Metaphysics: what there is
Systematic thought about the true nature of things is the very foundation of philosophical reasoning: idealism and materialism...realism, nominalism, and conceptualism...the noumenal and the phenomenal...logical positivism, emergentism, and modal re...
What is Real?: Arguments Against Metaphysical Speculation
Some philosophers object to the idea that there is a spiritual reality different from the physical world as mere metaphysical speculation. As one group contends anything we cannot perceive with our senses or prove scientically should not be conside...
What is Real?: Anti-realists' Thesis
Anti-realists contend that we shape the external world into the reality we know through our conceptual systems, language, and thought processes. Things are as we name them, parts and wholes as we define them. This applies to all reality in the unive...
What is Real?: Idealist's View of Reality,The
Writing somewhat later in the Scientific Revolution, Bish George Berkeley sought to crush the threat that materialism posed to religion by arguing that reality is made up entirely of ideas. Since we know about the world only through the ideas or sen...
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...
What is Real?: Realists' Side of the Debate with Anti-realists, The
The distinction between trying to capture the true nature of reality versus defining it in human terms has remained central to recent philosophy. The two sides in the debate are the realists and anti-realists. To realists, reality is objective and e...
What is Real?: Basic Nature of Reality, The
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that probes the basic nature of reality, trying to find a simple explanation for that which is complex. It looks at the world from both an onotological and cosmological point of view.
What is Real?: Reality as a Social Construction
Realists agree with anti-realists that much of reality is a social construction--money, marriage, government, language. But realists also believe there has to be a world that's independent of our representation of how things are. In contrast, anti-r...
What is Real?: Materialist's View of Reality, The
Materialists maintain that only the physical world is real. This idea which dates back to Democritus, a Greek philosopher who lived in the 5th century B.C, rose to prominence during the Scientific Revolution. Seventeenth century philosopher Thomas H...
Philosophy of religion
This program explores three major areas of philosophical inquiry into religion: religious epistemology, or the exploration of the rational grounds for religious beliefs and, in particular, the existence of God; the metaphysics of religion, which inq...