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Master Argument
:''See Diodorus Cronus § Master argument for the classical master argument related to the problem of future contingents.'' The master argument is George Berkeley's argument that mind-independent objects do not exist because it is impossible to conceive of them. The argument is against the intuitions that many have and has been widely challenged. The term "Berkeley's master argument" was introduced by Andre Gallois in 1974. His term has firmly become currency of contemporary Berkeley scholarship. Overview In order to determine whether it is possible for a tree to exist outside of the mind, we need to be able to think of an unconceived tree. But as soon as we try to think about this tree, we have conceived it. So we have failed and there is no good reason to believe that trees exist outside of the mind. Criticisms The master argument has been seen by several prominent philosophers as having a crucial mistake; see criticisms of idealism. Bertrand Russell Bertrand Arthur W ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diodorus Cronus
Diodorus Cronus ( el, Διόδωρος Κρόνος; died c. 284 BC) was a Greek philosopher and dialectician connected to the Megarian school. He was most notable for logic innovations, including his master argument formulated in response to Aristotle's discussion of future contingents. Life Diodorus was the son of Ameinias of Iasus in Caria. He lived in the court of Alexandria in the reign of Ptolemy I Soter, who is said to have given him the surname of Cronus ("old fogey") on account of his inability to solve at once some dialectic problem proposed by Stilpo, when the two philosophers were dining with the king. Diodorus is said to have taken that disgrace so much to heart that after his return from the meal, and writing a treatise on the problem, he died in despair. However, according to Strabo, Diodorus himself adopted the surname of Cronus from his teacher, Apollonius Cronus. Diodorus is thought to have died around 284 BC; his date of birth is unknown. It was once thought tha ... [...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] |
George Berkeley
George Berkeley (; 12 March 168514 January 1753) – known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne of the Anglican Church of Ireland) – was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism" (later referred to as " subjective idealism" by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are ideas perceived by the mind and, as a result, cannot exist without being perceived. Berkeley is also known for his critique of abstraction, an important premise in his argument for immaterialism. In 1709, Berkeley published his first major work, '' An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision'', in which he discussed the limitations of human vision and advanced the theory that the proper objects of sight are not material objects, but light and colour. This foreshadowed his chief philosophical work, ''A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Argument
An argument is a statement or group of statements called premises intended to determine the degree of truth or acceptability of another statement called conclusion. Arguments can be studied from three main perspectives: the logical, the dialectical and the rhetorical perspective. In logic, an argument is usually expressed not in natural language but in a symbolic formal language, and it can be defined as any group of propositions of which one is claimed to follow from the others through deductively valid inferences that preserve truth from the premises to the conclusion. This logical perspective on argument is relevant for scientific fields such as mathematics and computer science. Logic is the study of the forms of reasoning in arguments and the development of standards and criteria to evaluate arguments. Deductive arguments can be valid, and the valid ones can be sound: in a valid argument, premisses necessitate the conclusion, even if one or more of the premises is false ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Idealism
In philosophy, the term idealism identifies and describes metaphysical perspectives which assert that reality is indistinguishable and inseparable from perception and understanding; that reality is a mental construct closely connected to ideas. Idealist perspectives are in two categories: subjective idealism, which proposes that a material object exists only to the extent that a human being perceives the object; and objective idealism, which proposes the existence of an ''objective'' consciousness that exists prior to and independently of human consciousness, thus the existence of the object is independent of human perception. The philosopher George Berkeley said that the essence of an object is to be perceived. By contrast, Immanuel Kant said that idealism "does not concern the existence of things", but that "our modes of representation" of things such as ''space'' and ''time'' are not "determinations that belong to things in themselves", but are essential features of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"Bertrand Russell" 1 May 2003. He was one of the early 20th century's most prominent logicians, and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore and his student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British "revolt against idealism". Together with his former teacher A. N. Whitehead, Russell wrote ''Principia Mathematica'', a milestone in the development of classical logic, and a major attempt to reduce the whole ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tautology (logic)
In mathematical logic, a tautology (from el, ταυτολογία) is a formula or assertion that is true in every possible interpretation. An example is "x=y or x≠y". Similarly, "either the ball is green, or the ball is not green" is always true, regardless of the colour of the ball. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein first applied the term to redundancies of propositional logic in 1921, borrowing from rhetoric, where a tautology is a repetitive statement. In logic, a formula is satisfiable if it is true under at least one interpretation, and thus a tautology is a formula whose negation is unsatisfiable. In other words, it cannot be false. It cannot be untrue. Unsatisfiable statements, both through negation and affirmation, are known formally as contradictions. A formula that is neither a tautology nor a contradiction is said to be Contingency (philosophy), logically contingent. Such a formula can be made either true or false based on the values assigned to its propositi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philosophical Arguments
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 universities ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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