The Gregtionary

The Philosophy Edition I

A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z

A.

B.

Behaviorism - A school of psychology that confines itself to the study of observable and quantifiable aspects of behavior and excludes subjective phenomena, such as emotions or motives.

C.

Cartesian Skepticism - Descartes Method of Doubt of the material world.

D.

Determinist - The philosophical doctrine that every state of affairs, including every human event, act, and decision is the inevitable consequence of antecedent states of affairs.

Double Aspectism - Belief that mental properties and events on the one hand and physical properties and events on the other hand are irreducibly distinct features or aspects of one and the same thing that exhibits them both.

Dualism - Belief that mental things and physical things are fundamentally distinct kinds of entities. As a solution to the traditional mind-body problem, dualism derives especially from Descartes and his followers in the seventeenth century. Variations on this theme (including interactionism, parallelism, and epiphenomenalism) arise when dualists try to explain why events in the supposedly separate realms of mind and body seem so well-coordinated with each other.

E.

Empiricism - Reliance on experience as the source of ideas and knowledge. More specifically, empiricism is the epistemological theory that genuine information about the world must be acquired by a posteriori means, so that nothing can be thought without first being sensed. Prominent modern empiricists include Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Mill. In the twentieth century, empiricism principles were extended and applied by the pragmatists and the logical positivists.

Epiphenomenalism - Belief that consciousness is an incidental side-effect ("epiphenomenon") or by-product of physical or mechanical reality. On this view, although mental events are in some sense real they have no causal efficacy in the material realm.

Ethics - Branch of philosophy concerned with the evaluation of human conduct. Philosophers commonly distinguish:

• descriptive ethics, the factual study of the ethical standards or principles of a group or tradition;
• normative ethics, the development of theories that systematically denominate right and wrong actions;
• applied ethics, the use of these theories to form judgments regarding practical cases; and
• meta-ethics, careful analysis of the meaning and justification of ethical claims.

Existentialism - A (mostly) twentieth-century approach that emphasizes the primacy of individual existence over any presumed natural essence for human beings. Although they differ on many details, existentialists generally suppose that the fact of my existence as a human being entails both my unqualified freedom to make of myself whatever I will and the awesome responsibility of employing that freedom appropriately, without being driven by anxiety toward escaping into the inauthenticity or self-deception of any conventional set of rules for behavior, even though the entire project may turn out to be absurd. Prominent existentialists include Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Beauvoir, Sartre, and Camus.

Explanation - An intelligible account of why something happens. On a covering law model, the scientific explanation of an event has the form of an argument whose conclusion is the event to be explained and whose premises include both antecedent circumstances and one or more hypotheses.

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H.

Hedonism - Belief that pleasure {Gk. ‘hdonh [hêdonê]} is the highest or only source of intrinsic value. Although commonly defended as a moral theory about the proper aim of human conduct, hedonism is usually grounded on the psychological claim that human beings simply do act in such ways as to maximize their own happiness. Aristotle argued against any attempt to identify pleasure as the highest good, but Epicurus held that physical pleasure and freedom from pain are significant goals for human life. The utilitarianism of Bentham proposes a practical method for calculating hedonic value.

Humanism - Belief that individual human beings are the fundamental source of all value and have the ability to understand—and perhaps even to control—the natural world by careful application of their own rational faculties. During the Renaissance, humanists such as Bruno, Erasmus, Valla, and Pico della Mirandola helped shift attention away from arcane theological disputes toward more productive avenues of classical study and natural science.

I.

Idealism - Belief that only mental entities are real, so that physical things exist only in the sense that they are perceived. Berkeley defended his "immaterialism" on purely empiricist grounds, while Kant and Fichte arrived at theirs by transcendental arguments. German, English, and (to a lesser degree) American philosophy during the nineteenth century was dominated by the monistic absolute idealism of Hegel, Bradley, and Royce.

Interactionism - The supposition, defended by Descartes and others, that the minds and bodies of human beings exert direct causal influence on each other, even though they are distinct substances of different kinds.

J.

K.

L.

M.

Marxism - The political and economic philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in which the concept of class struggle plays a central role in understanding society's allegedly inevitable development from bourgeois oppression under capitalism to a socialist and ultimately classless society.

Materialism - Belief that only physical things truly exist. Materialists claim (or promise) to explain every apparent instance of a mental phenomenon as a feature of some physical object. Prominent materialists in Western thought include the classical atomists, Hobbes, and La Mettrie.

Methodological - The branch of logic that deals with the general principles of the formation of knowledge.

Morality – working on this one.

N.

Neurological – The medical science that deals with the nervous system.

O.

Objective / Subjective - Distinction between propositions or judgments about the way things are and those about how people think or feel about them. The truth of objective claims is presumed to be entirely independent of the merely personal concerns reflected in subjective expressions, even though is difficult to draw the distinction precisely. Thus, for example: "Spinach is green" is objective, while "I like spinach" is subjective. "Seventy-three percent of people in Houston don't like spinach," however, seems to be an objective claim about certain subjects.

The legitimacy of this distinction is open to serious question, since it is unclear whether (and how) any knowing subject can achieve genuine objectivity. Nevertheless, because objective truth is supposed to carry undeniable persuasive force, exaggerated claims of objectivity have often been used as tools of intellectual and social oppression.

Occasionalism - Belief that natural events are not directly related in causation, since both the apparent cause and the apparent effect are, in fact, produced by some third thing (usually divine providence). Geulincx and Malebranche introduced occasionalism as an improved way of reconciling the mechanism with the dualism of Descartes.

Ontological - Branch of metaphysics concerned with identifying, in the most general terms, the kinds of things that actually exist. Thus, the "ontological commitments" of a philosophical position include both its explicit assertions and its implicit presuppositions about the existence of entities, substances, or beings of particular kinds.

P.

Parallelism - Belief that even though the minds and bodies of human beings are distinct substances that can never interact with each other causally, it is nevertheless true that their development, features, and actions coordinate perfectly. Leibniz supposed that this happens as a result of a providentially pre-established harmony.

Preestablised Harmony - the mental and the material comprise two different kinds of substance; neither has any direct causal effect on the other and; the coincidence between mental and material events is due to both substances being created to act in concert even though there is no post-creation interaction between the two.

Q.

Qualia - The intrinsic phenomenal features of subjective consciousness, or sense data. Thus, qualia include what it is like to see green grass, to taste salt, to hear birds sing, to have a headache, to feel pain, etc. Providing an adequate account of qualia is sometimes held to be a difficult problem for functionalist explanations of mental states.

R.

Rationalist - Reliance on reason {Lat. ratio} as the only reliable source of human knowledge. In the most general application, rationalism offers a naturalistic alternative to appeals to religious accounts of human nature and conduct.

More specifically, rationalism is the epistemological theory that significant knowledge of the world can best be achieved by a priori means; it therefore stands in contrast to empiricism. Prominent rationalists of the modern period include Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.

Realism - Belief that universals exist independently of the particulars that instantiate them. Realists hold that each general term signifies a real feature or quality, which is numerically the same in all the things to which that term applies. Thus, opposed to nominalism.

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