Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy organizes scholars from around the world in philosophy and related disciplines to create and maintain an up-to-date reference work
Plato - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy There is another feature of Plato’s writings that makes him distinctive among the great philosophers and colors our experience of him as an author Nearly everything he wrote takes the form of a dialogue
The Meaning of Life - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy It has become increasingly common for philosophers of life’s meaning, especially objectivists, to hold that life as a whole, or at least long stretches of it, can substantially affect its meaningfulness beyond the amount of meaning (if any) in its parts
Truth - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy But a number of philosophers (e g , Davidson, 1969; Field, 1972) have seen Tarski’s theory as providing at least the core of a correspondence theory of truth which dispenses with the metaphysics of facts
The Moral Status of Animals - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Increasingly, philosophers are arguing that while our behavior towards animals is indeed subject to moral scrutiny, the kinds of ethical arguments that are usually presented frame the issues in the wrong way
Locke On Freedom - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy This question made sense to Scholastic philosophers (including, e g , Bramhall, who engaged in a protracted debate on the subject with Hobbes), who tended not to distinguish between the question of whether the will is free and the question of whether the mind or soul is free with respect to willing, and, indeed, some of whom thought that acts
Happiness - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Philosophers have most commonly distinguished two accounts of happiness: hedonism, and the life satisfaction theory Hedonists identify happiness with the individual’s balance of pleasant over unpleasant experience, in the same way that welfare hedonists do
Democracy - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1 Democracy Defined The term “democracy”, as we will use it in this entry, refers very generally to a method of collective decision making characterized by a kind of equality among the participants at an essential stage of the decision-making process
Time - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy In a famous paper published in 1908, J M E McTaggart argued that there is in fact no such thing as time, and that the appearance of a temporal order to the world is a mere appearance Other philosophers before and since (including, especially, F H Bradley) have argued for the same conclusion