A central idea of John Rawls's theory of justice, referred to as the difference principle, is that inequalities in the distribution of relevant goods are just if and only if these inequalities are needed to improve the plight of everyone, in particular of those who are the worst off.(See Rawls's ...
Determinism is the doctrine that every event, including every intentional action of a human being, is determined by prior causes. This is usually thought to imply that there are universal, nonstatistical laws of nature covering every aspect of everything that happens. Given the state of the ...
Deontology is the study of ethical concepts having to do with permissibility and impermissibility, e.g., rights, duties, and obligations. See deontological ethics.
The term dualism has a number of uses in philosophy, but perhaps the most common is to describe positions on the mind-body problem that hold that the mind cannot be identified with the body or part of the body, or that mental properties are not physical properties. The form of dualism Descartes ...
Deductivism is the thesis that science should focus solely on deductive arguments rather than inductive arguments because there is no good response to the problem of induction. Deductivism is most closely associated with the twentieth-century philosopher of sc\ience Karl Popper. Popper advocated ...
The cosmos is the universe considered as an integrated orderly system. Sometimes the cosmos is the orderly part of a larger whole, the other part being chaos. Any account of the origin of the universe as a whole, whether based on myth,religion, philosophy, or science is a cosmogony. An account of ...
A conditional is a kind of statement that is made out of two others. The normal form of the statement is "If P then Q." P is the antecendt and Q the consequent. "If P, Q" and "Q, if P" are stylistic variations of "If P then Q". One thing seems quite clear about conditionals: If the antecedent is ...
Behaviorism is used in somewhat different senses in psychology and philosophy. In psychology, behaviorism was a twentieth-century movement that maintained that the study of behavior is the best or even the only way to study mental phenomena scientifically. It is opposed to the introspective methods ...
