Plato: The Laws The Laws is Plato’s last, longest, and, perhaps, most loathed work. The book is a conversation on political philosophy between three elderly men: an unnamed Athenian, a Spartan named Megillus, and a Cretan named Clinias. These men work to create a constitution for Magnesia, a new Cretan colony. The government of Magnesia is a mixture of democratic and authoritarian principles that aim

Wilfrid Sellars: Philosophy of Mind The twentieth century philosophy of mind of Wilfrid Sellars (1912 – 1989) retains much from the traditional, Cartesian perspective. It endorses a realm of inner, private episodes of which we may have direct knowledge. However, Sellars rejects Cartesian substance dualism and the thesis that mental states are fully knowable simply by introspection. As an alternative, Sellars conceives of mental states by

Richard Rorty (1931—2007) Richard Rorty was an important American philosopher of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century who blended expertise in philosophy and comparative literature into a perspective called “The New Pragmatism” or “neopragmatism.” Rejecting the Platonist tradition at an early age, Rorty was initially attracted to analytic philosophy. As his views matured he came to believe that this tradition suffered in its own

Mathematical Nominalism Mathematical nominalism can be described as the view that mathematical entities—entities such as numbers, sets, functions, and groups—do not exist. However, stating the view requires some care. Though the opposing view (that mathematical objects do exist) may seem like a somewhat exotic metaphysical claim, it is usually motivated by the thought that mathematical objects are required to exist in order for mathematical claims

Neo-Kantianism By its broadest definition, the term ‘Neo-Kantianism’ names any thinker after Kant who both engages substantively with the basic ramifications of his transcendental idealism and casts their own project at least roughly within his terminological framework. In this sense, thinkers as diverse as Schopenhauer, Mach, Husserl, Foucault, Strawson, Kuhn, Sellers, Nancy, Korsgaard, and Friedman could loosely be considered Neo-Kantian. More specifically, ‘Neo-Kantianism’ refers to

Immanuel Kant: Transcendental Idealism Transcendental idealism is one of the most important sets of claims defended by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in the Critique of Pure Reason. According to this famous doctrine, we must distinguish between appearances and things in themselves, that is, between that which is mind-dependent and that which is not. In Kant’s view, human cognition is limited to objects that somehow depend on our