Hedonism The term “hedonism,” from the Greek word ἡδονή (hēdonē) for pleasure, refers to several related theories about what is good for us, how we should behave, and what motivates us to behave in the way that we do. All hedonistic theories identify pleasure and pain as the only important elements of whatever phenomena they are designed to describe.  If hedonistic theories identified pleasure and

Desired Articles by Area The following list is of areas of philosophy. Each area is linked to a list of the most desired articles in that area. Contact the relevant area editor if you would like to write one of the articles on one of those lists. All expected due dates for completion of an article need to be 12 months or less. The IEP

Logical Paradoxes A paradox is generally a puzzling conclusion we seem to be driven towards by our reasoning, but which is highly counterintuitive, nevertheless. There are, among these, a large variety of paradoxes of a logical nature which have teased even professional logicians, in some cases for several millennia. But what are now sometimes isolated as “the logical paradoxes” are a much less heterogeneous collection:

About the IEP The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) (ISSN 2161-0002) was founded in 1995 to provide open access to detailed, scholarly, peer-reviewed information on key topics and philosophers in all areas of philosophy. The Encyclopedia receives no funding, and it operates through the volunteer work of the editors, authors, volunteers, and technical advisers. The Encyclopedia is free of charge and available to all users

Knowledge of Language People are language users: they read, write, speak, and listen; and they do all of these things in natural languages such as English, Russian, and Arabic. Many philosophers and linguists have been interested in knowing what accounts for this facility that language users have with their language. A language may be thought of as an abstract system, characterized either as a set

René Descartes: Scientific Method René Descartes’ major work on scientific method was the Discourse that was published in 1637 (more fully: Discourse on the Method for Rightly Directing One’s Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences). He published other works that deal with problems of method, but this remains central in any understanding of the Cartesian method of science. The common picture of Descartes is as one