Hugo Grotius (1583—1645) Hugo Grotius was a Dutch humanist and jurist whose philosophy of natural law had a major impact on the development of seventeenth century political thought and on the moral theories of the…
Browsing CategoryWiki Philosophy
Plato: Political Philosophy
Plato: Political Philosophy Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.E.) developed such distinct areas of philosophy as epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. His deep influence on Western philosophy is asserted in the famous remark of Alfred North Whitehead:…
Reductionism
Reductionism Reductionists are those who take one theory or phenomenon to be reducible to some other theory or phenomenon. For example, a reductionist regarding mathematics might take any given mathematical theory to be reducible to…
Modal Logic: A Contemporary View
Modal Logic: A Contemporary View Modal notions go beyond the merely true or false by embedding what we say or think in a larger conceptual space referring to what might be or might have been,…
Chinese Philosophy: Overview of History
Chinese Philosophy: Overview of History There was no effort to write a comprehensive history of the Chinese Philosophy until the modern period of Western influence on Chinese culture. This is not to say that Chinese…
History of African Philosophy
History of African Philosophy This article traces the history of systematic African philosophy from the early 1920s to date. In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates suggests that philosophy begins with wonder. Aristotle agreed. However, recent research shows that…
Omnipotence
Omnipotence Omnipotence is the property of being all-powerful; it is one of the traditional divine attributes in Western conceptions of God. This notion of an all-powerful being is often claimed to be incoherent because a being who…
Copyright & Reprint Information
Copyright & Reprint Information All articles are copyrighted by The IEP and the authors of the original articles; accordingly, our articles are not open source or in the public domain. The Encyclopedia has these reprint…
Art and Interpretation
Art and Interpretation Interpretation in art refers to the attribution of meaning to a work. A point on which people often disagree is whether the artist’s or author’s intention is relevant to the interpretation of…
Toleration
Toleration The heart of tolerance is self-control. When we tolerate an activity, we resist our urge to forcefully prohibit the expression of activities that we find unpleasant. More abstractly, toleration can be understood as a political…