Cantabria PAU History of Philosophy cheat sheet

Plato: the Theory of Forms posits two worlds-the sensible (doxa, becoming) and the intelligible (episteme, being); the Form of the Good is the highest principle, source of truth and being, analogous to the sun in the allegory of the cave.

Plato's divided line (Republic VI) ranks cognition: eikasia (images), pistis (sensible objects), dianoia (mathematical reasoning), noesis (dialectical grasp of Forms); each level has its own mode of knowing and its own object.

Plato's soul is tripartite-rational (logistikon), spirited (thymoeides), appetitive (epithymetikon)-and justice in the soul is each part doing its own work; the just city mirrors this structure.

Aristotle: form (eidos) is immanent in the individual substance, not separate; each substance is a synolon of matter and form, and change is explained by the four causes-material, formal, efficient, final.

Aristotle's act/potency (energeia/dynamis) pair explains becoming: a thing is potentially what it becomes actually; the unmoved mover is pure act (no potency) and moves as final cause.

Aristotle's ten categories (substance plus nine accidents) classify predication; substance is primary being, and the syllogistic figures in the Prior Analytics formalize valid inference.

Augustine: interiority and the turn to the self ('in interiore homine habitat veritas'); memory, intellect, and will are the triune structure of the mind, and time is a distension of the soul (Confessions XI).

Augustine on evil: evil is not a positive substance but a privation of good (privatio boni); human free will explains moral evil, and grace is necessary for the will to choose the good after the Fall.

Aquinas: faith and reason are distinct but harmonious; natural reason can prove God's existence (the Five Ways) but not the Trinity; analogical predication allows God-talk without univocity or equivocity.

Descartes' method of doubt suspends all belief that can be doubted until the cogito ('I think, therefore I am') is reached as an indubitable first principle; the criterion of clear and distinct ideas follows.

Descartes proves God's existence from the idea of a perfect being (ontological argument) and from the fact that a perfect being would not deceive; God guarantees the reliability of clear and distinct perception.

Descartes' mind-body dualism: mind is res cogitans (thinking substance), body is res extensa (extended substance); their interaction is explained via the pineal gland, a famously problematic move.

Hume's fork: all objects of reason divide into relations of ideas (analytic, certain, e.g., mathematics) and matters of fact (synthetic, probable, grounded in experience); the negation of a matter of fact is conceivable.

Hume's analysis of causation: we never perceive a necessary connection, only constant conjunction and temporal priority; the idea of necessary connection is a habit of the mind produced by custom.

Hume on induction: past experience cannot justify future predictions without circularity; custom or habit, not reason, grounds our expectations-a conclusion that awakens Kant from 'dogmatic slumber'.

Kant's Copernican revolution: objects conform to our cognition, not vice versa; space and time are a priori forms of intuition, and the categories (e.g., causality) are a priori concepts of the understanding.

Kant's synthetic a priori judgments (e.g., '7+5=12', 'every event has a cause') are possible because intuition and categories structure experience; the thing in itself (noumenon) is thinkable but not knowable.

Kant's categorical imperative: act only on a maxim you could will as a universal law; treat humanity as an end, never merely as a means; the will is autonomous when it legislates the moral law to itself.

Marx: historical materialism holds that the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life; being determines consciousness, not the reverse.

Marx's base/superstructure: the economic base (forces and relations of production) shapes the superstructure (law, politics, ideology, religion); ideology is the ruling class's ideas presented as universal.

Marx's alienation (Entfremdung): under capitalism the worker is alienated from the product, the labor process, species-being, and other humans; communism aims at the return of the human to itself.

Marx's surplus value: the value produced by labor exceeds the value paid as wages; capital accumulates by extracting this surplus, and the falling rate of profit generates crises.

Nietzsche's will to power (Wille zur Macht) is the fundamental drive of all life, not merely domination but self-overcoming and creative growth; it is a principle of interpretation, not a metaphysical substance.

Nietzsche's master/slave morality: master morality values strength, nobility, and self-affirmation; slave morality, born of ressentiment, revalues weakness as goodness and strength as evil.

Nietzsche's eternal recurrence: the thought experiment that all events repeat infinitely; the Übermensch affirms life by willing the eternal return, while nihilism is overcome through revaluation of values.

Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics and language: concepts are metaphors frozen by convention; there are no facts, only interpretations; the 'death of God' announces the collapse of absolute values.

Related currents: Kierkegaard's existential subjectivity and leap of faith; Schopenhauer's blind will; Mill's utilitarianism and liberty principle; Darwin's evolutionary naturalism reshaping ethics and anthropology.

Ortega's 'I am I and my circumstance' (yo soy yo y mi circunstancia): the self is not a substance but a life-project co-constituted by its circumstances; saving circumstances is saving the self.

Ortega's perspectivism: each individual has a unique vantage point on reality; truth is not relative but perspectival-all perspectives together constitute the full reality, and no single one exhausts it.

Ortega's vital reason (razón vital) integrates reason and life; the topic of our time is the rebellion of the masses-mass man as a product of liberal democracy who lacks historical consciousness and demands without responsibility.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus: language mirrors the logical form of the world; propositions are pictures of facts; the limits of language are the limits of the world, and the mystical lies beyond what can be said.

Wittgenstein's later philosophy (Philosophical Investigations): meaning is use; language games and family resemblance replace essential definitions; the private language argument shows that inner states require public criteria.

Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations: no rule determines its application by itself; practice and agreement in forms of life ground normativity, dissolving the picture of meaning as an inner mental act.

Phenomenology (Husserl): intentionality of consciousness; epoché and reduction bracket the natural attitude to disclose essences; Heidegger's Dasein is being-in-the-world, and authenticity confronts being-toward-death.

Existentialism (Sartre): existence precedes essence; radical freedom entails responsibility; bad faith (mauvaise foi) is the denial of freedom by adopting fixed roles; the Other's look objectifies the self.

Contemporary currents: logical positivism's verification principle (Vienna Circle); Quine's critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction; Rawls's justice as fairness; Habermas's communicative action; postmodern critiques of grand narratives.

Identify the text's thesis (what the author asserts), its argumentative strategy (deduction, reductio, thought experiment, dialectic), and its conclusion; distinguish the author's voice from quoted interlocutors.

Contextualize the fragment: author, work, date, and philosophical tradition; note whether the passage is programmatic, polemical, or a reply to a named opponent.

Analyze key terms: flag technical vocabulary (e.g., energeia, cogito, a priori, Entfremdung, Dasein) and define it in the author's own sense rather than by contemporary usage.

Reconstruct the argument in premise-conclusion form; test validity (does the conclusion follow?) and soundness (are the premises true?); identify hidden premises and equivocations.

Evaluate with counterexamples and objections: thought experiments, reductio ad absurdum, and comparison with rival positions; note what the author would need to concede or defend.

Distinguish explanation from justification: a causal account of why we hold a belief is not a normative account of whether it is warranted (Hume's is/ought gap; Kant's quid facti vs. quid juris).

Structure the commentary: introduction (thesis and context), exposition (argument reconstruction), critical analysis (objections and replies), and conclusion (assessment and significance).

Common pitfalls: paraphrasing instead of analyzing; ignoring the author's historical interlocutors; attributing to the text claims it only mentions; conflating the author's view with that of a character in a dialogue.

Conceptual analysis technique: give necessary and sufficient conditions, test with borderline cases, and check for counterexamples; distinguish the concept from conceptions of it (e.g., justice vs. Rawls's or Plato's conception).