Philosophy & Ethics

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33 domain-specific abstractions whose origin domain is Philosophy & Ethics.

• Abstract and concrete — 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.
• Anti-realism — A family of philosophical positions rejecting truth or existence as wholly independent of epistemic access, conceptual scheme, or discourse.
• Apperception — Track a historically indexed family of theories in which a representation becomes consciously owned, unified, selected, or assimilated through its relation to a subject and an already organized field of representations.
• Aufheben — 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 — 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.
• Begging the Question — 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.
• Causal Theory of Reference — 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.
• Consequentialism — 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.
• Dialectics — Contradictions drive change.
• Dvaita Vedānta — 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.
• Existential Angst — Anxiety from lack of meaning.
• Four Causes — 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.
• Free will — The contested capacity for agents to choose or control actions in a way sufficient for genuine alternatives, authorship or moral responsibility.
• Hempel's Paradox — 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.
• Henosis — Name the Neoplatonic movement or consummation of unification with the One, structured by procession, return, purification, contemplation, and the limits of discursive predication.
• Homestead Principle — 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.
• Hypocrisy — The solicitation of moral, social, or institutional standing through a professed norm or identity that conflicts with concealed commitments, conduct, motives, or self-exemptions.
• Immaterial Spatial Entity — 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.
• Is-Ought Problem — 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.
• Material Inference — An inference licensed by the nonlogical conceptual content of its premises and conclusion rather than by logical form alone.
• Newton's Flaming Laser Sword — A philosophical razor that withholds serious dispute from propositions unless precise reasoning connects them to observable consequences capable of settling the dispute.
• Norm (philosophy) — 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.
• Ontological Paradox — 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.
• Paradigm-Case Argument — 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.
• Plato's Beard — 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.
• Principle of Charity — Constrain interpretation toward readings that make a speaker broadly coherent, rational, and substantially right, while preserving evidence and genuine disagreement.
• Process Philosophy — A family of metaphysical programs that treats becoming, occurrence, activity, and dynamically organized relations as primary, reconstructing enduring things as stabilized patterns of process.
• Quality inherence — 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.
• Rationalism — 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.
• Rhizome (philosophy) — 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.
• Ship of Theseus — 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.
• Vorstellung — A German philosophical term for what is presented before a mind—often rendered representation or presentation—whose extension and role vary across Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer from the genus of mental representation to image-bound thought and the subject-correlated world of objects.