Canary Islands PAU History of Philosophy key terms

An eternal, immaterial model or form that exists independently of particular things and gives them their intelligibility; sensible objects are imperfect copies that participate in it.

The relation by which a sensible thing derives its being and character from an intelligible Form without being identical to it; it explains unity in multiplicity in Plato's middle dialogues.

Plato's image in Republic VII of prisoners mistaking shadows for reality; it stages the ascent from opinion to knowledge and the philosopher's duty to return and educate others.

Plato's distinction between opinion, which concerns changing sensible things and may be true or false, and knowledge, which is justified, stable grasp of what truly is.

In Plato's Timaeus, the rational craftsman who orders pre-existing chaotic material by looking to the Forms, producing the best possible sensible cosmos without creating matter from nothing.

Aristotle's doctrine that every natural substance is a compound of matter (hyle) and form (morphe); form makes the thing what it is, matter is what undergoes change.

Aristotle's four ways of answering 'why': material (what it is made of), efficient (what produced it), formal (its defining structure) and final (the end or purpose it serves).

Aristotle's pair for explaining change: a capacity to become something (dynamis) and the realized state it reaches (energeia); change is the passage from the former to the latter.

For Aristotle, the primary bearer of properties, a concrete composite of matter and form; for later Scholastics, an entity subsisting in itself rather than inhering in another.

Medieval terms convertible with being as such, classically unity, truth, goodness and beauty; they add nothing to being but express it under different aspects of intelligibility.

Aquinas's claim that words like 'wise' apply to God and creatures neither univocally nor equivocally but proportionally, since creaturely perfections resemble their cause without capturing it.

Aquinas's five a posteriori arguments in the Summa theologiae for God's existence, moving from motion, causation, contingency, degrees of perfection and the order of nature to a first principle.

Knowledge of God attainable by unaided reason from created effects, as distinct from revealed theology, which depends on faith and scripture; central to Aquinas's synthesis of Aristotle and Christianity.

Augustine's account of how the mind grasps eternal truths: God, the intelligible light, enables the soul to see necessary truths that it cannot derive from changing sensible experience alone.

Augustine's turn inward in the Confessions: truth is sought not in external things but within the soul, where memory, understanding and will disclose the self and its relation to God.

Descartes's strategy of suspending assent to anything that admits the slightest doubt, including the senses and mathematics, in order to find an indubitable foundation for knowledge.

Descartes's first certainty: even while doubting everything, the doubter cannot doubt that he is thinking and therefore exists as a thinking thing.

Descartes's hyperbolic hypothesis of a supremely powerful deceiver that could falsify even mathematical judgments, used to push doubt to its extreme before the cogito.

Descartes's criterion of truth: a perception is clear when present and vivid to an attentive mind, and distinct when sharply separated from everything else.

The thinking thing that Descartes identifies with himself and with the mind; its essence is thought, and it is really distinct from the extended body.

The view that mind and body are two really distinct kinds of substance, defined respectively by thought and extension, which nevertheless interact in the human being.

Ideas that the mind possesses by its own nature rather than deriving from experience, such as the idea of God, of substance, and for Descartes the cogito itself.

The doctrine, associated with Malebranche, that created things have no causal power of their own and that God is the sole true cause on the occasion of each apparent interaction.

The empiricist image of the mind as a blank slate at birth, so that all its contents come from experience through sensation and reflection rather than from innate stock.

Hume's division of perceptions into lively, immediate impressions and fainter copies or ideas derived from them; the distinction grounds his test for the meaningfulness of terms.

Hume's three principles by which the imagination links perceptions: resemblance, contiguity in space and time, and cause and effect; they explain belief and the coherence of mental life.

Hume's analysis of the causal relation as constant conjunction plus a customary transition of the mind; we never perceive a necessary connection, only a felt expectation.

Inference from observed regularities to unobserved cases; Hume argues it cannot be justified by reason or experience without circularity, since it presupposes the uniformity of nature.

Marx's thesis that the economic structure of society, the relations of production, conditions the political and ideological superstructure, and that material contradictions drive historical change.

In Marxist usage, systems of ideas, beliefs and values that express and help reproduce dominant class interests, presenting partial social relations as natural or universal.