Andalusia PAU History of Philosophy key terms

First principle or ultimate substance from which all things derive and to which they return, central to pre-Socratic philosophy.

Nature or the natural world, understood by early Greek thinkers as a dynamic reality with its own intrinsic order.

Rational principle or order governing the cosmos, also the capacity for reasoned discourse in humans.

Eternal, immaterial archetype that exists independently of particular things and grounds their intelligibility.

Aristotelian theory that every sensible substance is a compound of matter (hyle) and form (morphe).

End, purpose, or goal toward which a natural process or entity intrinsically tends.

Explanatory framework that understands phenomena by reference to the purposes or ends they serve.

Plato's image of prisoners mistaking shadows for reality, illustrating the soul's ascent from ignorance to knowledge of the Forms.

Method of inquiry through question and answer that seeks to resolve contradictions and attain higher understanding.

Medieval intellectual tradition that harmonized Christian doctrine with Aristotelian philosophy using rigorous logical method.

Proof of God's existence from the mere concept of a supremely perfect being, which must exist to lack no perfection.

Descartes' indubitable first principle: the very act of thinking proves the thinker's existence.

Descartes' procedure of rejecting any belief that can be doubted in order to find an indubitable foundation for knowledge.

Epistemological stance that reason, not sensory experience, is the primary source of substantive knowledge.

Theory that all knowledge derives from sensory experience, rejecting innate ideas and emphasizing observation.

Concepts or principles supposedly present in the mind from birth, independent of experience.

Locke's metaphor describing the mind at birth as a blank slate subsequently written on by experience.

Theory that legitimate political authority arises from an implicit agreement among free individuals to form a commonwealth.

Hypothetical condition of humanity prior to political society, used to justify the need for government.

Rousseau's concept of the collective will of citizens aimed at the common good, distinct from the sum of private wills.

In Kant, pertaining to the conditions of possibility of experience that precede and structure it.

Knowledge that is independent of experience and universal, such as mathematical truths or causal principles.

Kantian judgment that is both informative (synthetic) and independent of experience (a priori), grounding natural science.

Kant's reversal whereby objects conform to our cognition rather than cognition to objects, making experience possible.

Kant's distinction between things as they appear to us under forms of intuition and things as they are in themselves.

Kant's supreme moral principle: act only on maxims that could become universal laws, unconditionally binding.

Capacity of the will to legislate its own moral law through reason, free from external determination.

Process in which contradictions between a thesis and its antithesis are resolved in a higher synthesis, driving historical development.

Separation or estrangement, as when workers are divorced from the products and process of their labor under capitalism.

Marxist view that economic relations of production fundamentally shape social, political, and cultural institutions.

Philosophical position that life is driven by a non-mechanical force or principle irreducible to physics and chemistry.

Bergson's creative life force that drives evolution and the development of living forms in unpredictable directions.

Method of describing the structures of conscious experience as they present themselves, suspending assumptions about their reality.

Property of consciousness whereby it is always directed toward an object, whether real or imagined.

Movement emphasizing individual freedom, choice, and the creation of meaning in an inherently absurd or indeterminate world.

Camus' term for the confrontation between the human demand for meaning and the silent indifference of the universe.

Group of critical theorists who analyzed how capitalism and mass culture reproduce domination through ideology and instrumental reason.

Approach that combines philosophical analysis with social critique to expose and challenge structures of power and domination.

Condition marked by skepticism toward grand narratives, universal reason, and stable foundations of knowledge.

Theory and practice of interpretation, especially of texts and historical traditions, emphasizing context and pre-understanding.