PSEB SS Philosophy flashcards

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

Definition of philosophy

The rational, critical and systematic inquiry into fundamental questions of reality, knowledge, value and meaning, pursued through argument and conceptual clarification rather than faith or experiment alone.

Metaphysics

The branch of philosophy investigating the nature of reality and being: what exists, the mind-body relation, causation, substance, time, and the existence of God.

Epistemology

The branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge: its definition, sources such as perception and reason, justification, and the limits of what can be known.

Ethics

The branch of philosophy that studies moral values, right and wrong action, obligation, virtue and the good life, including normative, applied and meta-ethical inquiry.

Logic

The branch of philosophy studying the principles of valid inference, distinguishing good arguments, where premises genuinely support the conclusion, from fallacious ones.

Aesthetics

The branch of philosophy examining beauty, art, aesthetic experience and judgement, asking what makes something beautiful and whether taste can be objective.

Socratic method

Socrates' practice of questioning an interlocutor's claims to expose contradictions and reach general definitions; it produces aporia, awareness of one's own ignorance, rather than settled answers.

Allegory of the Cave

Plato's image of prisoners mistaking shadows for reality; release into sunlight symbolises education's ascent from illusion through belief to genuine knowledge of the Forms.

Theory of Forms

Plato's doctrine that eternal, non-physical Forms, not sensible particulars, are fully real; particular things are imperfect copies participating in Forms, with the Form of the Good supreme.

Hylomorphism

Aristotle's view that every physical substance is a compound of matter (hyle) and form (morphe); form gives matter its determinate character, so form is immanent, not separate.

Four causes

Aristotle's four explanations of a thing: material (what it is made of), efficient (what produced it), formal (its defining structure) and final (its purpose or end).

Doctrine of the mean

Aristotle's ethical rule that moral virtue lies between two vices of excess and deficiency, determined by practical wisdom relative to the agent and situation, not by a fixed average.

Āstika and nāstika schools

Indian classification: āstika schools (Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta) accept Vedic authority; nāstika schools (Cārvāka, Buddhist, Jain) reject it.

Cārvāka philosophy

An Indian materialist school holding perception as the only valid source of knowledge, denying an afterlife, soul and karma, and treating bodily pleasure as the natural human aim.

Nyāya school

An Indian school of logic and epistemology that analyses valid means of knowledge (pramāṇas), especially perception, inference, comparison and testimony, and develops rigorous inference theory.

Vedānta

Indian school based on the Upaniṣads, most famously Advaita, which holds that the individual self (ātman) and ultimate reality (Brahman) are ultimately non-different.

Deductive argument

An argument claiming that its conclusion follows necessarily from its premises; if the argument is valid and premises true, the conclusion cannot be false.

Validity and soundness

Validity concerns form: premises cannot be true with a false conclusion. Soundness adds that the premises are actually true, so a sound argument guarantees a true conclusion.

Inductive argument

An argument whose premises make the conclusion probable rather than certain; it is assessed as strong or weak, and even strong induction can yield a false conclusion.

Fallacy

A common error in reasoning that makes a bad argument appear persuasive, such as attacking the person, appealing to popularity, or begging the question.

Ad hominem fallacy

Rejecting a claim by attacking the character, motives or circumstances of the person making it rather than addressing the reasons offered for the claim itself.

Straw man fallacy

Misrepresenting or exaggerating an opponent's position into a weaker version, refuting that distorted version, and then claiming to have defeated the original argument.

Begging the question

A circular fallacy in which the conclusion, or a close restatement of it, is assumed among the premises, so the argument offers no independent support for its claim.

Descartes' cogito

Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am': even radical doubt presupposes a doubting thinker, giving one indubitable truth on which to rebuild knowledge after methodological scepticism.

Cartesian dualism

Descartes' view that mind and body are two distinct substances: mind is thinking and unextended, body is extended and mechanical, interacting in the human being, notably in the pineal gland.

Empiricism

The epistemological position that experience, especially sense perception, is the ultimate source of knowledge; Locke, Berkeley and Hume are its classical British representatives.

Rationalism

The epistemological position that reason, independent of sense experience, can yield substantive knowledge of reality; Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz are its classical representatives.

Hume's fork

Hume's division of knowledge into relations of ideas, known a priori and certain, and matters of fact, known only through experience and therefore never absolutely certain.

Kant's synthetic a priori

Kant's claim that some judgements, such as arithmetic and causation, are both ampliative (synthetic) and independent of experience (a priori), made possible by the mind's structuring categories.

Utilitarianism

A consequentialist ethics holding that the right action maximises overall welfare or happiness; Bentham used a hedonic calculus, Mill distinguished higher and lower pleasures.

Kant's categorical imperative

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

Existentialism

A movement holding that existence precedes essence: humans are radically free and responsible for creating their own meaning through choices, as in Sartre and Kierkegaard.