- Pragmatism and Naturalism
Basically, this is the view that nothing SUPERnatural exists. So, no gods, no ghosts, no life-forces, etc. Usually this is taken to entail that everything can, at least in theory, be explained by science.
- Determinism
This is the view that everything that happens is fully determined by prior events and by the relevant laws of nature. A nice metaphor is this: according to determinism, if the universe were to be 'rolled back' (like a video tape) to some point in the past, and then set in motion again, everything would happen _exactly_ the way it did the first time around.
Most people would assume that determinism rules out free will. But this is actually controversial. Quite a few philosophers (including Joe, I think) believe that FW is _compatible_ with determinism. That view is called 'compatibilism' (great name, huh?). Compatibilists think that although everything is determined (including our actions), some of our actions are nevertheless free. Basically the idea is that your action is free if it is determined by _your own desires_.
- Logical Positivism
A philosophical position which had its heyday in the early 20th century. The LP'ists (including Carnap, Neurath, Schlick; and a bit later, Ayer) disliked metaphysics and thought philosophers should stop doing it. The job of philosophy, they thought, was to do a bit of conceptual ground-clearing, and then get out of the way so that scientists could get to work. They proposed a criterion by which to sort propositions into _meaningful_ (and thus worth pursuing) and _meaningless_ (and thus not worth pursuing). The criterion was whether the proposition could be _verified_, or tested. Since a proposition like 'God loves humanity', for example, can't be tested, the LP'ists judged it to be literally meaningless, or devoid of cognitive content. Such propositions might be meaningful in a broader sense -- emotionally or artistically, perhaps -- but the LP'ists were only interested in figuring out which propositions had a content which could be specified, and not just in those which people found stirring or interesting in some way. They had no problem with poetry, for example, so long as everyone understood that poets aren't in the business of trying to express truths about the world.
LP'ism is pretty much abandoned at this point. You may sometimes hear people in the Humanities outside philosophy claim that all analytic philosophers are LP'ists. Do not believe them. Anyone who's read any analytic philosophy from the last 30-40 years knows that it is neck-deep in metaphysics. The LP'ists would've hated it!
What next???
- Critical Pedagogy
- Hermeneutics
- Post-Structuralism
- Functionalism
... add more as they come to you!
I hope we do not forget the classics: Buddhist notion of no-self; the insights of the Lotus Sutra; the deconstruction of Nagarjuna; spontaneity (zi-ran), and non-artificial action (wu-wei) of the Daoists; and the principle of Adult education (Da Xue--which I believe should be called the return to Children's philosophy) of Kong Zi (Confucius). We must remember these much older classics of philosophy.
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