Qualia: The Knowledge Argument
[Revised entry by Martine Nida-Rümelin on November 23, 2009. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The knowledge argument aims to establish that conscious experience involves non-physical properties. It rests on the idea that someone who has complete physical knowledge about another conscious being might yet lack knowledge about how it feels to have the experiences of that being. It is one of the most discussed arguments against physicalism....

School of Names
[Revised entry by Chris Fraser on November 23, 2009. Changes to: Bibliography] The "School of Names" (ming jia) is the traditional Chinese label for a diverse group of Warring States (479-221 B.C.) thinkers who shared an interest in language, disputation, and metaphysics. They were notorious for logic-chopping, purportedly idle conceptual puzzles, and paradoxes such as "Today go to Yue but arrive yesterday" and "A white...

Other Minds
[Revised entry by Alec Hyslop on November 23, 2009. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The problem of other minds is the problem of how to justify the almost universal belief that others have minds very like our own. It is one of the hallowed, if nowadays unfashionable, problems in philosophy. Various solutions to the problem are on offer. It is noteworthy that so many are on offer. Even more noteworthy is that none of the solutions on offer can plausibly lay claim to enjoying majority support....

The Frame Problem
[Revised entry by Murray Shanahan on November 22, 2009. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] To most AI researchers, the frame problem is the challenge of representing the effects of action in logic without having to represent explicitly a large number of intuitively obvious non-effects. But to many philosophers, the AI researchers' frame problem is suggestive of wider epistemological issues. Is it possible, in principle, to limit the scope of the reasoning required to derive the consequences of an...

Moral Responsibility
[Revised entry by Andrew Eshleman on November 18, 2009. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] When a person performs or fails to perform a morally significant action, we sometimes think that a particular kind of response is warranted. Praise and blame are perhaps the most obvious forms this reaction might take. For example, one who encounters a car accident may be regarded as worthy of praise for having saved a child from inside the burning car, or alternatively, one may be regarded as...