Andalusia PAU History of Philosophy cheat sheet

Presocratic arché candidates: Thales water, Anaximenes air, Anaximander the apeiron (indefinite), Heraclitus logos and flux, Parmenides being as one and unchanging; the pluralists (Empedocles four roots, Anaxagoras nous, Democritus atoms and void) respond to Parmenides.

Socratic method: elenchus proceeds by refuting the interlocutor's thesis through contradiction (aporia); Socratic intellectualism holds that no one errs willingly and virtue is knowledge.

Plato's divided line ascends eikasia (images), pistis (sensible things), dianoia (mathematical reasoning), noesis (Forms); the sun analogy identifies the Form of the Good as cause of being and knowledge.

Plato's tripartite soul: rational (logistikon), spirited (thymoeides), appetitive (epithymetikon); justice is each part performing its own function, mirrored in the kallipolis' three classes.

Aristotle's four causes: material, efficient, formal, final; form is the ti ēn einai actualized in the synolon, and change is the passage from potency (dynamis) to act (energeia).

Aristotelian virtue ethics: virtue is a hexis (stable disposition) lying in a mean relative to us, determined by phronesis; eudaimonia is activity of the soul according to virtue over a complete life.

Augustine fuses Platonism with Christianity: illumination theory of knowledge, evil as privation of good, and the two cities (civitas Dei vs. terrena) in De civitate Dei.

Aquinas reconciles Aristotle and faith: five ways (motion, efficient cause, contingency, degrees, teleology) conclude a prime mover; natural law is the rational creature's participation in eternal law, grasped by synderesis.

Method of doubt (Descartes): reject anything admitting the least doubt; cogito ergo sum survives hyperbolic doubt; clear and distinct ideas are guaranteed by a non-deceiving God, whose existence is proved from the idea of perfection.

Descartes' substance dualism: res cogitans (thinking, unextended) and res extensa (extended, mechanical); the pineal gland is proposed as the point of interaction.

Hobbes' Leviathan: the state of nature is a war of all against all driven by competition, diffidence, and glory; the social contract authorizes a sovereign to secure peace, and natural laws are theorems of self-preservation.

Locke's empiricism: the mind is a tabula rasa; simple ideas come from sensation and reflection, complex ideas are compounded; primary qualities (solidity, figure, motion) resemble bodies, secondary qualities (color, taste) do not.

Hume's fork: relations of ideas (a priori, analytic) versus matters of fact (a posteriori); causation reduces to constant conjunction plus custom, and the self is a bundle of perceptions with no persisting ego.

Spinoza's monism: one substance, Deus sive Natura, with infinite attributes (thought and extension known); freedom is adequate knowledge of necessity, and conatus is each thing's striving to persevere.

Leibniz: monads are windowless simple substances with appetition and perception; the principle of sufficient reason and pre-established harmony underpin the best of all possible worlds.

Kant's Copernican turn: synthetic a priori judgments are possible because the subject supplies forms (space, time) and categories; phenomena are known, the thing-in-itself (noumenon) is not; the categorical imperative tests maxims for universalizability.

German idealism after Kant: Fichte's I posits itself and the not-I; Schelling's identity philosophy of subject-object; Hegel's dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis as the self-unfolding of Geist through alienation.

Hegel's Phenomenology traces consciousness from sense-certainty through self-consciousness (master-slave dialectic) to absolute knowing; the real is rational and the rational is real.

Marx inverts Hegel: material conditions determine consciousness; alienation arises when the worker's product confronts him as an alien power; surplus value is extracted from unpaid labor time.

Marx's base/superstructure: relations of production (base) condition political and legal institutions and ideology (superstructure); historical materialism reads history as class struggle.

Positivism (Comte): the law of three stages-theological, metaphysical, positive-and the hierarchy of sciences culminating in sociology; knowledge is confined to observable phenomena and their laws.

Utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill): the greatest happiness principle; Bentham's hedonic calculus weighs intensity and duration, Mill distinguishes higher and lower pleasures and defends liberty against the tyranny of the majority.

Schopenhauer: the world is will and representation; the Will is blind striving, and the only escapes are aesthetic contemplation and ascetic negation of the will.

Nietzsche: critique of slave morality and the ascetic ideal; the death of God, the will to power, and the eternal return as tests of affirmation; nihilism must be overcome by creating values.

Husserl's phenomenology: epoché suspends the natural attitude; intentionality means consciousness is always consciousness of something; eidetic reduction seeks essences, transcendental reduction the constituting ego.

Heidegger's Being and Time: Dasein is being-there, characterized by existentialia; being-in-the-world, thrownness, projection, and being-toward-death make authenticity possible against das Man.

Sartre: existence precedes essence; bad faith (mauvaise foi) is flight from freedom; the look of the Other objectifies the subject, and radical freedom entails responsibility.

Freud's metapsychology: id, ego, superego; the unconscious operates by condensation and displacement; culture rests on renunciation of instinct, producing discontent.

Analytic philosophy: Frege's sense/reference distinction, Russell's theory of descriptions, the early Wittgenstein's picture theory and saying/showing, and the later Wittgenstein's language games and family resemblance.

Logical positivism (Vienna Circle): the verification principle dismisses metaphysics as nonsense; Quine's 'Two Dogmas' attacks the analytic-synthetic distinction and holism replaces reduction.

Frankfurt School critical theory: Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment indicts instrumental reason; Adorno's negative dialectics refuses identity thinking; Habermas shifts to communicative action and the ideal speech situation.

Postmodernity: Lyotard's incredulity toward metanarratives, Foucault's power/knowledge and genealogy of discipline, Derrida's deconstruction of binary hierarchies-all contest the Enlightenment's universal subject.

Structure the commentary in three moves: (1) situate the fragment in the author's work and problem, (2) explain its argument line by line, identifying thesis, premises, and key terms, (3) assess its significance and possible objections.

Identify the fragment's argumentative type: deductive proof (cogito, ontological argument), analogy (sun, divided line), genealogical narrative (master-slave), or aphorism (Nietzsche), since each demands a different commentary approach.

Quote sparingly and always gloss: every quoted phrase must be unpacked in your own words, connecting it to the author's technical vocabulary (e.g., energeia, conatus, Dasein, Geist).

Locate the fragment's polemical target: Descartes against the sceptics, Hume against rationalist causation, Kant against dogmatic metaphysics, Marx against Hegelian idealism-commentary must state what is being refuted.

Distinguish what the text says from what the author's wider system implies; flag inferences you add as interpretation, not textual content, to avoid over-reading.

For definitional fragments (e.g., Aristotle on virtue, Kant on the categorical imperative), test the definition against a counterexample and note how the author would reply.

Watch translation-dependent terms: aretē as excellence/virtue, phronesis as practical wisdom, Aufhebung as sublation (preserve-and-cancel), Vorhandenheit as presence-at-hand.

Conclude with a critical evaluation: state one strong objection, the author's likely rejoinder, and a judgment on whether the argument survives it.

A concept definition needs three parts: genus (what kind of thing it is), differentia (what distinguishes it), and one illustrative example; avoid circularity and mere synonymy.

Synthesis template: historical context → central problem → key concepts → argumentative strategy → legacy and criticisms; keep the thread of one guiding question throughout.

Plato synthesis: theory of Forms as answer to the problem of universals and of stable knowledge against Heraclitean flux; cave, divided line, and recollection (anamnesis) as supporting devices.

Aristotle synthesis: hylomorphism plus teleology answers the problem of change; ethics and politics extend the natural telos of the human as zoon politikon.

Descartes synthesis: methodological doubt leads to the cogito, from which God's veracity guarantees clear and distinct ideas and the reconstruction of the physical world.

Kant synthesis: the three Critiques address what can I know (understanding limits knowledge to experience), what ought I do (practical reason and autonomy), and what may I hope (teleology and religion within reason).

Marx synthesis: alienation under capitalist relations of production generates class antagonism whose resolution is communism; philosophy becomes critique of political economy rather than speculation.

Nietzsche synthesis: nihilism diagnosed as the consequence of the death of God; revaluation of all values through will to power and eternal return aims at the overman (Übermensch).