RBSE SS Philosophy cheat sheet

Astika (orthodox) schools accept Vedic authority: Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa, and Vedanta; nastika schools rejecting it include Charvaka, Buddhism, and Jainism.

Nyaya recognizes four pramanas: pratyaksha (perception), anumana (inference), upamana (comparison), and shabda (testimony); Mimamsa adds arthapatti and anupalabdhi.

Vaisheshika ontology lists padarthas: dravya (substance), guna (quality), karma (action), samanya (universal), vishesha (particularity), samavaya (inherence), and abhava (absence).

Samkhya is dualist: purusha (pure consciousness) and prakriti (primordial matter) are ultimate; prakriti has three gunas-sattva, rajas, and tamas-and evolution yields 25 tattvas.

Yoga's eight limbs are yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, and samadhi; yoga is defined as chitta-vritti-nirodha, stilling mental modifications.

Advaita Vedanta holds that Brahman alone is real, the world is mithya (dependent appearance), and the jiva is ultimately identical with Brahman; maya obscures and projects.

Vishishtadvaita (Ramanuja) is qualified non-dualism: Brahman includes souls and world as real attributes; Dvaita (Madhva) holds a real distinction between God, souls, and matter.

Buddhism teaches the Four Noble Truths, anatta (no permanent self), anicca (impermanence), and dependent origination; Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka develops sunyata (emptiness).

Jainism emphasizes anekantavada (many-sided reality), syadvada (qualified predication), and ahimsa; Charvaka/Lokayata accepts perception only and denies afterlife, karma, and God.

Pre-Socratics: Thales posits water as arche; Heraclitus stresses flux and logos; Parmenides denies change; Democritus explains reality through indivisible atoms and void.

Plato separates timeless Forms from changing particulars; the cave allegory depicts ascent from illusion to knowledge; the soul has rational, spirited, and appetitive parts.

Aristotle's four causes are material, formal, efficient, and final; eudaimonia is flourishing through virtuous activity; virtue is a mean fixed by practical wisdom.

Descartes uses methodic doubt, reaches cogito ergo sum, and argues for mind-body dualism; clear and distinct ideas are the criterion of certainty.

Hume's fork separates relations of ideas from matters of fact; causation is constant conjunction plus customary expectation; the self is a bundle of perceptions.

Kant's Copernican revolution makes objects conform to cognition; synthetic a priori judgments are possible; phenomena are experienced while noumena remain unknowable.

Utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill) judges acts by aggregate happiness; Kantian deontology judges maxims by universalizability and respect for persons; virtue ethics centers character.

Hegel's dialectic moves through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; Marx turns it into historical materialism, explaining social change through class conflict and material conditions.

Existentialism includes Kierkegaard's leap of faith, Nietzsche's revaluation of values and will to power, and Sartre's claim that existence precedes essence and bad faith.

An argument has premises and a conclusion; deductive validity means the premises cannot be true while the conclusion is false; soundness requires validity plus true premises.

Categorical propositions: A universal affirmative (All S are P), E universal negative (No S are P), I particular affirmative (Some S are P), O particular negative (Some S are not P).

Distribution: A distributes S; E distributes S and P; I distributes neither; O distributes P. A valid syllogism needs the middle term distributed in at least one premise.

Syllogism rules: exactly three terms; no illicit major or minor; no two negative premises; a negative premise requires a negative conclusion; two particulars yield no conclusion.

Propositional forms: modus ponens (P→Q, P ⊢ Q), modus tollens (P→Q, ¬Q ⊢ ¬P), disjunctive syllogism (P∨Q, ¬P ⊢ Q), hypothetical syllogism (P→Q, Q→R ⊢ P→R).

Formal fallacies include affirming the consequent (P→Q, Q ⊢ P), denying the antecedent (P→Q, ¬P ⊢ ¬Q), and undistributed middle.

Mill's methods are agreement, difference, concomitant variation, residues, and the joint method; they identify causal candidates by comparing instances, not by proving necessity.

Popper holds that falsifiability demarcates science; a hypothesis must risk refutation. Kuhn holds that normal science operates within a paradigm until anomalies produce a revolution.

Correlation does not establish causation; confounders, reverse causation, and selection bias are alternative explanations requiring controls or randomization.

Consequentialism evaluates acts by outcomes; utilitarianism maximizes aggregate welfare; act-utilitarianism assesses each act, while rule-utilitarianism assesses rules whose general acceptance maximizes welfare.

Bentham's hedonic calculus weighs intensity, duration, certainty, proximity, fecundity, purity, and extent; Mill distinguishes higher and lower pleasures.

Kant's categorical imperative requires acting only on maxims that could be willed as universal law and treating humanity as an end, never merely as a means; moral worth requires duty.

Virtue ethics: eudaimonia is flourishing; virtues are stable dispositions; phronesis (practical wisdom) determines the mean between excess and deficiency relative to circumstances.

Metaethics: cognitivism holds moral statements truth-apt; non-cognitivism denies this (emotivism, prescriptivism); moral realism affirms mind-independent moral facts; error theory denies their existence.

Rawls's justice as fairness uses the original position and veil of ignorance; principles are equal basic liberties, fair equality of opportunity, and the difference principle.

Nozick's entitlement theory supports a minimal state and opposes patterned redistribution; libertarianism prioritizes self-ownership and voluntary exchange.

Care ethics (Gilligan, Noddings) emphasizes relationships, responsiveness, and context; the capabilities approach (Sen, Nussbaum) evaluates well-being by real freedoms.

Value distinctions: intrinsic value is valuable in itself; instrumental value is valuable for something else; hedonism identifies value with pleasure; desire-satisfaction and objective-list theories disagree.

Knowledge is traditionally analyzed as justified true belief (JTB); Gettier cases show JTB can be true by luck, so a fourth condition or a different analysis is needed.

Justification internalism requires accessible reasons; externalism allows reliability or proper function; reliabilism defines justification by truth-conducive cognitive processes.

Rationalism privileges reason (Descartes, Plato); empiricism privileges experience (Locke, Berkeley, Hume); Kant synthesizes both through synthetic a priori conditions.

Skeptical arguments include Cartesian dream doubt, the evil demon, and the brain-in-a-vat; responses include Moore's common-sense certainty, contextualism, and denying the closure principle.

Theories of truth: correspondence (fit with fact), coherence (systematic consistency), pragmatic (practical success), and deflationary (truth is not a substantive property).

Causality: Hume reduces it to constant conjunction and custom; Kant treats it as an a priori category; counterfactual theories analyze causation via what would happen under interventions.

Personal identity: Locke's psychological continuity through memory; Hume's bundle; bodily and narrative theories; thought experiments include brain transplants and fission.

Mind-body positions: substance dualism, property dualism, behaviorism, identity theory, and functionalism; qualia challenge functionalist accounts of consciousness.

Modality: necessary truths hold in all possible worlds; contingent truths could be otherwise; realism about universals contrasts with nominalism.

Ontological argument (Anselm, Descartes): God is the greatest conceivable being; existence in reality is greater than existence in thought alone; Kant replies that existence is not a predicate.

Cosmological arguments infer God from contingency or beginning: Aquinas's Five Ways and the Kalam argument; critics question the principle of sufficient reason and the premise that the universe began.

Teleological or design arguments infer purpose from order; Paley's watch analogy and fine-tuning versions; Hume and Darwinian evolution supply naturalistic alternatives.

Problem of evil: the logical version claims contradiction between evil and an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God; the evidential version claims evil lowers probability; free-will and soul-making defenses respond.

Divine attributes include omnipotence (paradox of the stone), omniscience (foreknowledge and free will), omnibenevolence, simplicity, eternity, immutability, and impassibility.

Faith and reason: fideism (Tertullian, Kierkegaard) subordinates reason; natural theology uses reason; reformed epistemology (Plantinga) holds belief in God can be properly basic.

Religious language: Ayer's verificationism calls it meaningless; Flew's falsification challenge; Aquinas uses analogy; Tillich treats God as ultimate concern; Wittgenstein notes language-game grammar.

Religious pluralism (Hick) sees traditions as different responses to the Real; exclusivism holds one tradition true; inclusivism affirms salvation through one tradition while acknowledging others.

Miracles: Hume argues testimony for miracles is never credible because uniform experience outweighs it; defenses distinguish violation of natural law from unusual events.

Biomedical principles are autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice; informed consent requires capacity, disclosure, understanding, and voluntariness.

Euthanasia distinctions: active vs passive, voluntary vs non-voluntary vs involuntary; arguments invoke autonomy, beneficence, slippery slopes, and sanctity of life.

Abortion debate: fetal personhood, bodily autonomy, and potentiality; Thomson's violinist case tests whether a right to life entails a right to use another's body.

Liberty: Berlin distinguishes negative liberty (non-interference) from positive liberty (self-mastery); republicanism adds non-domination; Mill's harm principle limits coercion.

Justice: Rawls's difference principle permits inequalities benefiting the least advantaged; Nozick's entitlement theory opposes patterned redistribution; Marx critiques alienation and exploitation.

Rights: natural rights are pre-political; human rights are universal; civil-political rights differ from economic-social rights; cultural relativism challenges universalism.

Punishment: retributive justifies punishment by desert; deterrent by future crime reduction; rehabilitative by reform; restorative by repair and reconciliation.

Civil disobedience is deliberate, public, nonviolent, and conscientious lawbreaking, accepting punishment to appeal to justice; Rawls requires substantial injustice and exhaustion of legal channels.

Contemporary issues include AI accountability, privacy and surveillance, climate justice, global distributive justice, animal welfare, and technology's effect on autonomy.