Andalusia PAU History of Philosophy flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Apeiron

Anaximander's indefinite, boundless source of all things, neither water nor any determinate element; things emerge from it and return to it as cosmic injustice is repaid.

Socratic elenchus

Question-and-answer refutation in which Socrates tests an interlocutor's definition until it collapses into contradiction, producing aporia rather than a positive doctrine.

Platonic Forms

Eternal, non-sensible paradigms that sensible particulars imitate or participate in; they ground genuine knowledge (episteme) as opposed to mere opinion (doxa).

Hylomorphism

Aristotle's doctrine that every sensible substance is a compound (synolon) of matter (hyle) and form (morphē), where form makes the thing what it is.

Eudaimonia

Aristotle's term for flourishing or happiness, defined as activity of the soul in accordance with virtue over a complete life, not a feeling or external good.

Thomistic natural law

Aquinas' claim that rational creatures participate in God's eternal law through reason, grasping self-evident first principles of practical reason that orient action toward the good.

Cogito ergo sum

Descartes' indubitable first principle: even under hyperbolic doubt, the act of thinking proves the thinker exists, though only as a thinking thing.

Primary vs secondary qualities

Locke's distinction: primary qualities (figure, motion, solidity) belong to bodies themselves, while secondary qualities (color, taste, sound) are powers to produce ideas in perceivers.

Hume's constant conjunction

The observed regular succession of one type of event after another; Hume argues this alone, plus custom, generates our idea of necessary causal connection.

Spinozist conatus

Each thing's inherent striving to persevere in its being; for humans, adequate understanding of this necessity constitutes virtue and freedom.

Leibnizian monad

A simple, indivisible, windowless substance whose entire history unfolds from within through perception and appetition, coordinated by pre-established harmony.

Kant's synthetic a priori

A judgment that adds to our knowledge yet holds with strict necessity, made possible because the knowing subject contributes the forms of intuition and the categories.

Categorical imperative

Kant's unconditional moral law: act only on maxims you could will as universal law, and treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means.

Hegelian dialectic

The self-moving development of Geist through contradiction: a position generates its negation and is preserved-and-cancelled (aufgehoben) in a higher, more concrete unity.

Marxist alienation

Under capitalist production the worker's product, labor process, species-being, and fellow workers confront him as estranged, hostile powers beyond his control.

Comte's three stages

The law that thought and society progress from theological explanation through metaphysical abstraction to positive knowledge of observable laws and their relations.

Mill's harm principle

The only justified ground for coercing an individual against his will is preventing harm to others; his own good, physical or moral, is insufficient.

Schopenhauer's Will

The blind, insatiable metaphysical striving underlying all representation; since it can never be permanently satisfied, existence is marked by suffering.

Nietzsche's eternal return

The thought experiment that all events recur endlessly; affirming it wholeheartedly is the test of amor fati and of overcoming nihilism.

Husserlian intentionality

The essential property of consciousness whereby every act is directed toward an object, whether real or imagined, and is correlated with that object's sense.

Heidegger's Dasein

The entity that we ourselves are, defined by being-in-the-world, understanding of Being, thrownness into facticity, and projection toward possibilities including death.

Sartrean bad faith

Self-deception in which a person denies his radical freedom by adopting a fixed role or appealing to determinism, thereby fleeing responsibility for his existence.

Freudian superego

The internalized agency of parental and social prohibitions, formed through the Oedipus complex, which generates guilt and regulates the ego's impulses.

Wittgenstein's language games

The many rule-governed practices in which words have use; meaning is determined by use within a form of life, not by reference to private mental objects.

Adorno's negative dialectics

A mode of thought that resists subsuming the particular under a totalizing concept, preserving non-identity and the suffering that identity thinking conceals.

Lyotard's metanarratives

Grand legitimating stories of progress, emancipation, or dialectic; postmodernity is defined by incredulity toward them and by small, plural language games.

Foucault's power/knowledge

The thesis that knowledge and power are mutually constitutive: discourses and disciplines produce truths and subjects rather than merely describing pre-existing reality.

Epoché

Husserl's methodological suspension of the natural attitude's belief in the world's existence, allowing the phenomenologist to describe pure intentional experiences and their essences.

Aufhebung

Hegel's term for the double movement by which a moment of consciousness is simultaneously negated, preserved, and raised to a higher level in the dialectic.

Textual commentary structure

A three-part analysis: contextualize the fragment within the author's problem, reconstruct its argument and key terms, then critically assess its strength and objections.

Interpretation versus text

The distinction between what a fragment explicitly asserts and the inferences a commentator draws from the wider system; conflating them weakens the commentary.

Philosophical synthesis

A structured overview moving from historical problem through central concepts and argumentative strategy to legacy and objections, organized around one guiding question.