THX 1138 - After watching the new DVD release of George Lucas's THX 1138, I cannot get the themes out of my mind. It may sound overstated, but I think the film is one of the very best "future shock", sci-fi, works I have seen. Although there are cynical levels on which to read the film, there is also an affirmative reading - a sense of hope. The tension between dystopia and utopia...

The teachings of Gautama Buddha (6th century BC - 5th century BC), because of its non-theistic nature, have been described as more of a Philosophy than a Religion. However, adherents of Buddhism contest that even these two categories lack in defining Buddhist teaching. For them, Buddhism presents itself as way to attain understanding and direct insight into the true nature of...

Ethics (from the Ancient Greek ethikos, the adjective of ethos, "custom, habit"), is a major branch of Philosophy and the study of Value Theory, Customs and Morality of a person or group. It covers the analysis and employment of concepts such as Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, and moral responsibility...

Semiosis is any form of activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning. The term was introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839?1914) to describe a process that interprets signs as referring to their objects, as described in his theory of sign relations, or semiotics. Other theories...

Welcome to GetWiki, a Wiki for the Humanities and Sciences, and "meta" topics, from Metaphysics to Metadata, running the easy-to-use GetWiki software. The website, first known as "GetMeta", was launched in April, 2004 as a testing platform for Wikinfo, which at that...

What is Philosophy? This question is as "philosophical" and profound as any of the big questions philosophers ask. The diverse, cultural activity of Philosophy is the historical study of the meaning and justification of beliefs about the most general and universal aspects of all things. It is a study carried out, not...

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for creating web pages, that is, information presented on the World Wide Web. Defined as a simple "application" of SGML, which is used by organizations with complex publishing requirements, HTML was an Internet standard maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The...

Systems Theory (or Theorie) or General Systems Theory or Systemics is an interdisciplinary field which studies systems as a whole. Systems Theory was founded by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, William Ross Ashby and others between the 1940s and the 1970s on principles from Physics, Biology and Engineering and later grew with connections into...

The GNU project was launched by Richard Stallman with the goal of creating a complete free operating system: the GNU system. The project was announced to the public on September 27, 1983, on the net.unix-wizards newsgroup. The original announcement was followed by Stallman's "GNU Manifesto" and other essays that laid out his motivations and ideology for the GNU project, one of...

Perception is one of our most important mental processes. If we could not perceive anything, then we would know nothing except the contents of our own minds. Because it is our window onto the world, it is important for us to know some basic facts about perception. For example, does our...

Metaphysics is a difficult branch of Philosophy, but is rather easy to define: It is the study of the most fundamental concepts and beliefs about them. Examples of metaphysical concepts are Being, Existence, Purpose, Universals, Property, Relation, Causality, Space, Time, Event,...

Philosophy of Religion is the study of the meaning and justification of fundamental religious claims, particularly about the nature and existence of God (or gods, or the divine). Philosophy of religion was classically regarded as part of metaphysics, since Aristotle, in some of whose writings were...

Epistemology is the branch of Philosophy dealing with the nature, origin and scope of Knowledge, and Method in obtaining Knowledge. Some consensus exists as to which epistemological methods give human beings the most accurate understanding of the truth (rather...

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1 Jul 1646 - 14 Nov 1716) was a German philosopher and mathematician, writing primarily in Latin and French, who, independently of Newton, invented Calculus, invented the Binary Number System, and was a contributor to a vast array of subjects, including Philosophy, Physics, Technology,...

Pragmatic theory of truth refers to those accounts, definitions, and theories of the concept truth that distinguish the philosophies of pragmatism and pragmaticism. The conception of truth in question varies along lines that reflect the influence of several thinkers, initially and notably, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, but a number of common...

There are many definitions of complexity, therefore many natural, artificial and abstract objects or networks can be considered to be complex systems, and their study (complexity science) is highly interdisciplinary. Examples of complex systems include ant-hills, ants themselves, human economies, nervous systems, cells and living things,...

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of real-time InternetInternet or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group (many-to-many) communication in discussion forums called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication and data transfers via IM (private message). IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in late August 1988 to replace a program called MUT...

Wikipedia Review is an internet discussion forum and blog for the critical discussion of Pseudopedia and other Wikimedia projects. History- The original version of Wikipedia Review was hosted at ProBoards in November 2005 by Igor Alexander. In December 2005, Igor Alexander gave up administration to Blu Aardvark. At that stage the policy of Wikipedia Review changed from...

George Berkeley (12 Mar 1685 - 14 Jan 1753, and pronounced: "Barkly") was an Anglo-Irish philosopher who advanced a theory of "Immaterialism" and was known as the good "Bishop Berkeley". Seen as a poweful "subjective idealism", Berkeley argued we can directly know only our own Sensation and Idea of an Object. The notion of "matter", for example, is an idea dependent upon being...

MySQL (pronounced which has, according to MySQL AB, more than 10 million installations. MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, which holds the copyright to most of the codebase. This is similar to the JBoss model and how the Free Software Foundation handles copyright in its projects, and dissimilar to how the Apache...

In Mathematics, a set of symbols is frequently used in mathematical expressions. As mathematicians are familiar with these symbols, they are not explained each time they are used. So, for mathematical novices, the following table lists many common symbols together with their name, pronunciation and related field of Mathematics. Additionally, the third column contains an informal...

__NOTOC__ Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML), or simply XTML, is an SGML markup language that has the same expressive possibilites as HTML, but conforms to the XML standard which is more strict. XHTML has been...

The protected articles included below by M.R.M. Parrott first appeared on rimric folio in 2003. Older Than You Know- In the passage of years following that big year for Matrix fans, 2003, and of course, the breakthrough in 1999, I find the "trilogy", "franchise", or just "series", as more and more relevant to today's world, while also striking...

''Middle East Region, (Middle East) Middle Eastern Philosophy is largely guided by the Abrahamic Religions, ancient theologies, comprising full world-views and their philosophical and historical interpretations and philosophizing up to the...