What is it to be moral, to lead an ethically good life? From a naturalistic perspective, any answer to this question begins from an understanding of what humans are like that is deeply informed by psychology, anthropology,

Epistemology is the area of philosophy that examines the phenomena of and related to knowledge. Traditional core questions include: How is knowledge different from lucky guessing? Can knowledge be innate? Is skepticism a threat, and if so,

Seeing is often a good reason for believing—when things go well. But suppose we have a case like this: Jill believes that Jack is angry, although she has no good grounds for this belief. Nevertheless, when she sees him,

We all recognize that parenting involves a seemingly endless succession of choices, beginning perhaps with the choice to become a parent, through a sequence of decisions concerning the care, upbringing, acculturation, and education of a child.

Social constructionists hold that the world is determined at least in part by our ways of representing it. Recent debates regarding social construction have focused on categories that play important roles in the human social world,

According to a challenge going back to Plato, democracy is unacceptable as a mode of political organization, because it distributes political power equally among those who are unequal in wisdom. Plato goes on to object that democracies are suspicious o...

In the 1960’s Thomas Kuhn argued, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that scientists’ choices between competing theories could not be determined by the empirical evidence. Ever since, philosophers of science have debated the role of non-episte...

When Descartes famously concluded “I think, therefore I am”, he took for granted his ability to use the first person pronoun to refer to himself. But how do we come to have this capacity for self-conscious thought? We aren’t born with it,

We are accustomed to the thought that individuals facing dire circumstances may rightfully take use of others’ property in order to save their own lives. For example, one thinks it obvious that in order to avoid freezing to death,

A popular way of thinking about the mind and its relation to physical stuff is in terms of computation. This general information-processing approach to solving the mind-body problem admits of a number of different, often incompatible, elaborations.

When we are thinking about what we ought to do, we are nearly always deciding among options. And we often talk in ways that reflect this; statement about what one ought to do are frequently explicitly statements that identify some act as the one to be ...

Shame is a complex social emotion that has a particularly negative valence; in the West it is associated with failure, inappropriateness, dishonor, disgrace. But within the Confucian tradition, there is in addition a distinct,

The freedoms prized and secured in a modern liberal democratic societies give rise to significant forms of moral and social diversity. In many cases, these forms of diversity must be dealt with by the state and its citizens.

For many cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of mind, the best current theory of cognition holds that thinking is in some sense computation “in some sense,” because that core idea can and has been elaborated in a number of different w...

Many of the longstanding debates in moral philosophy concern the question of where more theorizing should begin. Some hold that moral theories should start with definitions of moral terms like good; others contend instead that we should begin by identi...

Many environmentalists approach the problem of motivating environmentally friendly behavior from the perspective that nature is good and that we ought to act so as to maximize the good environmental consequences of our actions and minimize the bad ones...

Humans engage in a wide variety of collective behaviors, ranging from simple customs like wearing a heavy coat in winter to more complex group actions, as when an audience gives applause at the close of a musical performance.

The idea that the sciences can’t be unified–that there will never be a single ‘theory of everything’–is the current orthodoxy in philosophy of science and in many sciences as well. But different versions of pluralism present very different views of wha...

The idea that a political order derives its authority, legitimacy, and justification from some kind of initial agreement or contract, whether hypothetical or tacit, has been a mainstay of political philosophy, at least since Hobbes. Today,

Are complex phenomena “nothing but the sum of their parts”, or are they “more than the sum of their parts”? Physicists, chemists, and biologists as well as philosophers have long argued on both sides of this debate between the idea of reduction and tha...

The philosopher (and 1972 presidential candidate) John Hospers once wrote, “justice is getting what one deserves. What could be simpler?” As it turns out, this seemingly simple idea is in the opinion of many contemporary political philosophers complica...

Psychological and philosophical theories of the emotions tend to take the adult emotional repertoire as the paradigm case for understanding the emotions. From this standpoint, the emotions are usually distinguished into two categories: the basic emotio...

We are all familiar with the idea that some persons are disabled. But what is disability? What makes it such that a condition–physical, cognitive, psychological–is a disability, rather than, say, a disease or illness?

The predictive processing hypothesis is a new unified theory of neural and cognitive function according to which our brains are prediction machines: they process the incoming sensory stream in the light of expectations of what those sensory inputs ough...

On any mature view, war is horrific. Naturally, there is a broad range of fundamental ethical questions regarding war. According to most moral theories, war is nonetheless sometimes permitted, and perhaps even obligatory.