Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

392 GLOSSARY
compositio:
a Latin version of the Greek term ‘synthesis’. See
‘analysis and synthesis’.
concept:
philosophers now regard a concept as the meaning of
a word or phrase; so, for example, to speak of ‘the
concept of mind’ is to speak of the meaning of the
word ‘mind’. In the seventeenth century and before,
philosophers (whilst agreeing that a meaningful word
must stand for a concept) would not have said that to
have a concept is necessarily to be a word-user. A
philosopher such as Leibniz would say that God has
concepts, but would have denied that God uses words.
constructivism: a theory about the meaning and truth of mathematical
propositions. For the constructivist, to understand the
meaning of a mathematical proposition is to be able
to recognize a proof of it when such a proof is
presented to one, and to say that a mathematical
proposition is true is to say that we have a proof of it.
In effect, the constructivist regards mathematical
entities as creations of the human mind, and not as
abstract objects with an independent existence.
continuity, law of: regarded by Leibniz as one of the laws of philosophy.
Put non-technically, the law states that nature makes
no leaps. So, for example, there is no absolute
distinction between motion and rest; rest is motion
which is of infinite slowness.
contradiction, law of: a law of classical logic (defended by Aristotle in
Metaphysics, Book Gamma, chs 3–6) which states
that a proposition cannot be both true and false. Some
philosophers prefer to call this law ‘the law of noncontradiction’.
correspondence theory of see ‘truth, correspondence theory of.
truth:
creation ex nihilo: the idea that God created the universe ex nihilo, from
nothing, appears to have entered Western philosophy
by way of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. For the
ancient Greeks the question was not ‘Why is there
anything at all?’, but rather, ‘Why is what there is a
cosmos—that is, why does it display order?’
deduction:
a deductive argument is one in which one cannot
without self-contradiction assert the premises (q.v.)
and deny the conclusion. Some standard dictionaries
say that deduction is reasoning from the general to the
particular. This is often, but by no means always, the