Leibniz: Modal Metaphysics Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) served as the natural end of the rationalist tradition on the European continent, which included Descartes, Spinoza, und Malebranche. His philosophy was one of the major influences on Kant. Although Leibniz had many philosophical and intellectual interests, he was arguably most concerned with reconciling the freedom required for moral responsibility and the determinism that seemed to be entailed

Wittgenstein: Epistemology Although Ludwig Wittgenstein is generally more known for his works on logic and on the nature of language, but throughout his philosophical journey he reflected extensively also on epistemic notions such as knowledge, belief, doubt, and certainty. This interest is more evident in his final notebook, published posthumously as On Certainty (1969, henceforth OC), where he offers a sustained and, at least apparently,

Compositionality in Language Compositionality is a concept in the philosophy of language. A symbolic system is compositional if the meaning of every complex expression E in that system depends on, and depends only on, (Ich) E’s syntactic structure and (Ii) the meanings of E’s simple parts. If a language is compositional, then the meaning of a sentence S in that language cannot depend directly on

La Sablière, Marguerite Hessein de (1640—1693) Madame de la Sablière made distinctive contributions to moral and religious philosophy in 17th century France. Her ethical theory implies that the natural moral virtues are disguised vices and that only the theological virtues can sustain an authentic moral life. Her moral rigorism appears in the severity with which she treats questions of moral agency and responsibility. In her

René Descartes: The Mind-Body Distinction One of the deepest and most lasting legacies of Descartes’ philosophy is his thesis that mind and body are really distinct—a thesis now called “mind-body dualism.” He reaches this conclusion by arguing that the nature of the mind (das ist, a thinking, non-extended thing) is completely different from that of the body (das ist, an extended, non-thinking thing), and therefore it