Classification One of the main topics of scientific research is classification. Classification is the operation of distributing objects into classes or groups—which are, in general, less numerous than them. It has a long history that has developed during four periods: (1) Antiquity, where its lineaments may be found in the writings of Plato and Aristotle; (2) The Classical Age, with natural scientists from Linnaeus to

Moral Luck A case of moral luck occurs whenever luck makes a moral difference. The problem of moral luck arises from a clash between the apparently widely held intuition that cases of moral luck should not occur with the fact that it is arguably impossible to prevent such cases from arising. The literature on moral luck began in earnest in the wake of papers by

Rights and Obligations of Parents Historically, philosophers have had relatively little to say about the family. This is somewhat surprising, given the pervasive presence and influence of the family upon both individuals and social life. Most philosophers who have addressed issues related to the parent-child relationship—Kant and Aristotle, for example—have done so in a fairly terse manner. At the end of the twentieth century, this changed.

Ethnoepistemology As a species of naturalized epistemology, ethnoepistemology treats all human epistemological activities as fully natural phenomena to be described, understood, and evaluated from a broadly anthropological and fully a posteriori perspective. In this spirit it examines the entire gamut of human epistemological activities ranging from those of ordinary folk and cognitive specialists (for example, diviners, shamans, priests, magicians, and scientists) to those of epistemologists

Donald Davidson: Anomalous Monism Anomalous Monism is a type of property dualism in the philosophy of mind. Property dualism combines the thesis that mental phenomena are strictly irreducible to physical phenomena with the denial that mind and body are discrete substances. For the anomalous monist, the plausibility of property dualism derives from the fact that although mental states, events and processes have genuine causal powers, the causal

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