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| Reliance on experience as the source of ideas and knowledge. 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 thinkers include Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Mill. In the twentieth century, principles were extended and applied by the pragmatists and the logical positivists. |
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| Reliance on reason as the only reliable source of human knowledge. In the most general application, offers a naturalistic alternative to appeals to religious accounts of human nature and conduct. knowledge of the world can best be achieved by a priori means; it therefore stands in contrast to empiricism. Prominent thinkers include Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. |
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| The ancient theory of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, according to which simple, minute, indivisible, and indestructible particles are the basic components of the entire universe. |
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| Presocratic philosophers who offered to teach young Athenians how to use logic and rhetoric to defeat opponents in any controversy. Socrates and Plato sharply criticized most because they accepted monetary rewards for encouraging unprincipled persuasive methods. |
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| The pure objects of mathematical and dialectical knowledge. In the vigorous realism of Plato's middle dialogues, necessary truths are taken to involve knowledge of eternal, unchanging __________. Particular things in the realm of appearance are beautiful, or equal, or good only insofar as they participate in the universal _________ of Beauty, Equality, or the Good. The doctrine was attacked in Plato's own Parmenides and by Aristotle. |
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| Greek term for the end, completion, purpose, or goal of any thing or activity. According to Aristotle, this is the final cause which accounts for the existence and nature of a thing. Following Wolff, modern philosophers (often pejoratively) designate as ________ any explanation, theory, or argument that emphasizes purpose. |
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| Belief that mental things and physical things are fundamentally distinct kinds of entities. As a solution to the traditional mind-body problem,derives especially from Descartes and his followers in the seventeenth century. |
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| Belief that only mental entities are real, so that physical things exist only in the sense that they are perceived. Berkeley defended 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 ________ of Hegel, Bradley, and Royce.EB, |
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| Belief that only physical things truly exist. claim (or promise) to explain every apparent instance of a mental phenomenon as a feature of some physical object. Prominent followers in Western thought include the classical atomists, Hobbes, and La Mettrie. |
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| The human capacity to act (or not to act) as we choose or prefer, without any external compulsion or restraint. in this sense is usually regarded as a presupposition of moral responsibility: the actions for which I may be praised or blamed, rewarded or punished, are just those which I perform freely. |
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| Belief that, since each momentary state of the world entails all of its future states, it must be possible (in principle) to offer a causal explanation for everything that happens. When applied to human behavior, is sometimes supposed to be incompatible with the freedom required for moral responsibility. The most extreme variety of is in this context is fatalism. |
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| Belief that the causal determination of human conduct is consistent with the freedom required for responsible moral agency. |
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| The doctrine that God has foreordained all things, especially that God has elected certain souls to eternal salvation. The divine decree foreordaining all souls to either salvation or damnation. The act of God foreordaining all things gone before and to come. Destiny; fate. |
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| Belief that every event is bound to happen as it does no matter what we do about it. is the most extreme form of causal determinism, since it denies that human actions have any causal efficacy. Any determinist holds that indigestion is the direct consequence of natural causes, but the _____ believes that it is bound occur whether or not I eat spicy foods. |
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| In philosophy, refers to the idea that human free will is a necessary precondition of moral responsibility and, in fact, humans do have this free will. human acts cannot be wholly determined by prior states or natural laws. It is granted that such states and laws may have an influence upon human decisions, but nevertheless those decisions are, in principle, not predictable by reference to those states and laws. Thus, determinism (or at least "hard" determinism) is not true and humans have moral responsibility for their actions. |
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| The total effect of a person's actions and conduct during the successive phases of the person's existence, regarded as determining the person's destiny. |
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| School of philosophy organized at Athens in the third century B.C.E. by Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus. provided a unified account of the world that comprised formal logic, materialistic physics, and naturalistic ethics. Later Roman including Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, emphasized more exclusively the development of recommendations for living in harmony with a natural world over which one has no direct control. |
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| Virtue (in the context of stoicism) |
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| Excellence, skill, or art. In classical thought, virtues are admirable human characteristics or dispositions that distinguish good people from bad. Socrates sought a singular virtue for human life, while Plato identified four central virtues present in the ideal state or person. Aristotle held that every moral virtue is the mean between vicious extremes. Modern deontologists and utilitarians tend to suppose that individual virtues are morally worthwhile only when they encourage the performance of duty or contribute to the general welfare. |
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| Happiness (in the context of stoicism) |
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| General well-being in human life, an important goal for many people and a significant issue for theories in normative ethics. Aristotle disagreed with the identification of happiness with bodily pleasure defended by Aristippus and other hedonists. Most utilitarians accept this identification, but emphasize the importance of considering the greatest happiness of everyone rather than merely one's own. |
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Zeno of Citium taught in the stoa poikile in Athens, and his adherents accordingly obtained the name of Stoics. Zeno was followed by Cleanthes, and then by Chrysippus, as leaders of the school.
The Stoic doctrine is divided into three parts: logic, physics, and ethics. Stoicism is essentially a system of ethics which, however, is guided by a logic as theory of method, and rests upon physics as foundation. Briefly, their notion of morality is stern, involving a life in accordance with nature and controlled by virtue. It is an ascetic system, teaching perfect indifference (apathea) to everything external, for nothing external could be either good or evil. Hence to the Stoics both pain and pleasure, poverty and riches, sickness and health, were supposed to be equally unimportant. |
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| On Augustine and freewill |
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| Augustine’s approach to the “free choice of the will” assumes that “there can be no denying that we have a will.” Instead, Augustine defines “good will” as “a will by which we seek to live a good and upright life and to attain unto perfect wisdom” which, of course, assumes that it is free. This is worth meditating on while considering the literal Latin translation of the first two are not meant for “stuff,” but rather for God. The Catechism of the Catholic Church echoes this, saying, “Endowed with a spiritual soul, with intellect and with free will, the human person is from his very conception ordered to God and destined for eternal beatitude.” |
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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. |
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| Branch of philosophy concerned with providing a comprehensive account of the most general features of reality as a whole; the study of being as such. Questions about the existence and nature of minds, bodies, god, space, time, causality, unity, identity, and the world are all metaphysical issues. From Plato onwards, many philosophers have tried to determine what kinds of things (and how many of each) exist. But Kant argued that this task is impossible; he proposed instead that we consider the general structure of our thought about the world. Strawson calls the former activity revisionary, and the latter descriptive, metaphysics. |
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| Branch of philosophy that investigates the possibility, origins, nature, and extent of human knowledge. Although the effort to develop an adequate theory of knowledge is at least as old as Plato's Theaetetus, epistemology has dominated Western philosophy only since the era of Descartes and Locke, as an extended dispute between rationalism and empiricism over the respective importance of a priori and a posteriori origins. Contemporary postmodern thinkers (including many feminist philosophers) have proposed the contextualization of knowledge as part of an intersubjective process. |
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| Branch of philosophy concerned with the distinction between correct and incorrect reasoning. It commonly comprises both deductive and inductive arguments. |
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| Branch of philosophy that studies beauty and taste, including their specific manifestations in the tragic, the comic, and the sublime. Its central issues include questions about the origin and status of aesthetic judgments: are they objective statements about genuine features of the world or purely subjective expressions of personal attitudes; should they include any reference to the intentions of artists or the reactions of patrons; and how are they related to judgments of moral value? More specifically, aesthetics considers each of these issues as they arise for various arts, including architecture, painting, sculpture, music, dance, theatre, and literature. Aesthetics is a significant component of the philosophical work of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Santayana. |
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the study of religious faith, practice, and experience : the study of God and God's relation to the world
: a system of religious beliefs or ideas |
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| theology based on the doctrine that all religious truth is derived exclusively from the revelations of God to humans. |
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| Natural theology is a program of inquiry into the existence and attributes of God without referring or appealing to any divine revelation. In natural theology, one asks what the word “God” means, whether and how names can be applied to God, whether God exists, whether God knows the future free choices of creatures, and so forth. The aim is to answer those questions without using any claims drawn from any sacred texts or divine revelation, even though one may hold such claims. |
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| It addresses not only the perennial question Is there a God?, but also the questions If there is, then what is he like? and, most important of all, What does that mean for us? |
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(1) Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence.
(2) The universe has a beginning of its existence.
Therefore:
(3) The universe has a cause of its existence.
(4) If the universe has a cause of its existence then that cause is God.
Therefore:
(5) God exists. |
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the belief in one God as the creator and ruler of the universe, without rejection of revelation (distinguished from deism ).
2.belief in the existence of a god or gods (opposed to atheism ). |
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Every being (that exists or ever did exist) is either a dependent being or a self-existent being.
Not every being can be a dependent being.
So there exists a self-existent being. |
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God exists in our understanding. This means that the concept of God resides as an idea in our minds.
God is a possible being, and might exist in reality. He is possible because the concept of God does not bear internal contradictions.
If something exists exclusively in our understanding and might have existed in reality then it might have been greater. This simply means that something that exists in reality is perfect (or great). Something that is only a concept in our minds could be greater by actually existing.
Suppose (theoretically) that God only exists in our understanding and not in reality.
If this were true, then it would be possible for God to be greater then he is (follows from premise #3).
This would mean that God is a being in which a greater is possible.
This is absurd because God, a being in which none greater is possible, is a being in which a greater is possible. Herein lies the contradiction.
Thus it follows that it is false for God to only exist in our understanding.
Hence God exists in reality as well as our understanding. |
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The teleological argument, or argument from design, is also summarized by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica. Here is the extract from the Summa:
"The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things that lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God."
Perhaps this is the most common form of reasoning behind the existence of God. The average theist will argue for the existence of God with the teleological argument. |
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| Anselm's Ontological Argument is not acceptable, Aquinas argued, since we are in fact ignorant of the divine essence from which it is presumed to begin. We cannot hope to demonstrate the necessary existence of a being whose true nature we cannot even conceive by direct or positive means. Instead, Aquinas held, we must begin with the sensory experiences we do understand and reason upward from them to their origin in something eternal. In this vein, Aquinas presented his own "Five Ways" to prove the existence of god. |
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| Belief that only things of a single kind exist. In its most extreme form, monism may lead to Spinoza's conviction that only a single being is real or the idealist's supposition that everything is comprised by the Absolute. Contemporary philosophers more commonly suppose that many distinct things exist, each of them exhibiting both mental and physical properties. |
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| Belief that some or all human knowledge is impossible. Since even our best methods for learning about the world sometimes fall short of perfect certainty, skeptics argue, it is better to suspend belief than to rely on the dubitable products of reason. Classical skeptics include Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus. In the modern era, Montaigne, Bayle, and Hume all advocated some form of skeptical philosophy. Fallibilism is a more moderate response to the lack of certainty. |
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The difficulty of explaining how the mental activities of human beings relate to their living physical organisms. Historically, the most commonly accepted solutions have included mind-body dualism (Descartes), reductive materialism (Hobbes) or idealism (Berkeley), and the double aspect theory (Spinoza).
Although many contemporary philosophers accept some form of identity theory, they often rely on behavioral or functional methods of analyzing mental events and upon the achievements of neuroscience. |
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