Državna Matura Philosophy flashcards

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

Thaumazein

Greek for wonder; Plato and Aristotle describe it as the origin of philosophy, the puzzlement that drives questioning of what seems obvious.

Validity vs. soundness

Validity means the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. Soundness adds that all premises are actually true, so the conclusion must be true.

Ad hominem

A fallacy that attacks the person making the argument rather than the argument itself; it rejects a claim because of the speaker's character or motives.

Elenchus

Socratic method of cross-examination: asking questions until the interlocutor's definition collapses into contradiction, motivating a revised search for knowledge.

Theory of Forms

Plato's view that true reality consists of eternal, immaterial Forms, while sensible things are imperfect copies known through reason, not perception.

Four causes

Aristotle's explanation of change: material (what it is made of), formal (its structure), efficient (what produced it), and final (its purpose or end).

Eudaimonia

Aristotle's term for flourishing or living well, achieved through virtuous activity over a whole life, not a momentary feeling of pleasure.

Stoic apatheia

Freedom from disturbing passions achieved by judging only what is within our control; Stoics hold that virtue alone is good and external goods are indifferent.

Cogito ergo sum

Descartes' first certainty: even if everything is doubted, the act of doubting proves a thinking subject exists; the foundation of his rationalist system.

Tabula rasa

Locke's empiricist image of the mind as a blank slate; all ideas derive from experience, either through sensation or through reflection on mental operations.

Hume on causation

Hume argues we never perceive a necessary connection between cause and effect, only constant conjunction; causal belief arises from custom and habit.

Synthetic a priori

Kant's category of judgments that are informative (synthetic) yet independent of experience (a priori), such as arithmetic and the causal principle.

Categorical imperative

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.

General will

Rousseau's concept of the collective will aimed at the common good; legitimate authority rests on popular sovereignty expressing this will, not private interests.

Hegelian dialectic

Hegel's account of development through contradiction: a position generates its opposite and is resolved in a higher unity that preserves and transforms both.

Alienation of labor

Marx's claim that under capitalism workers are estranged from the product, the labor process, their species-being, and other people, reducing labor to a commodity.

Existence precedes essence

Sartre's existentialist thesis that humans first exist and then create themselves through free choices; there is no fixed human nature to determine us.

Heidegger's Dasein

Heidegger's term for human existence, characterized as being-in-the-world; its distinctive possibility is to ask about the meaning of Being.

Language games

Late Wittgenstein's idea that meaning depends on use within shared practices governed by rules; no single essence underlies all language.

Incredulity toward metanarratives

Lyotard's definition of postmodernity: loss of faith in grand narratives such as Enlightenment progress or emancipation that claimed to justify all knowledge.

Gettier problem

Cases where a belief is true and justified but only by luck, showing that justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge; epistemology must add a condition.

Foundationalism vs. coherentism

Foundationalism grounds knowledge in basic beliefs needing no support; coherentism justifies beliefs by their mutual consistency within a system, rejecting ungrounded foundations.

Compatibilism

The view that determinism and free will are compatible: freedom means acting from one's own desires without external constraint, even if those desires are causally determined.

Utilitarianism

Consequentialist ethics judging actions by their outcomes, aiming to maximize overall happiness or welfare; Bentham and Mill are its classic exponents.

Golden mean

Aristotle's virtue ethics principle that moral virtue lies between excess and deficiency, such as courage between recklessness and cowardice, relative to the situation.

Ontological argument

Anselm's proof that God, defined as the greatest conceivable being, must exist, since a being that exists in reality is greater than one existing only in thought.

Problem of evil

The challenge that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God is incompatible with the existence of suffering; responses include free-will and soul-making theodicies.

Veil of ignorance

Rawls' device for choosing principles of justice without knowing one's place in society, ensuring impartiality; it yields equal liberty and the difference principle.

Is–ought gap

Hume's point that descriptive statements about what is cannot by themselves entail normative conclusions about what ought to be, so moral reasoning needs extra premises.

Charitable interpretation

Reading a text so that its claims are as reasonable as the evidence allows before criticizing it, avoiding refutation of a weaker position than the author holds.

Counterexample method

Testing a proposed definition or universal claim by constructing a case that satisfies the conditions but lacks the property, forcing revision of the claim.

Analytic vs. synthetic

Analytic judgments are true by meaning alone and add no information; synthetic judgments extend knowledge and depend on how the world is, for Kant on intuition.