William James (1842—1910) William James is considered by many to be the most insightful and stimulating of American philosophers, as well as the second of the three great pragmatists (the middle link between Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey). As a professor of psychology and of philosophy at Harvard University, he became the most famous living American psychologist and later the most famous living American

Benedict de Spinoza: Epistemology The theory of knowledge, or epistemology, offered by the 17th century Dutch philosopher Benedict de Spinoza may yet prove to be the most daring in the history of philosophy. Not only does Spinoza claim to be able to know all the ways one can know something, he also claims to be able to know what everything is. Few philosophers besides Spinoza

Law and Economics The law and economics movement applies economic theory and method to the practice of law. It asserts that the tools of economic reasoning offer the best possibility for justified and consistent legal practice. It is arguably one of the dominant theories of jurisprudence. The law and economics movement offers a general theory of law as well as conceptual tools for the clarification and

Epistemology of Testimony We get a great number of our beliefs from what others tell us. The epistemology of testimony concerns how we should evaluate these beliefs. Here are the main questions. When are the beliefs justified, and why? When do they amount to knowledge, and why? When someone tells us p, where p is some statement, and we accept it, then we are forming

Philosophy of Medicine While philosophy and medicine, beginning with the ancient Greeks, enjoyed a long history of mutually beneficial interactions, the professionalization of “philosophy of medicine” is a nineteenth century event. One of the first academic books on the philosophy of medicine in modern terms was Elisha Bartlett’s Essay on the Philosophy of Medical Science, published in 1844. In the mid to late twentieth century,

Deshoulières, Antoinette du Ligier de la Garde (1638—1694) A major poet during the reign of Louis XIV in France, Madame Deshoulières used her writings to defend philosophical naturalism. Like her intellectual model Lucretius, she employed verse to argue that natural causes can adequately explain such apparently spiritual phenomena as thought, volition, and love. In metaphysics, Deshoulières argues that the real is comprised of variations of