Eastern Philosophy is a diverse body of approaches to life and philosophizing, particularly centered on understanding the process of the Universe and its endless becoming. In Western Culture, the term “Eastern Philosophy” refers very broadly to the various philosophies of “the East”, namely Asia, including China, India, Japan, Korea, Tibet, and other nations. ...

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All Rights Reserved © 2004 & 2007 M.R.M. ParrottThis article is updated from a version which appeared on rimric folio in 2004, and has been protected on GetWiki on behalf of the author, republished here with permission. All rights reserved. “Participating in a Wiki brings many of the same feelings of freedom as having one's own website or participating in a discussion forum, but there...

Friedrich Nietzsche (15 October 1844 - 25 August 1900, and pronounced: “NeeShuh”) was a Prussian (German) philosopher whose work encompassed Poetry, cultural criticism, philosophical essays, and aphorisms. Including strong elements of Philology, irony and insult, pointed criticisms of Truth and religious pseudo-morality, and...

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1 Jul 1646 - 14 Nov 1716) was a German philosopher and mathematician who wrote primarily in Latin and French, with works widely distributed in journals and tens of thousands of letters and unpublished manuscripts. Leibniz, independently of Isaac Newton, invented Calculus, and he also invented the Binary Number...

MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Development is led by some of the original developers of MySQL, who forked it due to concerns over its acquisition by Oracle Corporation in 2009. MariaDB is intended to maintain high compatibility with MySQL, with...

The history of Philosophy in the West begins with the Ancient Greeks, particularly with a group of philosophers who came to be known as the “Pre-Socratics” - because they appeared before Socrates brought dramatic change to Philosophy. This is not to say that there weren't other pre-philosophical rumblings in Egyptian, Semitic, and...

Ontology is the most fundamental branch of Metaphysics, which is the most fundamental branch of Philosophy. The study of Being and Existence, as well as the basic Categories of Things in general, Ontology is really the study of Reality, and supports all of Science today. A Being...

Thomas Hobbes (5 Apr 1588 - 4 Dec 1679) was an English political philosopher, most famous for his book Leviathan (1651) and his view of a “State of Nature” to avoid as a life which would be “brutish, nasty and short”. His view of the necessity of a powerful central Government, where some may be stronger or more intelligent than others, but none are beyond fear...

Open Source computer software is that whose “source code”, the code which generates the software's system or purpose, is either in the Public Domain or, more commonly, is copyright-protected by one or more persons or entities and licensed to anyone according to an Open Source License. This usually grants permission to use and redistribute the software, as well as to modify its source code and distribute modified...

The Philosophy of Mind, which includes the Philosophy of Perception, is a branch of Epistemology (or “Theory of Knowledge”), which in turn is a major branch of Philosophy. The specialization of the Philosophy of Mind is the focus on the nature of Mind, Mental Events and Functions, Perception, Memory, and Consciousness,...

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, economies, nervous systems, cells and living things, including human beings, as well as modern energy or telecommunication...

The Philosophy of Logic is a branch of Philosophy which deals with the scope and nature of Logic, and investigates philosophical problems raised by Logic, such as presuppositions often implicitly at work in theories and applications. It involves questions about how Logic is defined and how different logical systems are connected to each other, as well as...

Dynamism is term of Philosophy and Science coined by Gottfried Leibniz and developed into a full system of Reality and Cosmology. Dynamism describes that what exists are simple Elements, or for Leibniz, “Monads”, groups of Essences which have are Forces. Interactions between...

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The Philosophy of History is an area of Philosophy concerning any significance of “Human History”, and is speculative about Teleological Ends to our historical development. We should not confuse the “Philosophy of History” with the storied but less confusing “History of Philosophy”, which is the study of the development of...

PseudoPhilosophy is any idea or system that masquerades itself as Philosophy while significantly failing to meet even basic intellectual standards. The term is frequently pejorative, and most applications of it are quite contentious. The term bears the same relationship to Philosophy that PseudoScience bears to Science, or Anti-Matter to Matter. PseudoPhilosophy is simply “Bullshit”, in the common vernacular. The...

Metadata (“about” or “above” + “data” or “information”), literally “data about data”, is information that describes another set of data. A common example is a library catalog card, which contains data about the contents and location of a book: It is data about the data in the book referred to by the card. Other common contents of metadata include the source or author of the described dataset, how it should be accessed,...

Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century is reacting to two major forces affecting its way of life. The first, a dismantling or destructive force, comes primarily from Academia, while the second, a rebuilding or constructive force, comes mainly from the diversity of voices and media through which philosophers or thinkers can now...

Religious Studies is a popular and important element in cultures world-wide, and in the Western traditions it was a part of Philosophy (specifically Metaphysics) along with Science, but that was a long, long time ago, during Antiquity, and particularly the Middle Ages. While both Philosophy and Science have seen incredible...

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 with focus on Physics, Biology, and Engineering, and it later grew with connections into Philosophy, Sociology, and Economics, as developed by Fritjof Capra and others, as...

The Philosophy of Mathematics is a specialization of Logic closely related to the Philosophy of Logic, which are all a part of Philosophy. Addressing questions about the character of Mathematics and “Number”, the conduct of mathematical inquiry, the Philosophy of Mathematics is focused on the role of mathematical objects in describing empirical...

The Philosophy of Science is the branch of Philosophy which deals with the study of Science (in the sense of “Natural Science”). The Philosophy of Science is closely related to many areas in Metaphysics such as Teleology, as well as Epistemology, Logic, and even Ethics. Philosophers of Science seek to explain the very nature of...

Dynamism (see Dynamism for encyclopedic information) is a series of treatises in Philosophy and Science by M.R.M. Parrott, addressing subjects in Metaphysics, such as a Theory of Reality, a Theory of Life, Subjectivity, Ethics, and more. Dynamism: A Philosophy and Science Series is available in paperback from Barnes & Noble,...

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was a major Greek thinker in Ancient Philosophy, a student of Plato (who was student of Socrates) and a teacher of Alexander the Great. Aristotle was the first to treat many of the subjects we know separately, from Metaphysics, Logic and Physics to Ethics, Poetics, Politics and more. Alongside Plato and...