Key Ideas
This term names Descartes’s first certainty: that if he is thinking, he must exist.
What is the cogito?
This medieval philosopher presents the Five Ways, including arguments from motion and governance.
Who is Thomas Aquinas?
Aquinas’s argument from motion begins from this observable feature of the world.
What is motion or change?
Empiricism generally holds that this is central to the origin of knowledge.
What is experience?
Berkeley’s slogan “esse est percipi” means this.
What is “to be is to be perceived”?
Aquinas’s moral theory in which human reason participates in divine eternal law.
What is natural law?
Pragmatism clarifies ideas by asking about their practical this.
What are consequences or effects?
“I think, therefore I am” expresses this Cartesian argument.
What is the cogito?
A student says the sun will rise tomorrow because it always has. This philosopher asks whether that inference can be rationally justified.
Who is Hume?
The final unit begins with medieval scholastic reasoning and moves into this early modern search for certainty.
What is Cartesian rationalism?
Locke uses this image to describe the mind before experience writes ideas upon it.
What is tabula rasa, or the blank slate?
This philosopher doubts the senses, the body, and the external world in search of indubitable certainty.
Who is René Descartes?
In Aquinas’s argument from governance, natural things that lack intelligence still act toward this.
What is an end, telos, or purpose?
Locke says ideas come from these two sources.
What are sensation and reflection?
Berkeley argues that sensible objects exist as these in minds.
What are ideas?
For Kant, this is the only thing good without limitation.
What is a good will?
Peirce says belief is connected to the establishment of this.
What is a habit?
“White paper, void of all characters” expresses this Locke doctrine.
What is the rejection of innate ideas or tabula rasa?
Someone gives to charity only for reputation. Kant would say the action conforms to duty but lacks this.
What is full moral worth?
The empiricists generally shift philosophy toward the role of this in knowledge.
What is experience?
In Hume, these are the lively perceptions from which our fainter ideas are copied.
What are impressions?
This philosopher rejects innate ideas and argues that ideas arise from sensation and reflection.
Who is John Locke?
Aquinas argues that ordered natural activity points toward this kind of being.
What is an intelligent governor or divine intelligence?
Locke’s qualities such as shape, extension, motion, and number are this kind of quality.
What are primary qualities?
For Berkeley, this being preserves the order and continuity of ideas when finite minds are not perceiving them.
Who or what is God?
For Kant, an action has full moral worth only when it is done from this.
What is duty?
In Peirce, a belief’s meaning is clarified by the actions it is fitted to produce, also called habits of this.
What is conduct?
“Their esse is percipi” expresses this Berkeley doctrine.
What is idealism or immaterialism?
A city funds the policy that reduces suffering for the greatest number. This ethical theory best supports the reasoning.
What is utilitarianism?
Kant tries to answer this empiricist skeptic by explaining causation as a condition of experience.
Who is David Hume?
In Kant, this kind of judgment extends knowledge while being known independently of particular experience.
What is a synthetic a priori judgment?
This philosopher argues that the being of sensible things is to be perceived.
Who is George Berkeley?
Descartes argues that the idea of this kind of being cannot originate merely from a finite and imperfect mind.
What is an infinite and perfect being, or God?
Berkeley argues that primary qualities, like secondary qualities, are known only as these.
What are ideas in perception?
Kant calls space and time these forms through which objects are given to us.
What are forms of intuition?
Kant’s humanity formulation says to treat persons always as ends and never merely as this.
What are means?
James’s squirrel problem turns on what we practically mean by this phrase.
What is “going around”?
“This principle is Custom or Habit” explains this Humean account.
What is causal expectation?
A company hides data practices from users. Kant would object that the company treats users merely as this.
What are means or tools?
Kant’s moral philosophy and Mill’s utilitarianism give competing accounts of this.
What is morality or moral obligation?
This Kantian moral principle asks whether the maxim of an action can be willed as universal law.
What is the categorical imperative?
This philosopher argues that causal expectation arises from custom or habit.
Who is David Hume?
Descartes’s causal principle says that there must be at least as much reality in the cause as in this.
What is the effect?
Locke’s qualities such as color, taste, and sound are this kind of quality.
What are secondary qualities?
Kant argues that causation is not merely learned from repetition but is one of these structures of the understanding.
What is a category?
Mill’s theory says actions are right insofar as they tend to promote this.
What is happiness or utility?
For James, a metaphysical dispute is idle if the rival claims make no difference in this.
What is practice or experience?
“All bodies are extended” versus “All bodies are heavy” illustrates Kant’s distinction between these.
What are analytic and synthetic judgments?
A philosopher asks what concrete difference a theory would make if it were true. This is the method being used.
What is pragmatism?
Nietzsche challenges Kant and Mill by asking about the historical and psychological origins of this.
What are moral values?
Mill uses this distinction to argue that pleasures of intellect, imagination, and moral feeling can be better in kind than bodily pleasures.
What is the distinction between higher and lower pleasures?
This philosopher responds to Hume by arguing that the mind structures experience through forms and categories.
Who is Immanuel Kant?
Descartes treats the idea of God as this kind of idea rather than merely invented or adventitious.
What is an innate idea?
The latin phrase for Berkeley's dictum, "to be is to be perceived."
What is esse est percipi?
Russell’s table example distinguishes the real table from what we immediately experience, which he calls this.
What are sense-data?
Mill’s “Socrates dissatisfied” line defends this qualitative feature of pleasure.
What is higher quality?
James says theories should function less as final answers and more as these for moving through experience.
What are instruments?
“The good will is good not through what it effects” expresses Kant’s rejection of this as the source of moral worth.
What is consequentialism?
A critic asks who benefits from calling humility good and what history produced that value. This Nietzschean method is being used.
What is genealogy?
Peirce and James shift attention from abstract first principles toward practical effects, consequences, and this.
What is inquiry or lived experience?
Nietzsche uses this term for the reactive resentment that helps produce slave morality.
What is ressentiment?
This philosopher defends the Greatest Happiness Principle.
Who is John Stuart Mill?
Nietzsche attacks this metaphysical tradition, which places a higher reality above the apparent world.
What is the “true world” tradition?
Hume’s idea that every simple idea must be traced back to a simple impression.
What is the copy principle?
Russell’s “Appearance and Reality” problem asks how we move from immediate appearance to this.
What is knowledge of physical reality or the external object?
Nietzsche’s master morality is defined by a difference of good and bad, while slave morality is more this.
What is good and evil?
Russell’s analytic method emphasizes clarity, logical analysis, and careful distinctions in this field.
What is knowledge?
“Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” defends Mill’s view of these.
What are higher pleasures?
Descartes and Russell both question whether ordinary sense experience gives direct certainty about this.
What is the external world or physical objects?
Russell argues that knowledge through acquaintance is augmented by this.
What are definite descriptions?
Peirce’s method for clarifying meaning by tracing the practical effects of an idea.
What is the pragmatic maxim?
This philosopher criticizes the “true world” and investigates the genealogy of moral values.
Who is Friedrich Nietzsche?
Nietzsche's "death of God" is presented to this group.
Who are atheists?
Hume’s fork distinguishes relations of ideas from these empirical claims about the world.
What are matters of fact?
Mesoamerican philosophy challenges substance-based metaphysics by emphasizing reality as relation, balance, and this.
What is process or becoming?
Nietzsche’s genealogy argues that morality begin from this psychological drive.
What is the will-to-power?
Russell distinguishes knowledge by direct awareness from knowledge by description using these terms.
What are acquaintance and description?
“The true world... an idea become useless” attacks this metaphysical tradition.
What is the tradition of a higher true world beyond appearances?
A Kantian analyzing a lie first identifies the action’s principle, or this.
What is the maxim?
Mesoamerican philosophy broadens the course by challenging the assumption that philosophy is only this tradition.
What is the Western tradition?
Russell’s term for what is immediately given in experience, such as color or shape as it appears.
What are sense-data?
This American pragmatist uses the squirrel problem to clarify the meaning of philosophical disputes.
Who is William James?
Kant’s theoretical philosophy limits metaphysical knowledge by distinguishing appearances, or phenomena, from these.
What are noumena, or things-in-themselves?
Hume says we observe this repeated pattern in "causal events", not a necessary connection itself.
What is a constant conjunction of events?
This comparison links Berkeley and Russell: both ask whether ordinary perception gives us direct access to this.
What is mind-independent physical reality?
A Kantian critique of hidden manipulation says it fails to respect people as these.
What are rational agents or ends in themselves?
Wittgenstein’s later view says the meaning of a word is often found in this.
What is its use in the language?
“The pragmatic method... tracing its respective practical consequences” states this method.
What is pragmatism?
A Humean and a Kantian both discuss causation, but Hume explains expectation through habit while Kant treats causation as this.
What is a category or condition of possible experience?
A major arc from Descartes to Kant is the movement from a search for certainty to an account of how this is possible.
What is experience or knowledge?
In Mesoamerican (Aztec) philosophy, this concept names reality as dynamic, sacred, relational process or becoming.
What is teotl?
This analytic philosopher uses the table to distinguish appearance, sense-data, and physical reality.
Who is Bertrand Russell?
For the Mayan civilization, ritual enables this process of cyclicality.
What is time?
Hume’s problem of induction challenges our anticipation that the future will resemble the past.
What is the problem of induction?
This comparison links Berkeley, Kant, and Russell: all question a naive view that perception simply copies this.
What is reality as it is independently of perception or experience?
This ethical contrast separates Kant and Mill: Kant evaluates maxims and duty, while Mill evaluates this.
What are consequences for happiness?
This broad movement connects Peirce, James, Russell, and Wittgenstein: philosophy should clarify meaning by examining use, practice, analysis, and language rather than resting in this.
What is empty abstraction or verbal confusion?
“The real table... is not immediately known to us at all” introduces Russell’s problem of this.
What is appearance and reality?
A Mesoamerican response to a Western substance metaphysics might emphasize that things are not isolated substances but parts of relational this.
What is process, balance, or cosmic order?
A major theme across Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, Peirce, James, Russell, and Mesoamerican Philosophy is that philosophy asks not only what we believe, but this.
What is how our beliefs are justified, structured, or used?