Philosophy

John Hick

This philosopher created a soul-making theodicy which said that harshness and evil of earthly life prepares our souls for eternity in heaven

Parfit

This philosopher created a theory of identity by survival and psychological connectedness

Peter singer

This philosopher created an alternative to the Genetic, Cognitive, and Social criteria for personhood by creating the theory of sentience, saying that any being able to feel pleasure and pain is a person

Mary Warren

This philosopher defined the Cognitive Criteria for personhood, which were self-awareness, reasoning, conscouisness, self-motivated activity, and capacity to communicate

David Hume

This philosopher emphasized the distinction between the questions "is art good" and "do I like it?", saying that the second question is subjective, but the first is objective to some extent

Bertrand Russell

This philosopher made fun of people's inventing purposes to support the teleological argument by saying that God invented the bunny's white tail so hunters would have something to shoot at

Richard Swinburne

This philosopher modified the teleological argument to encompass natural selection by saying that although evolution could have happened, it is so unlikely that intelligent design is more likely

R. G. Collingwood

This philosopher noted that art is commonly used as an escape from life, but that the best art changes the way we interact with the world, making the distinction between amusement art and magic art

Bertrand Russell

This philosopher said that all assertions about imaginary beings are false

Ludwig Wittgenstein

This philosopher said that art defies definition

Infinite Regress

This idea, Thomas Aquinas's Cosmological Arguments said cannot be true, refers to a chain of events in which every event was caused by something before it, but there was no starting point

Tabula Rasa

This idea, proposed by John Locke, said that everyone is born not knowing and gains knowledge through experience; it is Latin for "blank slate"

Assertion

This is a linguistic act, either spoken or written, that has a truth value

Robert Chisholm

This is an American philosopher who created a Gettier case about sheep over a hill

Edmund Gettier

A 20th century philosopher who redefined knowledge using namesake cases, in which somebody can have justified true belief, but not knowledge

John Wisdom

A British philosopher who created the Parable of the Invisible Gardener to disprove the existence of God

Nelson Goodman

A contemporary American philosopher who addressed problems with inductive reasoning by creating a thought experiment about a hypothetical substance called grue

Gottlab Frege

A linguistic philosopher who created the ideas of sense versus referense

W.K. Clifford

A major proponent of epistemic responsibility who offered the shipbuilder analogy, and that there are no private beliefs

Russel's Teapot

A namesake food item, this theory is an analogy about the Christian church

Skeptic

A person who questions whether anything can be known with certainty

Entailment

A process of reasoning in which one fact leads to another; for example, if A is true, B must follow, and A necessarily leads to B; it is commonly used in deductive reasoning

Premise

A proposition used to justify a conclusion

Belief

A propositional attitude of truth

Rationalism

A response to skepticism that said that reasoning was the most reliable source of knowledge; its split with empiricism was supported by Plato against Aristotle

Empiricism

A response to skepticism that said that sense-experience was the most reliable source of knowledge; its split with rationalism was supported by Aristotle against Plato

Deductive argument

A type of argument for which if your premises are all true, then your conclusion must be true

Propositional Attitude

This is the perspective of the speaker towards the proposition they make; it is either belief or disbelief

Principle of Charity

Always try to understand the strongest, most persuasive version of an argument

Karl Popper

An Austrian philosopher who worked in Britain and made the distinction between science (like Einstein) and pseudoscience (like Freud); he also made some important philosophical definitions of science, such that science depends on theories that can be, and are seeking to be, disproven

Theodicy

An argument for why God can exist even though there is evil

Deductively sound argument

An argument which is valid and has all true premises

Lyceum

Ancient Greek "university" of Aristotle

Academy

Ancient Greek "university" of Plato

Contingent being

Any being that could have not existed

Proposition

This is the underlying content of an assertion, the underlying meaning of what you're saying

Secondary qualities

As stated by Locke, these qualities are not really objectively true of objects, but instead, they are in our minds

Primary qualities

As stated by Locke, these qualities are ones that physical objects themselves have

J. L. Austin

He argued that words do not always only mean ideas, but that words can actually do things themselves, such as declarations of war, marriage, promise, naming, etc., these are called performative utterances

Leo Tolstoy

This philosopher (not really; he's a writer) defined art as something intentionally created by the artist to communicate emotions or ideas

Paul Grice

Conversational implicature is his theory, which says that there is a difference between what is said and what is implied; he also created the cooperative principle, saying that both sides of the conversation have to look for the most likely intended meaning; he also created four maxims on how to best speak for communication

Local doubts

Doubts about a particular sense experience or some other occurrence at a particular point in time

Guanilo

Eleventh century French monk who argued against Anselm's proof of God

Anselm of Canterbury

Eleventh century French monk who tried to prove God's existence, but he failed because his proof involved begging the question

Justification

Evidence, or other support, for your belief

Tripartite soul

Idea of Plato that the soul is divided into three parts: The rational/logical part, which seeks truth and is swayed by facts and opinions; the spirited/emotional soul, how feelings fuel your actions; and the appetitive soul/physical desires, which drives you to eat, have... you know what..., and protect yourself

Ideas

Propositions that can be known through pure reason

Berkeley

Irish philosopher who was inspired by Locke and used his own ideas against him; he took perception to its logical conclusion, wondering if anything existed at all, and took apart Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities, showing that primary qualities depended on secondary qualities

The Brothers Karamazov

Ivan, from this work, decides that God is so evil that it would be immoral to worship him

Knowledge

Justified, true belief

William Paley

Late 18th century British philosopher who popularized Aquinas's Teleological argument, using the watchmaker analogy

Socratic Method

Learning through a dialectic exchange of ideas (as in arguing back and forth; dialogue), rather than a passive transmission of information; more of an exercise that brings both interlocutors closer to the truth instead of having a clear winner and loser

William James

This philosopher argued against Clifford, saying that belief in God was a live, forced, and momentous option (see CC Philosophy #14 for these definitions), and therefore viable to believe on faith; he was one of the founders of Pragmatism

Hume

This philosopher argued that the idea of the self doesn't persist over time, there is no you that is the same person from birth to death

David Hume

This philosopher countered Paley's argument for the teleological argument by saying God must have made many mistakes

Bertrand Russell

One of the early 20th century pioneers of analytic philosophy, he created the barber paradox

Interlocutors

People involved in a dialogue, debate, or conversation

Bernard Willliams

Philosopher who proposed the thought experiment about a mad scientist switching minds

Locke

This philosopher believed that people's consciousnesses are what makes them them; namely, he argued for memory theory, saying that personal identity persists over time because you retain memories of yourself at different points, and each of those memories is connected to one before it

Value Theory

The branch of philosophy that includes Ethics and Aesthetics

Ethics

The branch of philosophy that studies and evaluates human conduct

Epistemology

The branch of philosophy that studies the nature and scope of knowledge

Aesthetics

The branch of philosophy that studies the nature of beauty, or the philosophy of art

Metaphysics

The branch of philosophy that studies the nature of reality

Pragmatism

The philosophical idea that it is more important to believe useful things than true things

Pascal's Wager

The pragmatic reason to believe in God, created by a namesake mathematician

Epistemic responsibility

The responsibility we have regarding our beliefs

Empirical beliefs

The things that we come to know through our senses

Frankfurt Cases

These are scenarios in which someone should still be held accountable for their actions even though they had no other choice; it is an example of soft determinism

Fine Tuning Argument

These arguments seek to modify Aquinas's and Paley's teleological argument to make it compatible with modern scientific theories such as the big bang and evolution; one of them was created by Swindburne

Baron D'holbach

This French philosopher said that we don't have free will, but that everything is an inevitable result of what came before

Albert Camus

This French philosopher took existentialism to the extreme, saying that the literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

This German philosopher contributed to the idea of identity by creating the indiscernibility of identicals, which said that if any two things are identical, then they must share all the same properties

"Existence is not a Predicate"

This argument was used by Immanuel Kant to disprove Anselm's existence of God; it means that existence is cannot be a defining characteristic of any object

Validity

This characteristic of an argument means that the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion

Thomas Nagel

This contemporary American philosopher argued the philosophy that death is only bad because people fear missing out on good things they would otherwise experience

Eleonore Stump

This contemporary philosopher says that we have no reason to believe that asking God for anything would actually make a difference

5 Minute Hypothesis

This hypothesis was created by Bertrand Russel to suggest that everything we know and all the history and evidence we found could all have been faked

Alexius Meinong

This philosopher said that we can make meaningful assertions about imaginary things as long as they have some sort of being, which he classified into the three categories of Absistence, Subsistence, and Existence

Aquinas

This philosopher said that we should worry about the traits of God because he is so fast beyond or understanding

Wittgenstein

This philosopher said that you can't have a single definition of a word, but instead, we understand the meaning through experience and family resemblance between different ideas and words, and that words are cluster concepts, in that a cluster of different objects or ideas can be included in a word; he said meaning is use (in that words mean whatever they are used to mean)

Plato

This philosopher was the author of Euthyphro, a book in the form of dialogue about the problems with Divine Command Theory

Arthur Danto

This philosopher, who also created the idea of the chained cat statue, also created the red painting thought experiment to examine the ontology of art

Epicurus

This philosopher, who lived about 100 years after Socrates, said that there is no afterlife because we are just our bodies, and that due to lack of sensation, death is neither good nor evil

Materialism

This philosophy said that you equals your body

Fideism

This school of thought, created by Soren Kierkegaard and called his "Leap to Faith", says that belief in God must come from faith alone (summarized by Hank Green as "I believe because it is absurd to believe")

To be is to be percieved

This statement, "esse est percepi" in Latin, was coined by George Berkeley as an alternative to cogito ergo sum

Amusement Art

This type of art helps the audience escape from reality, diving into a no-stakes fictional world after a stressful day

Magic art

This type of art helps the audience learn how better to interact with this world's reality; an example is Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin

Abduction

This type of reasoning, which is drawing a conclusion based on the explanation that best explains a state of events, rather than from evidence provided by premises, is summed up well by the Sherlock Holmes quote, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."

Philos vs Mythos

This was an early philosophical debate in ancient Greece that roughly translates to science vs storytelling

Catharsis

This was an idea created by Aristotle saying that if someone hasn't experienced a certain strong emotion in a while, they begin to crave it, and they can experience it through art.

Meditations on First Philosophy

This was the book in which Descartes declared cogito ergo sum, which was his "foundational belief"

Induction

Using past experiences to make future conclusions, this type of reasoning means that true premises only guarantee the conclusion to be likel

Global doubt

doubts you cant step out of and thus cant check

nihilism

this is the belief in the ultimate meaningless of Life, which Friedrich Nietzsche believed in

absurdity

this is the existentialist term for the search for answers in an answerless world

essentialism

this is the school of philosophy that most philosophers sins Plato and Aristotle adhered to, believing that people's essences gave them a purpose in life

Essence

this is what Plato and Aristotle said everything had, a certain set of elements or core properties that are necessary or essential for a thing to be what it is

Jean-Paul Sartre

this philosopher believed that humans do have Essences but that they are created after people are born and develop as people develop their lives, he said that people had to live authentically, and accept the full weight of their freedoms