Michael-John Turp asks if anyone has the authority to establish moral truth. Socrates famously got himself into trouble by persistently questioning authority. He irritated his fellow citizens so much that he ended up on trial. Eventually he accepted his sentence of execution by drinking hemlock rather than evading the law by fleeing to an easy …
Chad Trainer on Leonardo da Vinci as a philosopher. Francis I, King of France and patron of Leonardo da Vinci, once proclaimed in a conversation with the King of Navarre and the Cardinals of Ferrara and Lorraine that nobody in the world knew more than Leonardo. As much reverence as Francis I had for Leonardo’s …
In which Mark Goldblatt starts off by discussing Thomas Aquinas and ends up by killing theology. What does it mean to say “God is just” or “God is merciful” or “God is loving”? Do such statements mean anything, rationally? In this essay, I’m going to argue that they don’t – not if we follow the …
What would the medieval philosophers who developed the theory of a Just War have thought about the invasion of Iraq? Ian Dungate imagines their response. In America and Australia, the voters have retrospectively endorsed their leaders’ decision to invade Iraq and topple the regime of Saddam Hussein. In Britain, the arguments continue, and some opposition …
Imadaldin Al-Jubouri on the medieval Islamic philosopher who pioneered the scientific understanding of history. Some consider the Italian philosopher Vico (1668-1744) to have been the founder of philosophy of history; others give the credit to the French philosopher Montesquieu (1689-1755). In fact, the Arabic philosopher and historian ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was the first pioneer to …
Thomas M. Powers on how a computer might process Kant’s moral imperative. Philosophers have worried about how to compare humans and machines ever since Alan Turing proposed his famous ‘intelligence test’ in his 1950 Mind article ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. If the successful imitation of a human conversation is one sufficient condition for intelligence, as …
James H. Moor defines different ways in which machines could be moral. Could we ever teach robots right from wrong? Can we afford not to try? I wish to defend the idea that robot ethics is a legitimate, interesting, and important field of philosophical and scientific research. I believe it’s possible that someday robots will …
Veṅkaṭanātha (also known as Vedānta Deśika “teacher of Vedānta”) was an Indian polymath who wrote philosophical as well as religious and poetical works in several languages, including Sanskrit, Maṇipravāḷa—a Sanskritised form of literary Tamil—and Tamil. He is traditionally dated to 1269-1370, but as explained by Neevel “the lifespans of the earliest teachers of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta …
Tyler Burge is an American philosopher who has done influential work in several areas of philosophy. These include philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of science (primarily philosophy of psychology), and history of philosophy (focusing especially on Frege, but also on the classical rationalists—Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant). Burge has also done some …