You are looking at all articles with the topic "Philosophy". We found 172 matches.

Hint: To view all topics, click here. Too see the most popular topics, click here instead.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Economics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Politics 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics 🔗 Game theory 🔗 Fisheries and Fishing

In economic science, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action. The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a "common") in Great Britain and Ireland. The concept became widely known as the "tragedy of the commons" over a century later after an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968. Faced with evidence of historical and existing commons, Hardin later retracted his original thesis, stating that the title should have been "The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons".

Although taken as a hypothetical example by Lloyd, the historical demise of the commons of Britain and Europe resulted not from misuse of long-held rights of usage by the commoners, but from the commons' owners enclosing and appropriating the land, abrogating the commoners' rights.

Although open-access resource systems may collapse due to overuse (such as in overfishing), many examples have existed and still do exist where members of a community with regulated access to a common resource co-operate to exploit those resources prudently without collapse, or even creating "perfect order". Elinor Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for demonstrating this concept in her book Governing the Commons, which included examples of how local communities were able to do this without top-down regulations or privatization. On the other hand, Dieter Helm argues that these examples are context-specific and the tragedy of the commons "is not generally solved this way. If it were, the destruction of nature would not have occurred."

In a modern economic context, "commons" is taken to mean any open-access and unregulated resource such as the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, ocean fish stocks, or even an office refrigerator. In a legal context, it is a type of property that is neither private nor public, but rather held jointly by the members of a community, who govern access and use through social structures, traditions, or formal rules.

In environmental science, the "tragedy of the commons" is often cited in connection with sustainable development, meshing economic growth and environmental protection, as well as in the debate over global warming. It has also been used in analyzing behavior in the fields of economics, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, game theory, politics, taxation, and sociology.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Greece 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Philosophy/Ancient philosophy

Aristotle's views on women influenced later Western thinkers, as well as Islamic thinkers, who quoted him as an authority until the end of the Middle Ages, influencing women's history.

In his Politics, Aristotle saw women as subject to men, but as higher than slaves, and lacking authority; he believed the husband should exert political rule over the wife. Among women's differences from men were that they were, in his view, more impulsive, more compassionate, more complaining, and more deceptive. He gave the same weight to women's happiness as to men's, and in his Rhetoric stated that society could not be happy unless women were happy too. Whereas Plato was open to the potential equality of men and women, stating both that women were not equal to men in terms of strength and virtue, but were equal to men in terms of rational and occupational capacity, and hence in the ideal Republic should be educated and allowed to work alongside men without differentiation, Aristotle appears to have disagreed.

In his theory of inheritance, Aristotle considered the mother to provide a passive material element to the child, while the father provided an active, ensouling element with the form of the human species.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Religion 🔗 Physics 🔗 London 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 England 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of science 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophers 🔗 Biography/politics and government 🔗 Philosophy/Metaphysics 🔗 Physics/Biographies 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Christianity/theology 🔗 Lincolnshire 🔗 Anglicanism

Isaac Newton (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727) was considered an insightful and erudite theologian by his Protestant contemporaries. He wrote many works that would now be classified as occult studies, and he wrote religious tracts that dealt with the literal interpretation of the Bible. He kept his heretical beliefs private.

Newton's conception of the physical world provided a model of the natural world that would reinforce stability and harmony in the civic world. Newton saw a monotheistic God as the masterful creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation. Although born into an Anglican family, and a devout but unorthodox Christian, by his thirties Newton held a Christian faith that, had it been made public, would not have been considered orthodox by mainstream Christians. Scholars now consider him a Nontrinitarian Arian.

He may have been influenced by Socinian christology.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Greece 🔗 Cognitive science 🔗 Philosophy/Ancient philosophy 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology

The Allegory of the Cave, or Plato's Cave, is an allegory presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic (514a–520a) to compare "the effect of education (παιδεία) and the lack of it on our nature". It is written as a dialogue between Plato's brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates, narrated by the latter. The allegory is presented after the analogy of the sun (508b–509c) and the analogy of the divided line (509d–511e).

In the allegory "The Cave", Plato describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. The shadows represent the fragment of reality that we can normally perceive through our senses, while the objects under the sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason. Three higher levels exist: the natural sciences; mathematics, geometry, and deductive logic; and the theory of forms.

Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are actually not the direct source of the images seen. A philosopher aims to understand and perceive the higher levels of reality. However, the other inmates of the cave do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life.

Socrates remarks that this allegory can be paired with previous writings, namely the analogy of the sun and the analogy of the divided line.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of religion 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind 🔗 Philosophy/Metaphysics

Neutral monism is an umbrella term for a class of metaphysical theories in the philosophy of mind, concerning the relation of mind to matter. These theories take the fundamental nature of reality to be neither mental nor physical; in other words it is "neutral".

Neutral monism has gained prominence as a potential solution to theoretical issues within the philosophy of mind, specifically the mind–body problem and the hard problem of consciousness. The mind–body problem is the problem of explaining how mind relates to matter. The hard problem is a related philosophical problem targeted at physicalist theories of mind specifically: the problem arises because it is not obvious how a purely physical universe could give rise to conscious experience. This is because physical explanations are mechanistic: that is, they explain phenomena by appealing to underlying functions and structures. And, though explanations of this sort seem to work well for a wide variety of phenomena, conscious experience seems uniquely resistant to functional explanations. As the philosopher David Chalmers has put it: "even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience - perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report - there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?" The hard problem has motivated Chalmers and other philosophers to abandon the project of explaining consciousness in terms physical or chemical mechanisms (only 56.5% of philosophers are physicalists, according to the most recent PhilPapers survey).

With this, there has been growing demand for alternative ontologies (such as neutral monism) that may provide explanatory frameworks more suitable for explaining the existence of consciousness. It has been accepted by several prominent English-speaking philosophers, such as William James and Bertrand Russell.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophical literature 🔗 Books 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Greece 🔗 Philosophy/Ancient philosophy 🔗 Archaeology

The Derveni papyrus is an Ancient Greek papyrus roll that was discovered in 1962 at the archaeological site of Derveni, near Thessaloniki, in Central Macedonia. A philosophical treatise, the text is an allegorical commentary on an Orphic poem, a theogony concerning the birth of the gods, produced in the circle of the philosopher Anaxagoras. The roll dates to around 340 BC, during the reign of Philip II of Macedon, making it Europe's oldest surviving manuscript. The poem itself was originally composed near the end of the 5th century BC, and "in the fields of Greek religion, the sophistic movement, early philosophy, and the origins of literary criticism it is unquestionably the most important textual discovery of the 20th century." While interim editions and translations were published over the subsequent years, the manuscript in its entirety was first published in 2006.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Systems 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics 🔗 Philosophy/Metaphysics

In the social sciences, unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated consequences or unforeseen consequences) are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen. The term was popularised in the twentieth century by American sociologist Robert K. Merton.

Unintended consequences can be grouped into three types:

• Unexpected benefit: A positive unexpected benefit (also referred to as luck, serendipity or a windfall).
• Unexpected drawback: An unexpected detriment occurring in addition to the desired effect of the policy (e.g., while irrigation schemes provide people with water for agriculture, they can increase waterborne diseases that have devastating health effects, such as schistosomiasis).
• Perverse result: A perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended (when an intended solution makes a problem worse).

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Ancient philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology

"I know that I know nothing" is a saying derived from Plato's account of the Greek philosopher Socrates. Socrates himself was never recorded as having said this phrase, and scholars generally agree that Socrates only ever asserted that he believed that he knew nothing, having never claimed that he knew that he knew nothing. It is also sometimes called the Socratic paradox, although this name is often instead used to refer to other seemingly paradoxical claims made by Socrates in Plato's dialogues (most notably, Socratic intellectualism and the Socratic fallacy).

This saying is also connected or conflated with the answer to a question Socrates (according to Xenophon) or Chaerephon (according to Plato) is said to have posed to the Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, in which the oracle stated something to the effect of "Socrates is the wisest person in Athens." Socrates, believing the oracle but also completely convinced that he knew nothing, was said to have concluded that nobody knew anything, and that he was only wiser than others because he was the only person who recognized his own ignorance.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of science 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Cultural Evolution

Memetics is a theory of the evolution of culture based on Darwinian principles with the meme as the unit of culture. The term "meme" was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, to illustrate the principle that he later called "Universal Darwinism". All evolutionary processes depend on information being copied, varied, and selected, a process also known as variation with selective retention. The information that is copied is called the replicator, and genes are the replicator for biological evolution. Dawkins proposed that the same process drives cultural evolution, and he called this second replicator the "meme". He gave as examples, tunes, catchphrases, fashions, and technologies. Like genes, memes are selfish replicators and have causal efficacy; in other words, their properties influence their chances of being copied and passed on. Some succeed because they are valuable or useful to their human hosts while others are more like viruses.

Just as genes can work together to form co-adapted gene complexes, so groups of memes acting together form co-adapted meme complexes or memeplexes. Memeplexes include (among many other things) languages, traditions, scientific theories, financial institutions, and religions. Dawkins famously referred to religions as "viruses of the mind".

Among proponents of memetics are psychologist Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine, who argues that when our ancestors began imitating behaviours, they let loose a second replicator and co-evolved to become the "meme machines" that copy, vary, and select memes in culture. Philosopher Daniel Dennett develops memetics extensively, notably in his books Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and From Bacteria to Bach and Back. He describes the units of memes as "the smallest elements that replicate themselves with reliability and fecundity." and claims that "Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes." In The Beginning of Infinity, physicist David Deutsch contrasts static societies that depend on anti-rational memes suppressing innovation and creativity, with dynamic societies based on rational memes that encourage enlightenment values, scientific curiosity, and progress.

Criticisms of memetics include claims that memes do not exist, that the analogy with genes is false, that the units cannot be specified, that culture does not evolve through imitation, and that the sources of variation are intelligently designed rather than random. Critics of memetics include biologist Stephen Jay Gould who calls memetics a "meaningless metaphor". Philosopher Dan Sperber argues against memetics as a viable approach to cultural evolution because cultural items are not directly copied or imitated but are reproduced. Anthropologist Robert Boyd and biologist Peter Richerson work within the alternative, and more mainstream, field of cultural evolution theory and gene-culture coevolution. Dual inheritance theory has much in common with memetics but rejects the idea that memes are replicators. From this perspective, memetics is seen as just one of several approaches to cultural evolution and one that is generally considered less useful than the alternatives of gene-culture coevolution or dual inheritance theory. The main difference is that dual inheritance theory ultimately depends on biological advantage to genes, whereas memetics treats memes as a second replicator in its own right. Memetics also extends to the analysis of Internet culture and Internet memes.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic

In economics, hyperbolic discounting is a time-inconsistent model of delay discounting. It is one of the cornerstones of behavioral economics and its brain-basis is actively being studied by neuroeconomics researchers.

The discounted utility approach states that intertemporal choices are no different from other choices, except that some consequences are delayed and hence must be anticipated and discounted (i.e., reweighted to take into account the delay).

Given two similar rewards, humans show a preference for one that arrives sooner rather than later. Humans are said to discount the value of the later reward, by a factor that increases with the length of the delay. In the financial world, this process is normally modeled in the form of exponential discounting, a time-consistent model of discounting. A large number of psychological studies have since demonstrated deviations in instinctive preference from the constant discount rate assumed in exponential discounting. Hyperbolic discounting is an alternative mathematical model that agrees more closely with these findings.

According to hyperbolic discounting, valuations fall relatively rapidly for earlier delay periods (as in, from now to one week), but then fall more slowly for longer delay periods (for instance, more than a few days). For example, in an early study subjects said they would be indifferent between receiving $15 immediately or $30 after 3 months, $60 after 1 year, or $100 after 3 years. These indifferences reflect annual discount rates that declined from 277% to 139% to 63% as delays got longer. This contrasts with exponential discounting, in which valuation falls by a constant factor per unit delay and the discount rate stays the same.

The standard experiment used to reveal a test subject's hyperbolic discounting curve is to compare short-term preferences with long-term preferences. For instance: "Would you prefer a dollar today or three dollars tomorrow?" or "Would you prefer a dollar in one year or three dollars in one year and one day?" It has been claimed that a significant fraction of subjects will take the lesser amount today, but will gladly wait one extra day in a year in order to receive the higher amount instead. Individuals with such preferences are described as "present-biased".

The most important consequence of hyperbolic discounting is that it creates temporary preferences for small rewards that occur sooner over larger, later ones. Individuals using hyperbolic discounting reveal a strong tendency to make choices that are inconsistent over time – they make choices today that their future self would prefer not to have made, despite knowing the same information. This dynamic inconsistency happens because hyperbolas distort the relative value of options with a fixed difference in delays in proportion to how far the choice-maker is from those options.