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wodeham
## 1. Life Adam Wodeham [Goddam/Woodham] (c. 1295-1358) was born near Southampton. He entered the Franciscan order at a young age. Wodeham's earliest philosophical education was at the Franciscan *studium* in London where he first studied under Walter Chatton (c. 1317-1321) and then William of Ockham (1320-1324). Du...
wolff-christian
## 1. Biographical Sketch Christian Wolff was born 24 January 1679 in Breslau in the province of Silesia (now part of Poland) to parents of modest means.[1] Wolff was educated at the Lutheran-humanist Maria-Magdelena-Gymansium, where his teachers included Christian Gryphius (1649-1706), a baroque poet and dramatis...
wollstonecraft
## 1. Biography The second of seven children, Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London, on 27 April 1759, in a house on Primrose Street. Her paternal grandfather was a successful master weaver who left a sizeable legacy, but her father, Edward John, mismanaged his share of the inheritance. He tried to es...
word-meaning
## 1. Basics The notions of *word* and *word meaning* are problematic to pin down, and this is reflected in the difficulties one encounters in defining the basic terminology of lexical semantics. In part, this depends on the fact that the term 'word' itself is highly polysemous (see, e.g., Matthews 1991; Booij 2007;...
work-labor
## 1. Conceptual Distinctions: Work, Labor, Employment, Leisure It is not difficult to enumerate examples of work. Hence, Samuel Clark: > > by *work* I mean the familiar things we do in fields, > factories, offices, schools, shops, building sites, call centres, > homes, and so on, to make a life and a living. Ex...
world-government
## 1. Historical Background For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be; ... Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. There the commo...
impossible-worlds
## 1. Reasons for Introducing Impossible Worlds Why might one believe in impossible worlds? One argument is the so-called "argument from ways" (Vander Laan 1997), which is related to the first definition of impossible world given above. This draws on the analogy with David Lewis's notorious argument concerning our...
possible-worlds
## 1. Possible Worlds and Modal Logic Although 'possible world' has been part of the philosophical lexicon at least since Leibniz, the notion became firmly entrenched in contemporary philosophy with the development of *possible world semantics* for the languages of propositional and first-order modal logic. In addit...
wright
## 1. Biographical Sketch Chauncey Wright was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1830, where his family had lived since colonial times and where his father had been a merchant and deputy-sheriff of the county. In 1848, he entered Harvard College. His education there included two years of advanced study in natur...
wilhelm-wundt
## 1. Biographical Timeline 1832 born at Neckarau/Mannheim, August 16 1845 enters Bruchsal Gymnasium 1851-2 study of medicine at Tubingen 1852-5 study of medicine at Heidelberg 1853 first publication "on the sodium chloride content of urine" 1855 medical assistant at a Heidelberg clinic 1856 semester of study with J...
wyclif
## 1. Life and Works ### 1.1 Life John Wyclif was born near Richmond (Yorkshire) before 1330 and ordained in 1351. He spent the greater part of his life in the schools at Oxford: he was fellow of Merton in 1356, master of arts at Balliol in 1360, and doctor of divinity in 1372. He definitely left Oxford in 1381 fo...
wyclif-political
## 1. Wyclif's Later Works Government and the relation of divine justice to human law, both secular and ecclesiastical, figure as occasional themes throughout the treatises of the *Summa de Ente*. After receiving his doctorate in theology in 1373, his attention began to focus more completely on these topics, and hi...
xenocrates
## 1. Metaphysics Most of what we can reconstruct about Xenocrates pertains to his metaphysics. We do this largely by identifying views of his that appear in Aristotle's criticisms of the metaphysical views of his predecessors and contemporaries, and chaining together with these other texts that can plausibly be tak...
xenophanes
## 1. Life and Works In his *Lives of the Philosophers* (Diels-Kranz, testimonium A1), Diogenes Laertius reports that Xenophanes was born in the small Ionian town of Colophon and flourished during the sixtieth Olympiad (540-537 BCE). Laertius adds that when Xenophanes was "banished from his native city" he "joined t...
xunzi
## 1. Xunzi and *Xunzi* The name Xunzi means Master Xun and refers to Xun Kuang Xun Kuang , who was renowned in his day as "the most revered of teachers" (*zui wei laoshi* Zui Wei Lao Shi ). His precise dates are unknown, and extant sources contradict one another: in particular, there is disagreement as to whether h...
yorck
## 1. Yorck's Life Count Paul Yorck von Wartenburg was born in Berlin on March 1, 1835. His grandfather was the famous Field Marshal Hans David Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg. (The Field Marshal's courageous signing of the Convention of Tauroggen, originally unauthorized by the king and thus in effect treasonous, start...
zabarella
## 1. Life and Works Giacomo (or Jacopo) Zabarella was born into an old and noble Paduan family on the 5th of September in 1533. From his father Giulio Zabarella he inherited the title of palatine count. Zabarella enjoyed a humanist education and entered the University of Padua, where he received the doctorate in 1...
zeno-elea
## 1. Life and Writings The dramatic occasion of Plato's dialogue, *Parmenides*, is a visit to Athens by the eminent philosopher Parmenides and Zeno, his younger associate, to attend the festival of the Great Panathenaea. Plato describes Parmenides as about sixty-five years old, Zeno as nearly forty, and Socrat...
paradox-zeno
## 1. Background Before we look at the paradoxes themselves it will be useful to sketch some of their historical and logical significance. First, Zeno sought to defend Parmenides by attacking his critics. Parmenides rejected pluralism and the reality of any kind of change: for him all was one indivisible, unchanging...
zermelo-set-theory
## 1. The Axioms The introduction to Zermelo's paper makes it clear that set theory is regarded as a fundamental theory: > > Set theory is that branch of mathematics whose task is to > investigate mathematically the fundamental notions > "number", "order", and > "function", taking them in their pristine, simpl...
zhuangzi
## 1. Zhuangzi's Life and Times Zhuangzi flourished through the latter half of the 4th century BC roughly contemporary with Mencius, and the movement known as the School of Names (Ming Jia *ming-jia* name school). Zhuangzi shows familiarity with Classical Chinese theories of pragmatic-semantics and makes his own the...
zhu-xi
## 1. Life and Works Zhu Xi was born in Youqi in Fujian in October 1130. Many anecdotes attest that he was a highly precocious child. It was recorded that at age five he ventured to ask what lay beyond Heaven, and by eight he understood the significance of the *Classic of Filiality* (*Xiaojing*). As a youth, he was ...
zombies
## 1. The idea of zombies Descartes held that non-human animals are automata: their behavior is wholly explicable in terms of physical mechanisms. But human behavior (he argued) could not be explained like that. Exploring the idea of a machine that would look and behave like a human being, he thought two things woul...