Accidentalism (philosophy)
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Accidentalism (philosophy)
In philosophy, accidentalism denies the causal closure of physical determinism and maintains that events can succeed one another haphazardly or by chance (not in the mathematical but in the popular sense). Opponents of accidentalism maintain that what seems to be a chance occurrence is actually the result of one or more causes that remain unknown due only to a lack of investigation. Charles Sanders Peirce used the term tychism (from τύχη, chance) for theories that make chance an objective factor in the process of the Universe. In ethics the term is used, like indeterminism, to denote the theory that mental change cannot always be ascribed to previously ascertained psychological states, and that volition is not causally related to the motives involved. An example of this theory is the doctrine of the ''liberum arbitrium indifferentiae'' ("liberty of indifference"), according to which the choice of two or more alternative possibilities is affected neither by contemporaneous data of ...
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Philosophy
Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some sources claim the term was coined by Pythagoras ( BCE), although this theory is disputed by some. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument, and systematic presentation. in . Historically, ''philosophy'' encompassed all bodies of knowledge and a practitioner was known as a ''philosopher''."The English word "philosophy" is first attested to , meaning "knowledge, body of knowledge." "natural philosophy," which began as a discipline in ancient India and Ancient Greece, encompasses astronomy, medicine, and physics. For example, Newton's 1687 ''Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy'' later became classified as a book of physics. In the 19th century, the growth of modern research universiti ...
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Causal Closure
Physical causal closure is a metaphysical fallacy about the nature of causation in the physical realm with significant ramifications in the study of metaphysics and the mind. It's based on the misconception that the physical world is a combinatorial algorithm and not an entropic one.https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-this-universe-new-calculation-suggests-our-cosmos-is-typical-20221117/ Why This Universe? A New Calculation Suggests Our Cosmos Is Typical. - Quanta Magazine In a strongly stated version, physical causal closure says that "all physical states have ''pure'' physical causes" — Jaegwon Kim, or that "physical effects have ''only'' physical causes" — Agustin Vincente, p. 150. Those who accept the theory tend, in general although not exclusively, to the physicalist view that all entities that exist are physical entities. As Karl Popper says, "The physicalist principle of closedness of the physical ... is of decisive importance and I take it as the characteristic principl ...
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Physical Determinism
Determinism is a philosophical view, where all events are determined completely by previously existing causes. Deterministic theories throughout the history of philosophy have developed from diverse and sometimes overlapping motives and considerations. The opposite of determinism is some kind of indeterminism (otherwise called nondeterminism) or randomness. Determinism is often contrasted with free will, although some philosophers claim that the two are compatible.For example, see Determinism is often used to mean ''causal determinism'', which in physics is known as cause-and-effect. This is the concept that events within a given paradigm are bound by causality in such a way that any state of an object or event is completely determined by its prior states. This meaning can be distinguished from other varieties of determinism mentioned below. Debates about determinism often concern the scope of determined systems; some maintain that the entire universe is a single determinate ...
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Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for thirty years, Peirce made major contributions to logic, a subject that, for him, encompassed much of what is now called epistemology and the philosophy of science. He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics, of which he is a founder, which foreshadowed the debate among logical positivists and proponents of philosophy of language that dominated 20th-century Western philosophy. Additionally, he defined the concept of abductive reasoning, as well as rigorously formulated mathematical induction and deductive reasoning. As early as 1886, he saw that logic gate, logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits. The same idea was used decades later to produce digital computers. See Also In 1934, the philosopher Paul W ...
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Tychism
Tychism ( el, τύχη, translation=chance) is a thesis proposed by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce that holds that absolute chance, or indeterminism, is a real factor operative in the universe. This doctrine forms a central part of Peirce's comprehensive evolutionary cosmology. It may be considered both the direct opposite of Albert Einstein's oft quoted dictum that: " God does not play dice with the universe" and an early philosophical anticipation of Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The thesis In his theory of tychism, Peirce sought to deny the central position of the doctrine of necessity which maintains that "the state of things existing at any time, together with certain immutable laws, completely determine the state of things at every other time." One of the principal arguments of the necessitarians is that their position involves a presupposition of all science. Peirce attacks this idea asserting: "To 'postulate' a proposition is no more than to h ...
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Indeterminism
Indeterminism is the idea that events (or certain events, or events of certain types) are not caused, or do not cause deterministically. It is the opposite of determinism and related to chance. It is highly relevant to the philosophical problem of free will, particularly in the form of libertarianism. In science, most specifically quantum theory in physics, indeterminism is the belief that no event is certain and the entire outcome of anything is probabilistic. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the "Born rule", proposed by Max Born, are often starting points in support of the indeterministic nature of the universe. Indeterminism is also asserted by Sir Arthur Eddington, and Murray Gell-Mann. Indeterminism has been promoted by the French biologist Jacques Monod's essay "''Chance and Necessity''". The physicist-chemist Ilya Prigogine argued for indeterminism in complex systems. Necessary but insufficient causation Indeterminists do not have to deny that causes exist ...
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Necessitarianism
Necessitarianism is a metaphysical principle that denies all mere possibility; there is exactly one way for the world to be. It is the strongest member of a family of principles, including hard determinism, each of which deny libertarian free will, reasoning that human actions are predetermined by external or internal antecedents. Necessitarianism is stronger than hard determinism, because even the hard determinist would grant that the causal chain constituting the world might have been different as a whole, even though each member of that series could not have been different, given its antecedent causes. The most famous defender of necessitarianism in the history of philosophy is Spinoza. Anthony Collins was also known for his defense of necessitarianism. His brief ''Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty'' (1715) was a key statement of the necessitarianist standpoint. The ''Century Dictionary'' defined it in 1889–91 as belief that the will is not free, but instead subject to ex ...
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Indeterminacy (philosophy)
Indeterminacy, in philosophy, can refer both to common scientific and mathematical concepts of uncertainty and their implications and to another kind of indeterminacy deriving from the nature of definition or meaning. It is related to deconstructionism and to Nietzsche's criticism of the Kantian noumenon. Indeterminacy in philosophy Introduction The problem of indeterminacy arises when one observes the eventual circularity of virtually every possible definition. It is easy to find loops of definition in any dictionary, because this seems to be the only way that certain concepts, and generally very important ones such as that of existence, can be defined in the English language. A definition is a collection of other words, and in any finite dictionary if one continues to follow the trail of words in search of the precise meaning of any given term, one will inevitably encounter this linguistic indeterminacy. Philosophers and scientists generally try to eliminate indeterminate ter ...
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The Cambridge Dictionary Of Philosophy
''The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy'' (1995; second edition 1999; third edition 2015) is a dictionary of philosophy published by Cambridge University Press and edited by the philosopher Robert Audi Robert N. Audi (born November 1941) is an American philosopher whose major work has focused on epistemology, ethics (especially on ethical intuitionism), rationality and the theory of action. He is O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University .... There are 28 members on the Board of Editorial Advisors and 440 contributors. Publication history ''The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy'' was first published in 1995 by Cambridge University Press. A second edition followed in 1999, and a third edition in 2015. References Bibliography ;Books * External links More information at the Cambridge University Press website 1995 non-fiction books Books by Robert Audi Cambridge University Press books Dictionaries of philosophy Encyclopedias of philosophy English-language book ...
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Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII of England, King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press A university press is an academic publishing house specializing in monographs and scholarly journals. Most are nonprofit organizations and an integral component of a large research university. They publish work that has been reviewed by schola ... in the world. It is also the King's Printer. Cambridge University Press is a department of the University of Cambridge and is both an academic and educational publisher. It became part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, following a merger with Cambridge Assessment in 2021. With a global sales presence, publishing hubs, and offices in more than 40 Country, countries, it publishes over 50,000 titles by authors from over 100 countries. Its publishing includes more than 380 academic journals, monographs, reference works, school and uni ...
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Metaphysical Theories
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality. The word "metaphysics" comes from two Greek words that, together, literally mean "after or behind or among he study ofthe natural". It has been suggested that the term might have been coined by a first century CE editor who assembled various small selections of Aristotle's works into the treatise we now know by the name ''Metaphysics'' (μετὰ τὰ φυσικά, ''meta ta physika'', 'after the ''Physics'' ', another of Aristotle's works). Metaphysics studies questions related to what it is for something to exist and what types of existence there are. Metaphysics seeks to answer, in an abstract and ful ...
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