Josiah Royce (1855—1916): Overview Josiah Royce was one of the most influential philosophers of the period of classical American philosophy, the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century. Although often identified as an exponent of Absolute Idealism, which is a philosophical view explored by Royce particularly in his Gifford Lectures, Royce was a thinker of widely diverse interests and talents. He made major contributions

Epicurus (341—271 B.C.E.) Epicurus is one of the major philosophers in the Hellenistic period, the three centuries following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E. (and of Aristotle in 322 B.C.E.). Epicurus developed an unsparingly materialistic metaphysics, empiricist epistemology, and hedonistic ethics. Epicurus taught that the basic constituents of the world are atoms, uncuttable bits of matter, flying through empty space, and he

Leibniz: Modal Metaphysics Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) served as the natural end of the rationalist tradition on the European continent, which included Descartes, Spinoza, and Malebranche. His philosophy was one of the major influences on Kant. Although Leibniz had many philosophical and intellectual interests, he was arguably most concerned with reconciling the freedom required for moral responsibility and the determinism that seemed to be entailed

Material Composition A material composite object is an object composed of two or more material parts. The world, it seems, is simply awash with such things. The Eiffel Tower, for instance, is composed of iron girders, nuts and bolts, and so on. You and I, as human beings, are composed of flesh and bone, and various organs. Moreover, these parts themselves are composed of further

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

Dynamic Epistemic Logic This article tells the story of the rise of dynamic epistemic logic. The rise began in the 1960s with the creation and development of epistemic logic, the logic of knowledge, Then in the late 1980s came dynamic epistemic logic, the logic of change of knowledge. Much of it was motivated by puzzles and paradoxes. The number of active researchers in these logics