The GNU General Public License is a Copyleft software license. It was written by a programmer, Richard Stallman in 1989 of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the distribution of programs released as part of the GNU Project. Though based on similar licenses used for early versions of Emacs, the GPL license subtly challenged the notion of Copyright, and...

Modern philosophy is Philosophy done during the "modern" era of Europe and North America. It is not a specific doctrine or school, (and so should not be confused with Modernism or Modernity) although there are certain assumptions common to much of it distinguishing it from Renaissance Philosophy and Contemporary Philosophy periods. Is Modern Philosophy Modern?...

Logic (λόγος in Greek, logos, "thought") is the most fundamental of all the Sciences and a major branch of Philosophy. Logic is the primary "proof" and method of Mathematics and all Language, leading to Arithmetic Geometry, Set Theory, and Computation, as well as...

Baruch Benedict de Spinoza (24 Nov 1632 - 21 Feb 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of a Portuguese Jewish family, whose controversial metaphysical ideas led to cherem (removal) against him from Jewish Society, and his works were banned by the Vatican. Despite his considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was...

Plato (428-27 - 348-47 BC) was a major Greek thinker in Ancient Philosophy, a student of Socrates, founder of the first Academy, and with his student Aristotle and the most important modern philosopher Kant, is still considered one of the singularly important thinkers of all...

Max Weber (21 Apr 1864 - 14 Jun 1920) was a German thinker who developed a "Hermeneutic" tradition in Sociology and Economics. Weber based many of his economic studies on early twentieth-century Germany, and became well-known for his study of the "bureaucratization" of society. Life and Works - Born in Erfurt, Germany, and the eldest of seven children of Max Weber and Helene, young...

Ancient Western Philosophy - The key figure in transforming early Greek philosophy into a unified and continuous project - the one still being pursued today - is Socrates, who studied under several Sophists and then spent much of his life, we are told, engaging everyone in Athens in discussion trying to determine whether anyone had a very good idea what they were...

Introducing GetWiki 1.0 - Despite the wonderful aspects of what the software could do, had many nagging problems, along with many hidden defaults which may not serve other sites beyond Pseudopedia's reach. After a series of bugfixes to Mediawiki 1.1.0, it became apparent the Internet-Encyclopedia software...

Theology was used as early as in Plato's Republic (book ii, chap 18). The the term, compounded from two Greek words theos (god) and logos (rational utterance), has been defined as reasoned discourse about God or the gods, or more generally about religion or spirituality. Theologians use various forms of analysis and argument...

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...

meta is: about, regarding, even other. metadata is disussion about data, metaphysics discussion about physics, metatheory discussion about theory. this , meta, is a prefix which can be used in a thousand ways on a thousand subjects. it is metamorphosis, metamemory, metacognition, metaethics, metalogic, metamathematics,...

A rhema or a rheme (also "relative term" and "topic comment"), is a logical term that requires reference to any number of other objects, called the correlates of the term, in order to denote a definite object, called the relate (pronounced with the accent on the first syllable) of the relative term in question. A relative term is typically expressed in ordinary language...

Background - GetWiki allows TeX markup for mathematics and logic formulas. Instead of assuming complicated dependencies and server resources on all GetWiki-based wikis just to generate PNG images, GetWiki translates TeX into simple XHTML markup1, with LaTeX parsing and image rendering available as a deprecated option2. In the future, as browsers become even more XML...

Again, in a ship, if a man were at liberty to do what he chose, but were devoid of mind and excellence in navigation (αρετης κυβερνητικης), do you perceive what must happen to him and his fellow sailors? (Plato, Alcibiades, 135A). Cybernetics is the study of Communication and Control...

Philosophy of Mathematics is an active branch of Philosophy addressing questions about the character of Mathematics, the conduct of mathematical inquiry, and the role of mathematical objects in describing empirical phenomena. As a form of philosophical inquiry, it examines the record of mathematical inquiry and poses...

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...

Dynamism is term of philosophy and science coined by Gottfried Leibniz (1646—1716) and developed into a full system of cosmology. Dynamism describes that what exists are simple elements, or for Leibniz, monads, and groups of elements which have only the essence of forces. Interaction between elements takes place without contact, through modes or...

How many students have relied on false information from Wikipedia? Is the fact that it's a Wiki relevant to the question? "Pseudopedia", "The Wikipedia", is an open-content information website, whose co-founder claims is the "sum of all human knowledge", or at least, that it should become that sum. Since 2003, The...

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...

Introducing GetWiki 2.0 - With the ability to develop GetWiki fully independently of "legacy" concerns, GetWiki 2.0 has brought major improvements and changes to GetWiki 1.0. Beyond the endless bugfixes to the old MediaWiki codebase and Wikipedian origins, development stabilized for 1.0 and has since moved toward a few major...

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...

Aesthetics (or Esthetics, or Philosophy of Art) is a branch of Philosophy dealing with the definition of Beauty and how we relate to what is Beautiful. The word aesthetics was first used by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who helped to establish the study of...

All Rights Reserved © 1998-99 M.R.M. ParrottThe chapter linked below first appeared as a series of internet discussion posts on Usenet, in 1998-99, and is the final chapter of "Synthetic A Priori", linked here courtesy of M.R.M. Parrott. ([http://mrmparrott.com/philosophy-science/...

Eastern Philosophy is a diverse body of approaches to life and philosophizing, particularly centered on understanding the process of the Universe and the endless "becoming". In Western culture, the term Eastern Philosophy refers very broadly to the various...

Open-source computer software is software whose source code is either in the public domain or, more commonly, is...