Mathematics and philosophy have historically enjoyed a mutually beneficial and productive relationship, as a brief review of the work of mathematician-philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz, Bolzano, Dedekind, Frege, Brouwer, Hilbert, Gödel, and Weyl easily confirms. In the last century, it was especially mathematical logic and research in the foundations of mathematics which, to a significant...

theistic philosophers have special view on human nature. they define it in terms of rational faculty and thus regard human final perfection and ultimate felicity dependent on the activity of this faculty and actualization of it. there are philosophers, such as plato, plotinus, and zakariya al-razi (rhazes), who maintain explicitly that human felicity is based on his becoming philosopher. other ...

Naturalistic philosophers rely on literature search and review in a number of ways and for different purposes. Yet this article shows how processes of literature search and review are likely to be affected by widespread and systematic biases. A solution to this problem is offered here. Whilst the tradition of systematic reviews of literature from scientific disciplines has been neglected in phi...

Many philosophers ignore developments in the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences that purport to challenge our ideas of free will and responsibility. The reason for this is that the challenge is often framed as a denial of the idea that we are able to act differently than we do. However, most philosophers think that the ability to do otherwise is irrelevant to responsibility and free will....

With the Enlightenment, philosophers in the West recognized that the immediate given of perception is a mental image or representation, not an extra-mental object. That insight raised a pressing, epistemological question: to what degree, if any, do those mental images represent an extra-mental state of affairs? To phrase the question in slightly different terms: in what manner (if any) and to w...

The brain has long been an object of interest and fascination for philosophers. Some philosophers, such as Descartes, even offered proposals as to how it worked. But philosophers, using the tools of their profession, do not have the ability themselves to investigate the operation of the brain any more than they have tools to investigate the cell, the atom, or the solar system. With respect to t...

Direct epistemic consequentialism is the idea that X is epistemically permissible i X maximizes epistemic value. It has received lots of attention in recent years and is widely accepted by philosophers to have counterintuitive implications. There are various reasons one might suspect that the relevant intuitions will not be widely shared among non-philosophers. This paper presents an initial em...

The design issues for group mutual exclusion have been modeled by Joung as the Congenial Talking Philosophers, and solutions for shared-memory models and complete message-passing networks have been proposed [2, 3]. These solutions, however, cannot be straightforwardly and efficiently converted to ring networks where each philosopher can only communicate directly with its two neighboring philoso...

Gettier cases have played a major role in Anglo-American analytic epistemology over the past fifty years. Philosophers have grouped a bewildering array of examples under the heading “Gettier case.” Philosophers claim that these cases are obvious counterexamples to the “traditional” analysis of knowledge as justified true belief, and they treat correctly classifying the cases as a criterion for ...

divine essence and explanation of his ontological place is an important problem for religious schools in conceptual and direct knowledge and both the philosophers and mystics concerns about it. mystics believed the method of intuition, but afterwards the emergence of speculative mysticism, they try to translate the intellectual intuition to conceptual knowledge, attaining this purpose, they use...