Cognitive Phenomenology Phenomenal states are mental states in which there is something that it is like for their subjects to be in; they are states with a phenomenology. What it is like to be in a mental state is that state´s phenomenal character. There is general agreement among philosophers of mind that the category of mental states includes at least some sensory states. For example,

Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) Pierre Bayle was a seventeenth-century French skeptical philosopher and historian. He is best known for his encyclopedic work The Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697, 1st edition; 1702, 2nd edition), a work which was widely influential on eighteenth-century figures such as Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson. Bayle is traditionally described as a skeptic, though the nature and extent of his skepticism remains hotly debated.

Ethical Criticism of Art Traditionally, there were two opposing philosophical positions taken with respect to the legitimacy of the ethical evaluation of art: ‘moralism’ and ‘autonomism’, where moralism is the view that the aesthetic value of art should be determined by, or reduced to, its moral value, while autonomism holds that it is inappropriate to apply moral categories to art; they should be evaluated by

Medieval Theories of Practical Reason Practical reason is the employment of reason in service of living a good life, and the great medieval thinkers all gave accounts of it. Practical reason is reasoning about, or better toward, an action, and an action always has a goal or end, this end being understood to be in some sense good. The medievals generally concurred that it was

Incarnation In the Bible‘s fourth gospel, John tells us “the Word [God the Son] became flesh [incarnate] and dwelt among us” (John 1: 14). The central claim of Christianity is that Jesus of Nazareth was none other than God the Son, who while remaining fully divine, took on a human nature for the sake of our salvation. Philosophical puzzles and problems arise as soon as we begin to unpack