Great Ideas of Philosophy

ut cannot know what it is. Ultimately, our knowledge claims must be utterly bounded by the pure intuitions of timeand space and the pure categories of the understanding.Ontology: The study of what really exists, one of the key questions central to the concept of metaphysics.Philosophy: The rational pursuit of truths deemed to be answers to perennial questions, as well as a historical studyof intractable problems; literally, the love of wisdom.Phrenology: A Victorian-era science of character divination, faculty psychology, and brain theory derived from theViennese physician Franz Joseph Gall’s system, which held that the surface of the skull could be read as an accurateindex of an individual’s psychological aptitudes and tendencies.Phronesis: Greek term for practical wisdom or prudence; the application of good judgment to human conduct, incontrast with the more theoretical inquiry leading to sophia, or wisdom generally.Phusis: Greek, “nature.”Physiognomy: The study of the shape and configuration of a person’s face to determine his or her character andintelligence.Pluralism: The philosophical doctrine that reality consists of several basic substances or elements.Polis: Life within a settled community, in which one participates and from which one draws lessons for life.Positivism: A form of empiricism that bases all knowledge on perceptual experience, rather than on intuition orrevelation.Pragmatism: The doctrine that practical consequences are the criteria of knowledge, meaning, and value.Providential: The mode of causation employed by God, according to Hellenistic philosophy. The cosmos is createdand ordered by a perfect rational entity, whose knowledge is also perfect. The creative entity takes an interest in itscreation.Pyrrhonism: An early Greek form of Skepticism.Pythagorean theorem: One of the earliest theorems known to ancient civilizations; named for the Greekmathematician and philosopher Pythagoras. The Pythagorean theorem states: “The area of the square built upon thehypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares upon the remaining sides.”Res cogitans/res extensa: The metaphysical dualism on which the Cartesian philosophical system rests. Rescogitans is God and the human soul; res extensa is the corporeal world.Revelation: An enlightening or astonishing disclosure. Also, communication of knowledge to man by a divine orsupernatural agency.Romanticism: A movement in literature, art, and intellectual thought during the late 18 th and early 19 th centuriesthat celebrated nature rather than civilization and valued imagination and emotion over rationality.Sophia: Greek, “wisdom.”Sophists: Greek philosophers who showed complete indifference to the problems of the world of matter andcentered their efforts on man. But man can be an object of study in his sense knowledge, as well as in the moreprofound world of reason. The Sophists stopped at the data of experience—at empirical, not rational, knowledge—and from this point of view, they wished to judge the world of reality.Stoics: Greek philosophers whose worldview was one of a rationally governed universe of material entities, eachanswering to its controlling principle and, thus, participating in the overall cosmic logos. In its most developedform, Stoicism takes the lawfulness of the cosmos as the model on which human life is to proceed. The rule of lawis the defining mark of our humanity, according to this philosophy.Sturm und Drang: German; “storm and stress.” Romanticism perceived this evolutionary struggle that producesnew and better things not predictable in a mechanistic view.Superego: According to Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, one of the three parts that make up the self.The superego is purported to represent our conscience and counteract the id with moral and ethical thoughts.44©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership