La Rioja PAU History of Philosophy key terms

In Plato, an eternal, immaterial model that exists independently of sensible things and makes them intelligible; particular objects are what they are by participating in it.

Plato's relation by which a sensible thing derives its character from an Idea; the thing is not the Idea itself but depends on it for its being and name.

Plato's image in the Republic of prisoners mistaking shadows for reality; it dramatises the ascent from opinion to knowledge and the philosopher's return to the city.

Plato's term for opinion: a fallible, changeable grasp of sensible things. It lies between ignorance and knowledge and is the cognitive state suited to the visible world.

In Plato, knowledge proper: infallible, justified grasp of what is, directed at the Forms rather than at changing sensible particulars. Aristotle restricts it to demonstrative knowledge of necessary truths.

Aristotle's doctrine that every natural substance is a compound of matter and form; matter is what it is made of, form is what makes it a determinate thing.

Aristotle's four ways of answering 'why?': the material, the efficient (source of change), the formal (what it is), and the final (the end for which it exists).

Aristotle's pair for explaining change: potency is the capacity to become something, act is the realised state. Change is the passage from potential to actual being.

Aristotle's term for human flourishing, the highest good and goal of action; achieved through excellent activity of reason over a complete life, not through pleasure or honour alone.

Aristotle's idea that moral excellence lies between excess and deficiency, chosen by reason and fixed by practical wisdom; courage, for instance, sits between recklessness and cowardice.

Aristotle's intellectual virtue of judging well what to do in particular circumstances; it guides moral choice and cannot be reduced to a body of general rules.

Augustine's account of how the mind grasps eternal truths: God, like a light, makes intelligible realities knowable to the human intellect, which by itself only reaches changing things.

In Augustine and later scholastic thought, the eternal patterns in God's mind according to which created things are made; they ground the possibility of stable truth about the world.

The problem of how revealed belief and rational argument relate. Augustine and Aquinas treat them as compatible, reason supporting faith; later thinkers separate or oppose them.

Aquinas's five arguments for God's existence in the Summa Theologiae, from motion, causation, contingency, degrees of perfection, and the order of nature.

Aquinas's claim that words like 'good' or 'wise' apply to God and creatures neither univocally nor merely equivocally, but proportionally, since creatures resemble God imperfectly.

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 rejecting any belief that can be doubted, in order to find a foundation that is certain and indubitable for rebuilding knowledge.

Descartes's first certainty: 'I think, therefore I am'. Even while doubting everything, the doubter cannot doubt that he exists as a thinking thing.

Descartes's hyperbolic hypothesis of a powerful deceiver that could falsify even mathematics; it pushes doubt to its limit before the cogito halts it.

Descartes's term for thinking substance: the mind, whose essence is thought. It is really distinct from extended substance, the body.

Descartes's view that mind and body are two distinct substances, one thinking and unextended, one extended and unthinking, which nevertheless interact in the human being.

The response to dualism holding that created things never truly cause changes; God is the sole efficient cause, and apparent causes are merely occasions for divine action.

Hume's term for a lively, forceful perception given in experience, such as a sensation or passion; ideas are weaker copies derived from impressions.

Hume's principle that the imagination links perceptions by resemblance, contiguity in space and time, and cause and effect, producing the order we take as natural.

Hume's analysis: we never perceive a necessary connection between events, only constant conjunction; the expectation of the effect is a habit of the mind, not a rational insight.

Kant's category for judgments that add information about the world yet hold with necessity and universality, such as 'every event has a cause'. Their possibility is his central question.

Kant's metaphor for his move in epistemology: objects must conform to the conditions of our cognition, rather than our cognition conforming to objects in themselves.

In Kant, referring to the conditions that make experience possible a priori, as opposed to what lies beyond experience; the transcendental inquiry examines the structure of knowing.

Kant's distinction between things as they appear to us, structured by space, time and the categories, and things as they are in themselves, which we can think but not know.

Kant's unconditional moral law, binding regardless of desires; its first formulation requires acting only on maxims that could become universal laws.

In Kant, the will's capacity to give itself the moral law through reason; a person is an end in itself precisely because it legislates for itself rather than being driven by inclination.

Kant's ideal of a systematic union of rational beings legislating universally, in which each is treated as an end and never merely as a means.

In Marx, the estrangement of workers from the product, the activity and the species-being of labour when work is controlled by another and reduced to a commodity.

Marx's view 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.

In Marx, a system of ideas that presents the interests of the ruling class as universal truths, thereby legitimising existing social relations and concealing their exploitative character.

Nietzsche's name for the basic drive he sees in all life: not mere self-preservation but the tendency to grow, overcome resistance and impose form and value.

For Nietzsche, the condition in which the highest values devalue themselves and life loses its meaning; it can be passive collapse or an active, creative overcoming.

Nietzsche's project of criticising the moral values inherited from Christianity and Platonism and creating new values rooted in the affirmation of life.

Ortega y Gasset's claim that reason is not detached from life but a function of it; thought must take the concrete, circumstantial life of the thinker as its starting point.

Ortega's formula that the self is inseparable from its surroundings; reality is the union of the person and the concrete situation in which he or she must choose.

Ortega's doctrine that each point of view captures a genuine part of reality, so truth is reached by integrating perspectives rather than by claiming a view from nowhere.

Wittgenstein's notion that meaning is constituted by the rules of a concrete practice of language use, such as giving orders, describing or praying, rather than by reference alone.

Wittgenstein's account of how a general term applies without a single defining essence: members of the class overlap in features like members of a family, with no common trait in all.

Wittgenstein's problem of how a rule determines correct application: no private interpretation fixes it, only shared practice and training in a community of speakers.

The Tractatus distinction: what a proposition says is its factual content, while logical form and the limits of language cannot be stated but only shown in use.

The PAU exercise of analysing a philosophical passage: locating its thesis, reconstructing its argument, explaining its terms and assessing it in relation to the author's system.

The property of an argument whose conclusion follows necessarily from its premises; validity concerns form, whereas truth concerns whether the premises hold in fact.

The exam requirement of defining the author's technical terms precisely and in context, showing how each term functions within the argument rather than reciting a memorised list.