Catalonia PAU History of Philosophy key terms

In Plato, the eternal, non-material pattern that a class of things shares and that makes them what they are; grasped by reason, not by the senses. Particular beautiful things participate in Beauty itself.

Plato's relation whereby sensible particulars owe their character to a Form they share in without being identical to it. Explains why many things are just while Justice itself remains one.

Plato's term for copying; sensible objects imitate Forms and art imitates sensible objects, so a painting stands at a third remove from truth and can mislead about reality.

Plato's cognitive state directed at changing sensible things; it can be true but lacks the secure grounding of knowledge because its object is unstable and its holder cannot give an account.

In Plato, infallible cognition of what is, directed at Forms and justified by a rational account of why the thing must be so. Contrasted with mere true opinion.

Plato's image of prisoners mistaking shadows for reality; release and ascent to sunlight depict education of the soul from sensible images to Forms, culminating in the Form of the Good.

Plato's division of the soul into rational, spirited and appetitive parts. Justice in the individual is each part doing its own work under reason's rule, mirroring the just city.

In Plato, the highest object of knowledge, which makes other Forms knowable and things good, compared to the sun that both illuminates and sustains what it lights.

Plato's doctrine that learning is recovering knowledge the soul acquired before birth; sensory experience triggers but does not produce it, which explains how we recognize perfect equality never seen.

The doctrine that God creates everything from nothing, without pre-existing matter, so all being depends continuously on the creator; central to Augustine's rejection of eternal unformed matter.

Augustine's claim that God is outside time while time began with creation; time is a distension of the mind measuring past, present and future through memory, attention and expectation.

Augustine's turn inward: truth is sought not in external things but in the inner self, where the mind encounters God more intimately than it knows itself, as in 'Do not go outward'.

Augustine's account of how the mind grasps eternal truths: God, like a sun, makes intelligible truths visible to reason, so certainty rests on divine light rather than sense experience.

Augustine's doctrine that Adam's disobedience wounded human nature for all descendants, weakening will and reason; humans need grace, not merely effort, to choose the good.

Augustine's resolution: the will is free but damaged by sin, and only prevenient grace restores it to love God; grace does not abolish freedom but heals and enables it.

Augustine's contrast between the earthly city, founded on self-love, and the city of God, founded on love of God; they are mingled in history and separated only at the last judgment.

Aquinas's five a posteriori arguments for God's existence from motion, causation, contingency, degrees of perfection and design, each concluding in a first cause or necessary being.

Aquinas's view that terms like 'wise' apply to God and creatures neither univocally nor equivocally but proportionally: God is wise in a way beyond creaturely wisdom.

Knowledge of God reachable by unaided reason from created effects, which Aquinas distinguishes from revealed truths such as the Trinity that reason cannot establish.

Aquinas's harmony thesis: reason and revelation share one truth because both come from God; philosophy can defend and clarify faith, though some mysteries exceed reason.

In Aquinas, the rational creature's participation in God's eternal law, knowable by reason and expressed in basic goods such as preserving life and living in society.

Descartes's strategy of suspending assent to anything that could possibly be false, including senses and mathematics under the evil-demon hypothesis, in order to find an indubitable foundation.

Descartes's first certainty: even while doubting everything, the doubter cannot doubt that he exists, since doubting is a form of thinking and thought presupposes a thinker.

Descartes's hyperbolic hypothesis of a powerful deceiver who could falsify even arithmetic; it motivates the need to prove a non-deceiving God before trusting clear ideas.

Descartes's criterion of truth: an idea is clear when present and vivid to an attentive mind, distinct when sharply separated from others and containing nothing obscure.

Descartes's claim that mind and body are distinct substances, defined by thinking and by extension respectively, yet causally interact in the human being.

Hume's division of perceptions: impressions are lively, forceful experiences such as sensations and passions; ideas are fainter copies of them used in thinking and memory.

Hume's rule that every simple idea derives from a corresponding impression; an idea lacking any possible impression is suspect as meaningless or confused.

Hume's explanation of how the mind connects perceptions by resemblance, contiguity and cause-and-effect, producing habitual transitions that imagination mistakes for rational inference.

Hume's analysis: we never perceive a necessary connection between events, only constant conjunction and a felt expectation; causal necessity is a habit of the mind, not a feature of things.

Hume's challenge: no reasoning can justify expecting the future to resemble the past, since any argument for uniformity would itself rely on that uniformity, making it circular.

Hume's observation that descriptions of what is the case do not by themselves entail prescriptions about what ought to be; moral conclusions need an extra premise.

Hume's view that moral judgments express feelings of approbation or disapprobation produced by contemplating character traits useful or agreeable to self and others, not rational insights.

Hume's claim that introspection reveals only a succession of perceptions, never a persisting ego; the self is a bundle we falsely unify through imagination and memory.

Kant's category for judgments that extend knowledge yet hold independently of experience, such as 'every event has a cause'; they are possible because the mind imposes forms on intuition.

Kant's reversal: instead of conforming our concepts to objects, objects of experience conform to the mind's forms and categories, which is why necessary knowledge of nature is possible.

Kant's distinction between things as they appear under space, time and the categories, which we can know, and things in themselves, which we can only think, not cognize.

Kant's argument that the categories are objectively valid because they are necessary conditions of any unified self-conscious experience; without them, a manifold could not be one experience.

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

In Kant, a command conditional on a desired end ('if you want X, do Y'); it guides skill and prudence but cannot ground morality because its binding force depends on contingent desires.

Kant's idea that the moral will gives itself the law through reason; acting morally is self-legislation, which grounds dignity and distinguishes persons from things.

Marx's thesis that the mode of production of material life conditions social, political and intellectual life; history advances through contradictions between productive forces and relations of production.

Marx's account of workers under capitalism being separated from the product, the act of producing, their species-being and other people, so labour becomes an external, hostile power.

Marx's term for the distinctively human capacity for free, conscious, social production; capitalism reduces it to a mere means of survival, estranging humans from their own nature.

Marx's concept for beliefs and institutions that present the interests of the ruling class as universal truth, thereby concealing exploitation and stabilizing existing relations of production.

Marx's engine of history: conflict between owners of the means of production and those who sell labour, which sharpens under capitalism and points toward revolutionary transformation.

Nietzsche's name for the basic drive of life to grow, overcome resistance and expand its influence; it is not domination alone but self-overcoming expressed in creating and interpreting.

Nietzsche's diagnosis that the highest values devalue themselves: the collapse of belief in God and absolute truth leaves life apparently without meaning or aim.

Nietzsche's image of a human type who creates values after nihilism, affirming life without otherworldly consolation; not a biological superior but a self-overcoming legislator of worth.

Nietzsche's genealogy contrasting noble valuation of strength and self-affirmation with slave morality's revaluation of weakness as good and power as evil, born of ressentiment.

Nietzsche's thought experiment: if you had to live this same life infinitely many times, would you affirm it? It tests whether one can say yes to existence as it is.

Nietzsche's psychological mechanism by which the weak, unable to act, imagine revenge and invert values, calling the strong evil and their own impotence good.

A single sentence stating the position an essay will defend and why it matters; it must be arguable, specific and answer the question asked rather than announce a topic.

Setting out an author's reasoning as numbered premises leading to a conclusion, making implicit steps explicit so the argument can be assessed for validity and soundness.

An argument is valid when the conclusion cannot be false if the premises are true; it is sound when valid and all its premises are actually true.

An exercise explaining a short philosophical passage: identifying its thesis, reconstructing its argument, clarifying key terms and assessing it, always anchored in the text's own wording.

The dialectical move of stating the strongest counterargument to a position and then defending or revising the position; examiners reward replies that engage the objection's force.