[Revised entry by Jeroen van den Hoven, Martijn Blaauw, Wolter Pieters, and Martijn Warnier on October 4, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Human beings value their privacy and the protection of their personal sphere of life. They value some control over who knows what about them. They certainly do not want their personal information to...

[New Entry by Bart Geurts on October 3, 2024.] Compare and contrast the following scenarios. In the first, Betty sends Fred an email saying that she will be in town tomorrow, and then sends the same message to Barney. In the second scenario, Betty addresses the two men jointly with one message. In both scenarios, Barney and Fred are apprised of the...

[Revised entry by Michael LeBuffe on October 1, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach was a philosopher, translator, and prominent social figure of the French Enlightenment. In his philosophical writings Holbach developed a deterministic and materialistic metaphysics, which grounded his polemics against organized...

[Revised entry by George Karamanolis on October 1, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Numenius, a Platonist philosopher of the mid 2nd century CE, had considerable impact on later Platonism, most notably on Plotinus (3rd c.) and Porphyry (3rd-4th c). His work, surviving only in fragments, is important both historically and philosophically....

[New Entry by Mark Boespflug and Elizabeth Jackson on October 1, 2024.] Doxastic voluntarism is the thesis that our beliefs are subject to voluntary control. While there's some controversy as to what "voluntary control" amounts to (see s1.2), it's often understood as direct control: the ability to bring about a state of affairs "just like that", without...

[Revised entry by Justin Steinberg on September 30, 2024. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] At least in anglophone countries, Spinoza's reputation as a political thinker is eclipsed by his reputation as a rationalist metaphysician. Nevertheless, Spinoza was a penetrating political theorist whose writings have enduring significance. In his two...