Glossary

	A 'home-made' glossary of philosophical terms to aid my revision. Please do not see these as definitive. A lot of these terms have common English usage - not to be confused with their philosophical meanings.
a priori	From the latin - before. A term used in the Theory of Knowledge for knowledge that is not derived from experience. Logic and certain mathematical knowledge are examples given of a priori knowledge. Needless to say this has been questioned.
a posteriori	The opposite of a priori. Knowledge that can only be gained from or after experience. Empirical knowledge if you like.
anguish	An existentialist term denoting the feeling one gets from knowing that the future is up to oneself. That one can only accept total responsibility for one's essence.
bad faith	An existentialist term for the way one acts when one is resisting or ignoring one's responsibility to ones self. It is when one's essence is given over to playing a role. Sartre's example is one of a waiter.
belief	A form of knowledge that canot readily be falsified as propositions.
Brentano's Thesis	Franz Brentano (1838-1917) characterised states of mind as 'aboutness' or Intentionality. Intentionality distinguishes the mental from the physical according to Brentano. This would include thoughts of non-existent objects and misrepresentations such as false beliefs.
cause	What is cause? Hume would say it is a belief that two occurences are conjoined. That one accepts that one occurence occurs after another. But there is no reason that it will do so in the future.
Cogito	The thinking subject - as in Descartes' 'Cogito ergo sum'. I think therefore I am.
consciousness	'The perception of what passes in a man's own mind' - John Locke.
cosmological argument	An argument for the existence of God. An inductive argument.Why is there a universe at all? How is the universe possible? Universe if and only if God. There is a universe. Therefore there is a God. For a thing at rest to move something must have moved it. There must have been a Prime Mover : God. This is infinite regression answered by Occam's Razor.
dualism	The belief that there is a difference between mental and physical activity.
empiricism	Concerned with facts and experience. The possibility of knowledge is a matter of observation, conjecture and confirmation. Usually conflicts with Rationalism that deduces knowledge from logical propositions.British empiricism had a Golden Age in the works of Locke, Berkeley and Hume.
epistemology	Another name for the Theory of Knowledge.
existentialism	A school of philosophy whose main tenet was that a person's essence develops after their existence. Main proponent Sartre.
facticity	An existentialist term. That which we have been 'thrown' into the world as. E.g. I am a white male.
false reductions
faith	is a form of belief, between knowledge and probable opinion - Aquinas.
functionalism	a type of monism belonging to the Philosophy of Mind. Focuses on the way mental states and behaviour interact.
Hume's fork	All that a mind may contemplate can be divided into relations of ideas and matters of fact.
Hylozoism	(from Greek hyle, "matter"; zoe, "life"), in philosophy, any system that views all matter as alive, either in itself or by participation in the operation of a world soul or some similar principle. Hylozoism is logically distinct both from early forms of animism, which personify nature, and from panpsychism, which attributes some form of consciousness or sensation to all matter. Throughout the history of thought hylozoistic interpretations of nature have been common. Early Greek thinkers sought the beginning of all things in various material substances. Thus, Thales considered water as the primary substance and saw all things as "full of gods"; for Anaximenes, air was the universal animating principle of the world, and for Heracleitus it was fire.
Identity Thesis	Leibniz's law (1646-1714) that two things are different if they have distinct properties. In Philosophy of Mind this implies that thoughts are just physiological states - there is no difference between mind and brain.
Intentionalism	A monist theory of Philosophy of Mind.We are always thinking about something - intentionality.
knowledge	Classical: An agent knows a proposition if and only if the proposition is true, that the agent believes it to be true and that there is sufficient evidence for the proposition to be true.
logical behaviourism	Gilbert Ryle's (1900-1976) thoughts on Philosophy of Mind.L.B. focuses solely on behaviour. Dualists perform a 'Category Mistake' in their descriptions of Mind being a different substance to brain. There is a disposition to behaviour that describes all that a dualist eould say about mental states.
scepticism	The belief that we cannot know anything about the outside world, as it depends upon our frail senses.
materialism	In the philosophy of Mind this is the argument that the Mind can be explained in purely physical terms.
metaphysics	The study of the ultimate reality - God, free will and being. Attacked by Logical Positivists and others as being meaningless. Ontology is a branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.
Metempsychosis	The migration of the soul from one body to another, not necessarily human.
Monism	There is only one elemental substance that can be explained by natural laws. Features in Philosophy of the Mind.There are four variants of the monist position: physicalism, behaviourism, functionalism and intentionalism.
Occam's Razor	An explanation of effects by causes must stop at some point. To stop infinite regression Occam required sufficient arguments for an effect, not all necessary causes. E.G. 'Best Explanation' argument for existence of 'Other Minds'.
ontological argument	An argument for the existence of God. A deductive argument. Ontology is the branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being. Bishop Anselm 11th Century: It is logically impossible to conceive of anything greater than God.God exists as a concept of our understanding. It is logically possible that such a God exists in reality. A God conceived to exist in understanding only, is not as great as a God existing in reality. It is logically possible to conceive of a God who both exists in understanding and in reality too. Therefore: If God exists in understanding, then God exists in reality too. Therefore God exists.
percept
Philosophy of Mind	Try: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/ for more qualified links and discussion of this area.Basically divided into Physicalism and dualism.
Physicalism	A belief that all phenomena can be explained by the natural sciences in the present or the future.
principle of falsification	Popper's answer to the logical positivist's principle of verification.
principle of verification	Logical Positivism's principle that if a proposition cannot be empirically verified as true or false, then it is 'non-sense'. It has some problems: temporal criticism:true now or in the future? Would exclude many modern scientific laws:e.g. QED.
proposition	A statement that can be either true or false.It can also be synthetic or analytic. It can be about the empirical world or the analytic or rational.
rationalism	A school of thought radically opposed to empiricism. Characterised by deductive logic and applying these concepts to the world. Descartes is often portrayed as a rationalist.
Realism	A belief that some entity has an external, independent existence. It is not just the product of the mind.
teleological argument	An argument for the existence of God. An inductive argument. Basically the world is too complex to have not been created by an intelligence such as God.See also: cosmological and ontological arguments.
Last updated: April 2001.