The Value of Art Philosophical discourse concerning the value of art is a discourse concerning what makes an artwork valuable qua its being an artwork. Whereas the concern of the critic is what makes the artwork a good artwork, the question for the aesthetician is why it is a good artwork. When we refer to a work’s value qua art, we mean those elements of

Atheism The term “atheist” describes a person who does not believe that God or a divine being exists. Worldwide there may be as many as a billion atheists, although social stigma, political pressure, and intolerance make accurate polling difficult. For the most part, atheists have presumed that the most reasonable conclusions are the ones that have the best evidential support. And they have argued that

Ethics of Artificial Intelligence This article provides a comprehensive overview of the main ethical issues related to the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on human society. AI is the use of machines to do things that would normally require human intelligence. In many areas of human life, AI has rapidly and significantly affected human society and the ways we interact with each other. It will

Pseudoscience and the Demarcation Problem The demarcation problem in philosophy of science refers to the question of how to meaningfully and reliably separate science from pseudoscience. Both the terms “science” and “pseudoscience” are notoriously difficult to define precisely, except in terms of family resemblance. The demarcation problem has a long history, tracing back at the least to a speech given by Socrates in Plato’s Charmides,

Emile Meyerson (1859—1933) Emile Meyerson, a chemist and philosopher of science, proposed that the explanations of science are governed by two fundamental principles of reason, namely, the principle of lawfulness and the principle of causality. While the contents of explanations change through history as the explanatory theories of science move from early atomism and qualitative theories to relativity physics and quantum mechanics, the form of

Pudgalavada Buddhist Philosophy The Pudgalavāda was a group of five of the Early Schools of Buddhism. The name arises from their adherents’ distinctive doctrine (vāda) concerning the self or person (pudgala). The doctrine holds that the person, in a certain sense, is real. To other Buddhists, their view seemed to contradict a fundamental tenet of Buddhism, the doctrine of non-self. However, the Pudgalavādins were convinced