we were equally free to choose good or evil. But humans are now constantly attracted towards evil, that is, toward excessive satisfaction of our lower desires for material things and pleasures. (As he explains it, this derives from our having inherited original sin from our first parents. Adam and Eve disobeyed God when they ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.) We can only escape from inherited sinfulness if we receive grace from God, and there is no way we can earn such grace, or force God to give it to us by being good.

A philosophical school of thought, which epistemologically tests truth in terms of “usefulness” or “workability.” Tends to be metaphysically pluralistic.

Pragmatism was a philosophical tradition that originated in the United States around 1870. The most important of the ‘classical pragmatists’ were Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910) and John Dewey (1859-1952). The influence of pragmatism declined during the first two thirds of the twentieth century, but it has undergone a revival since the 1970s with philosophers being increasingly willing to use the writings and ideas of the classical pragmatists, and also a number of thinkers, such as Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandom developing philosophical views that represent later stages of the pragmatist tradition. The core of pragmatism was the pragmatist maxim, a rule for clarifying the contents of hypotheses by tracing their ‘practical consequences’. In the work of Peirce and James, the most influential application of the pragmatist maxim was to the concept of truth. But the pragmatists have also tended to share a distinctive epistemological outlook, a fallibilist anti-Cartesian approach to the norms that govern inquiry.

is a philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge—with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions of epistemology.  It may be considered as a type of analytic philosophy

(1910–1989) was only 24 when he wrote the book that made his philosophical name, Language, Truth, and Logic (hereafter LTL), published in 1936. In it he put forward what were understood to be the major theses of Logical Positivism, and so established himself as that movement's leading English representative. In endorsing these views Ayer saw himself as continuing in the line of British empiricism established by Locke and Hume, an empiricism whose most recent representative was Russell. Throughout his subsequent career he remained true to this tradition's rejection of the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, and so he saw the method of philosophy to be the analysis of the meaning of key terms, such as ‘causality’, ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘freedom’, and so on.

The metaphysical view that the objects of experience exist independently of their being experienced.

In the free will/determinism debate, the position that determinism does not rule out what is meant by free will.