What is Philosophy?: Relationship of Philosophy to Other Fields of Thought
What is philosophy? How is it related to other fields of thought? How is it different? In response to these questions, nine preeminent scholars create an insightful view of philosophy and the role it plays in contemporary society.
What is Human Nature?: Biology's Challenge to Traditional Western View of Human Nature
In the 17th and 18th centuries, scientists are fascinated with collecting specimens and classifying species. However, It will be Charles Darwin who creates a new picture of nature. In the 1830s he travels to the Galapagos Islands to research both li...
Is Mind Distinct from Body?: Renes Descartes and the Mind-Body Problem
Descartes maintained that the entire universe consists of two substances, matter which exists in space and mind which has no spatial or physical properties. This doctrine becomes known as Cartesian dualism. Perhaps the hardest question for Cartesian...
Is Mind Distinct from Body?: Distinctions Between Computers and the Human Mind
In his 1972 book What Computers Still Can't Do Hubert Dreyfus points out capacities of the mind computers fail to match such as a sense of relevance and common sense. What computers can do is spread the computational load over time and operate with ...
Is Mind Distinct from Body?: Reductionists' Accounts of Mental Activity
Materialists argue that "the mystery of the mind" is an illusion that science will clear up once we understand all of the neurophysiological aspects of how the brain functions. Even in science, this reductionist view point is rare. Such knowledge ma...
What is Human Nature?: How Language Makes Human Life Distinctive
If human nature is not different from the rest of the nature, then why is human existence so different? Language. Language allows humans to organize efforts that require social cooperation, book writing, and the passage of history from generation to...
What is Real?: Comparitive Realities of Children and Adults
What does it mean to say that a child gains a sense of reality? Recent studies of the brain suggest that each person's sense of reality is finely etched by the strength, size, or weight of the synaptic connections in the brain. That is the fundament...
Does All Knowledge Come from Experience?: John Locke's Empiricism and Its Troublesome Gap
John Locke and later empiricists dispute the rationalists' claim that pure reason could grasp truths about the world. They argue that all knowledge of the world must come through the senses and experience. Locke compares the mind at birth to a tabul...
Is Time Real?: Time and Human Consciousness
Even if the external world does not seem to require the passage of time, human consciousness does. It is a tool that evolution appears to have given humans in order for them to deal successfully with the world. But is it all just illusion? Like St. ...
Is Reason the Source of Knowledge?: Necessary Truths
Descartes argues that the senses can perceive only the changing surfaces of things, but the mind can go deeper to find necessary truths. Empiricist who argue that all knowledge must come from the senses disagree.