Samuel Alexander (1859—1938) Samuel Alexander is best known for his role in British Emergentism, an early twentieth century movement which uses the notion of emergence to explain the relationship between mind and body. Alexander argues that mind emerges from body, in the sense that mind is dependent upon brain but not reducible to it. Alexander is also variously associated with both of the major competing

Political Philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre This article focuses on Alasdair MacIntyre’s contribution to political philosophy since 1981, although MacIntyre has also written influential works on theology, Marxism, rationality, metaphysics, ethics, and the history of philosophy. He has made a personal intellectual journey from Marxism to Catholicism and from Aristotle to Aquinas, and he is one of the preeminent Thomist political philosophers. The most consistent and

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

Libertarianism What it means to be a “libertarian” in a political sense is a contentious issue, especially among libertarians themselves. There is no single theory that can be safely identified as the libertarian theory, and probably no single principle or set of principles on which all libertarians can agree. Nevertheless, there is a certain family resemblance among libertarian theories that can serve as a framework

Bertrand Russell: Logic For Russell, Aristotelian syllogistic inference does not do justice to the subject of logic. This is surely not surprising. It may well be something of a surprise, however, to learn that in Russell’s view neither Boolean algebra nor modern quantification theory do justice to the subject. For Russell, logic is a synthetic a priori science studying all the kinds of structures there.