Catalonia PAU History of Philosophy flashcards

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

Plato: Theory of Forms

The intelligible world contains eternal, immaterial, universal Forms; sensible things are imperfect copies that participate in them and are known only through reason, not the senses.

Plato: Allegory of the Cave

Prisoners mistake shadows for reality; liberation is education of the soul turning from sensible images toward the Forms and finally the Good, which illuminates all that is knowable.

Plato: Divided Line

Four cognitive levels paired with objects: eikasia (images), pistis (sensible things), dianoia (mathematics), noesis (Forms); knowledge concerns being, opinion concerns becoming.

Plato: Anamnesis

Learning is recollection of Forms the soul knew before embodiment; the Meno's slave-boy demonstration shows that questioning can elicit latent knowledge without direct instruction.

Plato: Tripartite Soul

The soul has rational, spirited, and appetitive parts; justice is each part performing its own function under the governance of reason, mirroring the just city.

Augustine: Faith and Reason

Faith precedes and seeks understanding while reason clarifies and defends faith; Augustine holds that belief and rational inquiry are complementary rather than opposed, since truth is one.

Augustine: Divine Illumination

The human mind can grasp eternal and necessary truths only because God illuminates it; truth is found within the interior self rather than in external sensible things alone.

Augustine: Evil as Privation

Evil has no independent substance; it is the absence or corruption of a good that ought to be present in a creature, which preserves God's goodness against the problem of evil.

Augustine: Two Cities

History contains two intertwined communities: the City of God, founded on love of God, and the earthly city, founded on love of self; their destinies diverge at the last judgment.

Aquinas: Five Ways

Five a posteriori arguments from motion, causation, contingency, degrees, and governance, each concluding in a first mover, first cause, necessary being, maximum, or intelligent governor.

Aquinas: Natural Law

Rational creatures participate in God's eternal law through reason; the first practical principle is to do good and avoid evil, from which human laws and virtues are derived.

Aquinas: Essence and Esse

In creatures, what a thing is (essence) differs from the act of existing (esse); in God alone essence and existence are identical, which grounds God's uniqueness and necessity.

Descartes: Method of Doubt

Systematically suspend assent to anything that could possibly be false, including sensory reports and mathematics under an evil-demon hypothesis, in order to find an indubitable foundation.

Descartes: Cogito

Even while doubting everything, the doubter's own existence is certain: 'I think, therefore I am.' This is an intuition, not an inference from a syllogism.

Descartes: Clear and Distinct

A perception is true when it is present and evident to an attentive mind and cannot be confused with anything else; God's veracity guarantees that such perceptions cannot be false.

Descartes: Cartesian Circle

Objection that clear and distinct ideas are trusted because God is proved, while God is proved using clear and distinct ideas; Descartes answers that present intuition needs no guarantee, only memory does.

Descartes: Substance Dualism

Mind is an unextended thinking substance and body an extended mechanical substance; they interact in the human being, which Descartes locates at the pineal gland.

Hume: Impressions and Ideas

Impressions are vivid perceptions from experience; ideas are fainter copies of impressions. A term lacking any corresponding impression is philosophically suspect.

Hume: Relations of Ideas

Propositions demonstrably true or false by thought alone, such as mathematics, whose denial is a contradiction; they assert nothing about what exists in the world.

Hume: Matters of Fact

Contingent propositions about existence, known only through experience; their denial is conceivable, so they cannot be established by demonstration but only by causal inference.

Hume: Custom and Habit

After observing constant conjunction, imagination is determined by custom to expect the effect; this feeling of determination, not any perceived necessity, is the source of the idea of cause.

Hume: Bundle Theory of Self

Introspection reveals only particular perceptions in flux, never a permanent ego; personal identity is a fiction produced by imagination associating perceptions by resemblance and causation.

Hume: Is-Ought Gap

Descriptive premises about what is cannot by themselves entail prescriptive conclusions about what ought to be; moral judgments therefore rest on sentiment rather than reason.

Kant: Copernican Turn

Objects must conform to the conditions of our cognition rather than cognition conforming to objects; the subject's forms make experience possible and thereby ground a priori knowledge.

Kant: Synthetic A Priori

A judgment that is ampliative (synthetic) yet necessary and independent of experience (a priori), such as every event has a cause; it is possible because the mind imposes forms on intuition.

Kant: Space and Time

Space and time are pure forms of sensible intuition: empirically real for all appearances yet transcendentally ideal, not properties of things as they are in themselves.

Kant: Phenomena and Noumena

We know appearances structured by our forms of intuition and categories; things in themselves are thinkable as limiting concepts but can never be objects of theoretical knowledge.

Kant: Categorical Imperative

Act only on maxims you could will as universal law, and treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means; it is unconditional and grounded in rational autonomy.

Kant: Postulates of Practical Reason

Freedom, immortality, and God are not objects of theoretical proof but are rationally postulated because the moral law commands a highest good that only they make possible.

Marx: Historical Materialism

The mode of production of material life conditions social, political, and intellectual life; social being determines consciousness, not the reverse, and class conflict drives historical change.

Marx: Alienation

Under capitalism workers are estranged from the product of their labor, the activity of producing, their species-being, and other people, because labor is sold as a commodity.

Nietzsche: Master and Slave Morality

Aristocratic morality evaluates good versus bad by strength and excellence; slave morality, born of ressentiment, inverts this, calling the powerful evil and weakness good.

Nietzsche: Eternal Recurrence

The thought that one's life must be lived again infinitely; accepting and willing it is the test of amor fati and of the strength to affirm existence without transcendent consolation.