History of Virtue Ethics
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum briefly traces the history of virtue ethics, from Aristotle through Kant. She notes that the major theories of virtue have all included strong criticism of traditional social norms, and rejects the notion that virtue ethi...
Does All Knowledge Come from Experience?: Hume and Causal Relationships
Consider the motion of billiard balls on a table. Can reason analyze how they will move a priori without previous experience as rationalists contend? Hume insists that the only way we know about patterns like cause and effect is by seeing certain ev...
Does All Knowledge Come from Experience?: Hume and the Necessity of Experience
David Hume, the third major empiricist starts from the premise that all knowledge of the world must come from experience. He underscores this point by emphasizing how much more vivid sense impressions are than the copies we make of them by merely th...
Changes in Our Conception of Human Nature (Part One)
Philosopher Ian Hacking talks about changes in the way human nature has been viewed over time. From the time of Aristotle through the Enlightenment, human nature was seen as being an essential characteristic of what it is to be human, in which the v...
Design and Natural Selection
Philosopher Daniel Dennett talks about Darwin and the notion of intelligent design. Rather than conclude, as did William Paley, that intelligent design requires a designer, Dennett applies Darwinian natural selection to the design process, arguing t...
Time and Cosmology
Philosopher Stephen Toulmin talks about the efforts of Immanuel Kant and others to come to grips with questions about time and whether it's possible to produce an overall theoretical description of the whole process by which the material universe to...
The Realism vs. Anti-Realism Debate (Part 2)
Philosopher John Searle talks about the anti-realist view that we never actually perceive the real world and instead only perceive our own perceptions of that world. Professor Searle argues that this is incorrect, that we do, in fact, have direct pe...
The Nature of the Mind
Philosopher Hilary Putnam describes his current view of the mind, stating that we actually see and experience the external world, and not just an internal representation of it.