Plato: Meno Plato’s Meno introduces aspects of Socratic ethics and Platonic epistemology in a fictional dialogue that is set among important political events and cultural concerns in the last years of Socrates’ life. It begins as an abrupt, prepackaged debater’s challenge from Meno about whether virtue can be taught, and quickly becomes an open and inconclusive search for the essence of this elusive “virtue,” or

Imagery and Imagination Both imagery and imagination play an important part in our mental lives. This article, which has three main sections, discusses both of these phenomena, and the connection between them. The first part discusses mental images and, in particular, the dispute about their representational nature that has become known as the imagery debate. The second part turns to the faculty of the imagination,

John Hick (1922—2012) John Hick was arguably one of the most important and influential philosophers of religion of the second half of the twentieth century. As a British philosopher in the anglo-analytic tradition, Hick did groundbreaking work in religious epistemology, philosophical theology, and religious pluralism. As a young law student, Hick underwent a strong religious experience that led him to accept evangelical Christianity and to

Bertrand Russell: Ethics This article confines itself to Bertrand Russell’s conversion from ethical cognitivism (similar to G. E. Moore) to ethical non-cognitivism (similar to Ayer).  Russell’s conversion is not only historically important, as it contributes to the rise of metaethics, but it also clarifies the central issues between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. Traditionally, ethics has been understood as a branch of philosophy that focuses on normative

The American Environmental Justice Movement The origin of the American environmental justice movement can be traced back to the emergence of the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and more specifically to the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964.  The movement reached a new level with the emergence of Robert Bullard’s work entitled Dumping in Dixie in the 1990’s, which constituted a clarion call

Arthur Schopenhauer: Logic and Dialectic For Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), logic as a discipline belongs to the human faculty of reason, more precisely to the faculty of language. This discipline of logic breaks down into two areas. Logic or analytics is one side of the coin; dialectic or the art of persuasion is the other. The former investigates rule-oriented and monological language. The latter investigates result-oriented language