Bulgaria DZI Philosophy cheat sheet

Philosophy differs from myth and religion by demanding rational argument (logos) rather than authority or tradition as the ground of assent.

Core branches: metaphysics (being), epistemology (knowledge), logic (inference), ethics (action), aesthetics (beauty), political philosophy (order).

Socratic method: elenchus proceeds by eliciting a definition, drawing out contradictions, and refuting the proposed definition (aporia).

Dialectic in Plato aims at synoptic knowledge of Forms; in Hegel it is the movement of contradiction toward synthesis.

Phenomenology brackets the natural attitude (epoché) to describe phenomena as given in consciousness.

Hermeneutics treats understanding as interpretation of texts and meanings within a historical horizon.

Analytic method decomposes concepts into necessary and sufficient conditions; continental method stresses historical and existential context.

Philosophy is second-order: it asks about the conditions, limits, and validity of first-order knowledge claims.

Parmenides: being is one, unchanging, and thinkable; change and plurality are illusion.

Heraclitus: reality is flux (panta rhei); stability is a derivative appearance of a logos-governed process.

Aristotle's categories: substance (ousia) is primary; the other nine categories (quality, quantity, relation, etc.) inhere in it.

Hylomorphism: every sensible substance is a compound of matter (hyle) and form (morphe); form actualizes potentiality.

Four causes: material, efficient, formal, final - the final cause is the telos or end for the sake of which something is.

Modal concepts: necessity (true in all possible worlds), possibility (true in some), contingency (true but not necessary).

Realism holds universals exist independently; nominalism denies this; conceptualism locates them in the mind.

Occam's razor: entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity - prefer the simpler ontology.

Standard analysis: knowledge is justified true belief (JTB); all three conditions are individually necessary.

Gettier cases show JTB is insufficient: justified true belief can rest on a false premise or on luck.

Internalism: justification depends on factors accessible to the subject; externalism (reliabilism) ties justification to reliable belief-forming processes.

Foundationalism grounds knowledge in basic beliefs; coherentism justifies beliefs by mutual support within a system.

Correspondence theory: truth is agreement of a proposition with reality; coherence theory: truth is membership in a consistent system.

Pragmatist theory: truth is what works or what survives inquiry; deflationism: 'true' adds no substantive property.

Skepticism: global doubt is self-undermining if it claims knowledge of its own thesis; local skepticism targets specific domains.

A priori knowledge is independent of experience; a posteriori knowledge depends on experience.

Validity concerns form: an argument is valid iff the premises cannot be true while the conclusion is false; soundness adds true premises.

Modus ponens: P→Q, P, therefore Q. Modus tollens: P→Q, ¬Q, therefore ¬P. Affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent are fallacies.

Induction generalizes from observed cases; Hume's problem: no non-circular justification of induction exists.

Popper's falsifiability: a hypothesis is scientific only if it forbids some observable outcome; confirmation is never conclusive.

Kuhn: normal science operates within a paradigm; anomalies accumulate and precipitate a paradigm shift; paradigms are incommensurable.

Lakatos: research programmes have a hard core protected by auxiliary hypotheses and a heuristic that guides revision.

Hypothetico-deductive method: derive testable predictions from hypotheses and test them against observation.

Fallacies of relevance include ad hominem, appeal to authority, appeal to ignorance, and straw man.

Aristotle: the human is a rational animal (zoon logon echon) and a political animal (zoon politikon); reason is the specific difference.

Kant: persons are ends in themselves, possess dignity, and act under the moral law through autonomy of the will.

Existentialism: existence precedes essence; humans are thrown into the world and must create themselves through choice.

Sartre: we are condemned to be free; bad faith (mauvaise foi) is flight from freedom into a fixed role.

Determinism holds every event is caused; compatibilism reconciles freedom with determinism by defining freedom as acting on one's own desires.

Heidegger: Dasein is being-toward-death; authenticity requires confronting finitude rather than absorption in das Man.

Marx: human essence is the ensemble of social relations; labour is the species-activity through which humans objectify themselves.

Freedom has negative sense (absence of external constraint) and positive sense (self-mastery, capacity for self-legislation).

Consequentialism judges acts by outcomes; utilitarianism maximizes total or average welfare (Bentham's hedonic calculus).

Deontology judges acts by conformity to duty; Kant's categorical imperative has a formula of universal law and a formula of humanity.

Virtue ethics centres on character: eudaimonia is achieved through habituated excellences (arete) guided by practical wisdom (phronesis).

Aristotle's doctrine of the mean: virtue lies between excess and deficiency, relative to the agent and determined by reason.

Hume's is-ought gap: descriptive premises alone cannot entail a normative conclusion; moral judgments involve sentiment.

Moral relativism holds values are culture- or subject-dependent; moral realism holds some moral facts are objective.

The trolley problem tests the tension between utilitarian arithmetic and deontological constraints on using persons as means.

The good life: eudaimonism (flourishing), hedonism (pleasure), and perfectionism (realization of essential capacities).

Social contract theories (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) justify political authority by consent rather than divine right.

Hobbes: the state of nature is a war of all against all; the sovereign's absolute power prevents return to that condition.

Locke: natural rights to life, liberty, and property are inalienable; legitimate government is limited and revocable by the people.

Rousseau: general will expresses the common good; legitimate authority is self-legislation by citizens.

Rawls: justice as fairness uses the veil of ignorance and two principles - equal basic liberties, and inequality permitted only if it benefits the least advantaged.

Nozick: entitlement theory holds only acquisition, transfer, and rectification justify holdings; redistribution violates rights.

Civil society is the sphere of voluntary associations between family and state; it buffers state power and forms public opinion.

Legitimacy concerns rightful authority; legality concerns conformity to enacted law; the two can diverge.

Mimesis theory (Plato, Aristotle): art imitates reality; Aristotle holds imitation is natural and pleasurable and purges emotion (catharsis).

Plato distrusts art as a copy of a copy, removed from the Forms and appealing to the lower part of the soul.

Kant's aesthetic judgment is disinterested, universal without concepts, and subjective yet claiming general assent.

The sublime exceeds imagination's capacity to present it, producing pleasure mixed with pain.

Formalism locates aesthetic value in formal properties (composition, unity); expressionism locates it in the artist's feeling.

Institutional theory (Dickie): an artwork is an artifact conferred the status of candidate for appreciation by the artworld.

The intentional fallacy warns against deriving meaning from the artist's intentions alone; the affective fallacy confuses effect with value.

Aesthetic properties (beauty, grace, sublimity) are evaluative and perceived rather than merely physical.

Ontological argument (Anselm): God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived; existence is a perfection, so God exists.

Kant's objection: existence is not a real predicate; it adds no content to a concept.

Cosmological argument: everything contingent has a cause; a necessary being grounds the series.

Teleological argument: apparent design in nature implies an intelligent designer; Hume and Darwin challenge the inference.

Problem of evil: an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent God is incompatible with evil; theodicies invoke free will, soul-making, or greater goods.

Faith and reason: fideism denies reason's competence; natural theology holds God's existence is rationally demonstrable.

Agnosticism suspends judgment on God's existence; atheism denies it; theism affirms it.

Religious language debate: whether predicates applied to God are univocal, equivocal, or analogical.

Pre-Socratics: Thales seeks a material arche; Pythagoras number; Democritus atoms and void; Parmenides unchanging being.

Plato: two worlds - the intelligible realm of Forms and the sensible realm of becoming; the soul is tripartite (reason, spirit, appetite).

Aristotle: form is immanent in things; the unmoved mover is pure actuality and the final cause of motion.

Medieval synthesis: Augustine joins Platonism with Christian doctrine; Aquinas joins Aristotle with theology (summa, analogy of being).

Descartes: methodic doubt reaches the cogito; mind and body are distinct substances (dualism).

Empiricism (Locke, Berkeley, Hume): all ideas derive from experience; Hume reduces causation to constant conjunction and custom.

Kant's Copernican revolution: the mind imposes forms of intuition (space, time) and categories on experience; the thing-in-itself is unknowable.

Hegel: dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis; history is the self-realization of Spirit (Geist).

Identify the thesis, premises, and conclusion; reconstruct the argument in standard form before evaluating it.

Distinguish the author's claim from the author's reasons; a text may assert without arguing or argue without asserting.

Check for hidden premises (enthymemes) that the argument needs for validity.

Test validity by counterexample: imagine a case where premises are true and conclusion false.

Distinguish analytic from synthetic statements; a statement is analytic if its negation is self-contradictory.

Watch for equivocation, question-begging, false dilemma, and hasty generalization in the text.

Contextualize: identify the author's interlocutors, historical setting, and target of criticism.

Charitable interpretation (principle of charity) attributes the strongest plausible reading before critique.