Philosophy Concepts

100 flashcards by MentisLibrary

The vocabulary of philosophy across its main branches, each term tied to the thinker who shaped it, a concrete example, why the idea matters, and the confusion it is usually tangled with.

What is epistemology?
The branch of philosophy that studies knowledge: what it is, how beliefs are justified, and what the limits of knowledge are.
What is metaphysics?
The branch that asks what exists and what its fundamental nature is: substance, causation, time, identity, mind and body, free will.
What is ethics?
The branch that studies right and wrong, good and bad, and how one ought to live. Normative ethics proposes standards, metaethics asks what moral claims are, applied ethics treats cases.
What is aesthetics?
The branch that studies beauty, art and taste: what makes something beautiful, what counts as art, and whether judgments of taste can be correct or are merely preferences.
What is logic?
The study of correct reasoning: which forms of argument guarantee or support their conclusions, regardless of subject matter.
What is Plato's Theory of Forms?
Abstract, perfect, unchanging Forms (Beauty itself, Justice itself, the Circle) are the true reality; physical things are imperfect copies that participate in them and are known only through the Forms.
What is idealism?
The view that reality is fundamentally mental: what exists is minds and their ideas, and matter independent of perception either does not exist or is unknowable.
What is empiricism?
The view that all knowledge of the world ultimately derives from sense experience, and that the mind has no innate ideas about matters of fact.
What is rationalism?
The view that reason is a source of substantive knowledge independent of experience, and that some ideas (God, extension, causation) are innate or grasped by intellect alone.
What is utilitarianism?
The consequentialist theory that the right act is the one that maximizes overall well-being (happiness, pleasure or preference satisfaction), counting everyone's welfare equally.
What is deontology?
Duty-based ethics: some acts are right or wrong in themselves, and there are constraints (do not lie, do not kill the innocent) that hold even when breaking them would produce better outcomes.
What is existentialism?
A movement holding that humans have no fixed nature or given purpose; each person must create meaning through free choices and bear responsibility for them, facing anxiety and absurdity honestly.
What is nihilism?
The view that there are no objective values, meanings or truths; in its moral form, that nothing is really right or wrong.
What is determinism?
The thesis that every event, including every human choice, is fixed by prior events together with the laws of nature; given the past, only one future is possible.
What is the problem of evil?
If God is all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly good, evil should not exist; yet it does. The logical version alleges a contradiction; the evidential version argues the amount of suffering makes God improbable.
What is phenomenology?
The method of describing the structures of conscious experience exactly as they present themselves, setting aside assumptions about their causes or reality (bracketing).
What is pragmatism?
The American school holding that the meaning of a concept lies in its practical consequences, and that a belief is true insofar as it works: guides action successfully and survives continued inquiry.
What does the word philosophy mean?
From the Greek philosophia, love of wisdom: reasoned inquiry into the most basic questions about reality, knowledge, value, mind and good reasoning.
What is political philosophy?
The study of the state, justice, rights, liberty and legitimate authority: why obey any government, and what a just society looks like.
What is philosophy of mind?
The branch that asks what minds are, how mental states relate to the physical brain, and whether consciousness can be explained in physical terms.
Who was Socrates?
An Athenian philosopher (c. 470-399 BCE) who wrote nothing and is known through Plato and Xenophon. He questioned fellow citizens about virtue and was executed by hemlock after conviction for impiety and corrupting the youth.
What is the Socratic method?
Inquiry by question and answer (elenchus): a claim is tested by drawing out its consequences until it conflicts with something else the answerer believes, forcing the definition to be revised or abandoned.
Who was Plato?
An Athenian philosopher (c. 428-348 BCE), student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, who founded the Academy and wrote philosophical dialogues including the Republic, Phaedo and Symposium.
What does Plato's Allegory of the Cave illustrate?
Prisoners chained in a cave take shadows on the wall for reality; one is freed, climbs into sunlight, sees real things, and is disbelieved when he returns. It pictures the ascent from sense appearance to knowledge of the Forms.
Who was Aristotle?
A Greek philosopher (384-322 BCE) from Stagira, Plato's student for about twenty years, tutor of Alexander the Great and founder of the Lyceum. He wrote on logic, physics, biology, ethics, politics, rhetoric and poetics.
What is eudaimonia?
Aristotle's name for the highest human good, usually translated flourishing or living well: achieved by exercising the virtues over a complete life, not a passing feeling.
What is Aristotle's doctrine of the mean?
Each moral virtue is a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency, relative to the person and the situation.
What are Aristotle's four causes?
Four kinds of explanation for why a thing is as it is: material (what it is made of), formal (its shape or essence), efficient (what brought it about) and final (its purpose).
What did Heraclitus mean by "everything flows"?
That reality is constant change: you cannot step into the same river twice, because new water is always flowing past. Only the underlying pattern (logos) is stable.
What is Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise?
Achilles gives the tortoise a head start; by the time he reaches its starting point it has moved on, and so on forever, so it seems he can never overtake it. Zeno used it to argue that motion is impossible.