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

The Golden Rule The most familiar version of the Golden Rule says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  Moral philosophy has barely taken notice of the golden rule in its own terms despite the rule’s prominence in commonsense ethics. This article approaches the rule, therefore, through the rubric of building its philosophy, or clearing a path for such construction. The

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

Meaning and Communication Communication is crucial for us as human beings. Much of what we know or believe we learn through hearing or seeing what others say or express, and part of what makes us human is our desire to communicate our thoughts and feelings to others. A core part of our communicative activity concerns linguistic communication, where we use the words and sentences of

Mind and Multiple Realizability The claim that mental types are multiply realizable has played an important role in supporting antireductionism in philosophy of mind. The multiple-realizability thesis implies that mental types and physical types are correlated one-many not one-one. A mental state such as pain might be correlated with one type of physical state in a human and another type of physical state in, say,

Submissions Submitting an Article for Publication The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy encourages philosophy professors with Ph.D.s to e-mail the general editors or a specific area editor with an offer to submit an article. Articles should have a length of 6,000 to 15,000 words except in special cases approved in advance by the general editors. Please consult our lists of the 100 most desired articles, our