Philosophy

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278 domain-specific abstractions whose origin domain is Philosophy. They span 226 subdomains — sort by that column to group them, or click any subdomain to filter to it.

Abstraction	Subdomain	Description
Absolute Metaphor	Metaphorology	Blumenberg's term for a metaphor that cannot be fully replaced by literal conceptual terminology and instead provides an orienting image for questions that resist definitive conceptual resolution.
Abstract and concrete	Metaphysical Object Classification	Distinguish philosophical entities by an explicitly chosen abstract-versus-concrete criterion while preserving paradigm cases, disputed cases, and the fact that no single criterion commands universal agreement.
Abstract object theory	MetaphysicsPhilosophical Logic	Abstract object theory (AOT) is a branch of metaphysics regarding abstract objects.
Academic Approach	Philosophy of ScienceResearch Methodology	An academic approach is a recognizable scholarly orientation that organizes which questions are salient, which concepts and assumptions frame them, which forms of evidence and method are acceptable, and how interpretations are evaluated within a research community.
Accidental necessity	Modal MetaphysicsMedieval Philosophy	The disputed modal status according to which a contingent event, once past, is now unalterably or necessarily the case though it was not necessary before occurring.
Akrasia	Philosophy of Action	An agent intentionally acts against an available course they still judge better, all things considered.
Amor fati	Nietzsche StudiesEthics	An affirmative practical attitude that loves one's fate by willing the whole of one's life—including suffering, loss, contingency, and recurrence—rather than merely enduring or resigning oneself to it.
Ampliative	Medieval LogicSupposition Theory	A medieval logical operation by which a common term's supposition is extended beyond presently existing things—especially under past- or future-tense verbs—to include things existing at the relevant other time.
Animistic fallacy	Informal Logic	The error of inferring that an observed order, event or outcome must have been intentionally caused merely because it occurred or appears organized.
Appeal to Emotion	Informal Logic	A persuasive move that asks an audience to let an elicited feeling bear on acceptance of a claim or choice.
Appeal to the Stone	Informal Logic	An informal fallacy that rejects a claim as absurd or false while supplying no reason that engages the claim.
Appeal to Wealth	Informal Logic	An informal fallacy that infers a person's insight, virtue, or argument's merit from financial status instead of relevant reasons.
Argument from anecdote	Informal LogicInformal Fallacies	Misuse of anecdotal evidence in the form of argument from anecdote is an informal fallacy and is sometimes referred to as the "person who" or anecdotal fallacy, with statements like "I know a person who..." or "I know of a case where...".
Argument to moderation	Informal LogicReasoning Fallacies	A fallacy that treats a midpoint or compromise between opposed positions as correct merely because it lies between them, without independent support.
Aristotle's theory of universals	Aristotelian Metaphysics	A theory that universals exist immanently in individual substances rather than separately from them.
Atheist's wager	Philosophy of Religion	A decision argument recommending moral conduct regardless of belief in God, because living well is preferable whether a benevolent deity exists or not.
Atheistic Existentialism	Existentialist Philosophy	An existentialist family of views in which no deity or transcendent order fixes human essence or purpose, so situated agents must form projects and assume responsibility without that guarantee.
Aufheben	Hegelian Dialectics	Hegel's dialectical sublation: a transition that simultaneously cancels a determination, preserves its content and raises it into a more encompassing form rather than merely destroying or retaining it.
Baconian Method	Early Modern Philosophy of Science	Investigate a natural phenomenon through disciplined histories and tables of presence, absence, and degree, exclude incompatible candidate natures, form a provisional first interpretation, and test it against specially informative instances.
Basic limiting principle	Philosophy of ScienceEpistemology	A usually tacit general assumption that bounds what an explanatory framework treats as possible or knowable.
Beetle in a box	Philosophy of LanguagePhilosophy of Mind	The beetle-in-a-box is a famous thought experiment that Wittgenstein introduces in the context of his investigation of pains.
Begging the Question	Logic and Argument	Detect an argument whose premises presuppose the very conclusion they are offered to support — valid, even sound, yet dialectically empty — by testing whether the premises would survive an interlocutor who denies the conclusion.
Betrayal	TrustLoyalty	A social wrong in which a person or institution violates a relationship-defining entrusted expectation toward someone who relies on it, through harmful action or failure to provide expected protection or response.
Buridan's ass	Philosophy of ActionFree Will	A choice paradox in which exactly tied alternatives and a no-tie-break rule lead to costly indecision.
Cambridge change	MetaphysicsPhilosophy of Change	A gain or loss of a predicate by an object that occurs solely because another object or relation changes, while the first object's relevant intrinsic constitution remains unchanged.
Categorical proposition	Syllogistic Logic	A proposition asserting or denying that all or some members of a subject category belong to a predicate category.
Causal adequacy principle	Early Modern PhilosophyMetaphysics	The Cartesian rule that a total efficient cause must possess at least as much metaphysical reality as its effect, formally in the same mode or eminently in a higher one.
Causal closure	Philosophy of Mind	A metaphysical thesis that every physical event with a cause sufficient for its occurrence has a sufficient physical cause within the physical domain.
Causal Theory of Reference	Philosophy of Language	A semantic theory on which a name or natural-kind term refers through an appropriate historical-causal chain linking current use to an initial fixing or grounding in its referent, rather than through a uniquely identifying description held by each speaker.
Causalism	Philosophy of Action	The action-theory view that motivating reasons explain an intentional action by causally producing it.
Classical Modal Logic	Modal LogicPhilosophical Logic	A propositional modal logic with necessity–possibility duality and replacement of provable equivalents, broader than the class of normal modal logics.
Clifford's Principle	Ethics of BeliefEpistemology	An ethics-of-belief norm holding that accepting or retaining a belief without sufficient evidence is morally wrong, together with a duty not to disregard relevant counterevidence.
Clockwork Universe	Early Modern Philosophy of NaturePhilosophy of Science	A mechanistic world picture that likens the universe to a clock: an ordered machine whose components evolve under fixed laws from prior conditions, historically associated with early-modern mechanics, prediction, and often determinism.
Competing goods	Moral PhilosophyValue Pluralism	Competing goods are distinct valuable ends whose claims can conflict in a practical choice without one value necessarily reducing to, cancelling, or becoming commensurable with the other.
Composition of causes	Philosophy of Causation	Composition of causes is Mill's principle that jointly acting causes normally retain efficacy and add their effects, with emergent interactions as an explicit boundary.
Conatus	Early Modern Metaphysics and EthicsSpinoza Studies	Spinoza's principle that each finite thing immanently strives to persevere in its being and enhance its power, within a broader early-modern history of conatus concepts.
Conceptual necessity	Modal MetaphysicsPhilosophy of Language	Conceptual necessity is a property of the certainty with which a state of affairs, as presented by a certain description, occurs: it occurs by conceptual necessity if and only if it occurs just by virtue of the meaning of the description.
Conjunction Introduction	LogicNatural Deduction	The proof rule that combines derivations of A and B available in a common context into a derivation of their conjunction A ∧ B.
Consequentialism	Normative Ethics	A family of normative ethical theories on which an act, rule, motive, institution, or other evaluand has its moral status solely in virtue of the value of the relevant consequences under a declared account of value, scope, information, and choice.
Constructional System	Logical EmpiricismConstitution Theory	A logical system in which every object or concept of a domain is constructed from a proper subset designated as its basis, exposing dependencies among the domain's conceptual elements.
Constructive dilemma	Formal Logic	A valid propositional inference from two conditionals and a disjunction of their antecedents to the disjunction of their consequents.
Constructivist epistemology	Philosophy of ScienceEpistemology	Constructivist epistemology in philosophy of science holds that scientific knowledge and its models are actively constructed through conceptual, social, and investigative practices rather than passively copied from a theory-independent world.
Continuous predicate	Continuous LogicPeircean Logic	Continuous predicate is a term coined by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) to describe a special type of relational predicate that results as the limit of a recursive process of hypostatic abstraction.
Declarative knowledge	EpistemologyKnowledge That	Declarative knowledge, also known as theoretical knowledge, descriptive knowledge, propositional knowledge, and knowledge-that, is an awareness of facts that can be expressed using declarative sentences.
Deductive-nomological model	Philosophy of ScienceScientific Explanation	The deductive-nomological model (DN model) of scientific explanation, also known as Hempel's model, the Hempel–Oppenheim model, the Popper–Hempel model, or the covering law model, is a formal view of scientifically answering questions asking, "Why...?".
Definiens	LogicTheory of Definition	The word or group of words that is to be defined is called the definiendum, and the word, group of words, or action that defines it is called the definiens.
Deflationary theory of truth	Philosophy of Language	A family of theories holding that truth talk adds no substantial property beyond assertion, endorsement or semantic equivalence.
Denotation	Semantics and Philosophy of Language	The entity, value, extension, truth condition, or semantic object that an expression is assigned under an interpretation, distinguished from associated connotations and many pragmatic effects.
Denying the Antecedent	Formal LogicArgument Analysis	The invalid conditional inference that concludes not-Q from if-P-then-Q and not-P, treating a sufficient condition as necessary.
Descriptive interpretation	Philosophy of Logic	A Carnapian interpretation of a formal system in which at least one primitive symbol denotes an empirical object or observable property.
Destructive Dilemma	Formal LogicRules of Inference	The valid propositional inference from P→Q, R→S, and ¬Q∨¬S to ¬P∨¬R, combining two modus-tollens branches under a disjunction.
Deterritorialization	Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory	In Deleuze and Guattari's critical theory, the process by which relations, signs or practices are loosened from an established organizing context and made available for reconfiguration.
Diagrammatic reasoning	Philosophy of Reasoning	Inference conducted through structured visual representations whose spatial relations carry semantic and inferential force.
Dialectical monism	MetaphysicsOntology	An ontological position that treats reality as one underlying whole whose unity necessarily appears through opposed, interdependent, and dynamically related poles rather than through featureless sameness.
Dialectics	—	Contradictions drive change.
Direct reference theory	Philosophy of Language	A semantic theory on which the contribution of a name or indexical to propositional content is its referent rather than a descriptive sense.
Distinction without a Difference	Informal LogicArgumentation	An argumentative contrast offered as a reason for different treatment when it makes no difference under the criterion that governs the conclusion.
Doxastic logic	Philosophical Logic	A modal logic that formalizes what agents believe and how those beliefs interact with implication, introspection and consistency.
Drowning child analogy	EthicsEffective Altruism	Singer raises a drowning child analogy in his essay: inaction is clearly immoral if a child is drowning in a shallow pond and someone can save them but chooses not to.
Duck test	Reasoning	A colloquial abductive heuristic that identifies an unknown by the convergence of several familiar, repeatedly observed characteristics.
Dutch Book Arguments	Formal EpistemologySubjective Probability	A finite fair-bet portfolio test that exposes incoherent event prices through a guaranteed loss in every admissible outcome.
Dvaita Vedānta	Vedanta	Madhva's realist Vedānta system in which Vishnu alone is independent reality, souls and matter are eternally real but dependent, and five kinds of difference remain irreducible.
Efficient cause	Aristotelian PhilosophyMetaphysics	An efficient cause is the agent, interaction, or initiating source that brings a change or entity about within Aristotle's four-cause explanatory scheme.
Egoism	EthicsMoral Psychology	A family of descriptive and normative views that gives the self, self-interest, or one's own will a central role in explaining or guiding action.
Emergent materialism	Philosophy of MindNonreductive Materialism	A philosophy-of-mind position holding that mental properties depend entirely on material systems yet arise as novel, irreducible higher-level properties with autonomous explanatory laws.
Energeia	Aristotelian MetaphysicsAncient Philosophy	Energeia is Aristotle's notion of actuality or being-at-work—the realized activity or fulfillment of a capacity—understood in contrast with potentiality.
Epilogism	Ancient Greek EpistemologyEmpiric School	Epilogism (; lit. "appraisal" or "assessment") is a theory-free method of inference used in Ancient Greek philosophy and Ancient Greek medicine in order to arrive at insight without deductive reasoning or inference based on unobservables, relying solely on reflection of what is already both visible and evident.
Epiphenomenalism	Philosophy of Mind	The philosophy-of-mind view that physical processes cause mental events while mental events exert no causal influence on physical events.
Epistemic commitment	EpistemologyArgumentation Theory	A defeasible responsibility to uphold a truth-apt proposition with reasons, accept its inferential consequences, and revise or withdraw it under appropriate counterevidence.
Epistemic feedback	Epistemology of Measurement	A feedback relation in which observing, measuring or reporting a phenomenon changes either the phenomenon observed or the subsequent observation method.
Epistemic Innocence	EpistemologyPhilosophy of Psychiatry	A costly cognition can have context-dependent epistemic benefit when no less costly available alternative supplies that benefit.
Ethics dumping	Research Ethics	The export of research practices to lower-resource settings in order to evade or exploit weaker ethical protections.
Evidential Decision Theory	Decision Theory	A decision rule that prefers the act with highest outcome utility conditional on that act occurring, even when this diverges from causal-effect ranking.
Exemplification	Philosophy of LanguageGoodman Theory of Symbols	In the philosophy of language, exemplification is a mode of symbolization characterized by the relation between a sample and what it refers to.
Extensionality	LogicIdentity Principles	The principle that objects of a given kind are equal when they have the same externally observable members, values or behavior, as formalized for sets, functions and relations.
Fallacy of accent	Informal LogicFallacies	The fallacy of accent (also known as accentus, from its Latin denomination, and misleading accent ) is a verbal fallacy that reasons from two different vocal readings of the same written words.
Fallacy of Four Terms	Categorical LogicFallacy Analysis	A purported categorical syllogism in which two premises contain four effective terms rather than one shared middle term and two extremes, so the conclusion's extremes are not inferentially linked.
Fallacy of the Single Cause	Informal Logic	A causal-reasoning error that treats one contributing factor as the sole sufficient explanation of an outcome when the evidence supports multiple interacting, jointly sufficient, enabling, or alternative causes.
False attribution	Informal LogicFallacies	An argumentative fallacy in which a claim is supported by assigning it to an irrelevant, unqualified, unidentified, biased, distorted, or fabricated source, thereby substituting borrowed authority for evidence; distinct from accidental misattribution unless the attribution functions persuasively.
Fatalism	Metaphysics of Freedom and Necessity	A family of views holding that at least some future outcomes are inevitable or outside effective human control, sometimes joined to resignation on the ground that resistance cannot alter what is destined.
Faulty generalization	Informal Logic	An informal fallacy that infers a broad population claim from evidence too small, biased or unrepresentative to warrant that scope.
Fitch's paradox of knowability	Epistemic LogicEpistemology	Fitch's paradox of knowability is a puzzle of epistemic logic.
Form of the Good	Platonic Metaphysics and Ethics	In Plato’s philosophy, the supreme Form that makes intelligible things knowable and gives truth, order, and value to the other Forms, analogized in the Republic to the sun’s enabling of sight and life.
Formal ethics	MetaethicsFormal Deontic Systems	Represent consistency constraints on moral judgments in a modal–deontic logical system while leaving substantive moral content underdetermined.
Formation rule	LogicFormal Syntax	A syntactic rule that recursively determines which symbol strings or expressions are well formed in a formal language, independently of their meaning or truth.
Four Causes	Aristotelian Metaphysics	Explain an Aristotelian thing or change through four complementary aitiai: what it is made from, the form by which it is what it is, the source of change, and that for the sake of which it occurs.
Four-Valued Logic	Many Valued Logic	A finite-valued logical system whose semantics distinguishes exactly four values, with the meaning and connective tables fixed by a declared logic rather than by cardinality alone.
Frankfurt cases	Free WillMoral Responsibility	Frankfurt cases (also known as Frankfurt counterexamples or Frankfurt-style cases) were presented by philosopher Harry Frankfurt in 1969 as counterexamples to the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), which holds that an agent is morally responsible for an action only if that person could have done otherwise.
Free variables and bound variables	LogicVariable Binding	The distinction between variable occurrences whose values are supplied by an external assignment and occurrences captured by a quantifier, lambda or other binder within an expression.
Frege's Puzzles	Philosophy of LanguageTheories of Reference and Propositional Attitudes	The paired semantic challenge that co-referring expressions can differ in cognitive value and can fail to substitute truth-preservingly inside propositional-attitude reports.
Frege–Church ontology	Philosophy of Language and Intensional Logic	A semantic ontology distinguishing objects or denotations, names or expressions, and concepts or senses to preserve intensional differences under reference-preserving substitution.
Frequentist Probability	Frequency InterpretationReference Class	Interpret an event's probability through its stable long-run relative frequency in a specified repeatable reference sequence.
Game	Game StudiesPhilosophy of GamesPlay Studies	A bounded activity in which participants act under constitutive rules within an artificial challenge or play structure that gives states, actions, and outcomes game-internal significance.
Gamer's Dilemma	Ethics of Virtual ActionsApplied Ethics	A virtual-ethics consistency problem asking what principle justifies divergent judgments about simulated acts when neither directly harms a real depicted victim.
Gavagai	Philosophy of LanguageRadical Translation	Quine's radical-translation thought experiment showing that behavioral evidence can underdetermine whether an unfamiliar utterance refers to rabbits, stages, parts, or another proxy ontology.
Gaze	PhenomenologyVisual Culture	Positioned looking or being seen that shapes how a person is interpreted or made socially visible.
Genetic reductionism	Philosophy of Biology	The view that genes alone or primarily suffice to explain complex traits, behavior or social outcomes.
Golden Rule	Ethics	An interpersonal moral heuristic asks agents to guide their treatment of others by how they would wish or accept corresponding treatment themselves.
Grounding (metaphysics)	Metaphysics	A non-causal metaphysical dependence relation in which one fact or entity obtains in virtue of more fundamental grounds.
Hand-waving	ReasoningArgument Quality	A pejorative description of argument that substitutes vague plausibility, rhetoric or omitted steps for the evidence or derivation required to support a conclusion.
Hanlon's razor	EpistemologyPhilosophical Razors	A rule of thumb advising that harmful or frustrating behavior should not be attributed to malice when error, incompetence, ignorance, or another less intentional cause adequately explains it.
Hasty generalization	Informal LogicFallacies	Hasty generalization is the fallacy of examining just one or very few examples or studying a single case and generalizing that to be representative of the whole class of objects or phenomena.
Hempel's dilemma	Philosophy of MindPhysicalism	Hempel's dilemma is a question first asked (at least on record) by the philosopher Carl Hempel in 1969.
Hempel's Paradox	Confirmation Theory and Inductive Logic	Expose that treating confirmation as yes/no forces the absurd conclusion that a white shoe confirms 'all ravens are black' via the contrapositive — dissolved by grading confirmation, so a non-black non-raven confirms only by a vanishing likelihood ratio.
Heterophenomenology	Philosophy of MindMethods for Studying Consciousness	Treat a person's reports of conscious experience as sincere evidence about how things seem while constructing a revisable third-person account that neither grants those reports incorrigible authority nor dismisses their intentional content.
Heterotopia (space)	Philosophy of Space and Human GeographyFoucauldian Spatial Analysis	A real 'other space' in Foucault's spatial analysis whose organization juxtaposes, mirrors, contests, or compensates for surrounding social spaces, often through distinctive access and time relations.
Hitchens's Razor	Informal EpistemologyPhilosophical RazorsArgumentation Theory	A burden-of-support rule allowing an assertion offered without evidence to be withheld or dismissed without a contrary evidential case, while not thereby proving it false.
Homeostatic property cluster theory	Philosophy of Science	A theory of natural kinds in which overlapping property clusters are sustained by causal mechanisms without every member sharing one defining essence.
Homestead Principle	Theories of Property	A normative rule of original acquisition under which a previously unowned or commonly available resource may become a claimant's property through a qualifying act such as first occupancy, productive use, or labor, subject to the theory's publicity, boundary, and proviso conditions.
Hume's Fork	Early Modern EpistemologyEmpiricism	Hume's division between necessary relations of ideas known through thought and contingent matters of fact warranted through experience.
Hypocrisy	Ethics	The solicitation of moral, social, or institutional standing through a professed norm or identity that conflicts with concealed commitments, conduct, motives, or self-exemptions.
I'm Entitled to My Opinion	Informal Logic and ArgumentationFallacies	Using one's right to hold a view as a substitute for reasons that the view is true or justified.
Identity theory of mind	Philosophy of MindPhysicalism	Type physicalism (also known as reductive materialism, type identity theory, mind–brain identity theory, and identity theory of mind) is a physicalist theory in the philosophy of mind.
Immanent critique	Critical Theory	A critical method that evaluates a social form by exposing contradictions between its own professed norms and its realized institutions or practices.
Immaterial Spatial Entity	Spatial Ontology	A spatial particular — a hole, room, or border — that has a location, shape, and history yet is constituted of no matter, individuated instead by its relation to material bearers, and admitted (or not) as a first-class entity by whether eliminating it into bearer-talk loses a fact.
Imperfect induction	LogicInductive Reasoning	The imperfect induction is the process of inferring from a sample of a group to what is characteristic of the whole group.
Impossible World	Modal Semantics	A world-like semantic point that violates stated possibility constraints, used to interpret contradictions, non-normal logics, or counterpossibles.
Incorrigibility	Epistemology	A proposition or belief status such that the subject cannot be mistaken about it or cannot revise it through correction.
Intergenerational equity	Ethics and Public Policy	A justice principle requiring benefits, burdens, opportunities and inherited resources to be assessed fairly across present and future generations.
Interpellation (philosophy)	Structuralist MarxismMarxist Theory	Interpellation is a concept introduced to Marxist theory by Louis Althusser as the mechanism through which pre-existing social structures "constitute" (or construct) individual human organisms as subjects (with consciousness and agency).
Interpretation (logic)	LogicFormal Semantics	An assignment of denotations to the nonlogical symbols of a formal language over a domain, determining the truth or satisfaction of its formulas.
Introspection	Philosophy of MindEpistemology	Introspection is the examination of one's own conscious thoughts and feelings.
Is-Ought Problem	Ethics and Metaethics	Hume's principle that no purely descriptive premises can by themselves deductively entail a normative conclusion — so any move from 'is' to 'ought' requires an explicit, defensible bridging value premise, and its absence marks a category error.
Jus Post Bellum	Just War TheoryMilitary Ethics	Jus post bellum ( ; Latin for "justice after war") is a concept that deals with the morality of the termination phase of war, including the responsibility to rebuild.
Kant's Antinomies	Kantian Metaphysics	Kant's four paired cosmological arguments in which reason appears to prove opposed claims about the world as a whole.
Kathekon	Stoic Ethics	A Stoic appropriate action justified by an agent's nature and circumstances without requiring perfected virtue.
Kavka's toxin puzzle	Decision TheoryPhilosophy of Action	Kavka's toxin puzzle is a thought experiment about the possibility of forming an intention to perform an act which, following from reason, is an action one would not actually perform.
Khudi	Islamic PhilosophyPhilosophy of Self	Muhammad Iqbal's doctrine of the self as a real, developing center of agency strengthened through disciplined self-affirmation, relation to God and community, and responsible action rather than self-annihilation.
KK thesis	EpistemologyEpistemic Logic	The KK thesis or KK principle (also known as epistemic transparency or positive introspection) is a principle of epistemic logic which states that "If you know that P is the case then you know that you know that P is the case." This means that one cannot know that P is, if one does not know whether one's knowledge of P is correct.
Knowledge by presence	Islamic PhilosophyEpistemologyIlluminationist Philosophy	Knowledge by presence in Islamic philosophy is immediate non-representational awareness in which the known reality is present to the knower rather than apprehended through a separate acquired concept or mental form.
Language of thought hypothesis	Philosophy of Mind	The hypothesis that cognition operates over an internal language-like system of compositional mental representations with combinatorial syntax and semantics.
Lesser of two evils principle	EthicsMoral Reasoning	The lesser of two evils principle, also referred to as the lesser evil principle and lesser-evilism, is the ethical principle that, when faced with selecting from two immoral options, the less immoral one should be chosen.
Lewis's Triviality Result	Conditional LogicProbability of Conditionals	An impossibility argument showing that a fixed conditional proposition cannot generally have probability equal to conditional probability throughout a nontrivial class closed under relevant conditioning.
Liar Paradox	LogicPhilosophy of Language	A truth-status contradiction arising when a sentence directly or indirectly says of itself that it is false or not true under sufficiently strong truth principles.
Line of Flight	Continental PhilosophyDeleuze and GuattariPost Structuralism	A deterritorializing trajectory within an assemblage that enables escape, new connection, and transformation while remaining vulnerable to capture.
Locke's place-time-kind principle	MetaphysicsPersonal Identity	Locke's place–time–kind principle, also called Locke's thesis, is a claim in the philosophy of John Locke that no two things of the same kind can occupy the same place at the same time, and that no single thing can be in two places at once.
Logical connective	LogicFormal Syntax and Semantics	A formal operator that forms a compound formula from one or more formulas and whose semantics determines the compound's truth or satisfaction from its arguments.
Logical Consequence	Logic	A logic-relative relation licensing a formula as following from premises under a specified semantic or derivational criterion.
Logical cube	Traditional and Diagrammatic Logic	A three-dimensional opposition diagram that organizes eight categorical propositions and displays their contradiction, contrariety, subcontrariety and subalternation relations.
Logical form	Logic	A precise formal-semantic representation of a statement or argument that exposes the structure relevant to validity and interpretation.
Logical graph	LogicExistential GraphsDiagrammatic Reasoning	Peirce's existential-graph notation and calculus, in which logical assertions are arranged spatially on a sheet using juxtaposition, enclosure by cuts, identity lines, and transformation rules rather than only linear formulas.
Logical possibility	Modal LogicModal Metaphysics	The status of a proposition that is satisfiable or at least not refutable under the axioms, inference rules, semantics, and consistency policy of a specified logical system.
Lottery paradox	EpistemologyRational Acceptance	The inconsistency between accepting each highly probable claim that an individual lottery ticket will lose and accepting the certain claim that some ticket will win.
Mandeville's paradox	Moral Philosophy	Mandeville's paradox is named after Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), who posits that actions which may be qualified as vicious with regard to individuals have benefits for society as a whole.
Material Inference	Philosophy of Logic	An inference licensed by the nonlogical conceptual content of its premises and conclusion rather than by logical form alone.
Meaning Postulate	Philosophy of LanguageFormal Semantics	An object-language semantic axiom that restricts interpretations of lexical predicates, so a stipulated word relation supports analytic inferences beyond logical form alone.
Meno's Paradox	EpistemologyAncient Philosophy	Meno (; , Ménōn) is a Socratic dialogue written by Plato around 385 BC, but set at an earlier date around 402 BC.
Mereology	Ontology	The formal study of part–whole relations and the structures generated by parthood.
Mereotopology	Formal Ontology and Spatial Reasoning	A formal theory combining part–whole relations with topological notions such as connection, contact, interior and boundary, often using regions rather than points as primitives.
Metalanguage	Logic Linguistics and Formal Semantics	A language used to name, quote, define or make claims about expressions and structures of another object language.
Mill's Methods	Philosophy of ScienceInductive Logic	Five comparative methods for inductively identifying possible causal conditions through agreement, difference, combined comparison, residues, and concomitant variation.
Modal Status	Modal LogicMetaphysics of Modality	A modal status is the classification of a proposition, state of affairs, event, or world as actual, possible, necessary, contingent, or impossible relative to specified accessibility, logical, metaphysical, temporal, epistemic, or normative semantics.
Modus ponens	LogicClassical Logic	The valid inference rule that from a conditional P → Q and its antecedent P derives the consequent Q, with validity determined by the conditional's formal system and not by the empirical truth, relevance, or persuasiveness of the premises.
Monotonicity of entailment	Logic	A logical property whereby every conclusion entailed by a premise set remains entailed after any additional premises are added.
Moore's paradox	Philosophy of Language and EpistemologyEpistemology	The peculiar absurdity of sincerely asserting ‘p, but I do not believe p’ or ‘p, but I believe not-p’ in the first person and present tense, even though either conjunction can be true and is not logically contradictory.
Moral authority	Ethics and Political Theory	Legitimacy to influence judgment or conduct grounded in perceived ethical principle and integrity rather than formal coercive office.
Moral intellectualism	MetaethicsMoral Epistemology	Moral intellectualism makes knowledge or rational understanding of the good constitutive of virtue and, in strong versions, sufficient for right action.
Moral particularism	Moral PhilosophyNormative Ethics and Theory of Reasons	Hold that sound moral judgment does not depend on applying a sufficient stock of invariant moral principles because a consideration's relevance or polarity can change with the other features of the particular case.
Moral perception	Moral EpistemologyVirtue Ethics	The discernment of morally salient features in a particular situation that structures what an agent notices before or within explicit moral deliberation.
Moral responsibility	Moral Philosophy	The status of being appropriately answerable to praise, blame, reward, or punishment for action or omission.
Multiple occupancy view	Metaphysics of IdentityPersonal Identity	The multiple occupancy view explains symmetrical fission by positing numerically distinct continuants that coincide before the split and follow different later branches.
N-universes	Paradox AnalysisPhilosophical Methodology	A family of deliberately simplified philosophical world-models that varies a small set of entities and criteria to isolate the structure of paradoxes and thought experiments.
Natural rights and legal rights	Political PhilosophyPhilosophy of Law	Natural rights are claimed to hold independently of particular institutions, whereas legal rights are created, recognized, and alterable within a specific legal system.
Naturalization of intentionality	Philosophy of Mind	According to Franz Brentano, intentionality refers to the "aboutness of mental states that cannot be a physical relation between a mental state and what it is about (its object) because in a physical relation each of the relata must exist whereas the objects of mental states might not.".
Naïve Realism (Philosophy of Perception)	Philosophy of Perception	The view that genuine perception constitutively relates a subject to ordinary mind-independent objects.
Neutral monism	Philosophy of MindMonist Metaphysics and the Mind Body Problem	Hold that ultimate reality has one fundamental kind whose intrinsic nature is neither mental nor physical, while mental and physical phenomena are derivative organizations or aspects of that neutral basis.
Newton's Flaming Laser Sword	Philosophy of Science	A philosophical razor that withholds serious dispute from propositions unless precise reasoning connects them to observable consequences capable of settling the dispute.
Nominalism	Metaphysics	In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels.
Non-normal modal logic	Modal LogicPhilosophical Logic	A non-normal modal logic is a variant of modal logic that deviates from the basic principles of normal modal logics.
Nonmaleficence	BioethicsEthics	The ethical duty to avoid preventable, unnecessary, or disproportionate harm while evaluating intervention, restraint, alternatives, safeguards, and uncertainty.
Nonsense	Philosophy of LanguageSemantics of Meaninglessness	Nonsense is communication or symbol production that fails to yield a coherent interpretation under the relevant linguistic, logical, or representational rules, whether unintentionally or as a deliberate literary construction.
Norm (philosophy)	Normativity	A prescriptive standard, rule or reason that guides or evaluates action through what ought, may or must be done rather than merely describing what is the case.
Normal modal logic	Modal LogicPhilosophical Logic	A normal modal logic contains all propositional tautologies and the distribution axiom K, and is closed under uniform substitution, modus ponens, and necessitation.
Noumenon	Kantian Philosophy	In Kantian philosophy, an object considered independently of the conditions of sensible intuition, functioning as a limiting contrast to phenomena rather than an object of empirical knowledge.
Obligationes	Medieval LogicScholastic Disputation	A medieval rule-governed disputation in which a respondent temporarily accepts a positum and must grant, deny, doubt, or distinguish successive propositions consistently while an opponent probes for contradiction.
Ontological Paradox	Causation and Time	Assess a self-causing closed causal loop — an object or piece of information that exists with no origin traceable outside the loop — by testing whether it is self-consistent (coherent, unlike the grandfather paradox) yet still lacking a traceable origin.
Overwhelming Exception	Informal LogicHistorical Method	An informal fallacy in which material exceptions shrink a broad-sounding claim so far that its surviving scope no longer supports the advertised conclusion.
Paraconsistent logic	Logic	A logic whose consequence relation does not validate explosion, allowing some contradictions without every proposition becoming derivable.
Paradigm-Case Argument	Ordinary Language Philosophy	Answer a sweeping skeptical denial by identifying an actual central case through which the disputed expression is ordinarily taught or applied, while keeping the argument’s semantic premises distinct from stronger metaphysical claims.
Paradox of analysis	—	The puzzle that a correct conceptual analysis appears uninformative if analysandum and analysans mean the same thing, yet incorrect if they do not.
Paradoxes of material implication	Philosophical and Mathematical Logic	Classically valid consequences of the truth-functional conditional that conflict with ordinary expectations about relevance, causation or inferential connection in natural-language if–then statements.
Pascal's Mugging	Decision TheoryThought Experiments	In philosophy, Pascal's mugging is a thought experiment demonstrating a problem in expected utility maximization.
Pascal's wager	Philosophy of ReligionDecision Theory	A prudential argument that, under a stylized decision matrix, finite worldly costs of cultivating belief are outweighed by the possibility of infinite salvation if God exists, offered as a reason to wager and practice rather than as evidential proof of God's existence.
Paternalism	Political PhilosophyEthics	Paternalism is action that limits a person's or group's liberty or autonomy against their will and is intended to promote their own good.
Performative Contradiction	Philosophy of LanguageDiscourse Ethics	Expose a conflict between what an utterance asserts and a condition its very performance pragmatically presupposes.
Phenomenal concept strategy	Philosophy of Mind	A physicalist response to consciousness arguments that locates the apparent explanatory gap in special concepts used to think about experience rather than in an ontological gap.
Phenomenal conservatism	EpistemologyTheories of Justification	The epistemic principle that if it seems to a subject that p, that seeming supplies prima facie justification for believing p unless defeated by contrary evidence or reliability concerns.
Phonocentrism	Philosophy of LanguageMedia Hierarchies	The doctrine or bias that treats speech and sound as more immediate, fundamental or authoritative than writing or signed language.
Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality	MetaphysicsValue Theory	Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality treats Quality as fundamental to reality and distinguishes dynamic Quality from patterned static levels rather than beginning with a subject–object division.
Plato's Beard	Ontology	Quine's name for the riddle that meaningful denial of an entity seems to require that entity to exist in some sense, entangling language about nonbeing with ontological commitment.
Poiesis	Continental Philosophy and Semiotics	Poiesis is the process by which something not previously existing is brought into being, including self-producing forms such as autopoiesis.
Political freedom	Political PhilosophyLiberty	Political freedom, also called political autonomy or political agency, is a central concept in history and political thought and one of the most important features of democratic societies.
Popperian Growth of Knowledge	Philosophy of Science	A critical-rationalist model in which inquiry advances from problems through bold conjectures, attempted error elimination, and successor problems rather than through inductive accumulation or final verification.
Postpositivism	Philosophy of Science	Postpositivism or postempiricism is a metatheoretical stance that critiques and amends positivism and has impacted theories and practices across philosophy, social sciences, and various models of scientific inquiry.
Power-knowledge	Critical Theory	Foucault’s concept that regimes of knowledge and relations of power mutually produce and sustain one another.
Principle of Charity	Philosophy of Language	Constrain interpretation toward readings that make a speaker broadly coherent, rational, and substantially right, while preserving evidence and genuine disagreement.
Principle of double effect	Normative Ethics	An ethical doctrine distinguishing an intended good effect from a foreseen but unintended harmful side effect under conditions of act permissibility, proportionality, and noninstrumentality.
Principle of Explosion	Formal Logic	A logic-relative consequence rule under which a proposition and its negation together entail any formula whatsoever.
Principle of sufficient reason	Metaphysics and Explanation	The philosophical principle that every contingent fact has a sufficient reason why it obtains rather than not.
Private language argument	Philosophy of Language	Wittgenstein’s argument that a language whose signs refer only to one person’s intrinsically private sensations cannot sustain the public standards required for meaningful rule-following.
Probabilistic causation	Philosophy of Causation	A family of causal theories in which a cause changes, typically raises, the probability of its effect under an appropriate comparison and background context.
Process Philosophy	Metaphysics	A family of metaphysical programs that treats becoming, occurrence, activity, and dynamically organized relations as primary, reconstructing enduring things as stabilized patterns of process.
Professional ethics	Applied Ethics	A profession-specific system of duties, standards, virtues, conflicts controls, and accountability governing how specialized authority is exercised toward clients, colleagues, institutions, and the public.
Prohairesis	Ancient Ethics and Stoic Philosophy	The deliberative moral choice or faculty of assent that ancient Greek ethics, especially Epictetus's Stoicism, treats as properly one's own and central to agency and character.
Proof by example	Informal Logic	The invalid inference that a universal claim has been proved merely by exhibiting one or several favorable instances.
Proof-theoretic semantics	Logic and Philosophy of Language	An approach to meaning in which the inferential rules governing an expression, especially introduction and elimination rules, constitute or determine its semantic content.
Proposition	Philosophy of Language and Logic	An abstract content expressed by a declarative utterance, capable of being believed, denied or evaluated as true or false independently of the particular sentence expressing it.
Propositional attitude	Philosophy of Mind	A belief-like, desire-like, or intention-like mental stance that an agent bears toward propositionally structured content.
Psychological determinism	Philosophy of Action	The view that psychological states and actions are fully determined by antecedent motives, reasons, character or other conditions outside an agent’s ultimate control.
Psychophysical parallelism	Philosophy of Mind	A philosophy-of-mind position holding that mental and bodily event streams correspond systematically without directly causing one another.
Public Reason	Political Philosophy	Public reason is a family of political-justification ideals asking whether coercive power can be justified to free and equal citizens amid reasonable pluralism.
Quality inherence	Upper Ontology	Refuse to let a property exist on its own — bind every attribute to a bearer, a context, and the inherence relation that ties them, so a value with no namable owner is a category error, not a discovery.
Quantifier Shift	LogicFirst Order LogicInformal Argument Analysis	An invalid inference from a possibly different witness for each case to one fixed witness for every case, without a premise licensing the stronger quantifier scope.
Quantifier variance	Metaontology	The term quantifier variance refers to claims that there is no uniquely best ontological language with which to describe the world.
Quidditism	MetaphysicsPhilosophy of Laws of Nature	In metaphysics, quidditism is the perspective implied by the belief that nomological roles do not supervene on causal properties.
Radical constructivism	Epistemology	An epistemology treating knowledge as viable organization of experience rather than verifiable correspondence with a mind-independent world.
Radical probabilism	Formal Epistemology	An epistemological view that rational belief is graded throughout and can be revised without treating incoming evidence as a proposition learned with certainty.
Radical unintelligibility	Lonergan StudiesPhilosophy of Action	Radical Unintelligibility, a term coined by Bernard Lonergan, is the philosophical idea that we can act against our better judgment.
Ranking Theory	Formal Epistemology	Represent plain belief and its revision through ordinal degrees of disbelief assigned to possible worlds.
Rationalism	Epistemology	An epistemological position giving reason, intellectual intuition or deduction priority as a source or test of at least some substantive knowledge independently of sensory experience.
Received view of theories	Philosophy of ScienceLogical Empiricism	The received view of theories is a position in the philosophy of science that identifies a scientific theory with a set of propositions which are considered to be linguistic objects, such as axioms.
Regular modal logic	Modal Logic	A classical modal logic closed under a rule lifting conjunction-preserving implication through necessity and containing the duality of necessity and possibility.
Relational space	Philosophy of SpaceRelationalism	A metaphysical view that spatial facts consist in relations among material objects or events rather than occupancy of an independently existing spatial container.
Relevance logic	Philosophical Logic	A family of nonclassical logics requiring a substantive connection between the antecedent and consequent of a valid implication.
Religious alienation	Philosophy of Religion	A philosophical and social-theoretical account in which religious representations estrange human capacities, products or self-understanding from the people who generate them.
Representationalism (Indirect Realism)	Philosophy of PerceptionPhilosophy of Mind	In philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, direct (or naïve) realism, as opposed to indirect (or representational) realism, are differing models that describe the nature of conscious experiences.
Research Program	Philosophy of ScienceResearch Methodology	A sustained, socially organized line of inquiry that coordinates a community, a relatively stable problem framework or core commitments, and a revisable sequence of theories, methods, or projects over time.
Rhizome (philosophy)	Deleuze Guattari Rhizomatics	Model an assemblage as a heterogeneous, multiple-entry, non-arborescent field of connections whose paths can break, reconnect, and be mapped without deriving every element from one root or hierarchy.
Rotation method	Kierkegaard StudiesExistentialismAesthetics of Existence	Kierkegaard's aesthetic strategy for resisting boredom by varying how limited circumstances are perceived and used rather than endlessly changing circumstances.
Rule of replacement	LogicNatural Deduction	Rewrite a designated subformula with a logically equivalent expression inside a larger propositional formula while preserving the whole formula's truth conditions.
Russell's Teapot	Philosophy of ReligionEpistemologyBurden of Proof	Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, as opposed to shifting the burden of disproof to others.
Schema (Kant)	Kantian Philosophy	A time-structured rule by which Kant’s imagination mediates between a pure category and sensible appearances.
Scientific consensus	Philosophy of ScienceSocial Epistemology	Scientific consensus is the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the vast majority of active, qualified experts on a conclusion in a specific scientific discipline.
Scientific Diagram	Scientific RepresentationPhilosophy of ScienceScientific Visualization	A scientific diagram is a convention-governed visual representation that maps observations, model variables, or derived quantities into spatial coordinates, symbols, curves, regions, or relations so that scientific structure can be compared, calculated, diagnosed, or inferred.
Scientific Hypothesis	Philosophy of ScienceScientific MethodologyConfirmation Theory	A sufficiently specific explanatory, relational, or predictive claim proposed for observation-linked evaluation, with identifiable consequences and evidence-sensitive conditions for support, revision, or rejection.
Scientific pluralism	Philosophy of Science	Scientific pluralism is a position within the philosophy of science that rejects various proposed unities of scientific method and subject matter.
Self-sampling assumption	Anthropic ReasoningFormal Epistemology	The self-indication assumption (SIA) is a philosophical principle defined in Anthropic Bias.
Semantic Externalism	Philosophy of LanguagePhilosophy of Mind	A speaker's linguistic reference, and on some accounts content, is partly fixed by the physical or social environment rather than internal state alone.
Semantic holism	Philosophy of Language	The view that the meaning of a linguistic expression depends on its relations to a substantially larger language or belief system.
Semantic theory of truth	Philosophy of Logic	A formal account defining truth for an object language in a suitably stronger metalanguage through recursive satisfaction and T-schema instances.
Sense and Reference	Philosophy of LanguageFregean Semantics	Frege’s semantic distinction between an expression’s objective mode of presentation and the object or truth-value it designates.
Ship of Theseus	Metaphysics of Identity	Expose that 'is it still the same thing?' has no brute answer once total component replacement pulls substrate-continuity apart from pattern-continuity — the verdict is relative to which identity criterion you have decided counts.
Simulation Hypothesis	MetaphysicsEpistemology	The simulation hypothesis proposes that what one experiences as the real world is actually a simulated reality, such as a computer simulation in which humans are constructs.
Speciesism	Animal EthicsMoral Status and Discrimination	Differential moral consideration or treatment based on species membership, often criticized as an unjustified bias favoring human interests over comparable interests of other animals.
Spider Diagram	Diagrammatic LogicEuler Based Visual Logics	A diagrammatic logic extending Euler regions with spiders, shading, and compound Boolean structure to assert cardinality and set-membership constraints under formal semantics.
Square of opposition	Term LogicAristotelian Logic	In term logic (a branch of philosophical logic), the square of opposition is a diagram representing the relations between the four basic categorical propositions.
Strong emergence	Philosophy of MindPhilosophy of Science	Usage of the notion "emergence" is often subdivided into two perspectives: "weak emergence" and "strong emergence".
Subalternation	Traditional Syllogistic Logic	In the traditional square of opposition, the immediate inference from a universal categorical proposition to its corresponding particular proposition, and contrapositively from the particular's falsity to the universal's falsity.
Subverted Support	Informal LogicFallacies	An explanatory fallacy in which reasons are offered for an alleged event, condition, or phenomenon before establishing that the explanandum actually occurred or exists.
Sunrise problem	Bayesian Epistemology	The problem of assigning predictive probability to the next recurrence of a repeatedly observed event, exposing how induction depends on prior assumptions.
Suppressed Correlative	Informal LogicFallacies	A fallacy in which one member of an intended contrast is redefined so broadly that it absorbs the other, making the distinction vacuous and eliminating the alternative by stipulation.
Supreme Emergency	Just War Theory	In just-war theory, a supreme emergency is an imminent and catastrophic threat to a political community claimed to justify or excuse action otherwise prohibited by jus in bello.
Svasaṃvedana	Buddhist PhilosophyPhilosophy of Mind	In Buddhist philosophy, svasaṃvedana (also svasaṃvitti) is a term which refers to the reflexive nature of consciousness, or the awareness of being aware.
Symbol (formal)	Formal Logic	An abstract atomic item in a formal language whose concrete inscriptions or encodings are token instances rather than the symbol itself.
T-schema	Philosophical Logic	The disquotational schema stating that the named sentence S is true if and only if S.
Temporality	Philosophy of TimePhenomenology	In philosophy, temporality refers to the idea of a linear progression of past, present, and future.
The Saying and the Said	Levinasian EthicsEthical Signification and Language	A Levinasian distinction between language as pre-propositional ethical exposure to another and language as the necessary thematic content that identifies, communicates, and can also totalize.
Theological noncognitivism	Philosophy of Religion	Theological noncognitivism is the non-theist position that religious language, particularly theological terminology such as 'God', is not intelligible or meaningful, and thus sentences like 'God exists' are cognitively meaningless.
Theological Veto	Philosophy of ReligionFaith and Reason	A philosophy-of-religion diagnosis in which claimed revelation or divine sovereignty is used to deny independent human reason standing to examine, revise, or reject theological claims.
Thick concept	Moral PhilosophyMetaethics and Evaluative Language	Combine substantial descriptive content with an evaluative valence in one concept, so competent application both characterizes a case and ordinarily commends or condemns it.
Trademark argument	Philosophy of ReligionCartesian Philosophy	The trademark argument is an a priori argument for the existence of God developed by the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes.
Transactionalism	Pragmatist Philosophy	A pragmatist philosophical approach that treats persons, environments and meanings as mutually constituted within ongoing transactions rather than as independent entities that later interact.
Transcendental idealism	Epistemology	Kant’s doctrine that objects of experience appear under a priori forms and categories supplied by cognition, while things in themselves are not thereby known.
Trivial Objections	Informal Logic	The fallacy of treating minor objections as sufficient to defeat a larger claim they leave substantially untouched.
Trivialism	Philosophical Logic	The logical or metaphysical thesis that every proposition is true, including each contradiction and its negation.
Truthmaker theory	Metaphysics	Truthmaker theory is "the branch of metaphysics that explores the relationships between what is true and what exists".
Two wrongs don't make a right	Ethics	The maxim 'two wrongs do not make a right' denies that another party's prior wrongdoing supplies sufficient moral justification for a retaliatory or otherwise wrongful act.
Ubuntu philosophy	African PhilosophyEthics	A family of Bantu-African moral and social philosophies that understand personhood, responsibility, and flourishing as constituted through reciprocal relationships with other people and the surrounding world.
Ugly duckling theorem	Philosophy of Classification	A formal result showing that, when every logically definable predicate is weighted equally, any two distinct objects share the same number of properties, so similarity requires inductive bias.
Unity of the Proposition	Philosophy of LanguageTheory of Propositions	The problem of explaining what makes representational constituents compose one truth-evaluable proposition rather than a mere list or aggregate.
Universal pragmatics	Social PhilosophyTheory of Communicative Action	Habermas's reconstruction of the general validity claims and communicative competencies presupposed when speakers seek mutual understanding through language.
Unmoved mover	MetaphysicsAristotelian Philosophy	The unmoved mover (), or prime mover (), is a concept advanced by Aristotle as a primary cause, or first uncaused cause, or "mover" of all the motion in the universe.
Value (ethics)	Ethics and AxiologyValue Theory	Mark an object, state, trait, relation, or activity as good, bad, worthy, choice-giving, or reason-providing under an ethical evaluative standard, while distinguishing bearers, grounds, and intrinsic from instrumental status.
Violinist Thought Experiment	BioethicsAbortion Ethics	Granting for the sake of argument that the fetus has a right to life, Thomson uses thought experiments to argue that the right to life does not include, entail, or imply the right to use someone else's body to survive and that induced abortion is therefore morally permissible.
Virtue aesthetics	AestheticsVirtue Theory	Virtue aesthetics is treating aesthetics similarly to the frameworks of virtue ethics and virtue epistemology.
Vitalism	Philosophy of BiologyNatural Philosophy	Vitalism is an idea that living organisms are differentiated from the non-living by the presence of forces, properties or powers including those which may not be physical or chemical.
Worldview	Philosophy Anthropology and Cultural Cognition	An encompassing orientation through which a person or community interprets reality, including assumptions about what exists, how knowledge works, what matters and how life should be conducted.
Wu wei	Chinese Philosophy	A Chinese philosophical ideal of unforced, noncoercive action that accords with the spontaneous course of a situation.