Aragón PAU History of Philosophy key terms

Platón's claim that true reality consists of eternal, immaterial Forms, separate from sensible things, which are only imperfect copies that participate in them.

The realm of physical objects perceived by the senses; for Plato it is changing, imperfect and merely an image of the intelligible world.

Relation by which a sensible thing owes its limited being and qualities to the corresponding Idea, without being identical with it.

Imitation; in Plato the sensible world imitates the Ideas and art imitates the sensible world, so a painting is a copy of a copy.

Opinion or belief: knowledge of the changing sensible world, fallible and inferior to true knowledge because it lacks justification by reason.

True, justified knowledge of the intelligible world; in Plato it is reached through reason and dialectic, not through the senses.

Plato's method of ascending from hypotheses to the unhypothetical first principle, and of dividing concepts; the highest form of philosophical knowledge.

Plato's division of the soul into rational, spirited and appetitive parts, each with its own virtue, used to explain moral conflict and justice.

Aristotle's doctrine that every natural substance is a compound of matter (hyle) and form (morphe), neither of which exists separately in nature.

Aristotle's pair for explaining change: potency is the capacity to become something, act is the realized state; change is the passage from one to the other.

The purpose or end for which something exists or happens; for Aristotle it is one of the four causes and explains natural processes teleologically.

Aristotle's first cause: a purely actual, immaterial being that moves the cosmos as its final cause, being loved and desired rather than pushing anything.

Happiness or human flourishing; for Aristotle the highest good, achieved through virtuous activity of reason over a complete life.

Aristotle's ethical rule that virtue lies between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency, relative to the agent and the situation.

Descartes' procedure of rejecting every belief that admits the slightest doubt in order to find an indubitable foundation for knowledge.

Descartes' first certainty: the act of thinking proves the thinker exists; even a deceiver cannot make me doubt that I am thinking.

Descartes' hypothesis of an all-powerful deceiver who could falsify even mathematical truths, pushing doubt to its most radical point.

Thinking substance; for Descartes the essence of the mind, defined as a thing whose nature is to think, distinct from extended body.

Descartes' separation of reality into two created substances, thinking mind and extended body, which interact but have no property in common.

Extended substance; the essence of material bodies for Descartes, characterized by length, breadth and depth and governed by mechanical laws.

Descartes' criterion of truth: a perception is certain when it is present and evident to the mind and cannot be confused with anything else.

Hume's term for a vivid, forceful perception given directly in experience, such as a sensation or passion, as opposed to a faint idea.

A faint copy of an impression in thought or memory; Hume holds that every legitimate idea must be traceable to some prior impression.

For Hume, not a necessary connection perceived in things but a habit of the mind that expects similar effects after repeated observed conjunctions.

Hume's explanation of belief in causal necessity: repeated experience creates a custom that makes us expect the future to resemble the past.

Hume's position that reason cannot justify our basic beliefs about matters of fact, yet nature compels us to act as if they were true.

Hume's three principles by which the mind links ideas: resemblance, contiguity in space or time, and cause and effect.

Kant's category for judgments that add information about the world yet hold with strict necessity, such as arithmetic and the principle of causality.

Kant's shift in philosophy: objects must conform to our forms of knowledge rather than our knowledge conforming to objects.

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

Kant's pure concepts of the understanding, such as substance and causality, which make experience possible by unifying the manifold of intuition.

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.

Kant's idea that the moral will gives itself its own law through reason, so that duty springs from freedom rather than external commands.

For Kant, the necessity of acting from respect for the moral law, regardless of inclination; only actions done from duty have moral worth.

Nietzsche's name for the basic drive of life to grow, overcome resistance and create values, not a mere wish to dominate others.

Nietzsche's diagnosis of the collapse of the highest values, especially the Christian-moral interpretation of the world, leaving life without meaning.

Nietzsche's project of creating new values by revaluing those inherited from slave morality, affirming life instead of denying it.

Nietzsche's figure of the human being who creates values and affirms life without metaphysical consolation; not a biological superior race.

Nietzsche's thought experiment: if every moment of life had to be repeated endlessly, would you affirm it? A test of life-affirmation.

For Marx, the process by which workers lose control of the products, process and purpose of their labour, so that their own activity confronts them as a hostile power.

Marx's term for the value created by workers beyond what is returned to them as wages, which the capitalist appropriates as profit.

Marx's view that the economic structure of society conditions its political and ideological superstructure, and that class conflict drives historical change.

Ortega's proposal that reason must be rooted in lived circumstance; thought arises from and responds to the concrete life of the individual.

Ortega's formula that the self is inseparable from its surroundings; saving the self means engaging with the circumstances one is given.

Ortega's doctrine that each viewpoint captures a genuine part of reality, so truth is reached by integrating perspectives, not by abolishing them.

Exam exercise requiring identification of the author's thesis, explanation of key concepts, reconstruction of the argument and contextualization within the author's thought.

Situating a text in its historical, intellectual and biographical setting, and relating it to the author's wider philosophy and to later or earlier thinkers.

Clarifying the meaning of a text's central terms as the author uses them, distinguishing them from ordinary or later senses of the same words.