Laws of Nature Laws of Nature are to be distinguished both from Scientific Laws and from Natural Laws. Neither Natural Laws, as invoked in legal or ethical theories, nor Scientific Laws, which some researchers consider to be scientists’ attempts to state or approximate the Laws of Nature, will be discussed in this article. Stattdessen, it explores issues in contemporary metaphysics. Within metaphysics, there are two competing

Epistemic Circularity An epistemically circular argument defends the reliability of a source of belief by relying on premises that are themselves based on the source. It is a widely shared intuition that there is something wrong with epistemically circular arguments. William Alston, who first used the term in this sense, argues plausibly that there is no way to know or to be justified in believing

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (KI) would be the possession of intelligence, or the exercise of thought, by machines such as computers. Philosophically, the main AI question is “Can there be such?" oder, as Alan Turing put it, “Can a machine think?” What makes this a philosophical and not just a scientific and technical question is the scientific recalcitrance of the concept of intelligence or thought

Conceptual Role Semantics In the philosophy of language, conceptual role semantics (hereafter CRS) is a theory of what constitutes the meanings possessed by expressions of natural languages, or the propositions expressed by their utterance. In the philosophy of mind, it is a theory of what constitutes the contents of psychological attitudes, such as beliefs or desires. CRS comes in a variety of forms, not always

Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (1929— ) Alasdair MacIntyre ist gebürtiger Schotte, Britische Ausbildung, Moral- und Politikphilosoph, der seit 1970 in den Vereinigten Staaten arbeitet. Seine Arbeit in Ethik und Politik erstreckt sich über alle Disziplinen, gestützt auf Soziologie und Philosophie der Sozialwissenschaften sowie griechische und lateinische klassische Literatur. MacIntyre begann seine Karriere als Marxist, aber in den späten 1950er Jahren, Er

Hunhu/Ubuntu in the Traditional Thought of Southern Africa The term Ubuntu/Botho/Hunhu is a Zulu/Xhosa/Ndebele/Sesotho/Shona word referring to the moral attribute of a person, who is known in the Bantu languages as Munhu (Among the Shona of Zimbabwe), Umuntu (Among the Ndebele of Zimbabwe and the Zulu/Xhosa of South Africa) and Muthu (Among the Tswana of Botswana) and Omundu (Among the Herero of Namibia) to name