BCS Written Philosophy cheat sheet

Pre-Socratics: Thales (water), Anaximander (apeiron), Heraclitus (flux, logos), Parmenides (being, denial of change), Democritus (atoms and void).

Plato: Forms as separate, eternal, perfect paradigms; divided line (eikasia, pistis, dianoia, noesis); soul tripartite (reason, spirit, appetite).

Aristotle: four causes (material, formal, efficient, final); hylomorphism; virtue as mean between extremes; logic as organon; unmoved mover.

Hellenistic schools: Stoics (logos, virtue as living according to nature), Epicureans (pleasure as absence of pain, atomism), Skeptics (epoché, suspension of judgment).

Medieval: Augustine (faith and reason, illumination), Aquinas (five ways, natural law, analogy of being), Ockham (nominalism, razor: do not multiply entities beyond necessity).

Modern rationalism: Descartes (cogito, clear and distinct ideas, mind-body dualism), Spinoza (substance monism, Deus sive Natura), Leibniz (monads, pre-established harmony).

Modern empiricism: Locke (tabula rasa, primary/secondary qualities), Berkeley (esse est percipi), Hume (impressions and ideas, causation as custom, is-ought gap).

Kant's Copernican revolution: synthetic a priori judgments; phenomena vs noumena; categories of understanding; categorical imperative (universalizability, humanity formula).

Ontology asks what exists; metaphysics broader includes modality, causation, persistence, universals.

Categories: substance vs attribute; particular vs universal; abstract vs concrete; possible vs actual.

Universals: realism (Platonic ante rem, Aristotelian in re), nominalism (resemblance, trope theory), conceptualism.

Identity and persistence: endurantism (three-dimensional, wholly present) vs perdurantism (four-dimensional, temporal parts).

Modality: possible worlds semantics; necessity (true in all worlds), possibility (true in some), actuality (true in this world).

Causation: regularity (Hume), counterfactual (Lewis), probabilistic, interventionist, dispositional.

Free will: compatibilism (freedom as absence of constraint), incompatibilism (libertarian or hard determinism), Frankfurt cases.

Personal identity: psychological continuity (Locke, Parfit), bodily continuity, soul criterion; fission and teletransportation puzzles.

Knowledge as justified true belief (JTB); Gettier cases show JTB insufficient when justification is accidentally true.

Justification: foundationalism (basic beliefs), coherentism (mutual support), infinitism (chain without foundation).

Internalism vs externalism: justification accessible to subject vs reliabilism (processes that reliably produce true belief).

Skepticism: Cartesian evil demon, brain-in-a-vat; responses: Moorean common sense, contextualism, transcendental argument.

A priori vs a posteriori; analytic vs synthetic; necessary vs contingent - do not conflate these distinctions.

Sources of knowledge: perception (direct realism, representationalism), testimony, memory, reason, introspection.

Virtue epistemology: knowledge as true belief from intellectual virtue (reliable faculty or responsible character).

Epistemic concepts: belief, truth, justification, certainty, probability, defeaters, epistemic closure.

Validity: conclusion cannot be false if premises true; soundness = validity + all premises true.

Propositional connectives: negation ¬, conjunction ∧, disjunction ∨, conditional →, biconditional ↔; truth tables define them.

Common valid forms: modus ponens (p→q, p ⊢ q), modus tollens (p→q, ¬q ⊢ ¬p), disjunctive syllogism, hypothetical syllogism.

Common fallacies: affirming the consequent (p→q, q ⊢ p), denying the antecedent (p→q, ¬p ⊢ ¬q), equivocation, ad hominem, straw man, false dilemma.

Quantifiers: universal ∀, existential ∃; categorical propositions A (All S are P), E (No S are P), I (Some S are P), O (Some S are not P).

Square of opposition: contradictories (A-O, E-I), contraries (A-E), subcontraries (I-O), subalternation (A→I, E→O).

Induction: enumerative, analogical, statistical; strength is probabilistic, not truth-preserving; problem of induction (Hume).

Argument evaluation: identify conclusion, premises, hidden assumptions; distinguish explanation from argument; check for circularity and question-begging.

Normative theories: consequentialism (maximize good outcomes), deontology (duties/rules), virtue ethics (character and flourishing).

Utilitarianism: Bentham (hedonic calculus), Mill (higher/lower pleasures, harm principle); act vs rule utilitarianism.

Kantian ethics: categorical imperative - formula of universal law and formula of humanity; never treat persons merely as means.

Virtue ethics: Aristotle's eudaimonia, phronesis (practical wisdom), golden mean; MacIntyre's tradition-based virtues.

Metaethics: moral realism (objective truths), anti-realism (emotivism, prescriptivism, error theory), relativism (cultural, individual).

Moral psychology: Hume's is-ought gap; moral judgment as sentiment vs reason; moral luck (Williams, Nagel).

Applied issues: trolley problem (utilitarian vs deontological responses), doctrine of double effect, euthanasia, animal ethics (Singer's equal consideration of interests).

Justice: Rawls (veil of ignorance, two principles), Nozick (entitlement, minimal state), utilitarianism (aggregate welfare).

Social contract: Hobbes (security, absolute sovereign), Locke (natural rights, consent, right of revolution), Rousseau (general will, popular sovereignty).

Legitimacy and authority: consent, fair play, natural duty, democratic authorization; distinction between de facto and de jure authority.

Liberty: negative (non-interference) vs positive (self-mastery); Mill's harm principle limits coercion to preventing harm to others.

Justice: Rawls's original position and difference principle (inequalities benefit least advantaged); Nozick's historical entitlement; Sen's capabilities approach.

Equality: formal (like cases alike), proportional, distributive; debates over luck egalitarianism and responsibility.

Feminist and critical theory: public/private divide, standpoint epistemology, intersectionality, critiques of neutrality.

Nationalism and cosmopolitanism: borders, immigration, global distributive justice; communitarian critique of liberal atomism (Sandel, MacIntyre).

Civil disobedience: Rawls's conditions (clear injustice, legal means exhausted, nonviolence, public, willingness to accept punishment).

Mind-body: dualism (substance, property), physicalism (identity theory, functionalism), eliminativism; qualia and the hard problem (Chalmers).

Intentionality: mental states about things; theories: representationalism, interpretivism (Dennett), teleosemantics.

Consciousness: higher-order theories, global workspace, integrated information; zombie and Mary's room thought experiments.

Language: sense vs reference (Frege), definite descriptions (Russell), speech acts (Austin, Searle), meaning as use (Wittgenstein).

Theories of meaning: referential, ideational, truth-conditional (Davidson), verificationist, use-based; Quine's indeterminacy of translation.

Philosophy of science: demarcation (Popper's falsifiability vs Kuhn's paradigms), realism vs anti-realism, underdetermination, theory-laden observation.

Scientific method: hypothetico-deductive model, induction, abduction (inference to best explanation), falsification, paradigm shifts.

Explanation: covering-law model (Hempel), causal-mechanical, unificationist; laws of nature (regularity, necessitarian).