Midterm Exam Flashcards
What is the definition of critical thinking?
Critical thinking refers to the conscious act of evaluating, judging and criticizing the worth or value of one’s action, belief, behavior, or one’s intellectual and rational product.
What is the “commonsensical notion of philosophy”?
This refers to the underlying notions that make up what we call an individual’s personal philosophy.
What are the Three Concepts of Philosophy, according to Armando F. Bonifacio?
The commonsensical notion of “philosophy”, the activity of reflection as a kind of philosophy, and beyond analysis, making an effort in reconstruction
What is philosophy?
The study of reality not exactly empirical nor mathematical, the study of justifications, and the analysis of various concepts such as causes, beauty, knowing
What are not considered as philosophical questions?
- It is not something that can be answered empirically, therefore, the answers are something that is:
- Not ordinary perceptions
- Not the sciences
- Not things that happened in the past
- Not mathematical
What are the branches and areas of philosophy?
- Logic, the study of correct reasoning
- Epistemology, the study of knowledge
- Metaphysics, the study of reality
- Axiology, the study of values
What year are the Presocratic philosopher from?
600 BC
What are the main characteristics of Presocratic philosophers?
- Had different interests from Socrates.
- Focused mainly on questions about nature and origins of things and the world
- Aristotle named them phusikoi or “physicist”
- Had an arche
Who is Thales of Miletus?
He is the Father of Philosophy. His arche is water.
Who Anaximander of Miletus?
He is a pupil of Thales. He believed that humans originally came from fish, the sun is pure fire and larger than the Earth, and the moon’s shine is a reflection of sunlight but he believed the Earth is cylindrical. His arche is apeiron (the infinite or indefinite).
Who is Anaximenes of Miletus?
He is a pupil of both Thales and Anaximander. He believed the Earth is flat. His arche is aer (or dense moist air or vapour), believing that aer is one and unlimited but also definite. He also believed that the eternal motion of air is where change come from.
Who is Pythagoras?
He is believed to be first person to use the word philosophy. He created the Pythagorean group, which was a philosophical school that had religious way of life, including beliefs in reincarnation and prohibition of beans. His arche is numbers, believing that all is “number”. He also believed that the Earth was a sphere and was heliocentric.
Who is Xenophanes?
A contemporary of Pythagoras. He rejected the Olympian religion and deities. He believed that natural phenomena should not be explained by divination but rather naturalistically investigated. His arche is “one”. He is also first of the Eleatics, who view reality as a single unchanging eternal thing.
Heraclitus
His arche is fire. Plato interprets Heraclitus as arguing for transience and instability of the intelligible world. He is often called “The Dark” or “The Riddler” for his obscure and ambiguous remarks and “Weeping Philosopher” for his attitude of misanthropy and tendency for melancholy. He came up with the quote “You can’t step into the same river twice”.
Who is Parmenides?
He is a pupil of Xenophanes but disagreed with him. His arche is “what is”, which points to that there cannot be “what is not”.
Who is Zeno?
He is a pupil of Parmenides and his adopted son and lover. He defended Parmenides’ views using paradoxes, showing that plurality also leads to obscurity. He also invented the stadium paradox. Solutions to the paradoxes involves calculus and concepts of actual and potential infinites.
Who is Empedocles?
His arche is the four elements of water, fire, earth, and air, which combines and separates the arche to create everything are the powers and strife. He believed that love and strife are cyclical forces in an eternal force.
Who is Anaxagoras?
His arche is nous (or mind). Before the world came into existence, the universe was just an undifferentiated and unlimited mass of stuff, these elements or seeds were put together by a nous that puts into motion. Nous is response to Parmenides’ argument that things have no motive force
Who are Leucippus and Democritus?
Their arche is atoms. They argued atoms made up the universe, which are not divisible infinitely.
Who are the Sophists?
Sophists were mostly travellingteachers, that focused on rhetorics and augmentation. For a fee, taught people the art of persuasion, public speaking, and argumentation. As philosophers that aimed at universal and objective truths, they rejected the idea that truth is relative.
What is abstraction?
By focusing on the common characteristics, we can have one word for many things.
What is extension?
Members or examples that are included in that concept
What is intension?
Essential definition; Both a sufficient and necessary condition for it to be called that term
What is meant by “family resemblance”?
“A complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail
What is ambiguous?
A word that has too many concepts associated with it.
