COMMENTS

  1. 9 Philosophical Thought Experiments You Should Know About

    A thought experiment that tests loyalty against ethical principles is the bad father. In the thought experiment, there is a son who holds honesty as the highest value. However, his father is not an honest man. One day, his son catches him stealing from a local farmer. In this situation, the son must make a choice.

  2. Einstein's thought experiments

    Thought experiments invoke particulars that are irrelevant to the generality of their conclusions. It is the invocation of these particulars that give thought experiments their experiment-like appearance. ... In addition, Einstein can arguably be considered the father of solid state physics and condensed matter physics. [38] He provided a ...

  3. Thought Experiments and Philosophical Problems

    What If. . .Collected Thought Experiments in Philosophy is a brief collection of over 100 classic and contemporary "thought experiments," each exploring an important philosophical argument. These thought experiments introduce students to the kind of disciplined thought required in philosophy, and awaken their intellectual curiosity.

  4. Thought experiment

    The ancient Greek δείκνυμι, deiknymi, 'thought experiment', "was the most ancient pattern of mathematical proof", and existed before Euclidean mathematics, [7] where the emphasis was on the conceptual, rather than on the experimental part of a thought experiment.. Johann Witt-Hansen established that Hans Christian Ørsted was the first to use the equivalent German term ...

  5. Thought Experiments

    Thought Experiments. First published Sat Dec 28, 1996; substantive revision Tue Nov 28, 2023. Thought experiments are basically devices of the imagination. They are employed for various purposes such an entertainment, education, conceptual analysis, exploration, hypothesizing, theory selection, theory implementation, etc.

  6. Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt

    Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (1832-1920) is known to posterity as the "father of experimental psychology" and the founder of the first psychology laboratory (Boring 1950: 317, 322, 344-5), [] whence he exerted enormous influence on the development of psychology as a discipline, especially in the United States. Reserved and shy in public (cf. Kusch 1995: 249, f.), Wundt aggressively ...

  7. Ship of Theseus

    The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a thought experiment and paradox about whether an object is the same object after having all of its original components replaced over time, typically one after the other.. In Greek mythology, Theseus, the mythical king of the city of Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped onto a ...

  8. Thought Experiments

    Thought Experiments. First published Sat Dec 28, 1996; substantive revision Sun Mar 25, 2007. Thought experiments are devices of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things. We need only list a few of the well-known thought experiments to be reminded of their enormous influence and importance in the sciences: Newton's bucket ...

  9. Einstein's Relativity Explained in 4 Simple Steps

    Einstein later explained the problem with another thought experiment: Imagine firing a light beam along a railroad embankment just as a train roars by in the same direction at, say, 2,000 miles a ...

  10. Thought Experiments: Exploring Creative and Philosophical Thinking

    Thought experiments have been a source of creative and philosophical thinking since the days of ancient philosophers. From the Socratic method to Descartes' wax analogy, thought experiments have been used to explore the boundaries of our understanding and push the limits of our imagination. This article explores the use of thought experiments ...

  11. PDF Thought Experiments: State of the art

    experiments or thought experiment-like inferences by considering them. So in Part I, we tentatively expand our notion of thought experiment, while still covering the cases that are most discussed in the literature. We hope this provides a balance between historical scholarship on well-known thought experiments and those that are less well-known.

  12. 2.1.3: The "ticking time bomb" thought experiment

    Thought experiments are frequently used in philosophy as a method to justify our intuitive thinking. A common feature of these thought experiments is that they are imaginary and involve some degree of generalization (Williamson, 2018). One of the most used thought experiment in the torture debate is the "ticking time bomb" scenario.

  13. Thought Experiments

    Thought experiments are performed in the imagination. We set up some situation, we observe what happens, then we try to draw appropriate conclusions. In this way, thought experiments resemble real experiments, except that they are experiments in the mind. The terms "thought experiment," "imaginary experiment," and "Gedankenexperiment ...

  14. 1.2: Introduction and Thought Experiments- The Trolley Problem

    The trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics. The general form of the problem is this: There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever.

  15. The Greatest Father-Son Team In Science

    This Simple Thought Experiment Shows Why We Need Quantum Gravity. Jul 19, 2018, 10:00am EDT. ... But we're nothing compared to the father-son team that won the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics.

  16. Descartes' Epistemology

    Descartes' Epistemology. First published Wed Dec 3, 1997; substantive revision Mon Nov 27, 2023. René Descartes (1596-1650) is widely regarded as a key figure in the founding of modern philosophy. His noteworthy contributions extend to mathematics and physics. This entry focuses on his philosophical contributions to the theory of knowledge.

  17. Knowledge argument

    Knowledge argument. The knowledge argument (also known as Mary's Room or Mary the super-scientist) is a philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson in his article "Epiphenomenal Qualia " (1982) and extended in "What Mary Didn't Know" (1986). The experiment describes Mary, a scientist who exists in a black-and-white world where ...

  18. Why Wilhelm Wundt is considered the father of experimental ...

    Jul 30, 2022. All influential psychologists at the turn of the 20th century were either students of Wundt or students of his students. Experimental psychology was defined by the experiments in Liepzig lab and the American labs opened by Wundt's students. He incorporated the influences of Gustav Theodor Fechner, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz ...

  19. Why Franklin, Washington and Lincoln considered American democracy an

    From the time of the founding era to the present day, one of the more common things said about American democracy is that it is an "experiment.". Most people can readily intuit what the term ...

  20. The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time

    TDT has its roots in the classic thought experiment of decision theory called Newcomb's paradox, in which a superintelligent alien presents two boxes to you: Advertisement. The alien gives you ...

  21. Wilhelm Wundt

    Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (/ w ʊ n t /; German:; 16 August 1832 - 31 August 1920) was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor, one of the fathers of modern psychology.Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person ever to call himself a psychologist. [1]He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology".

  22. 9 Philosophical Thought Experiments That Will Keep You Up at Night

    This thought experiment reveals the complexity of morality by distinguishing between killing a person and letting them die — a problem with implications to our laws, behavior, science, policing ...

  23. CCTV shows shock moment father shot confronting man daughter thought

    Shocking CCTV shows the moment an innocent father was shot after confronting a man his daughter thought was following her in Melbourne's south-east.. Blessing Valla, 21, was driving home from a local McDonald's about 12.30am on Monday when she noticed a white station wagon following her.