Cutie Stories

Reduction

A cursory glance at the history of science reveals a continuous succession of scientific theories of various areas or domains. For example, since ancient times theories of the cosmos have been proposed to account for the observed behavior of the heavenly bodies.

The geocentric Ptolemaic theory was, for instance, succeeded by the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. Another example concerns the nature of light. Corpuscular theories were succeeded by wave theories of light. Wave theories, in turn, have been followed by the quantum theories of electromagnetic radiation.

This entry concerns the nature of certain relations that may obtain between different pairs of theories in such sequences. A radical or extreme view of those relations is that of Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn (1970) famously argues that across scientific revolutions there is a radical disconnect between theories. One can find a similar argument in Paul K. Feyerabend (1962). On such a view, no rational relations can obtain between a theory and its predecessor.

Giuseppe Rensi

Giuseppe Rensi was an Italian skeptical philosopher and professor of philosophy at the universities of Messina and Genoa. Rensi first upheld a religiously or theistically oriented idealistic philosophy, defending it in a number of essays and fostering it through his translations of the works of Josiah Royce.

He contrasted his theistic "constructive idealism" with the "immanentistic idealism" of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile; he regarded the latter as a temporary position that, if developed coherently, would have led to constructive idealism.

According to Rensi, an idealism that does not arrive at God subtracts reality both from the external world, which then becomes a set of ideas, and from the human spirit, which is then resolved into a set of ideas without a subject.

Reason

In English the word reason has long had, and still has, a large number and a wide variety of senses and uses, related to one another in ways that are often complicated and often not clear. However, there is one particular sense of the word in which it, with its synonyms or analogues in other languages, has figured prominently in philosophical controversy.

This is the sense, sometimes distinguished typographically by an initial capital, in which the term is taken to designate a mental faculty or capacity— in which reason might, for example, be regarded as coordinate with, but distinguishable from, sensation, emotion, or will.

Questions to be Examined

The question that has been chiefly debated by philosophers might be expressed succinctly, but far from clearly, as "What can reason do?" However, there has also been discussion of the question whether the faculty of reason is peculiar to humanity (and presumably to "higher" beings, if there are any), or whether its possession and exercise in some degree can also be ascribed to "lower" animals.

Reference

"Reference" is usually conceived as the central relation between language or thought and the world. To talk or think about something is to refer to it. Twentieth-century philosophy found such relations particularly problematic.

One paradigm of reference is the relation between a proper name and its bearer. On a more theoretical conception all the constituents of an utterance or thought that contribute to determining whether it is true refer to their contributions (as, for example, a predicate refers to a property).

In analytic philosophy discussion of reference was dominated until the 1960s by the views of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell and modifications of them (such as those by P. F. Strawson). Criticisms of assumptions common to those views then provoked a revolution in the theory of reference. The alternatives include causal and minimalist theories.

Reflective Equilibrium

Reflective equilibrium is a coherence method of philosophical justification or inquiry. Nelson Goodman (1955) introduced reflective equilibrium, although not under that name, to contemporary philosophy in a discussion of deductive and inductive logic. It is arguable, however, that philosophers have employed something such as reflective equilibrium to inquire into a wide range of topics since ancient times.

Goodman maintained that we justify an inference by showing that it conforms to the rules of either deduction or induction. But for the inferences to be justified, these rules must be valid. Goodman held that we justify rules of inference by showing that they accord with judgments we make about which particular inferences are acceptable and which are unacceptable.

According to the epistemological reading, when we complete the process of mutual adjustment Goodman describes, thereby bringing our judgments regarding the particular inferences and the rules of inference we accept into a state of reflective equilibrium, these rules and particular judgments are by definition justified.

Reformation

In the narrower and probably most common sense, "Reformation" is the name given to the spiritual crisis of the sixteenth century that resulted in the permanent division of the Western church.

The birthdate of the Reformation is traditionally given as 1517, the year in which Martin Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg; the termination of the period may be assigned to the 1550s, by which time an ecclesiastical stalemate between the Protestants and the Roman Catholics appeared unavoidable.

Sometimes the Reformation is extended backward to include such early reform movements as Lollardy or forward to include the religious conflicts, lasting into the seventeenth century, that sought to resolve the Catholic-Protestant stalemate forcibly or to readjust the divisions between the various Protestant groups.

Reincarnation

The doctrine variously called transmigration of souls, metempsychosis, palingenesis, rebirth, and "reincarnation" has been and continues to be widely believed. Although some of these terms imply belief in an immortal soul that transmigrates or reincarnates, Buddhism, while teaching rebirth, denies the eternity of the soul. The word rebirth is therefore the most comprehensive for referring to this range of beliefs.

In one form or another the doctrine of rebirth has been held in various cultures. It was expressed in ancient Greece (Pythagoras, Empedocles, Orphism, Plato, and later, Plotinus); among some Gnostics and in some Christian heresies such as the medieval Cathari; in some phases of Jewish Kabbalism; in some cultures of tropical Africa; and most notably in such Eastern religions as Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism.

Some European philosophers, notably Arthur Schopenhauer and J. M. E. McTaggart, have incorporated the doctrine into their metaphysics. The origin of the doctrine of rebirth as a religious belief is obscure.