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Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and in contemporary analytic philosophy. Rorty had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative literature at Stanford University. Among his most influential books are ''Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature'' (1979), ''Consequences of Pragmatism'' (1982), and ''Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity'' (1989). Rorty rejected the long held idea that correct internal representations of objects in the outside world is a necessary prerequisite for knowledge. Rorty argued instead that knowledge is an ''internal'' and ''linguistic'' affair; knowledge only relates to our own language. Rorty argues that language is made up of v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Western Philosophy
Western philosophy encompasses the philosophical thought and work of the Western world. Historically, the term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy of the pre-Socratics. The word ''philosophy'' itself originated from the Ancient Greek (φιλοσοφία), literally, "the love of wisdom" grc, φιλεῖν , "to love" and σοφία '' sophía'', "wisdom"). History Ancient The scope of ancient Western philosophy included the problems of philosophy as they are understood today; but it also included many other disciplines, such as pure mathematics and natural sciences such as physics, astronomy, and biology (Aristotle, for example, wrote on all of these topics). Pre-Socratics The pre-Socratic philosophers were interested in cosmology; the nature and origin of the universe, while rejecting mythical answers to such questions. They were specifically interested in the (the cause or first principle) of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or Rhetorical modes, mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by philosophical skepticism, skepticism toward the "meta-narrative, grand narratives" of modernism, opposition to epistemological, epistemic certainty or stability of meaning (semiotics), meaning, and emphasis on ideology as a means of maintaining political power. Claims to objective fact are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the instrumental conditionality, conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-reference, self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism (philosophy), pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity (philosophy), identity, hierar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grounding (metaphysics)
Grounding is a topic in metaphysics. Consider an ordinary physical object, such as a table, and the atoms it is made of. Without the atoms, the table would not exist. The table's existence ''depends'' on the existence of the atoms. This kind of dependence is called "grounding" to distinguish it from other kinds of dependence, such as the dependence of an effect on its cause. It is sometimes called ''metaphysical'' or ''ontological dependence''. Grounding can be characterized as a Relations (philosophy), relation between a ''ground'' and a ''grounded entity''. The ground exists on a more fundamental level than the grounded entity, in the sense that the grounded entity depends for its existence or its Property (philosophy), properties on its ground. According to the meta-ontology#Neo-Aristotelian approach, neo-Aristotelian approach to ontology, the goal of ontology is to determine which entities are fundamental and how the non-fundamental entities depend on them. Overview A distinctio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sentimentality
Sentimentality originally indicated the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but in current usage the term commonly connotes a reliance on shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason. Sentimentalism in philosophy is a view in meta-ethics according to which morality is somehow grounded in moral sentiments or emotions. Sentimentalism in literature refers to techniques a writer employs to induce a tender emotional response disproportionate to the situation at hand (and thus to substitute heightened and generally uncritical feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgments). The term may also characterize the tendency of some readers to invest strong emotions in trite or conventional fictional situations. "A sentimentalist", Oscar Wilde wrote, "is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it." In James Joyce's ''Ulysses'', Stephen Dedalus sends Buck Mulligan a telegram that reads "The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Systematic Philosophy
In its most common sense, philosophical methodology is the field of inquiry studying the methods used to do philosophy. But the term can also refer to the methods themselves. It may be understood in a wide sense as the general study of principles used for theory selection, or in a more narrow sense as the study of ways of conducting one's research and theorizing with the goal of acquiring philosophical knowledge. Philosophical methodology investigates both descriptive issues, such as which methods ''actually'' have been used by philosophers, and normative issues, such as which methods ''should'' be used or how to do ''good'' philosophy. A great variety of philosophical methods have been employed. Methodological skepticism uses systematic doubt in its search for absolutely certain or indubitable first principles of philosophy. The geometrical method starts with a small set of such principles and tries to build a comprehensive philosophical system on this small foundation based on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cultural Criticism
Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.Tylor, Edward. (1871). Primitive Culture. Vol 1. New York: J.P. Putnam's Son Culture is often originated from or attributed to a specific region or location. Humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, which is shown by the diversity of cultures across societies. A cultural norm codifies acceptable conduct in society; it serves as a guideline for behavior, dress, language, and demeanor in a situation, which serves as a template for expectations in a social group. Accepting only a monoculture in a social group can bear risks, just as a single species can wither in the face of environmental change, for lack of functional responses to the change. Thus in military culture, valor is counted a typical be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cultural Left
The New Left was a broad political movement mainly in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of activists in the Western world who campaigned for a broad range of social issues such as civil and political rights, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, gender roles and drug policy reforms. Some see the New Left as an oppositional reaction to earlier Marxist and labor union movements for social justice that focused on dialectical materialism and social class, while others who used the term see the movement as a continuation and revitalization of traditional leftist goals. Some who self-identified as "New Left" rejected involvement with the labor movement and Marxism's historical theory of class struggle, although others gravitated to their own takes on established forms of Marxism and Marxism–Leninism, such as the New Communist movement (which drew from Maoism) in the United States or the K-GruppenThe K groups originally referred to the mainly Maoist-oriented small parties and other ass ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reformist Left
Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and in contemporary analytic philosophy. Rorty had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative literature at Stanford University. Among his most influential books are ''Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature'' (1979), ''Consequences of Pragmatism'' (1982), and ''Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity'' (1989). Rorty rejected the long held idea that correct internal representations of objects in the outside world is a necessary prerequisite for knowledge. Rorty argued instead that knowledge is an ''internal'' and ''linguistic'' affair; knowledge only relates to our own language. Rorty argues that language is made up of v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anti-foundationalism
Anti-foundationalism (also called nonfoundationalism) is any philosophy which rejects a foundationalist approach. An anti-foundationalist is one who does not believe that there is some fundamental belief or principle which is the basic ground or foundation of inquiry and knowledge. Anti-essentialism Anti-foundationalists use logical or historical or genealogical attacks on foundational concepts (see especially Nietzsche and Foucault), often coupled with alternative methods for justifying and forwarding intellectual inquiry, such as the pragmatic subordination of knowledge to practical action. Foucault dismissed the search for a return to origins as Platonic essentialism, preferring to stress the contingent nature of human practices. Anti-foundationalists oppose metaphysical methods. Moral and ethical anti-foundationalists are often criticized for moral relativism, but anti-foundationalists often dispute this charge, offering alternative methods of moral thought that they claim ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Antirepresentationalism
In the philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, the question of direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational realism, is the debate over the nature of conscious experience;Lehar, Steve. (2000)The Function of Conscious Experience: An Analogical Paradigm of Perception and Behavior, ''Consciousness and Cognition''.Lehar, Steve. (2000), ''The Function of Conscious Experience''. out of the metaphysical question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by our conscious experience. Naïve realism is known as ''direct'' realism when developed to counter ''indirect'' or representative realism, also known as epistemological dualism, the philosophical position that our conscious experience is not of the real world itself but of an internal representation, a miniature virtual-reality replica of the world. Indirect realism is broadly equivalent to the materialist view of perce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Behaviorism
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent (behavioral psychology), antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement (psychology), reinforcement and punishment (psychology), punishment three-term contingency, contingencies, together with the individual's current motivating operation, motivational state and Stimulus control, controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental events. Behaviorism emerged in the early 1900s as a reaction to depth psychology and other traditional forms of psychology, which often had difficulty making predictions that could be tested experimentally, but derived from earlier research in the late nineteenth century, such as when Edward Thorndike p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Epistemological
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Debates in epistemology are generally clustered around four core areas: # The philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and the conditions required for a belief to constitute knowledge, such as truth and justification # Potential sources of knowledge and justified belief, such as perception, reason, memory, and testimony # The structure of a body of knowledge or justified belief, including whether all justified beliefs must be derived from justified foundational beliefs or whether justification requires only a coherent set of beliefs # Philosophical skepticism, which questions the possibili ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
