Catalonia PAU History of Philosophy cheat sheet

Theory of Forms: the sensible world is a copy of the intelligible world; the Forms are eternal, immaterial, universal, and knowable only by reason, not by the senses.

Allegory of the cave maps onto the divided line: shadows and reflections (eikasia, imagination), sensible objects (pistis, belief), mathematical objects (dianoia, discursive reason), Forms and the Good (noesis, intellection).

The Good is the highest Form: it makes other Forms knowable and gives them being, as the sun gives visibility to objects and life to the visible world.

Knowledge (episteme) is of what is, opinion (doxa) is of what becomes; the divided line ties each cognitive state to its proper object.

Reminiscence (anamnesis): learning is the soul's recollection of Forms it contemplated before embodiment; the Meno slave-boy episode illustrates it.

Tripartite soul: rational (logistikon), spirited (thymoeides), appetitive (epithymetikon); justice in the soul is each part doing its own work under reason's rule.

Just city analogy: philosopher-kings (reason), guardians/soldiers (spirit), producers (appetite); justice is harmony of the parts, not a rule imposed from outside.

Art is mimesis at third remove from truth (copy of a copy), which grounds Plato's critique of poetry in the Republic and his censorship proposals.

Key works to cite: Apology, Meno, Phaedo (immortality), Symposium (love and beauty), Republic (cave, line, justice), Timaeus (cosmology).

Augustine: 'credo ut intelligem' and 'intellige ut credas' - faith and reason are complementary; faith seeks understanding, reason clarifies faith.

Illumination theory (Augustine): the human mind grasps eternal truths only through divine illumination; truth is interior ('in interiore homine habitat veritas').

Evil as privation of good (privatio boni): evil has no independent substance; it is a corruption or absence of a good that ought to be present.

Original sin and grace: human will is wounded by sin; salvation requires prevenient grace, not merely unaided effort; developed against Pelagius.

Two cities (De civitate Dei): civitas Dei (love of God to contempt of self) vs. civitas terrena (love of self to contempt of God); they are intermixed in history.

Aquinas: five ways (quinque viae) - motion, efficient causation, contingency, degrees of perfection, finality/governance - each concluding in a first cause or prime mover.

Essence/act of being (esse) distinction in Aquinas: in creatures essence and existence differ; in God they are identical (God as ipsum esse).

Natural law (lex naturalis): participation of eternal law in rational creatures; graspable by reason via first practical principle 'do good and avoid evil'; human law derives from it.

Faith and reason harmony: reason can prove preambles (God's existence, unity) but not mysteries (Trinity, Incarnation); philosophy is the 'handmaid' of theology.

Key works: Augustine's Confessions, De civitate Dei, De libero arbitrio; Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (I, q.2 on God's existence; I-II on law and virtue), Summa contra Gentiles.

Method of doubt: reject anything that can be doubted (senses deceive, dreams, evil demon/malicious genius) to find an indubitable foundation.

Cogito ergo sum: even if all else is doubted, the doubter's existence is certain; the cogito is an intuition, not a syllogism.

Criterion of truth: clear and distinct perception (clare et distincte) is the mark of the true; guaranteed by God's veracity once His existence is proved.

Proofs of God: from the idea of a perfect being (trademark argument, causal adequacy), and the ontological argument (existence belongs to the essence of the supremely perfect being).

Cartesian circle problem: the reliability of clear and distinct ideas depends on God, yet God's existence is proved using clear and distinct ideas; note the memory-based reply.

Mind–body dualism (substance dualism): res cogitans (thinking substance, unextended) vs. res extensa (extended substance, mechanical body); union and interaction at the pineal gland.

Physics: matter is pure extension, so a vacuum is impossible; all natural change is motion governed by laws of nature established by God.

Passions: bodily events affecting the soul; reason's task is to master them through knowledge of their causes, not mere suppression.

Key works: Discourse on the Method, Meditations on First Philosophy (I–VI), Principles of Philosophy, Passions of the Soul.

Impressions vs. ideas: all ideas are copies of prior impressions; a term with no corresponding impression is suspect (copy principle).

Fork: relations of ideas (a priori, demonstrative, e.g. mathematics) vs. matters of fact (a posteriori, contingent, e.g. the sun will rise).

Causation is not a necessary connection perceived in objects; we infer effects from custom/habit after constant conjunction of events.

Induction has no rational justification: no argument can prove that the future must resemble the past without begging the question.

Self (Treatise I.4.6): no impression of a permanent self is found; the self is a bundle of perceptions in constant flux; personal identity is a fiction of imagination.

Is/ought gap: moral conclusions cannot be deduced from purely descriptive premises; moral judgments derive from sentiment, not reason.

Reason is the slave of the passions: reason supplies information about means, but sentiment supplies the ends and moral motive.

Miracles (Enquiry X): a miracle violates a law of nature; the evidence for any miracle is outweighed by the evidence for the law it violates.

Key works: A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751).

Copernican turn: objects must conform to our cognition, not cognition to objects; the subject contributes the forms that make experience possible.

Synthetic a priori judgments exist (e.g., 7+5=12, every event has a cause); they are possible only because the mind imposes forms on intuition and thought.

Space and time are pure forms of sensible intuition: empirically real (valid for all appearances) but transcendentally ideal (not properties of things in themselves).

Categories (including causality) are pure concepts of the understanding that constitute the objective order of experience; they apply only to possible experience.

Phenomena vs. noumena: we know appearances only; things in themselves (Ding an sich) are thinkable but not knowable.

Antinomies and paralogisms diagnose reason's error when it extends beyond experience; the dialectic explains metaphysical illusion.

Moral law: categorical imperative, universalizability formula ('act only on maxims you could will to be universal law') and the humanity formula (treat persons as ends, never merely means).

Autonomy and the kingdom of ends: the moral law is self-legislated by rational will; acting from duty, not inclination, gives moral worth.

Postulates of practical reason: freedom, immortality, God - not objects of theoretical knowledge but required by the moral law; the primacy of practical reason.

Key works: Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87), Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Critique of Judgment (1790).

Marx: historical materialism - not consciousness but social being determines consciousness; modes of production structure society and its ideas.

Base and superstructure: economic base (productive forces and relations of production) conditions the legal, political, and ideological superstructure.

Alienation (Entfremdung): under capitalism the worker is alienated from the product, the labor process, the species-being, and other humans.

Surplus value: the source of profit lies in unpaid labor time; the commodity form conceals social relations (commodity fetishism).

Class struggle drives history; the bourgeoisie/ proletariat conflict leads to revolution and a classless society (dialectical reading of Hegel inverted).

Marx's critique of ideology: dominant ideas are the ideas of the dominant class; religion as 'opium of the people' (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right).

Nietzsche: will to power as the fundamental drive; critique of Christian-moral values as slave morality born of ressentiment.

Master/slave morality (Genealogy of Morals): good/bad (aristocratic) vs. good/evil (slave inversion); the slave revolt in morals revalues strength as evil.

Death of God and nihilism: with the collapse of transcendent values, active nihilism must create values; the Übermensch embodies value creation.

Eternal recurrence as an existential test: would you will this life again infinitely? Affirmation is amor fati; perspectivism denies a view from nowhere.

Key works: Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), The German Ideology, Capital; Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Text analysis sequence: identify the thesis, reconstruct the argument's premises and conclusion, locate key terms, then evaluate - do not merely summarize.

Quote precisely and briefly; every quotation must be followed by an explanation of its function in the author's argument, not left to speak for itself.

Argument evaluation: distinguish validity (form) from soundness (form plus true premises); name the premise that is questionable and why.

Common fallacies to flag: ad hominem, straw man, false dilemma, circular reasoning, equivocation, appeal to authority, hasty generalization.

Counterargument requirement: state the strongest objection, then a reply; a good essay anticipates objections rather than avoiding them.

Essay structure: introduction with thesis and roadmap, body paragraphs each with one claim plus textual support and analysis, conclusion that synthesizes rather than repeats.

Contextualization: situate the author in his historical and philosophical debate (e.g., Kant responding to Hume's skepticism; Marx inverting Hegel) to earn analysis marks.

Comparison questions: organize by problem (e.g., the source of knowledge, the foundation of morality) rather than by author, so differences are directly argued.

Terminology accuracy: use the author's own vocabulary (cogito, a priori, entelechy, alienation) and define it on first use; imprecise terminology loses marks.

Timing and length discipline: outline before writing, allocate time proportionally to the mark weighting, and reserve time for revision of the thesis and conclusion.