Empirical+philosophy
111occasionalism — The view that reserves causal efficacy to the action of God. Events in the world merely form occasions on which God acts so as to bring about the events normally accompanying them, and thought of as their effects. Although the position is… …
112Ayer, Alfred Jules — (1910–1989) English philosopher and left wing intellectual. Born of a Swiss father and Belgian mother, Ayer was educated in Britain. After graduating from Oxford in 1932 he studied in Vienna for a year, before returning to teach at Oxford. His… …
113Brentano, Franz — (1838–1917) German philosopher and psychologist. His teaching at the universities of Wurzburg and Vienna may be regarded as the foundation of the phenomenological movement in philosophy. Brentano became a priest in 1864 but left the Church in… …
114Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas — (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist. Born in Landshut, Bavaria, Feuerbach studied theology and philosophy at Heidelberg and Berlin. He enjoyed only a sporadic teaching career, and lived mainly on income derived from his wife s… …
115Mill, John Stuart — (1806–1873) English philosopher and economist, and the most influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. As the son of James Mill, John Stuart was given an intensive private education, in which he began Greek at the age of three, and Latin… …
116personal identity — The problem is that of what makes the identity of the single person at a time or through time. To take the latter first, we can each imagine ourselves as having been rather different, or as becoming rather different, as indeed we will in the… …
117Quine, Willard van Orman — (1908– ) The most influential American philosopher of the latter half of the 20th century, Quine was born in Akron, Ohio, of partly Dutch and partly Manx descent. After Oberlin College he did graduate work at Harvard, gaining his doctorate in… …
118rationalism — Any philosophy magnifying the role played by unaided reason, in the acquisition and justification of knowledge. The preference for reason over sense experience as a source of knowledge began with the Eleatics, and played a central role in… …
119Duhem thesis — Sometimes called the Quine– Duhem or Duhem–Quine thesis. The thesis that a single scientific hypothesis cannot be tested in isolation, since other, auxiliary hypotheses will always be needed to draw empirical consequences from it. The Duhem… …
120induction — The term is most widely used for any process of reasoning that takes us from empirical premises to empirical conclusions supported by the premises, but not deductively entailed by them. Inductive arguments are therefore kinds of ampliative… …
