Philosophical Concepts & Thought Experiments

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Abstractions about philosophical positions, thought experiments and historical scientific ideas, including metaphysical theories like nominalism and pantheism, epistemic puzzles like Russell's teapot, and superseded hypotheses such as vitalism and recapitulation.

27 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Cymatics — Cymatics (from ) is a subset of modal vibrational phenomena.
• Energeia — 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 — 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.
• Galileo's ship — Galileo's ship refers to two physics experiments, a thought experiment and an actual experiment, by Galileo Galilei, the 16^th- and 17^th-century physicist and astronomer.
• Hempel's dilemma — Hempel's dilemma is a question first asked (at least on record) by the philosopher Carl Hempel in 1969.
• Heroic Theory of Invention and Scientific Development — The heroic theory of invention and scientific development is the view that the principal authors of inventions and scientific discoveries are unique heroic individuals—i.e., "great scientists" or "geniuses".
• Horopter — The horopter can be measured empirically in which it is defined using some criterion.
• Idappaccayatā — Idappaccayatā (Pali, also idappaccayata; Sanskrit: idaṃpratyayatā) is a Buddhist term that is translated as "specific conditionality" or "this/that conditionality".
• Introspection — Introspection is the examination of one's own conscious thoughts and feelings.
• Locke's place-time-kind principle — 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.
• Nominalism — In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels.
• Panspermia — Panspermia () is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the universe, distributed by cosmic dust, meteoroids, asteroids, comets, and planetoids, as well as by spacecraft carrying unintended contamination by microorganisms, known as directed panspermia.
• Pantheism — Pantheism is a diverse family of philosophical and religious beliefs that equate reality with divinity.
• Phyletic Gradualism — Phyletic gradualism is a model of evolution which theorizes that most speciation is slow, uniform and gradual.
• Recapitulation theory — The theory of recapitulation, also called the biogenetic law or embryological parallelism— usually summarized as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"— is a historical hypothesis that the development of the embryo of an animal, from fertilization to gestation or hatching (ontogeny), goes through stages resembling or representing successive adult stages in the evolution of the animal's remote ancestors (phylogeny).
• Representationalism (Indirect Realism) — 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.
• Russell's Teapot — 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.
• Scientific pluralism — Scientific pluralism is a position within the philosophy of science that rejects various proposed unities of scientific method and subject matter.
• Simulation Hypothesis — 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.
• Stop motion — Stop motion with live actors is often referred to as pixilation.
• Strong emergence — Usage of the notion "emergence" is often subdivided into two perspectives: "weak emergence" and "strong emergence".
• Theological noncognitivism — 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.
• Trademark argument — The trademark argument is an a priori argument for the existence of God developed by the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes.
• Truthmaker theory — Truthmaker theory is "the branch of metaphysics that explores the relationships between what is true and what exists".
• Unmoved mover — 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.
• Vernier Scale — A vernier scale ( ), named after Pierre Vernier, is a visual aid to take an accurate measurement reading between two graduation markings on a linear scale by using mechanical interpolation, which increases resolution and reduces measurement uncertainty by using vernier acuity.
• Vitalism — 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.