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.
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher who spent most of his career in Great Britain. Born in Dublin, Burke served as a member of Parliament (MP) between 1766 and 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party.
Normative ethics is the study of ethical behaviour and is the branch of philosophical ethics that investigates questions regarding how one ought to act, in a moral sense.
A deliberative assembly is a meeting of members who use parliamentary procedure.
Moral relativism or ethical relativism is used to describe several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different peoples and cultures. An advocate of such ideas is often referred to as a relativist.
Representative democracy is a type of democracy where representatives are elected by the public. Nearly all modern Western-style democracies function as some type of representative democracy: for example, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the United States. This is different from direct democracy, where the public votes directly on laws or policies, rather than representatives.
In the United States, the Electoral College is the group of presidential electors that is formed every four years during the presidential election for the sole purpose of voting for the president and vice president. The process is described in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. The number of electoral votes a state has equals its number of Senators (2) plus its number of Representatives in the House of Representatives, the latter being dependent on the Census's reported population. Each state appoints electors using legal procedures determined by its legislature, equal in number to its congressional delegation totaling 535 electors in the 50 states. A 1961 amendment granted the federal District of Columbia three electors. Federal office holders, including senators and representatives, cannot be electors. Of the current 538 electors, a simple majority of 270 or more electoral votes is required to elect the president and vice president. If no candidate achieves a majority there, a contingent election is held by the House of Representatives to elect the president and by the Senate to elect the vice president.
Moral realism is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world, some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately. This makes moral realism a non-nihilist form of ethical cognitivism with an ontological orientation, standing in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism and moral skepticism, including ethical subjectivism, error theory, and non-cognitivism. Moral realism's two main subdivisions are ethical naturalism and ethical non-naturalism.
Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:
- Ethical sentences express propositions.
- Some such propositions are true.
- The truth or falsity of such propositions is ineliminably dependent on the attitudes of people.
In metaphysics and philosophy of language, the correspondence theory of truth states that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world and whether it accurately describes that world.
The delegate model of representation is a model of a representative democracy. In this model, constituents elect their representatives as delegates for their constituency. These delegates act only as a mouthpiece for the wishes of their constituency/state and have no autonomy from the constituency only the autonomy to vote for the actual representatives of the state. This model does not provide representatives the luxury of acting in their own conscience and is bound by imperative mandate. Essentially, the representative acts as the voice of those who are (literally) not present.
The Constitutional Convention took place in Philadelphia from May 25 to September 17, 1787. Although the convention was intended to revise the league of states and first system of government under the Articles of Confederation, the intention from the outset of many of its proponents, chief among them James Madison of Virginia and Alexander Hamilton of New York, was to create a new frame of government rather than fix the existing one. The delegates elected George Washington of Virginia, former commanding general of the Continental Army in the late American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and proponent of a stronger national government, to become President of the convention. The result of the convention was the creation of the Constitution of the United States, placing the Convention among the most significant events in American history.
Political representation is the activity of making citizens "present" in public policy-making processes when political actors act in the best interest of citizens according to Hanna Pitkin's Concept of Representation (1967).
Akrasia is a lack of mental strength or willpower, or the tendency to act against one's better judgment. It is sometimes translated into English as incontinence. Beginning with Plato, a variety of philosophers have attempted to determine whether or not akrasia exists and how best to define it.
Edward Nouri Zalta is an American philosopher who is a senior research scholar at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. He received his BA from Rice University in 1975 and his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1981, both in philosophy. Zalta has taught courses at Stanford University, Rice University, the University of Salzburg, and the University of Auckland. Zalta is also the Principal Editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Quietism in philosophy sees the role of philosophy as broadly therapeutic or remedial. Quietist philosophers believe that philosophy has no positive thesis to contribute; rather, it defuses confusions in the linguistic and conceptual frameworks of other subjects, including non-quietist philosophy. For quietists, advancing knowledge or settling debates is not the job of philosophy, rather philosophy should liberate the mind by diagnosing confusing concepts.
Bracketing means looking at a situation and refraining from judgement and biased opinions to wholly understand an experience. The preliminary step in the philosophical movement of phenomenology is describing an act of suspending judgment about the natural world to instead focus on analysis of experience. Suspending judgement involves stripping away every connotation and assumption made about an object. Its earliest conception can be traced back to Immanuel Kant who argued that the only reality that one can know is the one each individual experiences in their mind. Edmund Husserl, building on Kant’s ideas, first proposed bracketing in 1913, to help better understand another’s phenomena.
A mathematical object is an abstract concept arising in mathematics. In the usual language of mathematics, an object is anything that has been formally defined, and with which one may do deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs. Typically, a mathematical object can be a value that can be assigned to a variable, and therefore can be involved in formulas. Commonly encountered mathematical objects include numbers, sets, functions, expressions, geometric objects, transformations of other mathematical objects, and spaces. Mathematical objects can be very complex; for example, theorems, proofs, and even theories are considered as mathematical objects in proof theory.
James Iredell was one of the first Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was appointed by President George Washington and served from 1790 until his death in 1799. His son, James Iredell Jr., was a Governor of North Carolina.
Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies was a pamphlet written by Daniel Dulany the Younger in opposition to the UK Stamp Act of 1765 effectively imposing taxes on the colonies. In the pamphlet, published in Annapolis in 1765, Dulany argued that the colonies could not be taxed by Parliament, as they were not represented in it. The pamphlet sold widely and was influential in the development of colonial opinion in the early stages of the American Revolution.
