, among them the visual arts, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such...
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| x Structuralism | Claude Lévi-Strauss |
Structuralism is a theoretical paradigm that emphasizes that elements of culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or "structure." Alternately, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn,...
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| Ferdinand de Saussure | |||
| Gunther Kress | |||
| x Mythography |
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Claude Lévi-Strauss |
A mythographer, or a mythologist is a compiler of myths. The word derives from the Greek "μυθογραφία" (mythografia), "writing of fables", from "μῦθος" (mythos), "speech, word, fact, story, narrative" + "γράφω" (graphο), "to write, to inscribe"....
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| x Culinary triangle | Claude Lévi-Strauss |
The culinary triangle is a concept described by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss involving three types of cooking; these are boiling, roasting, and smoking, usually done to meat.
The boiling of meat is looked at as a cultural way of cooking...
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| x Practical philosophy | Hans-Georg Gadamer |
The division of philosophy into a practical philosophy and a theoretical discipline has its origin in Aristotle's moral philosophy and natural philosophy categories. In Sweden and Finland courses in theoretical and practical philosophy are taught...
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| x Justice as Fairness | John Rawls |
Justice as Fairness is the political philosopher John Rawls' conception of justice. It comprises two main principles of Liberty and Equality; the second is subdivided into Fair Equality of Opportunity and the Difference Principle.
Rawls arranges the...
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| x ’Pataphysics |
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Alfred Jarry |
'Pataphysics (French: 'pataphysique) is a philosophy or pseudophilosophy dedicated to studying what lies beyond the realm of metaphysics. The term was coined and the concept created by French writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), who defined 'pataphysics...
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| x Cratylism | Cratylus |
Cratylism is a philosophical theory based on the teachings of Cratylus also known as Kratylos. Vaguely exegetical, it holds that the fluid nature of ideas, words, and communications leaves them fundamentally baseless, and possibly unable to support...
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| x Law of the Infinite Cornucopia | Leszek Kołakowski |
The Law of the Infinite Cornucopia, put forth by Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski suggests that for any given doctrine one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of arguments by which one can support it.
A historian's application of this...
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| x No true Scotsman | Antony Flew |
No true Scotsman is an informal logical fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion. When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim, rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this...
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| x Dualism |
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Heraclitus |
In philosophy of mind, dualism is the assumption that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct. Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, and is contrasted...
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| René Descartes | |||
| x Demiurge |
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The demiurge is a concept from the Platonic, Neopythagorean, Middle Platonic, and Neoplatonic schools of philosophy for an artisan-like figure responsible for the fashioning and maintenance of the physical universe. The term was subsequently adopted...
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| x Polydeism |
Polydeism (from Greek πολύς ( 'poly' ), meaning 'many', and Latin deus meaning God) is a polytheistic form of Deism encompassing the belief that the universe was the collective creation of multiple Gods, each of whom created a piece of the universe...
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| x Quietism |
Quietism is a Christian philosophy that swept through France, Italy and Spain during the 17th century, but it had much earlier origins. The mystics known as Quietists insist, with more or less emphasis, on intellectual stillness and interior...
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| x Georgism |
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Henry George |
Georgism (also called Geoism or Geonomics) is an economic philosophy and ideology that holds that people own what they create, but that things found in nature, most importantly land, belong equally to all. The Georgist philosophy is based on the...
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| x Social contract |
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Thomas Hobbes |
The social contract or political contract is an intellectual construct that typically addresses two questions, first, that of the origin of society, and second, the question of the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual. Social...
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| x State of nature |
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John Locke |
State of Nature is a term in political philosophy used in social contract theories to describe the hypothetical condition that preceded governments. There must have been a time before government, and so the question is how legitimate government...
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| x Tabula rasa |
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John Locke |
Tabula rasa is the epistemological theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception. Generally proponents of the tabula rasa thesis favour the "nurture" side of the nature...
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| x Positive liberty | Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
Positive liberty is defined as having the power and resources to fulfill one's own potential (this may include freedom from internal constraints); as opposed to negative liberty, which is freedom from external restraint. Specifically, the concepts...
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| x General will | Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
The general will (volonté générale), made famous by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is a concept in political philosophy referring to the will of the people as a whole. As used by Rousseau, the "general will" is identical to the rule of law, and to Spinoza's...
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| x Amour-propre | Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
Amour-propre (lit. "self love") is a concept in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that denotes a self-love that depends upon the opinion of others. Rousseau contrasts it with amour de soi, which also means self love, but which does not involve...
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| x Civil religion |
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
The intended meaning of the term civil religion often varies according to whether one is a sociologist of religion or a professional political commentator. The following discussion includes both perspectives followed by a brief history of the...
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| x Popular sovereignty | Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
Popular sovereignty or the sovereignty of the people is the principle that the legitimacy of the state is created and sustained by the will or consent of its people, who are the source of all political power. It is closely associated with...
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