Question | Answer |
Conventionalism | the claim that a certain body of facts has been established by human convention and not by nature, by social agreement and not by the way the world is prior to human invention. |
Correspondence theory of truth | the theory that a proposition is true if it corresponds with the facts. “Caesar crossed the Rubicon” is true if and only if there was in fact a man called Caesar, and he did in fact cross the Rubicon; otherwise the proposition is false. |
Cosmological argument | an attempt to establish God's existence by deducing it from some observable facts in the world. For example, Thomas Aquinas's claim that from the observation of casual chains in the world we can deduce the necessity of a “first cause,” or God. |
Creationism | the view that Darwin's theory of natural selection is false, and that the intricate complexity of the world indicates that the world was created by a higher power. |
Dada (or dadaism) | from the French word for “hobbyhorse” a continental art movement conceived as a protest against the mechanized slaughter of World War I. |
Deconstruction | a creation by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida; based on his reading of the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, because of the very nature of thought and language, almost all traditional texts can be shown to deconstruct themselves. |
Deep ecology | a development decrying as “shallow” movements that justify conservation as being in the interest of human beings. Finds an intrinsic value in all living systems, and condemn the human arrogance of anthropocentrism. |
Definiens | X is a definiens of Y if X defines Y. In such a case, Y is the definiendum of X. |
Determinism | the view that every event occurs necessarily. Every event follows inevitably from the events that preceded it. There is no randomness in reality; rather, all is law governed. Freedom doesn't exist or exist in such a way as to be compatible with necessity. |
Dialectic | in the philosophies of Hegel and Marx,is a mechanism of change and progress in which every possible situation exists only in relation to its own opposite. This relationship is one of both antagonism and mutual dependency. |
Distributive justice | the form of justice that is achieved in a society when the opportunities and material goods of the society are fairly distributed in ways that recognize both the contributions and needs of all the members of this society. |
Dualism | the ontological view that reality is composed of two kinds of beings, usually (as in Descartes) minds and bodies. |
Efficient cause | a term from Aristotelian philosophy designating one of the four kinds of causes in the world--the physical force operating on the object undergoing change (e.g., the sculptors chiseling of a piece of granite). |
Ego | in psychoanalysis, the name of the rational, most conscious, social aspect of the psyche, as contrasted with the id and superego. |
Egoism | a theory of motivation according to which the motive behind all acts either is self- interest (psychological) or ought to be self- interest (moral). |
Eliminative materialism | a materialistic theory of mind according to which sentences that seem to refer to non-material conscious states such as “I have a headache” can be eliminated in favor of more accurate sentences referring to material states such as “my C-fibers are firing" |
Empiricism | the epistemological view that true knowledge is derived primarily from sense experience. For these philosophers, all significant knowledge is a posteriori or a priori. |
Enlightenment | a philosophical movement of the 18th century characterized by the belief in the power of reason to sweep away superstition, ignorance, and injustice. |
Entitlement | this term has been used by philosophers in recent years to designate the good reasons by virtue of which a person can justify her beliefs and is therefore entitled to claim them as knowledge. |
Epistemology | theory of knowledge. The branch of philosophy that answers questions such as: what is knowledge? What, if anything, can we know? What is the difference between opinion and knowledge? |
Eros | the Greek word for sexual love; the name of the Greek God of love, which in psychoanalytic theory becomes the name of a purported “life instinct” and is opposed to Thanatos the “death instinct”. |
Ethics | moral philosophy. The branch of philosophy that answers questions such as: is there such a thing as a Good? What is “the good life”? Is there such a thing as absolute duty? Are valid moral arguments possible? Our moral judgments based only on preference? |
Ethnocentrism | the biased belief that one's own ethnic, social, or cultural group holds values that are superior to those of other groups, leading to an attitude that blinds the believer to the values of other cultures or social systems. |
Eugenics | the advocacy of controlled breeding in order to improve the human race. |
Ex nihilo | from the Greek, “out of nothing”. Used as an adverb designating the appearance of something that seems to have no material source. E. g., “God created the world Ex nihilo”. |
Existentialism | a 20th century philosophy associated with Jean-Paul Sartre but also the work of Karl Jasper's, Simone de Beauvoir,among others. More of a shared attitude than a school of thought,existentialists are those who believe that,“existence precedes essence”. |
Experience | as a technical term in empiricistic epistemology, the term designating the data provided directly by the five senses. |
Experimental | if observable evidence is pertinent to its confirmation or falsification. |
Expressionism | a theory of art according to which the function of art is to find release, to express and articulate a kind of emotional knowledge that is somehow deeper than knowledge of merely empirical or scientific facts. |
Proposition | is whatever is asserted by a sentence. The sentence "it's raining," "es regnet," and "Llueve" all assert the same proposition. |
Coherence theory of truth | The theory that a proposition is true if it coheres with the body of all the other propositions taken to be true; that is, if it follows logically from those propositions, or supports them and is supported by them, or does not contradict any of them. |
Nihilism | as an ontological view the theory that nothing exists; as a moral view, the theory that there are no values or that nothing deserves to exist. |
Hard Determinism | the view that determinism is true and that therefore freedom and responsibility do not exist. Contrast with soft determinism. |
Id | in psycho analysis, the name given to one of the three aspects of the psyche. It is the mostly unconscious, antisocial,irrational by cunning “animal” self,containing the primitive sexual and aggressive drives,as contrasted with the ego and the super ego |
Superego | in psychoanalysis, the component of the psyche that counteracts antisocial desires and impulses of the id by attaching conscious and unconscious feelings of guilt to them. |
Hedonism | a theory of motivation according to which the motive behind all acts either is pleasure (physiological hedonism) or ought to be pleasure (moral hedonism). |
Psychoanalysis | the name given by Sigmund Freud to his method of psychotherapy, eventually becoming a theory of the mind, of selfhood, and of culture, in which psychological and social phenomena are traced to their origins in the unconscious mind. |
Synthetic proposition | if its negation does not lead to a self-contradiction. For example “Jupiter has a square moon” is synthetic because its negation, “Jupiter does not have a square moon” is not self-contradictory. |
Principal of falsifiability | a criterion of scientific meaning set forth by Sir Karl Popper to which a theory is scientific only if it is framed in such a way that it would be possible to state what kind of evidence would refute or falsify the theory, if such evidence existed. |