Cantabria PAU History of Philosophy flashcards

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

Plato's Theory of Forms

The doctrine that sensible things are imperfect copies of eternal, immaterial Forms, known by reason rather than sense perception; the Form of the Good is the highest principle.

Allegory of the Cave

Plato's image of prisoners mistaking shadows for reality; education is the turning of the soul from sensible images toward the intelligible Forms and the Good.

Aristotle's four causes

Material (what it is made of), formal (its essence), efficient (what produces it), and final (its purpose); together they explain why a substance is what it is.

Act and potency

Aristotle's pair for explaining change: a thing is potentially what it can become and actually what it already is; the unmoved mover is pure act.

Augustine on time

Time is a distension of the mind (distentio animi): the past exists as memory, the present as attention, and the future as expectation, not as independent realities.

Aquinas's Five Ways

Five a posteriori arguments for God's existence from motion, causation, contingency, degrees of perfection, and finality; each concludes to a first cause or necessary being.

Descartes' cogito

'I think, therefore I am': the one indubitable truth reached after methodic doubt; even a deceiver cannot make me doubt that I am thinking while I doubt.

Cartesian dualism

The view that mind (res cogitans) and body (res extensa) are distinct substances; the mind is unextended and thinking, the body extended and mechanical.

Hume's fork

The division of all knowledge into relations of ideas (analytic, certain) and matters of fact (synthetic, probable); only the former are demonstrably true.

Hume on causation

We perceive only constant conjunction and priority, never necessary connection; the idea of causal necessity arises from custom or habit, not from reason or observation.

Kant's Copernican revolution

The hypothesis that objects must conform to our cognition rather than cognition to objects; space, time, and the categories are a priori conditions of possible experience.

Synthetic a priori

A judgment that is ampliative (synthetic) yet independent of experience (a priori), such as 'every event has a cause'; Kant argues these make mathematics and natural science possible.

Categorical imperative

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

Marx's historical materialism

The thesis that the mode of production of material life conditions social, political, and intellectual life; social being determines consciousness, not the reverse.

Marx's alienation

Under capitalism workers are estranged from the product, the labor process, their species-being, and other people; communism aims to overcome this estrangement.

Surplus value

The difference between the value produced by labor and the wages paid; capital accumulates by extracting this unpaid surplus from workers.

Nietzsche's will to power

The fundamental drive of life toward growth, self-overcoming, and creative expansion; it is an interpretive principle rather than a metaphysical substance.

Master and slave morality

Nietzsche's contrast between noble valuation of strength and self-affirmation and slave morality's ressentiment-driven revaluation of weakness as goodness.

Eternal recurrence

Nietzsche's thought experiment that all events repeat infinitely; affirming it expresses the Übermensch's love of life and overcoming of nihilism.

Ortega's perspectivism

Each individual has a unique, partial vantage on reality; truth is not relative but perspectival, and all perspectives together constitute the full reality.

Vital reason

Ortega's integration of reason and life: reason must be rooted in vital circumstance, and life must be guided by reason; neither pure rationalism nor vitalism suffices.

Rebellion of the masses

Ortega's diagnosis that mass man, product of liberal democracy, demands rights without responsibilities and lacks the historical consciousness needed to sustain civilization.

Wittgenstein's picture theory

In the Tractatus, propositions are logical pictures of possible facts; language and world share a logical form, and what cannot be pictured cannot be said.

Language games

Wittgenstein's later notion that meaning is use within rule-governed practices; different forms of life embed different language games with their own criteria of correctness.

Private language argument

Wittgenstein's argument that a language referring only to private sensations is impossible, since meaning requires public criteria and agreement in a form of life.

Heidegger's Dasein

The human way of being, characterized as being-in-the-world; authenticity involves confronting being-toward-death and resolutely owning one's possibilities.

Sartre's bad faith

The self-deception of denying one's radical freedom by adopting fixed roles or excuses; authenticity requires owning one's freedom and responsibility.

Husserl's intentionality

The thesis that consciousness is always consciousness of something; the epoché brackets the natural attitude to disclose the essential structures of experience.

Is/ought gap

Hume's observation that descriptive premises about what is cannot by themselves entail prescriptive conclusions about what ought to be, without an added normative premise.

Reductio ad absurdum

A proof strategy that assumes the negation of the target claim and derives a contradiction, thereby establishing the claim's truth by eliminating its alternative.

Necessary and sufficient conditions

A conceptual analysis specifies conditions that are jointly sufficient and individually necessary for applying a term; counterexamples test whether the analysis is adequate.

Quid facti vs. quid juris

Kant's distinction between the factual question of how we come to have a cognition and the normative question of what justifies its claim to validity.