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Graham Oddie is a New Zealand philosopher who lives and works in the United States. He has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado since 1994. [1]
Oddie was educated at the University of Otago, where he received a first class honors degree in philosophy, and at the London School of Economics, where he received a PhD in logic and philosophy of science (1979). His teachers at the University of Otago included Pavel Tichý and Alan Musgrave, and at the LSE, John Watkins (his supervisor), and Colin Howson. Before moving to the United States he held positions at the University of Otago Oddie wrote a PhD on his new idea of truthlikeness which transformed into his book, Likeness to Truth. [2] and Massey University (where he was Professor and Chair of Philosophy from 1988 to 1994). At the University of Colorado he was elected Chair of Philosophy in 1997, and appointed Associate Dean for Humanities and the Arts in 2002. He is a past President of the Australasian Association of Philosophy, and has held visiting positions at the University of Helsinki, Tantur Institute Jerusalem, the University of London, the Australian National University, the University of Sydney, the University of Canterbury, and Oxford University. [3]
Oddie is best known for his work in the theory of value—including the nature of value, the logic of value and our knowledge of value. He is also known for work on cognitive values (truth, truthlikeness and probability). [4] His books include Likeness to Truth [5] (the first monograph on the notion of verisimilitude, or closeness to the truth), and Value, Reality, and Desire [6] (an extended defense of the thesis that value is real and irreducible).
In analytic philosophy, anti-realism is the position that the truth of a statement rests on its demonstrability through internal logic mechanisms, such as the context principle or intuitionistic logic, in direct opposition to the realist notion that the truth of a statement rests on its correspondence to an external, independent reality. In anti-realism, this external reality is hypothetical and is not assumed.
Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, is a movement whose central thesis is the verification principle. This theory of knowledge asserts that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content. Starting in the late 1920s, groups of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians formed the Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle, which, in these two cities, would propound the ideas of logical positivism.
The problem of universals is an ancient question from metaphysics that has inspired a range of philosophical topics and disputes: "Should the properties an object has in common with other objects, such as color and shape, be considered to exist beyond those objects? And if a property exists separately from objects, what is the nature of that existence?"
Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical movement that arose in the second half of the 20th century as a critical response to assumptions allegedly present in modernist philosophical ideas regarding culture, identity, history, or language that were developed during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment. Postmodernist thinkers developed concepts like différance, repetition, trace, and hyperreality to subvert "grand narratives", univocity of being, and epistemic certainty. Postmodern philosophy questions the importance of power relationships, personalization, and discourse in the "construction" of truth and world views. Many postmodernists appear to deny that an objective reality exists, and appear to deny that there are objective moral values.
Truth or verity is the property of being in accord with fact or reality. In everyday language, it is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs, propositions, and declarative sentences.
Philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. Amongst its central questions are the difference between science and non-science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose and meaning of science as a human endeavour. Philosophy of science focuses on metaphysical, epistemic and semantic aspects of scientific practice, and overlaps with metaphysics, ontology, logic, and epistemology, for example, when it explores the relationship between science and the concept of truth. Philosophy of science is both a theoretical and empirical discipline, relying on philosophical theorising as well as meta-studies of scientific practice. Ethical issues such as bioethics and scientific misconduct are often considered ethics or science studies rather than the philosophy of science.
In logic and mathematics, a truth value, sometimes called a logical value, is a value indicating the relation of a proposition to truth, which in classical logic has only two possible values.
Virtue ethics is an approach that treats virtue and character as the primary subjects of ethics, in contrast to other ethical systems that put consequences of voluntary acts, principles or rules of conduct, or obedience to divine authority in the primary role.
Hindu philosophy or Vedic philosophy is the set of Indian philosophical systems that developed in tandem with the religion of Hinduism during the iron and classical ages of India. In Indian tradition, the word used for philosophy is Darshana, from the Sanskrit root 'दृश' meaning 'to see, to experience'.
Arthur Norman Prior, usually cited as A. N. Prior, was a New Zealand–born logician and philosopher. Prior (1957) founded tense logic, now also known as temporal logic, and made important contributions to intensional logic, particularly in Prior (1971).
Indian philosophy consists of philosophical traditions of the Indian subcontinent. The philosophies are often called darśana meaning, "to see" or "looking at." Ānvīkṣikī means “critical inquiry” or “investigation." Unlike darśana, ānvīkṣikī was used to refer to Indian philosophies by classical Indian philosophers, such as Chanakya in the Arthaśāstra.
Ilkka Maunu Olavi Niiniluoto is a Finnish philosopher and mathematician, serving as a professor of philosophy at the University of Helsinki since 1981. He is currently on leave from his position, having been appointed as rector of the University of Helsinki on 1 August 2003, for a five-year period. On 25 April 2008 he was chosen to succeed Kari Raivio as chancellor of the University of Helsinki, beginning 1 June 2008.
Moral nihilism is the meta-ethical view that nothing is morally right or morally wrong and that morality does not exist.
Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski is an American philosopher. She is the Emerita George Lynn Cross Research Professor, as well as Emerita Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, at the University of Oklahoma. She writes in the areas of epistemology, philosophy of religion, and virtue theory.
The Robert Burns Fellowship is a New Zealand literary residency. Established in 1958 to coincide with bicentennial celebrations of the birth of Robert Burns, it is often claimed to be New Zealand's premier literary residency. The list of past fellows includes many of New Zealand's most notable 20th and 21st century writers.
In meta-ethics, expressivism is a theory about the meaning of moral language. According to expressivism, sentences that employ moral terms – for example, "It is wrong to torture an innocent human being" – are not descriptive or fact-stating; moral terms such as "wrong", "good", or "just" do not refer to real, in-the-world properties. The primary function of moral sentences, according to expressivism, is not to assert any matter of fact but rather to express an evaluative attitude toward an object of evaluation. Because the function of moral language is non-descriptive, moral sentences do not have any truth conditions. Hence, expressivists either do not allow that moral sentences to have truth value, or rely on a notion of truth that does not appeal to any descriptive truth conditions being met for moral sentences.
In philosophy, verisimilitude is the notion that some propositions are closer to being true than other propositions. The problem of verisimilitude is the problem of articulating what it takes for one false theory to be closer to the truth than another false theory.
Evolutionary ethics is a field of inquiry that explores how evolutionary theory might bear on our understanding of ethics or morality. The range of issues investigated by evolutionary ethics is quite broad. Supporters of evolutionary ethics have argued that it has important implications in the fields of descriptive ethics, normative ethics, and metaethics.
Barry Stroud was a Canadian philosopher and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Known especially for his work on philosophical skepticism, he wrote about David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the metaphysics of color, and many other topics.
Structuralism is a theory in the philosophy of mathematics that holds that mathematical theories describe structures of mathematical objects. Mathematical objects are exhaustively defined by their place in such structures. Consequently, structuralism maintains that mathematical objects do not possess any intrinsic properties but are defined by their external relations in a system. For instance, structuralism holds that the number 1 is exhaustively defined by being the successor of 0 in the structure of the theory of natural numbers. By generalization of this example, any natural number is defined by its respective place in that theory. Other examples of mathematical objects might include lines and planes in geometry, or elements and operations in abstract algebra.