academician

Posted by Jonathan Dancy

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-particularism/

[Revised entry by Jonathan Dancy on September 22, 2017.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Moral Particularism, at its most trenchant, is the claim that there are no defensible moral principles, that moral thought does not consist in the application of moral principles to cases, and that the morally perfect person should not be conceived as the person of principle. There are more cautious versions, however. The strongest defensible version, perhaps, holds that though there may be some moral principles, still the rationality of moral thought and judgement in no way depends...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-particularism/

Posted by Laura J. Snyder

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whewell/

[Revised entry by Laura J. Snyder on September 22, 2017.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
William Whewell (1794 - 1866) was one of the most important and influential figures in nineteenth-century Britain. Whewell, a polymath, wrote extensively on numerous subjects, including mechanics, mineralogy, geology, astronomy, political economy, theology, educational reform, international law, and architecture, as well as the works that remain the most well-known today in philosophy of science, history of science, and moral philosophy. He was one of the founding members and a president of the British Association for the...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whewell/

Posted by Mark Philp

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paine/

[Revised entry by Mark Philp on September 19, 2017.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer, controversialist and international revolutionary. His Common Sense (1776) was a central text behind the call for American independence from Britain; his Rights of Man (1791 - 2) was the most widely read pamphlet in the movement for reform in Britain in the 1790s and for the opening decades of the nineteenth century; he was active in the French Revolution and was a member of the French National Convention between 1792 and 1795; he is seen by many as a key figure in the emergence of claims for the state's responsibilities for welfare and educational provision, and...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paine/

Posted by E. Jennifer Ashworth

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analogy-medieval/

[Revised entry by E. Jennifer Ashworth on September 15, 2017.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Medieval theories of analogy were a response to problems in three areas: logic, theology, and metaphysics. Logicians were concerned with the use of words having more than one sense, whether completely different, or related in some way. Theologians were concerned with language about God. How can we speak about a transcendent, totally simple spiritual being without altering the sense of the words we use? Metaphysicians were concerned with talk about reality. How can we say...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analogy-medieval/

Posted by Jerry Samet and Deborah Zaitchik

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/innateness-cognition/

[Revised entry by Jerry Samet and Deborah Zaitchik on September 13, 2017.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html]
Nativism and Empiricism are rival approaches to questions about the origins of knowledge. Roughly speaking, Nativists hold that important elements of our understanding of the world are innate, that they are part of our initial condition, and thus do not have to be learned from experience. Empiricists deny this, claiming that all knowledge is based in experience. Different Nativist and Empiricist views spell out the details in different ways, depending on which elements of our knowledge are at issue, what counts as understanding, what is meant by...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/innateness-cognition/

Posted by Eric Brown

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-politics/

[Revised entry by Eric Brown on September 12, 2017.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Plato's Republic centers on a simple question: is it always better to be just than unjust? The puzzles in Book One prepare for this question, and Glaucon and Adeimantus make it explicit at the beginning of Book Two. To answer the question, Socrates takes a long way around, sketching an account of a good city on the grounds that a good city would be just and that defining justice as a virtue of a city would help to define justice as a virtue of a human being....

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-politics/