Madrid PAU History of Philosophy flashcards

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

Idea (Plato)

An eternal, immaterial model or form that exists independently of particular things and gives them their intelligibility; sensible objects are imperfect copies that participate in it.

Participation (méthexis)

The relation by which a sensible thing derives its being and character from an intelligible Form without being identical to it; it explains unity in multiplicity in Plato's middle dialogues.

Allegory of the Cave

Plato's image in Republic VII of prisoners mistaking shadows for reality; it stages the ascent from opinion to knowledge and the philosopher's duty to return and educate others.

Doxa and episteme

Plato's distinction between opinion, which concerns changing sensible things and may be true or false, and knowledge, which is justified, stable grasp of what truly is.

Demiurge

In Plato's Timaeus, the rational craftsman who orders pre-existing chaotic material by looking to the Forms, producing the best possible sensible cosmos without creating matter from nothing.

Hylomorphism

Aristotle's doctrine that every natural substance is a compound of matter (hyle) and form (morphe); form makes the thing what it is, matter is what undergoes change.

Four causes

Aristotle's four ways of answering 'why': material (what it is made of), efficient (what produced it), formal (its defining structure) and final (the end or purpose it serves).

Potentiality and actuality

Aristotle's pair for explaining change: a capacity to become something (dynamis) and the realized state it reaches (energeia); change is the passage from the former to the latter.

Substance (ousia)

For Aristotle, the primary bearer of properties, a concrete composite of matter and form; for later Scholastics, an entity subsisting in itself rather than inhering in another.

Transcendentals

Medieval terms convertible with being as such, classically unity, truth, goodness and beauty; they add nothing to being but express it under different aspects of intelligibility.

Analogy of being

Aquinas's claim that words like 'wise' apply to God and creatures neither univocally nor equivocally but proportionally, since creaturely perfections resemble their cause without capturing it.

Five Ways

Aquinas's five a posteriori arguments in the Summa theologiae for God's existence, moving from motion, causation, contingency, degrees of perfection and the order of nature to a first principle.

Natural theology

Knowledge of God attainable by unaided reason from created effects, as distinct from revealed theology, which depends on faith and scripture; central to Aquinas's synthesis of Aristotle and Christianity.

Illumination (Augustine)

Augustine's account of how the mind grasps eternal truths: God, the intelligible light, enables the soul to see necessary truths that it cannot derive from changing sensible experience alone.

Interiority

Augustine's turn inward in the Confessions: truth is sought not in external things but within the soul, where memory, understanding and will disclose the self and its relation to God.

Methodological doubt

Descartes's strategy of suspending assent to anything that admits the slightest doubt, including the senses and mathematics, in order to find an indubitable foundation for knowledge.

Cogito

Descartes's first certainty: even while doubting everything, the doubter cannot doubt that he is thinking and therefore exists as a thinking thing.

Evil demon

Descartes's hyperbolic hypothesis of a supremely powerful deceiver that could falsify even mathematical judgments, used to push doubt to its extreme before the cogito.

Clear and distinct ideas

Descartes's criterion of truth: a perception is clear when present and vivid to an attentive mind, and distinct when sharply separated from everything else.

Res cogitans

The thinking thing that Descartes identifies with himself and with the mind; its essence is thought, and it is really distinct from the extended body.

Substance dualism

The view that mind and body are two really distinct kinds of substance, defined respectively by thought and extension, which nevertheless interact in the human being.

Innate ideas

Ideas that the mind possesses by its own nature rather than deriving from experience, such as the idea of God, of substance, and for Descartes the cogito itself.

Occasionalism

The doctrine, associated with Malebranche, that created things have no causal power of their own and that God is the sole true cause on the occasion of each apparent interaction.

Tabula rasa

The empiricist image of the mind as a blank slate at birth, so that all its contents come from experience through sensation and reflection rather than from innate stock.

Impressions and ideas

Hume's division of perceptions into lively, immediate impressions and fainter copies or ideas derived from them; the distinction grounds his test for the meaningfulness of terms.

Association of ideas

Hume's three principles by which the imagination links perceptions: resemblance, contiguity in space and time, and cause and effect; they explain belief and the coherence of mental life.

Causality (Hume)

Hume's analysis of the causal relation as constant conjunction plus a customary transition of the mind; we never perceive a necessary connection, only a felt expectation.

Induction

Inference from observed regularities to unobserved cases; Hume argues it cannot be justified by reason or experience without circularity, since it presupposes the uniformity of nature.

Copernican turn

Kant's metaphor for his claim that objects must conform to the conditions of our cognition rather than the reverse, so that we know appearances as structured by the subject.

Synthetic a priori

A judgment that amplifies knowledge yet is known independently of experience; Kant holds that mathematics and the principles of natural science are of this kind, and asks how they are possible.