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Compossibility
Compossibility is a philosophical concept from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. According to Leibniz, a complete individual thing (for example a person) is characterized by all its properties, and these determine its relations with other individuals. The existence of one individual may negate the possibility of the existence of another. A possible world is made up of individuals that are compossible—that is, individuals that can exist together. Composability and possible worlds Leibniz indicates that a world is a set of compossible things, however, that a world is a kind of collection of things that God could bring into existence. For not even God can bring into existence a world in which there is some contradiction among its members or their properties. When Leibniz speaks of a possible world, he means a set of compossible, finite things that God could have brought into existence if he were not constrained by the goodness that is part of his nature. The actual world, on the other ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou (; ; born 17 January 1937) is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Badiou has written about the concepts of being, truth, event and the subject in a way that, he claims, is neither postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity. Badiou has been involved in a number of political organisations, and regularly comments on political events. Badiou argues for a return of communism as a political force. Biography Badiou is the son of the mathematician (1905–1996), who was a working member of the Resistance in France during World War II. Alain Badiou was a student at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and then the École Normale Supérieure (1955–1960). In 1960, he wrote his ' (roughly equivalent to an MA thesis) on Spinoza for Georges Canguilhem (the topic was "Demonstrative Stru ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philosophical
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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history and philology. Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics and computer science. In addition, he contributed to the field of library science: while serving as overseer of the Wolfenbüttel library in Germany, he devised a cataloging system that would have served as a guide for many of Europe's largest libraries. Leibniz's contributions to this vast array of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of thousands of letters and in unpublished manuscripts. He wrote in several languages, primarily in Latin, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Best Of All Possible Worlds
The phrase "the best of all possible worlds" (french: Le meilleur des mondes possibles; german: Die beste aller möglichen Welten) was coined by the German polymath and Enlightenment philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in his 1710 work '' Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l'homme et l'origine du mal'' (''Essays of Theodicy on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil''), more commonly known simply as the ''Theodicy''. The claim that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds is the central argument in Leibniz's theodicy, or his attempt to solve the problem of evil. Leibniz In Leibniz's works, the argument about the best of all possible worlds appears in the context of his ''theodicy'', a word that he coined by combining the Greek words ''Theos'', 'God', and ''dikē'', 'justice'. Its object was to solve the problem of evil, that is, to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering in the world with the existence of a perfectly g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louis Bourguet
Louis Bourguet (23 April 1678, Nîmes – 31 December 1742, Neuchâtel) was a polymath and correspondent of Leibniz who wrote on archaeology, geology, philosophy, Biblical scholarship and mathematics. Bourguet entered the College of Zurich in 1688. He became Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at Neuchâtel in 1731. He tried to integrate Leibnizian philosophy with issues in natural philosophy. Works * *''Traité des petrifications'', 1742 References External links *''Lettres philosophiques sur la formation de sels et des crystaux''(1729, French) - digital facsimile from Linda Hall Library''Traité des petrifications''(1742, French) - digital facsimile from Linda Hall Library The Linda Hall Library is a privately endowed American library of science, engineering and technology located in Kansas City, Missouri, sitting "majestically on a urban arboretum." It is the "largest independently funded public library of scien ... 1678 births 1742 deaths French archa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Definitions Of Philosophy
Definitions of philosophy aim at determining what all forms of philosophy have in common and how to distinguish philosophy from other disciplines. Many different definitions have been proposed but there is very little agreement on which is the right one. Some general characteristics of philosophy are widely accepted, for example, that it is a form of rational inquiry that is systematic, critical, and tends to reflect on its own methods. But such characteristics are usually too vague to give a proper definition of philosophy. Many of the more concrete definitions are very controversial, often because they are revisionary in that they deny the label philosophy to various subdisciplines for which it is normally used. Such definitions are usually only accepted by philosophers belonging to a specific philosophical movement. One reason for these difficulties is that the meaning of the term "philosophy" has changed throughout history: it used to include the sciences as its subdisciplines, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Truth
Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth 2005 In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs, propositions, and declarative sentences. Truth is usually held to be the opposite of falsehood. The concept of truth is discussed and debated in various contexts, including philosophy, art, theology, and science. Most human activities depend upon the concept, where its nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion; these include most of the sciences, law, journalism, and everyday life. Some philosophers view the concept of truth as basic, and unable to be explained in any terms that are more easily understood than the concept of truth itself. Most commonly, truth is viewed as the correspondence of language or thought to a mind-independent world. This is called the correspondence theory of truth. Various theo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Louis René Deleuze ( , ; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of ''Capitalism and Schizophrenia'': ''Anti-Oedipus'' (1972) and ''A Thousand Plateaus'' (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise ''Difference and Repetition'' (1968) is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus. See also: "''Difference and Repetition'' is definitely the most important work published by Deleuze." (Edouard Morot-Sir, from the back cover of the first edition of the English translation), or James Williams' judgment: "It is nothing less than a revolution in philosophy and stands out as one of the great philosophical works of the twentieth century" (James Williams, ''Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide'' dinburgh UP, 2003 p. 1). ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Problem Of Future Contingents
Future contingent propositions (or simply, future contingents) are statements about states of affairs in the future that are ''contingent:'' neither necessarily true nor necessarily false. The problem of future contingents seems to have been first discussed by Aristotle in chapter 9 of his ''On Interpretation'' (''De Interpretatione''), using the famous sea-battle example. Roughly a generation later, Diodorus Cronus from the Megarian school of philosophy stated a version of the problem in his notorious ''master argument''. The problem was later discussed by Leibniz. The problem can be expressed as follows. Suppose that a sea-battle will not be fought tomorrow. Then it was also true yesterday (and the week before, and last year) that it will not be fought, since any true statement about what will be the case in the future was also true in the past. But all past truths are now necessary truths; therefore it is now necessarily true in the past, prior and up to the original statement ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Lewis (philosopher)
David Kellogg Lewis (September 28, 1941 – October 14, 2001) was an American philosopher who is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton University from 1970 until his death. He is closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years. Lewis made significant contributions in philosophy of mind, philosophy of probability, epistemology, philosophical logic, aesthetics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of time and philosophy of science. In most of these fields he is considered among the most important figures of recent decades. But Lewis is most famous for his work in metaphysics, philosophy of language and semantics, in which his books ''On the Plurality of Worlds'' (1986) and ''Counterfactuals'' (1973) are considered classics. His works on the logic and semantics of counterfactual conditionals are broadly used by philosop ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
On The Plurality Of Worlds
''On the Plurality of Worlds'' (1986) is a book by the philosopher David Lewis that defends the thesis of modal realism. "The thesis states that the world we are part of is but one of a plurality of worlds," as he writes in the preface, "and that we who inhabit this world are only a few out of all the inhabitants of all the worlds." It is not to be confused with cosmic pluralism. Content The book is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1: A Philosopher's Paradise Chapter 1 begins with an exposition of modal realism. Lewis proposes that possible worlds, including ours, are real concrete things that are isolated from each other. "There are no spatiotemporal relations at all between things that belong to different worlds," and adds, "Nor does anything that happens at one world cause anything to happen at another." He recommends a plurality of worlds because hypothesizing it is "serviceable," the familiar analysis of necessity as truth at all possible worlds being "only the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Many-worlds Interpretation
The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts that the universal wavefunction is objectively real, and that there is no wave function collapse. This implies that all possible outcomes of quantum measurements are physically realized in some "world" or universe. In contrast to some other interpretations, such as the Copenhagen interpretation, the evolution of reality as a whole in MWI is rigidly deterministic and local. Many-worlds is also called the relative state formulation or the Everett interpretation, after physicist Hugh Everett, who first proposed it in 1957.Hugh Everettbr>Theory of the Universal Wavefunction Thesis, Princeton University, (1956, 1973), pp 1–140 Bryce DeWitt popularized the formulation and named it ''many-worlds'' in the 1970s. See also Cecile M. DeWitt, John A. Wheeler eds, The Everett–Wheeler Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, ''Battelle Rencontres: 1967 Lectures in Mathematics and Physics'' (1968)Bryce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
