WBCHSE HS Philosophy key terms

The materialist school of Indian philosophy that accepts perception alone as a valid source of knowledge, denies an afterlife, soul, and creator god, and explains consciousness as a product of the material body.

Direct cognition arising from contact between a sense organ and its object; in Nyāya it is the primary and most reliable means of knowing, while Cārvāka treats it as the only one.

Knowledge of an unperceived fact derived from a perceived sign or reason, as when smoke on a hill leads to the knowledge of fire; a central pramāṇa for Nyāya and most Indian schools.

A valid means or source of true cognition. Indian schools disagree over how many there are, ranging from perception alone in Cārvāka to six in some Mīmāṃsā traditions.

The universal, exceptionless relation between a reason and what it invariably accompanies, such as smoke and fire; without it, an inferential conclusion cannot be justified.

A defective reason that fails to establish its conclusion, for example because it is unproved, contradicted, or deviates from the required invariable concomitance with the probandum.

Knowledge gained from the statement of a trustworthy person or authoritative text; accepted as a distinct pramāṇa by Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, and Vedānta but rejected by Cārvāka and reduced by others.

Sāṃkhya's two ultimate realities: unconscious, ever-active nature (prakṛti) composed of three guṇas, and pure conscious self (puruṣa), whose proximity triggers the evolution of the world.

The three constituent qualities of prakṛti in Sāṃkhya: sattva (luminosity, harmony), rajas (activity, passion), and tamas (inertia, obscurity), whose varying proportions explain the diversity of things.

A dualist Indian school that explains the world through two independent principles, puruṣa and prakṛti, and holds that suffering ends when consciousness discriminates itself from unconscious nature.

The school closely allied to Sāṃkhya that accepts its metaphysics but adds a discipline of eight limbs, including ethical restraints, posture, breath control, and meditation, to still the fluctuations of mind.

An Indian school centred on the interpretation of Vedic ritual texts, holding that duty is known through scriptural injunction and that the self is real and distinct from the body.

The Mīmāṃsā view that a cognition is valid by its own nature, so validity needs no external confirmation, while invalidity is discovered only through some later conflicting experience.

Śaṅkara's non-dualist school holding that brahman alone is ultimately real, the individual self is identical with it, and the perceived world is an appearance superimposed through ignorance (avidyā).

In Vedānta, brahman is the ultimate ground of reality and ātman the innermost self; Advaita identifies the two, while other schools distinguish them as distinct realities.

The beginningless power of illusion or ignorance that causes the one reality to appear as a manifold world of separate selves and objects, and whose removal is said to bring liberation.

An Indian school specialising in logic and epistemology, which accepts four pramāṇas and develops a five-membered syllogism along with a realist metaphysics of substances, qualities, and relations.

The Nyāya form of inference stated in five members: thesis, reason, example, application, and conclusion, illustrated by the hill-has-fire argument from smoke.

The Western epistemological view that all knowledge derives from sensory experience, with the mind contributing no innate ideas; associated with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.

The Western view that reason, independently of sense experience, can grasp fundamental truths, and that some ideas or principles are innate; associated with Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.

The empiricist metaphor of the mind as a blank slate at birth, on which experience writes all its contents; developed by Locke against the doctrine of innate ideas.

Descartes' argument that the very act of doubting proves the existence of a thinking self, giving an indubitable starting point for knowledge after methodological doubt.

Descartes' procedure of provisionally rejecting any belief that could conceivably be false, in order to find beliefs that are certain and rebuild knowledge on them.

The philosophical position that knowledge claims are doubtful or unattainable, ranging from Pyrrhonian suspension of judgement to Hume's doubts about induction and causation.

Hume's point that no reasoning can justify projecting observed regularities into the future, since any such justification would itself rely on the uniformity it seeks to prove.

In Western metaphysics, that which exists in itself and supports attributes, as in Aristotle's primary substances or Descartes' extended and thinking substances.

The relation by which one event or entity produces another; theories range from Aristotle's four causes to Hume's analysis of constant conjunction and Kant's a priori category.

The view that mind and body are fundamentally different kinds of entity, classically Descartes' two substances, which raises the problem of how they can causally interact.

The dualist position that mental and physical states causally affect one another, as when a decision moves the body and an injury causes pain; criticised for leaving the mechanism unexplained.

The debate over whether human actions can be genuinely free if every event, including choice, is causally determined; compatibilists redefine freedom as acting on one's own desires.

The incompatibilist view that determinism is false and that agents possess a genuine power of choice not fixed by prior causes, so moral responsibility is real.

The ethical theory that pleasure is the only intrinsic good and pain the only intrinsic evil, so right action is that which maximises pleasure; defended by Cārvāka and by Epicurus and Bentham.

A consequentialist theory holding that the right action is the one producing the greatest happiness for the greatest number, associated with Bentham and refined by Mill.

Any ethical theory that judges the rightness of an action solely by its consequences rather than by the agent's intentions, motives, or adherence to rules.

The non-consequentialist ethics of Kant, which grounds duty in the categorical imperative and holds that persons must be treated as ends in themselves, never merely as means.

Kant's supreme moral principle, binding unconditionally: act only on maxims that could be willed as universal laws, and treat humanity always as an end.

The Bhagavadgītā's ideal of performing one's duty without attachment to the fruits of action, which purifies the self and is central to Indian ethical teaching.

One's own particular duty, determined by one's nature, station, and circumstances; in the Bhagavadgītā, following it is better than imitating the duty of another.

A deductive argument of three propositions, two premises and a conclusion, containing exactly three terms, in which the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises.

In a categorical syllogism, the term appearing in both premises but not in the conclusion; its distribution determines whether the premises can support the conclusion.

The property of a term being used to refer to its entire class in a proposition; a universal subject or a negative predicate is distributed, and the middle term must be distributed at least once.

The figure of a syllogism is the arrangement of its middle term in the premises, and the mood is the sequence of proposition types (A, E, I, O) it contains.

A formal error in which the middle term is not distributed in either premise, so the premises fail to link the subject and predicate of the conclusion.

Reasoning from particular observations to a general conclusion, or from known cases to a further case, yielding conclusions that are probable rather than certain.

An inductive argument that infers a further resemblance from observed resemblances, as in the design argument for God's existence; its conclusion is only probable.