Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continually affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978.
A thought experiment is a hypothetical situation in which a hypothesis, theory, or principle is laid out for the purpose of thinking through its consequences.
Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.
First formulated by David Hume, the problem of induction questions our reasons for believing that the future will resemble the past, or more broadly it questions predictions about unobserved things based on previous observations. This inference from the observed to the unobserved is known as "inductive inferences", and Hume, while acknowledging that everyone does and must make such inferences, argued that there is no non-circular way to justify them, thereby undermining one of the Enlightenment pillars of rationality.
George Stephen Boolos was an American philosopher and a mathematical logician who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The new riddle of induction was presented by Nelson Goodman in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast as a successor to Hume's original problem. It presents the logical predicates grue and bleen which are unusual due to their time-dependence. Many have tried to solve the new riddle on those terms, but Hilary Putnam and others have argued such time-dependency depends on the language adopted, and in some languages it is equally true for natural-sounding predicates such as "green". For Goodman they illustrate the problem of projectible predicates and ultimately, which empirical generalizations are law-like and which are not. Goodman's construction and use of grue and bleen illustrates how philosophers use simple examples in conceptual analysis.
Henry Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism, and aesthetics.
The Bobbs-Merrill Company was a book publisher located in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Irma S. Rombauer was an American cookbook author, best known for The Joy of Cooking (1931), one of the world's most widely read cookbooks. Following Irma Rombauer's death, periodic revisions of the book were carried out by her daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, and subsequently by Marion's son Ethan Becker. The Joy of Cooking remains in print, edited by members of the Rombauer–Becker family, and more than 18 million copies have been sold.
The Metaphysics of Morals is a 1797 work of political and moral philosophy by Immanuel Kant. It is divided into two sections: the Doctrine of Right, dealing with political rights, and the Doctrine of Virtue, dealing with ethical virtues.
In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of computation. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943) were the first to suggest that neural activity is computational. They argued that neural computations explain cognition. The theory was proposed in its modern form by Hilary Putnam in 1967, and developed by his PhD student, philosopher, and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Despite being vigorously disputed in analytic philosophy in the 1990s due to work by Putnam himself, John Searle, and others, the view is common in modern cognitive psychology and is presumed by many theorists of evolutionary psychology. In the 2000s and 2010s, the view has resurfaced in analytic philosophy.
Clarence Edwin Ayres was the principal thinker in the Texas school of institutional economics during the middle of the 20th century.
This is a bibliography of works by Damon Knight.
Irrealism is a philosophical position first advanced by Nelson Goodman in "Ways of Worldmaking", encompassing epistemology, metaphysics, and aesthetics.
Factual relativism argues that truth itself is relative. This form of relativism has its own particular problem, regardless of whether one is talking about truth being relative to the individual, the position or purpose of the individual, or the conceptual scheme within which the truth was revealed. This problem centers on what Maurice Mandelbaum in 1962 termed the "self-excepting fallacy." Largely because of the self-excepting fallacy, few authors in the philosophy of science currently accept alethic cognitive relativism. Factual relativism is a way to reason where facts used to justify any claims are understood to be relative and subjective to the perspective of those proving or falsifying the proposition.
The Boston Pamphlet was a 1772 pamphlet published in Boston in the American Revolution. Written by members of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, the pamphlet outlined the rights of British American colonists and indicated how recent British policies were in violation of those rights. Although called the "Boston Pamphlet" by contemporaries, it was officially known as The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and other Inhabitants of The Town of Boston, In Town Meeting assembled, According to Law.
Arthur Stringer was a Canadian novelist, screenwriter, and poet who later moved to the United States.
Catherine Z. Elgin is a philosopher working in epistemology and the philosophies of art and science. She holds a Ph.D. from Brandeis University where she studied with Nelson Goodman and is currently a professor of philosophy of education at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University.
Israel Scheffler was an American philosopher of science and of education.
David Macarthur is an Australian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney who works primarily on skepticism, metaphysical quietism, pragmatism, liberal naturalism and philosophy of art. He has taken up these and other themes in articles on the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
