Balearic Islands PAU History of Philosophy flashcards

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

Theory of Forms

Plato's doctrine that sensible objects are imperfect copies participating in eternal, immaterial Forms, which are the proper objects of knowledge rather than opinion.

Hylomorphism

Aristotle's view that every sensible substance is a composite of matter and form, with form as the actuality that makes the thing what it is.

Privatio boni

Augustine's claim that evil is not a positive substance but an absence or corruption of good, so that everything God created is good insofar as it exists.

Five Ways

Aquinas' five arguments for God's existence, reasoning from motion, causation, contingency, gradation, and finality to a first uncaused cause.

Method of doubt

Descartes' procedure of suspending every belief that can be doubted, including sensory reports and mathematics, in order to find an indubitable foundation.

Cogito ergo sum

Descartes' first certainty: even the most radical doubt presupposes a thinking subject, so 'I think, therefore I am' cannot be doubted.

Hume's fork

Hume's division of all knowledge into relations of ideas, which are a priori and certain, and matters of fact, which are contingent and grounded in experience.

Constant conjunction

Hume's account of causation: we observe one event regularly followed by another, but never perceive a necessary connection between them.

Bundle theory

Hume's view that the self is nothing over and above a flux of particular perceptions, with personal identity a fiction produced by imagination.

Synthetic a priori

Kant's category of judgments that extend knowledge yet hold independently of experience, such as arithmetic and the principle of causality.

Categorical imperative

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

General will

Rousseau's concept of the will of the citizen body directed at the common good, distinct from the mere sum of private particular wills.

Aufhebung

Hegel's term for dialectical sublation, which simultaneously cancels, preserves, and elevates a prior moment into a higher unity.

Historical materialism

Marx's thesis that the material mode of production conditions social, political, and intellectual life, so that social being determines consciousness.

Alienation

Marx's term for the worker's estrangement under capitalism from the product, the labor process, species-being, and other human beings.

Will to power

Nietzsche's claim that the fundamental drive of life is toward growth, overcoming, and value creation, not mere political domination.

Eternal recurrence

Nietzsche's thought experiment asking whether one could affirm living this exact life infinitely many times, as a test of life-affirmation.

Razón vital

Ortega y Gasset's vital reason, which integrates rational analysis with the concrete circumstances of life rather than abstracting from them.

Bad faith

Sartre's mauvaise foi: self-deception in which one denies one's radical freedom by adopting a fixed identity or social role.

Divided line

Plato's image ranking cognition into imagination, belief, mathematical reasoning, and dialectical knowledge, with the Good as the highest object.

Four causes

Aristotle's four explanatory factors: material, efficient, formal, and final, which together answer why a thing is what it is.

Distentio animi

Augustine's description of time as a distension of the mind, where the past is memory, the present attention, and the future expectation.

Is/ought gap

Hume's observation that descriptive premises about what is cannot by themselves entail normative conclusions about what ought to be.

Phenomena and noumena

Kant's distinction between things as they appear under our forms of intuition and things as they are in themselves, which are thinkable but unknowable.

Master-slave dialectic

Hegel's account in which self-consciousness seeks recognition from another, and the slave attains self-consciousness through labor and confrontation with death.

Compatibilism

Hume's position that freedom consists in acting according to one's own desires without external constraint, and is compatible with causal determinism.

Autonomy

Kant's conception of freedom as the rational will legislating the moral law to itself, rather than being determined by external inclinations.

Perspectivism

Ortega's view that reality is known from partial but structured perspectives, with truth emerging from their integration rather than relativism.

Ressentiment

Nietzsche's term for the weak's creative revaluation of values, inverting aristocratic strength into 'evil' and weakness into 'good'.

Transcendental illusion

Kant's term for reason's tendency to apply categories beyond possible experience, generating ideas of the soul, world, and God.

Reductio ad absurdum

An argument form that assumes the negation of a thesis, derives a contradiction, and concludes that the original thesis must be true.

Steel man

The argumentative practice of reconstructing and refuting the strongest version of an opposing position rather than a weakened caricature.