Term
|
Definition
| Sartre’s characterization of a person’s refusal to accept himself or herself; this sometimes means not accepting the facts that are true about you. More often it means accepting the facts about you as conclusive about your identity, as in the statement “Oh, I couldn’t do that, I’m too shy.” |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The uninterrupted identifiability of an object over time in the same location or in a sequence of tangent locations. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The test or standard according to which a judgment or an evaluation can be made. For example, a test for a substance’s being an acid is whether or not it turns litmus paper red. Or, a sure mark or standard. In ancient skepticism, a sufficient guarantee of truth. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Initiated by Jacques Derrida, a current school of philosophical thought (especially popular among some feminist and African-American thinkers) that encourages critical reading for “cultural bias” and that rejects the idea of the “unified self.” |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| In general, the distinction between mind and body as separate substances or very different kinds of states and events with radically different properties. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| All those characteristics of a person that can be discovered through experience and that distinguish each of us from other persons qualitatively; that which makes each of us a particular man or woman and gives us a particular “character.” |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The necessary or defining characteristics or properties of a thing. The essence of a person is that without which we would not say one is that particular person. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The bare, logical fact of one’s own self-consciousness: Descartes’ “I think”; the self “behind” all of our experiences; the mental activity that unifies our various thoughts and sensations. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| In psychology, the methodological thesis that insists that only what is observable can be used as evidence in research regarding humans. All talk of “minds,” “desires,” “purposes,” “ideas,” “perceptions,” and “experiences” is replaced with terms that refer only to the experimental situation or behavior of the person in question. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The theory that mind and body causally interact, that mental events (for example, an “act of will”) can cause a bodily consequence (for example, raising one’s arm), and that a bodily change (for example, a puncture of the skin) can cause a mental consequence (for example, a pain). |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The theory (for example, in Spinoza) that mind and body are simply different aspects (or “attributes”) of one and the same substance, thus avoiding the problem of interaction between substances. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
1. The thesis that mental events are epiphenomena, that is, side effects of various physical processes in the brain and nervous system but of little importance themselves. The model is a one-way causal model: Body states cause changes in the mind, but mental states have no effect in themselves on the body. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The view that the mind is the product of a pattern in the brain, as in a computer, rather than a product of the matter of the brain as such. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
1. The thesis that the mind and brain are ontologically one and the same or, more accurately, that mental states and events are, in fact, certain brain and nervous system processes. The theory is usually presented as a form of materialism, but it is important to emphasize that, unlike many materialistic theories, it does not deny the existence of mental events. It denies only that they have independent existence. Mental events are nothing other than certain bodily events. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The thesis that mental events and bodily events parallel each other and occur in perfect coordination but do not interact. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The belief that the order of the universe is prearranged by God. In Leibniz, this view allows him an alternative to Newton ’s theory of causal relationships, namely that the coordination between our ideas and the physical events of the world and our bodies was set up by God in perfect order. |
|
|
Term
| PRIVATE LANGUAGE ARGUMENT |
|
Definition
| Wittgenstein’s argument that even if there were such “private objects” as mental states and events, it would be impossible for us to talk about them and impossible for us to identify them, even in our own case. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
1. The technical term used by philosophers to refer to the curious fact that a person usually (if not always) can immediately know, simply by paying attention, what is going on in his own mind, whereas other people can find out what is going on—if they can at all—only by watching the person’s behavior, listening to what he or she says, or asking (and hoping they get a truthful answer). |
|
|
Term
| ABSOLUTE SPACE AND ABSOLUTE TIME |
|
Definition
| The view that space and time exist independently of objects and events “in” them, a view defended by Newton . In general, absolute, as used in philosophy, means independent and nonrelative, unqualified and all-inclusive. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The idea that one object can have a causal effect on another from a distance, as in Newton ’s laws of gravitational attraction. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The view that things (or, at the extreme, all things) are alive. It may also be the view that the universe as a whole is one gigantic organism. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| In Spinoza, an essential property of God; for example, having a physical nature, having thoughts. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The study of the origins of the universe in its entirety. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
1. The study of the universe in its entirety. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
1. God’s knowledge of and power over all that will happen, including our own future actions. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The metaphysical view that only minds and their ideas exist. |
|
|
Term
| IDENTITY OF INDISCERNIBLES |
|
Definition
| A principle of Leibniz’s philosophy according to which no two things can possibly have all of the same properties or be absolutely identical in all respects. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The metaphysical view that accepts the existence of nonspatial, nonsensory entities such as numbers, minds, and ideas. The weak version asserts merely that there are such entities. The strong version asserts that there are only such entities (that is, there are no physical objects). |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
1. The idea that the soul survives death (and, in some belief systems, precedes birth). |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
1. A sequence going back endlessly. For example, “A is caused by B, and B by C, and C by D . . . and so on to infinity.” Aristotle believed such a regress to be an intellectual absurdity. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
1. Ideas that are “born into the mind”; knowledge that is “programmed” into us from birth and need not be learned. Experience may be necessary to “trigger” such ideas, but they are already “in” all of us. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The metaphysical view that only physical matter and its properties exist. Such intangible entities as numbers, minds, and ideas are really properties of physical bodies. To talk about energy, e.g., is, in a way, to talk about physical potential; to talk about minds is to talk about behavior; to talk about ideas is to talk about the various structures and interrelationships between objects. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Most simply, the study of the most basic (or “first”) principles. Traditionally, the study of ultimate reality, or “Being as such.” Popularly, any kind of very abstract or obscure thinking. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The simple immaterial substances that are the ultimate constituents of all reality. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
|
|
Term
|
Definition
1. The belief that one can come to grasp certain fundamental religious truths (the existence of God, the oneness of the universe) through direct experience, but of a very special kind, different from ordinary understanding and often at odds with reason. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The belief that ultimate reality is a natural property. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The study of being. That is, that part of metaphysics that asks such questions as, “What is there?” “What is it for something to exist?” “What is an individual thing?” “How do things interact?” |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The belief that God is identical to the universe as a whole, that everything is divine, or that God is in everything. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
1. The metaphysical view that there are many distinct substances in the universe and, perhaps, many different kinds of substances as well. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The “cause-of-itself,” the first cause, which (Who) initiates all changes but is not itself (Himself) affected by anything prior. |
|
|
Term
| PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON |
|
Definition
| The insistence that all events must have a justification and that ultimately all events must be justified by God’s reasons. The principle is sometimes invoked to assert that everything must have some explanation, whether or not God is involved. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
1. Not having spatial dimensions. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The belief that all phenomena have a purpose, end, or goal. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
1. A thing that so exists that it needs no other thing in order to exist (God). |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Ancient Greek philosophers and teachers who believed that no reality exists except for what we take to be reality. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Properties are generally distinguished from the substances in which they “inhere” by pointing to the fact that a property cannot exist without being a property of something; for example, there can be any number of red things but no redness that exists independently. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Plato’s obscure and unexplained relationship between the things of this world and the Forms of which they are manifestations. |
|
|
