[Revised entry by Kristen Rundle and Jeremy Waldron on June 17, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The phrase “the rule of law” has to be distinguished from the phrase “a rule of law”. The latter phrase is used to designate some particular legal rule like the rule against perpetuities or the rule that says […]

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[Revised entry by Stewart Shapiro and Teresa Kouri Kissel on June 17, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Typically, a logic consists of a formal or informal language together with a deductive system and/or a model-theoretic semantics. The language has components that correspond to a part of a natural language like English or Greek. The […]

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[Revised entry by Lev Vaidman on June 17, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics holds that there are numerous parallel worlds existing in the same space and time as our own. Recognizing the existence of these additional worlds makes it possible to remove fundamental randomness and action at […]

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[Revised entry by Crispin Sartwell on June 17, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The nature of beauty is one of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy, and is – with the nature of art – one of the two fundamental issues in the history of philosophical aesthetics. Beauty has traditionally been […]

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“There is an inconvenience which attends all abstruse reasoning. That it may silence, without convincing an antagonist, and requires the same intense study to make us sensible of its force, that was at first requisite for its invention.” - David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

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Plagiarism: Nabokov called it unconscious. Dylan told his accusers to rot in hell. Both had a point

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Debate over whether David Foster Wallace was a virtuosic bully or a genius with a heart of gold has eclipsed consideration of his work

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Dwight Macdonald opposed World War II, denounced the atom bomb, and never found an ideological home. Was he right?

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suliqyre:After reading a strange text, we can be left wondering what it means. It seems to be saying something important, but we aren’t sure what. We wonder if perhaps we’ve missed something and this has prevented us from reaching the whole meaning.We want to go back and reread, we want to seek out context, we want to get more information. We want to do these things so that we can find the point of the text. Knowing the point feels like the most important thing. But our anxiety over not having a clear meaning can easily mislead us. It can pull us away from what we need to see and drag our attention back into the text, forcing us to analyze every last detail as we grasp for definite knowledge.We don’t need to force ourselves to get something out of everything we read. Reading is just like every other experience we have: we might see some meaning in it or we might not. Unless we’re overcome by paranoia, we don’t usually concern ourselves with the meaning of every little thing that happens to us.Read more…

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[New Entry by Hsueh Qu and Elizabeth S. Radcliffe on June 16, 2026.] [Editor’s Note: The following new entry by Hsueh Qu and Elizabeth S. Radcliffe replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous authors.]…

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