Definitions Flashcards
Justice
Is the ethical concept by which we make decisions on the distribution of decision making rights and on the exercise of power
Distributive Justice
The distribution of benefits and burdens.
Commutative Justice
The justice that applies to contracts and exchange.
Causation
The relation between two events that holds when, given that one occurs, it produces the second.
Determined
The doctrine that every event has a cause.
Power (social)
The ability to achieve something, whether by right or by control or influence. Power is the ability to mobilize economic, social, or political forces in order to achieve a result.
Power (metaphysical)
A capacity or ability to bring about an effect or undergo a modification. Eg water had the power to dissolve salt; salt has the capacity to dissolve in water.
Love
A profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.
Rationality
To accept something as making sense, as appropriate, or required, or in accordance with some acknowledged goal, such as aiming at truth or aiming at good.
Irrational
Without means of reason; deprived of reason.
Personal Identity
The concept you develop about yourself that evolves over the course of your life.
Society
A group of persons unified by a distinctive and systematic set of normative relations, whereby actions of one are perceived as meriting characteristic responses by others. To be part of the same society is to be subject to these norms of interaction.
Imagination
The faculty of reviving or especially creating images in the mind’s eye. The ability to create and rehearse possible situations to combine knowledge in unusual ways, or to invent experiments.
Dialectic
The process of reasoning to obtain truth and knowledge on any topic.
Dichotomy
A division into two.
Anthropomorphism
The attribution of human characteristics to something that is not human; for instance to God or to the weather.
A posteriori
Something that can be considered valid only by means of experience.
A priori
Something known to be valid without need of experience.
Argument
A process of reasoning in logic that purports to show its conclusion to be true.
Contingent
May or may not be case; things could be either way. The opposite is necessary.
Deduction
Reasoning from the general to the particular. It is universally agreed that deduction is valid.
Induction
Reasoning from the particular to the general. Induction does not necessarily yield results that are true, so whether it is genuinely a logical process is disputed.
Dualism
A view of something as made up of two irreducible parts, such as the idea of human beings as consisting of bodies and minds, the two being radically unlike.
Essence
The essence of a thing is that which is distinctive about it and makes it what it is. For instance, the essence of a unicorn is that it is a horse with a single horn on its head.
Ethics
A branch of philosophy that is concerned with questions about how we should live, and therefore about the nature of right and wrong, good and bad.
Fallacy
A seriously wrong argument, or false conclusion based on such an argument.
Falsifiability
A statement, or set of statements, is falsifiable if t can be proved wrong by empirical testing. According to Karl Popper, falsifiability is what distinguishes science from non-science.
Humanism
A philosophical approach based on the assumption that mankind is the most important thing that exists, and that there can be no knowledge of a supernatural world, is any such world exists.
Intuition
Direct knowing, whether by sensory perception or by insight; a form of knowledge that makes no use of reasoning.
Irreducible
An irreducible thing is one that cannot be brought to a simpler or reduced form.
Logic
The branch of philosophy that makes a study of rational argument itself - its terms, concepts, rules, and methods.
Materialism
The doctrine that all real existence is ultimately of something material.
Necessary
Must be the case. The opposite is contingent. Hume believed that necessary connections existed only in logic, not in the real world, a view that has been upheld by many philosophers since.
Necessary and Sufficient Conditions
For X to be a husband it is a necessary condition for X to be married. However, this is not a sufficient condition - for what if X is female? A sufficient condition for X to be a husband is that X is both a man and married. One of the commonest forms of error in thinking is to mistake necessary conditions for sufficient conditions.
Ontology
A branch of philosophy that asks what actually exists, as distinct from the nature of our knowledge of it, which is covered by the branch of epistemology. Ontology and epistemology taken together constitute the central tradition of philosophy.
Phenomenon
An experience that is immediately present. If i look at an object, the object as experienced by me is a phenomenon. Immanuel Kant distinguished this from the object as it in itself, independently of being experienced: this he called the noumenon.
Philosophy
Literally, “the love of wisdom.” The word is widely used for any sustained rational reflection about general principles that has the aim of achieving a deeper understanding.
Premise
The starting point of an argument. Any argument has to start from at least one premise, and therefore does not prove its own premise.
Proposition
The content of a statement that confirms or denies whether something is the case, and s capable of being true or false.
Rationalism
The view that we gain knowledge of the world through use of reason, without relying on sense - perception, which is regarded by rationalists as unreliable.
Synthesis
Seeking a deeper understanding of something by putting the pieces together.
Transcendental
Outside the world of sense experience. Someone who believes that ethics are transcendental believes that ethics have their source outside the empirical world.
Universal
A concept of general application, like “red” or “woman”.
Utilitarianism
A theory of politics and ethics that judges the morality of actions by their consequences, that regards the most desirable consequence of any action as the greatest good of the greatest number, and that defines “good” in terms of pleasure and the absence of pain.
Validity
An argument is valid if its conclusion follows from it premises. This does not necessarily mean that the conclusion is true.
Description
Typically gives one or more items of information about a particular topic. E.g. Wedge tailed eagles are the largest bird of prey in Australia. They have been known to eat kangaroos, goats and sheep, but mostly they eat rabbits and other small prey, dead or alive.
Narrative
The standard form for novels, films and television dramas. They describe or portray actions in time and contain chronology.
Explanation
We already accept the truth of a statement and we try to say how it is that it came about. E.g. My car won’t start, because the battery is flat.
Summary
Identifies the main positions adopted by each participant.
Clarification
Outlines the core concepts employed by each participant.
Evaluation
Evaluated the acceptability of the major premises used by each participants. Evaluates the strength of inferential moves made by each participant.
