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Clifford's principle holds that it is immoral for individuals, no matter of circumstances, to believe anything without sufficient evidence.While this principle has existed for centuries, it only became prominent in the minds of the common people after the ethics of belief debate in the 19th century [1] between W.K. Clifford and William James, with Clifford articulating the principle in his now ...
William Kingdon Clifford (4 May 1845 – 3 March 1879) was a British mathematician and philosopher.Building on the work of Hermann Grassmann, he introduced what is now termed geometric algebra, a special case of the Clifford algebra named in his honour.
Contemporary discussions of the ethics of belief stem largely from a famous nineteenth-century exchange between the British mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford and the American philosopher William James. In 1877 Clifford published an article titled "The Ethics of Belief" in the journal The Contemporary Review. There Clifford argued for ...
Clifford James Geertz (/ ɡ ɜːr t s / ⓘ; August 23, 1926 – October 30, 2006) was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades... the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States."
James' "The Will to Believe" and William K. Clifford's essay "The Ethics of Belief" are touchstones for many contemporary debates over evidentialism, faith, and overbelief. James' "The Will to Believe" consists of introductory remarks followed by ten numbered but not titled sections.
American scholar Nicholas Rescher has stated that metaphysics comes into play when analyzing such a philosophical viewpoint about human thinking given that nature of ideals gives them a particular status as "useful fictions", with this developing in terms of their special existence relative to the broader concept of ethical choice.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is a best-selling 2002 book by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, in which the author makes a case against tabula rasa models in the social sciences, arguing that human behavior is substantially shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations.
For Strauss, the American awareness of ineradicable evil in human nature and hence the need for morality, was a beneficial outgrowth of the pre-modern Western tradition. [39] O'Neill (2009) notes that Strauss wrote little about American topics, but his students wrote a great deal and that Strauss's influence caused his students to reject ...