The key words of the salon's philosophers, explained simply. Each definition sums up the meaning the philosopher gives to the term; it is no substitute for reading their works.
318 terms
Knowledge is a priori when it does not depend on experience: it is then universal and necessary, like “every event has a cause” or the truths of mathematics. It is a posteriori when it comes from experience, like “this wall is white”. For Kant, all our knowledge begins with experience, but it does not all arise out of experience.
See also: Transcendental, Categories
The reasoning by which one forms a hypothesis to explain a surprising fact: if the hypothesis were true, the fact would be a matter of course. For Peirce, it is the only form of reasoning that introduces a new idea; deduction then draws out its consequences, and induction puts them to the test.
See also: Fallibilism
Potency is the capacity to become something; act is its realisation: the seed is a tree in potency, the full-grown tree is that tree in act. Motion is the passage from potency to act. Thomas Aquinas calls God “pure act”: in him, nothing remains to be realised.
See also: Prime mover, Four causes
A notion that comes from Aristotle. For Avicenna, it is the last of the celestial Intelligences, which illuminates the human mind and gives it intelligible forms, that is, universal ideas. We do not produce our knowledge on our own: we receive it when our mind is ready to welcome it.
See also: Emanation, Unity of the intellect
An adequate idea is complete: it contains within itself what is needed to explain what it represents. An inadequate idea is partial and confused: it shows us effects cut off from their causes. For Spinoza, error is nothing positive: it is merely a lack of knowledge, the lack that inadequate ideas involve.
See also: Kinds of knowledge, Affect
The school of thought of which Śaṅkara is the great master. Advaita means “not two”: there is not God on one side and the world and souls on the other, but a single reality, Brahman. Vedānta, “the end of the Vedas”, refers to the interpretation of the Upaniṣads, sacred texts of India.
What changes our power of acting, increasing or decreasing it, together with the idea we have of that change. For Spinoza, all affects derive from three primary ones: desire, joy (the passage to a greater power) and sadness (the passage to a lesser power). An affect is a passion when we are not its complete cause, and an action when it follows from our nature alone.
See also: Conatus, Adequate / inadequate idea
For Simone Weil, affliction is distinct from mere suffering: it seizes the whole soul, brands it with slavery and reduces it to the state of a thing. Yet if one neither flees nor denies it, it can become a path towards God.
Becoming a stranger to oneself. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes the worker as dispossessed of the product of his labour, of his activity, which has become a constraint, and finally of his humanity: instead of fulfilling himself in his work, he loses himself in it.
See also: Labour power, Commodity fetishism
When the literal sense of a sacred text contradicts a certain demonstration, Averroes holds that it must be interpreted by seeking its figurative sense. This reading is reserved for those capable of demonstration; spreading it to everyone would only cause confusion. A doctrine of “double truth” has been wrongly attributed to him: for him, truth is one.
See also: Faith and reason, Three classes of minds
A story from the Republic: prisoners chained at the back of a cave see only shadows cast on a wall and take them for reality. One of them, set free, climbs painfully towards the light and discovers the real world, then the sun. It is an image of philosophical education, which leads from sensible appearances to the Forms and the Good.
See also: Sensible world / intelligible world, Form of the Good
A movement of thought born in New England in the 1830s, with Emerson as its central figure. It holds that truth is discovered through intuition and inner experience rather than through traditions and institutions, and that nature is a source of spiritual elevation. The word echoes Kant, but does not have the same meaning as his “transcendental”.
See also: Over-Soul, Transparent eyeball, Transcendental
“Love of fate”: to want nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear what happens, still less to conceal it, but to love it.
See also: Eternal recurrence
Amour de soi (self-love) is a natural and good feeling, which leads every being to look after its own preservation. Amour-propre is a social and artificial feeling, born of comparison with others, which makes us want to be preferred: it is the source of vanity, jealousy and most of our ills.
See also: Natural goodness, Origin of inequality
For Sartre, anguish is not fear of an external danger, but awareness of our freedom: nothing guarantees that we will make the right choice, and we alone are answerable for it. It is the sign of our responsibility.
See also: Condemned to be free
The thesis that animals are very complex automata, all of whose movements can be explained mechanically, like those of a clock. Their lack of genuine language shows, according to Descartes, that they have no thought.
See also: Dualism
A contradiction into which reason necessarily falls when it claims to know what lies beyond all possible experience. Kant sets out four: for instance, one can prove with equal force that the world has a beginning in time and that it has none, or that human beings are free and that everything is subject to the necessity of nature. These conflicts reveal the limits of knowledge.
See also: Thing in itself, Postulates of practical reason
Freedom from disturbing passions — fear, anger, envy — and not insensitivity. It is the fruit of sound judgement about what is up to us and what is not: whoever desires only what is within their power no longer has any reason to be agitated.
See also: Ataraxia, Impressions
The two forces which, according to The Birth of Tragedy, gave birth to Greek tragedy. The Apollonian, from the god Apollo, is order, measure, beautiful form and dream; the Dionysian, from the god Dionysus, is intoxication, excess and fusion with life.
The absence of pain in the body. Together with ataraxia, it constitutes true pleasure according to Epicurus: not the accumulation of enjoyments, but the state of a body that does not suffer and a soul that is not troubled.
See also: Ataraxia
In What Is Art? (1897), Tolstoy defines art as the transmission of a feeling experienced by the artist to those who receive the work, through a kind of infection. True art must convey sincere, moral feelings accessible to all, and not flatter the refined taste of an elite — a criticism he applied to his own novels.
Absence of disturbance in the soul: the tranquillity of a mind freed from fears and empty desires. For Epicurus, together with aponia (absence of bodily pain), it constitutes true pleasure, the goal of the happy life. Stoics such as Epictetus also seek it, through the right use of judgements.
See also: Aponia, Classification of desires, Impressions
The innermost Self, the pure consciousness that remains behind the body, thoughts and emotions. For Śaṅkara, Ātman is not different from Brahman: their identity is not a union to be achieved, but a fact that has always already been true, hidden only by ignorance. This is the meaning of the Upaniṣadic saying “You are That”.
See also: Brahman, Advaita Vedānta, Liberation
Everything that exists is made of atoms, indivisible and eternal particles that move in the void; their combinations form all bodies, including the soul, which disperses at death. Epicurus takes up this physics from Democritus to free people from fear: nothing in nature depends on the whims of the gods.
See also: Clinamen, Death is nothing to us
For Simone Weil, attention is not a tense effort, but a form of availability: suspending one's thought, leaving it empty and open to what is. It is the substance of prayer as of true study, and “the rarest and purest form of generosity” towards the afflicted.
See also: Affliction, Decreation
What the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence. God has infinitely many attributes, but we know only two: thought and extension (matter). Body and mind are therefore not two separate things: they are one and the same reality, expressed under two attributes.
The capacity of the will to give itself its own law, through reason. For Kant, it is the foundation of morality and of human dignity. Its opposite, heteronomy, consists in receiving one's rule from elsewhere: from a desire, a fear, an authority or the pursuit of happiness.
See also: Categorical imperative, Duty
The direct and liberating understanding of the nature of things — impermanence, suffering, non-self — which puts an end to ignorance. The word “buddha” itself means “the Awakened One”: the one who has woken from the sleep of illusion.
See also: Nirvāṇa, Four Noble Truths
The way of lying to oneself to flee one's freedom, by making oneself a thing: invoking one's nature, character or circumstances, as if they decided in our place. Sartre gives the example of the café waiter who plays at being a café waiter, as if he could be nothing else.
See also: Condemned to be free, In-itself / for-itself
An expression born of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, organiser of the deportation of the Jews, which Arendt attended in Jerusalem in 1961. There she found not a monster, but an ordinary, zealous official, incapable of thinking from the standpoint of anyone else. The worst evil can be committed by people who have stopped thinking, without any particular hatred.
See also: Thinking, Totalitarianism
The base is the economic foundation of a society: its productive forces and relations of production. The superstructure includes law, politics, religion, morality and philosophy. For Marx, it is the economic base that conditions the superstructure; Engels would add: “in the last instance”.
See also: Historical materialism, Ideology
For Deleuze, becoming comes before fixed being: reality is made not of stable identities, but of processes and transformations. To become is not to imitate or to resemble: it is to enter a zone of proximity where something new is produced.
See also: Difference, Rhizome
For Peirce, a belief is a habit of action, which calms us; doubt is a state of unease that drives us to inquire. Inquiry is the struggle to pass from doubt to belief. Only real doubt, prompted by an actual difficulty, can set it in motion: doubting everything on command, like Descartes, is mere pretence.
See also: Methodical doubt, Pragmatic maxim, Inquiry
God, infinitely good, wise and powerful, chose to create, among all the possible worlds he conceived, the best one: not a world without evil, but the one in which evil is the condition of a greater overall perfection. Voltaire ridiculed this thesis in Candide, through the character of Pangloss.
See also: Theodicy, Critique of optimism
A question from The Prince: is it better to be loved or feared? The ideal would be to be both; but if one must choose, Machiavelli answers that it is safer to be feared, since people's love is fickle. The prince must nevertheless avoid being hated.
See also: Effectual truth of the matter, Machiavellianism
The highest happiness, which consists in understanding all things through God, that is, through Nature, and in feeling a lasting joy that Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God. It is not a reward granted afterwards: blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself (Ethics, V, 42).
See also: Kinds of knowledge, Deus sive Natura
An expression borrowed from the poet Antonin Artaud. For Deleuze and Guattari, it designates a body freed from the organisation imposed on it, which assigns each part a function; it becomes a surface on which desire can circulate freely.
See also: Desire as production
The absolute and single reality, “without a second”. For Śaṅkara, Brahman has no parts and no qualities that could be attributed to it (nirguṇa): it is pure being, consciousness and bliss. The manifold world and separate selves are only appearances of it, due to ignorance.
See also: Ātman, Advaita Vedānta, Ignorance
Zhuangzi once dreamed that he was a butterfly, fluttering happily about, unaware that he was Zhuangzi. On waking, he no longer knew whether he was Zhuangzi who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuangzi. The story illustrates the fragility of our certainties and the ceaseless transformation of things.
See also: Relativity of perspectives, Transformation of things
For Marx, capital is not merely a sum of money or machines: it is a social relation, the relation between those who own the means of production and those who have only their labour power. It is driven to accumulate endlessly; and the bourgeoisie, by creating the proletariat, produces, as Marx and Engels put it, its own “grave-diggers”.
See also: Surplus value, Proletariat
For Socrates, the main task of life: to make one's soul as good as possible, rather than caring about wealth, reputation or the body. He urged this tirelessly on his fellow Athenians, for the unexamined life is not worth living.
See also: No one does wrong willingly, Know thyself
A moral command that holds unconditionally, whatever goal one is pursuing. Its first formula asks us to act only according to a rule (a maxim) that we could will to become a universal law. Another asks us to treat humanity, in ourselves as in others, always at the same time as an end, and never merely as a means.
See also: Hypothetical imperative, Duty, Autonomy
The pure concepts of the understanding: forms that the mind applies to everything it knows, such as unity, reality, substance or causality. Kant counts twelve, arranged in four groups (quantity, quality, relation, modality). They do not come from experience: they are what make experience possible.
See also: A priori / a posteriori, Phenomenon
We never perceive the cause itself, nor any necessary connection between two events: we only see that they regularly follow one another, like the impact of one billiard ball and the movement of another. It is custom, or habit, born of this repetition, that makes us expect the second as soon as the first occurs.
See also: Problem of induction, Impressions and ideas
The title of an essay by Freud (1930). Civilisation requires people to renounce the satisfaction of their drives, sexual and aggressive; this renunciation produces a sense of guilt and a dissatisfaction that are not accidental, but inherent in civilised life.
See also: Death drive, Sublimation
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” write Marx and Engels in the Manifesto. Freemen and slaves, lords and serfs, bourgeois and proletarians: social groups with opposing interests clash, and these conflicts are the driving force of history.
See also: Proletariat, Historical materialism
Epicurus distinguishes three kinds of desires: natural and necessary desires (eating, drinking, shelter), natural but unnecessary desires (refined food), and empty desires, neither natural nor necessary (wealth, fame). To be happy, it is enough to satisfy the first: whoever knows how to be content with little is free.
See also: Ataraxia, Fourfold remedy
An idea is clear when it is present and manifest to an attentive mind, and distinct when it is so sharply separated from all others that it contains nothing obscure. For Descartes, everything we conceive clearly and distinctly is true, and it is God's truthfulness that guarantees this.
See also: Divine truthfulness, Rules of method
A slight spontaneous swerve of atoms as they fall, at no fixed time or place. Without it, atoms would fall in straight lines without ever meeting, and everything would be subject to rigid fate; thanks to it, bodies form and freedom becomes possible. The Latin word clinamen comes from Lucretius, a Roman poet of the 1st century BC and a distant follower of Epicurus.
See also: Atomism
The first certainty Descartes reaches at the end of doubt: even if an evil demon deceived me in everything, in order to be deceived I must think, and in order to think I must be. “I think, therefore I am” (the phrase of the Discourse on the Method; the Meditations say “I am, I exist”) is the unshakeable truth on which he seeks to rebuild all knowledge.
See also: Methodical doubt, Dualism, Flying man
Since human beings are responsible for what they do and what they fail to do, writers and intellectuals must take a stand on the problems of their time. To remain silent is still to choose: it is to consent.
See also: Condemned to be free
The illusion by which commodities seem to have value in themselves, like magical objects, whereas this value comes from human labour and from relations between people. Social relations thus take on the appearance of relations between things.
See also: Alienation, Capital
The egalitarian and communal principle that Nkrumah attributes to traditional African societies, in which land and resources were held in common. He sees it as the basis of a modern African socialism.
See also: Consciencism
For Marx, the future society without classes and without private ownership of the means of production, in which the free development of each would be the condition for the free development of all. He thinks of it as the outcome of the real movement of history, rather than as an ideal to be imposed.
See also: Proletariat, Class struggle
A Latin word meaning “effort” or “striving”. Each thing, as far as it can, strives to persevere in its being: this striving is not one quality among others, it is the very essence of the thing. In human beings, conatus that is conscious of itself is called desire.
See also: Affect
Man did not choose to be free, but he cannot stop being so: even refusing to choose is still a choice. He is therefore entirely responsible for what he makes of himself, and in choosing himself he is also answerable for the image of humanity that he holds out to others.
See also: Anguish, Bad faith, Commitment
In the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, Rousseau celebrates it as a “divine instinct”: an inner feeling, surer than the reasonings of philosophers, which makes us love the good and judge our actions.
See also: Pity
The philosophy proposed by Nkrumah (1964) for decolonised Africa. It recognises the three heritages of African society — African tradition, the Islamic contribution and the Euro-Christian contribution — and seeks to bring them together, on a materialist basis, towards a society that recovers the egalitarianism of traditional African societies without idealising the past.
See also: Communalism, Historical materialism
Literally “thirst”: the greedy desire that clings to pleasures, to existence or even to non-existence. According to the second Noble Truth, it is what produces suffering and keeps the cycle of rebirth going.
See also: Four Noble Truths, Saṃsāra
For Deleuze and Guattari, in What Is Philosophy? (1991), philosophy is neither contemplation, nor reflection, nor communication: it is the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts. A concept is not a given truth, but a creation that responds to a problem.
See also: Plane of immanence
For Berdyaev, human beings are called not only to be saved, but to create: creation is not a luxury added to spiritual life, it is an essential part of it, a response to the creative call of God himself. This is the theme of his book The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916).
See also: Uncreated freedom
In the 18th century, optimism was the doctrine that “all is well” in the best of all possible worlds. After the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Voltaire judged it indecent in the face of real suffering, and ridiculed it in Candide: evil exists, and there is no point in justifying it.
See also: Best of all possible worlds, We must cultivate our garden
Dewey opposes the idea, inherited from the Greeks, that knowing consists in contemplating the world from outside, like a spectator. For him, knowing is a way of acting in and on the world.
See also: Instrumentalism, Mirror of nature
Tolstoy sees the state, the army, the courts and property as forms of organised violence, which the rich and powerful impose on the poor in the name of law and order. His position has been described as Christian anarchism.
See also: Non-resistance to evil by violence
The “divine sign” whose voice Socrates said he had heard since childhood. It never told him what to do: it only warned him not to do what he was about to do.
A Chinese word meaning “the Way”. For Laozi, it is the nameless origin of all things, which gives birth to them and runs through them without ever taking possession of them. It escapes words: the Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao. Zhuangzi sees it present in everything, even in the humblest things, embracing every point of view without fixing on any. One does not define it; one attunes oneself to it.
Often translated as “virtue”, in the old sense of power or efficacy. It is the strength proper to a being when it follows the Dao. The title of the book attributed to Laozi, the Dao De Jing, means “the classic of the Way and its virtue”.
See also: Dao
A notion introduced by Freud in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: a tendency towards destruction and a return to the inanimate state, turned against oneself or against others. It is opposed to Eros, the life drives, which tend to unite and preserve. It is sometimes called Thanatos, a word Freud himself hardly ever used.
See also: Eros, Civilization and Its Discontents
Epicurus's argument against the fear of death: all good and evil lie in sensation, and death is the end of all sensation. While we exist, death is not present; when death is present, we no longer exist. There is therefore nothing to fear in it.
See also: Fourfold remedy, Atomism
An announcement made by a “madman” in The Gay Science: “God is dead… And we have killed him.” Nietzsche does not prove that God does not exist; he observes that belief in God no longer grounds our values. It is an immense event, which threatens humanity with nihilism but also opens up the possibility of creating new values.
See also: Nihilism, Revaluation of all values
The renunciation of self-assertion, to make room within oneself for emptiness and let God come. For Simone Weil, God withdrew to let the world exist; human beings respond to this love by consenting to no longer want to be the centre.
See also: Gravity and Grace, Attention
Belief in a creator God, the first cause of the order of the universe, without adherence to any revealed religion, its dogmas or its clergy. Voltaire expresses it through an image: the universe is like a clock, and he cannot imagine that this clock exists without a clockmaker.
See also: Écrasez l'infâme
For Dewey, democracy is not first of all a form of government, but “a mode of associated living”, of conjoint, communicated experience. It must be constantly reinvented in concrete institutions, starting with the school.
See also: Education and growth
The principle that every phenomenon arises in dependence on other phenomena: when this exists, that comes to be; when this ceases, that ceases. Nothing exists by itself alone. The Buddha sees in it the chain of causes that produces suffering; Nāgārjuna concludes from it that all things are empty of inherent nature.
See also: Emptiness, Non-self, Inherent nature
In Anti-Oedipus (1972), Deleuze and Guattari oppose the idea that desire is a lack: desire produces, it creates connections, flows and the real. They reproach psychoanalysis for having reduced it to the family triangle of father, mother and child.
See also: Oedipus complex, Body without organs
Everything that happens is the necessary effect of prior causes, and freedom is an illusion. In Jacques the Fatalist, Diderot puts this idea in the mouth of Jacques, who repeats, after his captain, that everything that happens to us “was written up above”, while showing with humour how, in practice, we live as if we were free.
See also: Materialism
The movement by which something leaves its territory, sheds its codes and attachments; it is always accompanied by reterritorialisations, which fix things again. For Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism constantly deterritorialises flows — of money, labour, desire — before reterritorialising them elsewhere.
See also: Rhizome, Line of flight
“God, or Nature”. The phrase by which Spinoza identifies God with the whole of Nature: not a creator standing outside the world, endowed with will and pursuing goals, but the single, infinite reality of which all things are part.
See also: Substance, Natura naturans / natura naturata
For Plato, the art of conversing through questions and answers, and then the method by which the mind rises from mere hypotheses to the Forms and the Good: for him, the highest science. For Marx, heir to Hegel, dialectic is the movement of reality itself, which advances through contradictions: it is the struggles between social classes that transform history.
See also: Forms, Historical materialism, Class struggle
In Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze seeks to think difference in itself, and not as a mere gap between two already identical things. He reproaches the tradition, from Plato to Hegel, for always subordinating difference to identity.
See also: Becoming
God, being perfect, cannot be a deceiver, since deception is an imperfection. This truthfulness guarantees that our clear and distinct ideas are true and that the external world really exists. Our errors come not from God, but from our will, which judges beyond what the understanding clearly conceives.
See also: Clear and distinct idea, Cogito
For Freud, a dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. The content we remember on waking hides a latent meaning, which can be recovered through free association. The interpretation of dreams is, in his words, the “royal road” to the unconscious.
See also: Unconscious, Free association
An internal pressure, on the frontier between body and mind, that directs activity towards an aim: obtaining satisfaction. Unlike animal instinct, it has no object fixed in advance and can change its object or its aim.
See also: Libido, Death drive, Sublimation
The thesis that soul and body are two really distinct substances: the soul is a thinking thing, without extension; the body is an extended thing, which does not think. The difficulty then becomes explaining their union, which experience nonetheless makes us feel at every moment.
See also: Substance, Cogito, Pineal gland
A Pāli word often translated as “suffering”, but in the broader sense of unsatisfactoriness: the fact that no experience is ever fully satisfying, not even pleasures, since they pass. It is the observation stated in the first of the Four Noble Truths.
See also: Four Noble Truths, Craving, Impermanence
The necessity of performing an action out of respect for the moral law. Kant distinguishes acting in accordance with duty — like the shopkeeper who does not cheat an inexperienced customer, simply out of self-interest, to keep his customers — from acting from duty: only the second kind of action has moral worth.
See also: Categorical imperative, Autonomy
The phrase with which Voltaire often ended his letters. “The infamous thing” refers to superstition and religious fanaticism, and to the intolerance of churches that persecute in the name of their dogmas.
For Dewey, education is not preparation for future life, nor a filling of the mind: it is life itself, a continuous growth through reflective experience. Pupils learn by doing, through shared activities and real problems, rather than by memorising facts.
See also: Democracy as a way of life, Inquiry
Machiavelli wants to stick to the way things actually happen, not to imaginary republics. People must be taken as they are, not as one would like them to be. That is why a prince must learn to be able not to be good, and to use this or not according to necessity.
See also: Virtù, Better feared than loved
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” With this famous sentence, Marx demands that thought become practical, that is, action upon the world.
See also: Historical materialism
The way the world proceeds from God according to Avicenna: not by an arbitrary choice, but necessarily, as light emanates from the sun. From the Necessary Being proceeds a first Intelligence, then others, degree by degree, down to the Active Intellect and the sublunary world.
See also: Necessary Being, Active Intellect
For Laozi, emptiness is not a lack but what makes things useful: the hollow of the hub lets the wheel turn, the hollow of the vessel lets it be filled, the space of a room makes it habitable. The sage cultivates this emptiness within: the openness of a mind cluttered with nothing.
The absence of inherent nature: nothing exists independently, since everything arises in dependence on other things. Emptiness is therefore not nothingness, but another way of expressing dependent origination. Nāgārjuna specifies that emptiness is itself empty: turning it into a new thesis to cling to would mean falling back into the very error it was meant to cure.
See also: Inherent nature, Dependent origination, Two truths
The great systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts, edited by Diderot and d'Alembert from 1751. It aimed to gather and spread the knowledge of its time, including that of craftsmen, and to push back prejudice.
A form of government in which an absolute ruler, advised by philosophers, reforms his country according to reason. Voltaire, who corresponded with Frederick II of Prussia and Catherine II of Russia, preferred such reforms from above to revolutionary upheavals.
See also: Tolerance
For Plato, love is a desire for beauty that can rise by degrees: from attraction to one beautiful body to love of all beautiful bodies, then to the beauty of souls and of knowledge, up to the contemplation of Beauty itself; this is what the Symposium sets out. For Freud, Eros refers to all the life drives, which tend to unite and preserve, as opposed to the death drive.
See also: Forms, Death drive
The essence of a thing is what it is; its existence is the fact that it is. Avicenna clearly distinguishes them: one can perfectly well conceive what a horse is without knowing whether one exists. In every created thing, existence is therefore added to essence; in God alone, they are one. Thomas Aquinas takes up this distinction and makes it a pillar of his thought.
See also: Necessary Being, Subsistent being itself
A thought put to the test by Nietzsche: what if you had to live your life again exactly as it was, an infinite number of times, with every pain and every joy? Whoever could will this would say a total yes to their existence. Eternal recurrence is a criterion: live in such a way that you could wish to live again.
A thesis defended by Averroes, following Aristotle, against the theologian al-Ghazālī: the world was not created at a moment in time, as a craftsman makes an object. It depends entirely on God, who eternally brings it into actuality.
See also: Prime mover
A notion drawn from The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), an essay by Simone de Beauvoir. Human beings are ambiguous: at once free and caught up in a body, a world and a history. An existentialist ethics does not flee this ambiguity; it asks us to will our own freedom, which means also willing that of others.
Evil is not a thing, a substance existing in its own right: it is the absence of a good that should be there, as blindness is the absence of sight. Augustine, who had first adhered to Manichaeism, for which evil was a real power opposed to the good, came to this thesis: everything that exists is good insofar as it exists. Thomas Aquinas takes it up.
See also: Original sin, Free will
The central formula of existentialism. A manufactured object, like a paper-knife, has an essence defined before it exists: the craftsman knows in advance what it will be. Human beings, on the contrary, exist first and then define themselves through their choices and acts; there is no human nature fixed in advance. Simone de Beauvoir concludes from this in particular that there is no “feminine nature”.
See also: Condemned to be free, One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman
The faculty of judging, choosing and willing: the only thing that belongs entirely to us. Neither prison, nor illness, nor a tyrant can compel it. For Epictetus, true good and evil are found there alone.
See also: What is up to us, Inner freedom
The question of their relationship runs through medieval thought. Augustine invites us to believe in order to understand, and to understand in order to believe. Averroes holds that philosophy and Revelation cannot contradict each other, since they come from the same truth. Thomas Aquinas distinguishes what reason can know by itself, such as the existence of God, from what faith alone teaches, such as the Trinity; since both come from God, they cannot truly be opposed.
See also: Allegorical interpretation, Five ways, Natural law
The thesis that none of our knowledge is absolutely certain: all of it may be revised. Far from leading to discouragement, it is the foundation of scientific method, which corrects its errors through lasting confrontation with reality, within a community of inquirers.
See also: Abduction, Belief and doubt
What do all “games” have in common: chess, football, card games, children's ring games? Nothing single, answers Wittgenstein, but a network of overlapping similarities, like the features of a family. We should not look for a common essence behind every word.
See also: Meaning is use
A practice described by Zhuangzi: emptying one's mind of opinions, desires and accumulated knowledge, to become open like emptiness, which welcomes all things. It means listening not with the ears, nor even with the mind, but with the breath (qi).
See also: Emptiness, Free and easy wandering
The respect and care owed to one's parents, during their lifetime and after their death. Confucius sees it as the root of the social virtues: whoever learns to honour their parents learns to respect the order of the family, and then that of society.
The set of words we use to justify our actions, our beliefs and our lives, beyond which we have no further arguments. For Rorty, no vocabulary is closer to reality than any other: vocabularies are judged by their usefulness for our purposes, and intellectual progress consists in redescribing things differently.
See also: Liberal ironist, Pragmatism
The five arguments by which Thomas Aquinas shows that the existence of God can be proved by reason, starting from the world: motion requires a first mover; causes, a first cause; contingent beings, a necessary being; degrees of perfection, a perfect being; the ordering of things towards an end, an intelligence that directs them.
See also: Prime mover, Necessary Being, Faith and reason
Avicenna's thought experiment: imagine a man created all at once, suspended in the air, his eyes veiled, his limbs spread apart so that he touches nothing, not even his own body. He would perceive nothing, and yet he would know that he exists. Avicenna concludes that the soul knows itself directly, independently of the body.
See also: Cogito
Emerson writes that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. Whoever is growing must dare to say today what they think, even if it contradicts what they said yesterday: better a lived truth than a false constancy.
See also: Self-Reliance
In her essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, Simone Weil defines force as that which turns anyone subjected to it into a thing: in the extreme case, a corpse. It petrifies both those who suffer it and those who think they possess it.
See also: Affliction
Every natural thing is made up of matter, what it is made of, and form, what makes it the thing it is. Form does not exist in a separate world, like Plato's Forms: it is in the thing itself. For a living being, the form is the soul. Thomas Aquinas takes up this idea: the human soul is the form of the body, not a complete substance shut up in it as in a prison; yet it can continue to exist after death.
See also: Four causes, Forms, Substance
The set of shared practices, habits and ways of acting in which our language is rooted. “To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life,” says Wittgenstein. Understanding other people's words requires sharing, at least in part, their form of life.
See also: Language-game, Private language
The highest of the Forms, lying even beyond being. Just as the sun makes things visible and makes them grow, the Good makes the Forms knowable and gives them their being. Knowing it is the goal of philosophy and the condition of just government.
See also: Forms, Allegory of the cave, Philosopher-king
Intelligible realities, eternal and unchanging, of which sensible things are only imperfect copies: there are many beautiful things, but only one Form of Beauty, which makes them beautiful. They are grasped not by the senses but by the intellect. Aristotle would later reject this separate world: for him, form lies in the thing itself.
See also: Sensible world / intelligible world, Form of the Good, Form and matter
The unpredictable chance of circumstances. According to Machiavelli, fortune governs half of our actions, but leaves the other half to us. It is like a river in flood: it cannot be stopped, but in calm times one can build dykes and channels to contain its violence.
See also: Virtù
To understand a thing, four questions must be answered. The material cause: what is it made of (the bronze of a statue)? The formal cause: what is it, what is its form? The efficient cause: who or what produced it (the sculptor)? The final cause: for the sake of what does it exist? Against those who consider it illusory, Aristotle holds the final cause to be fully real in nature.
See also: Form and matter, Act and potency
The heart of the Buddha's teaching, set out like a medical diagnosis: life involves suffering (dukkha); suffering has a cause, craving; it can cease, and that cessation is nirvāṇa; and finally there is a path leading to it, the Noble Eightfold Path.
See also: Dukkha, Craving, Nirvāṇa, Noble Eightfold Path
The four moral dispositions present in every human being: compassion, shame at wrongdoing, respect, and the sense of right and wrong. When cultivated, they become the four virtues: humaneness, righteousness, ritual propriety and wisdom. Mencius gives a famous example: anyone who sees a child about to fall into a well immediately feels compassion, without any calculation.
See also: Goodness of human nature, Ren, Yi
A summary of Epicurus's teaching in four maxims: the gods are not to be feared; death is not to be dreaded; the good is easy to obtain; evil is easy to endure.
See also: Death is nothing to us, Classification of desires
The “free and easy wandering”, title of the first chapter of the Zhuangzi: a mind attached neither to self, nor to merit, nor to fame, moving freely. The great bird Peng, which soars to heights the little quail cannot imagine, gives a first image of it.
See also: Usefulness of the useless, Fasting of the heart
The fundamental rule of psychoanalytic treatment: the patient says everything that comes to mind, without sorting or censoring, even what seems absurd or embarrassing. These chains of thoughts make it possible to trace back to what has been repressed.
See also: Dream, Repression
The capacity to choose, which God gave to human beings. For Augustine, it is the misuse of free will, and not God, that causes moral evil. But since the Fall, the will is as if captive: free in principle, it needs grace to turn truly towards the good.
See also: Grace, Evil as privation
Hume notes that many moralists pass, without warning, from statements about what is to statements about what ought to be. Yet an ought cannot be logically derived from a mere fact: that people act in a certain way does not prove that they ought to.
See also: Reason, the slave of the passions
Nietzsche's method: instead of looking for the eternal foundation of our values, he investigates their historical and psychological origin. Who invented the words “good” and “evil”, in whose interest, out of what kind of life? A value may have a far less noble origin than it claims.
See also: Ressentiment, Master morality / slave morality
The will of the people considered as a body, which always aims at the common interest. It is not the mere sum of private interests, which Rousseau calls the will of all. By obeying the law, the expression of the general will, each person obeys only themselves: this is the foundation of political legitimacy.
See also: Social contract
Originally a noble by birth, the junzi becomes, for Confucius, a person noble by conduct. He cares about righteousness rather than profit, corrects himself before reproving others, and strives to keep learning all his life. He is contrasted with “the petty man”.
Moral virtue is a disposition to choose the mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency: courage lies between rashness and cowardice, generosity between extravagance and stinginess. This mean is not a mathematical average: it depends on the situation and is discerned by practical wisdom.
See also: Practical wisdom, Habitus
Mencius's thesis that human nature is originally good: it tends towards goodness as water tends downwards. Evil does not come from our nature, but from circumstances that divert or neglect it, just as a deforested mountain ends up looking naturally bare.
See also: Four sprouts
Governing by example rather than by law and punishment. According to Confucius, a people constrained by punishments only seeks to avoid them, without any sense of shame; guided by virtue and the rites, it gains a sense of shame and corrects itself. Mencius adds that a good ruler feeds his people and does not exhaust them with pointless wars.
See also: Mandate of Heaven, Li, Rectification of names
God's free gift, which no work can earn. For Augustine, it is necessary for the will, wounded by sin, to be able to will and do the good. Thomas Aquinas sees it in harmony with nature: grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it.
See also: Original sin, Free will
A story embedded in The Brothers Karamazov: Christ returns to Seville at the time of the Inquisition, and the Grand Inquisitor has him arrested. He reproaches him for having offered human beings too heavy a freedom; the Church, for its part, gives them bread and governs them through miracle, mystery and authority, in exchange for that freedom. Christ answers only with a kiss.
The title of a collection of Simone Weil's thoughts, published after her death. Gravity refers to everything in us that pulls downwards by a kind of natural law: selfishness, the search for compensation, submission to force. Only grace, which comes from elsewhere, can raise the soul above this law.
See also: Decreation, Grace
A disposition acquired by repeating actions, which becomes a kind of second nature. For Aristotle, we become just by doing just actions, as we become lyre players by playing the lyre. Thomas Aquinas, who read Aristotle in Latin, where hexis is rendered as habitus, defines virtue as a habitus inclining towards the good.
See also: Golden mean, Happiness
Happiness understood not as a passing feeling but as a life well lived: the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, carried on over a whole life. It is the supreme good, sought for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else. As Aristotle says, one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one happy day make happiness.
See also: Golden mean, Habitus
Marx's conception of history (the expression is Engels's): it is not ideas that drive the world, but the material conditions of life, that is, the way human beings produce their means of existence. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Nkrumah draws on this materialism to think about the liberation of Africa.
See also: Base / superstructure, Class struggle, Dialectic
A conditional command of the form “if you want this result, do that”: if you want to be healthy, exercise. It indicates the means to an end, but says nothing about the moral worth of that end. Kant contrasts it with the categorical imperative.
See also: Categorical imperative
The three agencies of the psychical apparatus according to Freud. The id is the reservoir of the drives, which seek immediate satisfaction. The superego is the moral agency, formed by internalising parental prohibitions. The ego, partly conscious, tries to reconcile the demands of the id, the superego and reality.
See also: Unconscious, Drive
There are no two perfectly identical beings in nature: two things that differed in nothing would not be two, but one. Leibniz recounts that a gentleman, challenged by the Electress of Hanover, searched a whole garden in vain for two exactly identical leaves.
See also: Monad
For Marx, a set of ideas that reflects the interests of a class while presenting itself as universal and natural. “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”: they justify the existing social order and conceal its relations of domination.
See also: Base / superstructure, Opium of the people
An idea attributed to Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, although the exact phrase does not appear as such in the novel. Without God or the immortality of the soul, nothing would ground good and evil any longer: people would go on acting, but their acts would no longer be truly guilty or virtuous. Dostoevsky explores the dizzying consequences of this thought.
See also: Grand Inquisitor, Returning the ticket
The metaphysical ignorance that makes us take the manifold world and the individual self for ultimate reality. It is not a mere lack of information, but a fundamental error about what we are, which only knowledge can dispel.
See also: Superimposition, Liberating knowledge
Everything that is compounded changes and eventually passes away: nothing remains identical from one moment to the next. Together with suffering and non-self, impermanence is one of the three marks of all existence.
The impressions that things make on our mind. It is not things that disturb us, but the judgements we make about them: death is nothing terrible; what is terrible is the opinion that death is terrible. The work of philosophy is to examine each impression before giving it our assent.
See also: What is up to us, Ataraxia
For Hume, all the contents of the mind divide into impressions — sensations and emotions in all their liveliness, as we experience them — and ideas, which are faint copies of them, in memory or imagination. To know whether an idea has any meaning, one must look for the impression from which it derives.
See also: Causation and custom, The self as a bundle of perceptions
The two regions of being in Being and Nothingness. The in-itself is the being of things: it is what it is, full and without distance from itself. The for-itself is the being of consciousness: it is never simply what it is, it constantly projects itself towards what it is not yet.
See also: Bad faith, The look of the other
Self-existence, independent of anything else, which we spontaneously attribute to objects, to people and to ourselves. Nāgārjuna shows that nothing possesses it: what depends on something else cannot exist by itself alone.
See also: Emptiness, Dependent origination
For Epictetus, himself a former slave, free is the person who desires only what is up to them: nothing can then hinder or compel them. The rich master, prisoner of his desires and fears, is more of a slave than the slave who masters his judgements.
See also: What is up to us, Faculty of choice
For Dewey, thought always arises from a problematic situation, concretely experienced. Inquiry is the process by which this indeterminate situation is transformed into a resolved one, by formulating and testing hypotheses. All of logic comes down to this procedure, which holds for science as well as for everyday life.
See also: Pragmatism, Instrumentalism
The name Dewey gives to his own version of pragmatism: ideas and theories are instruments for solving problems and acting on the world, not copies of an external reality. Like tools, they are judged by how well they work.
See also: Inquiry, Critique of the spectator theory of knowledge
For Augustine, it is by turning inward, and not by scattering oneself outside, that one finds truth and God. He addresses God as one who is “more inward than my innermost self”. The search for truth begins with a return to oneself.
See also: Time, distension of the soul, Faith and reason
A Sanskrit word meaning “action”. Every intentional act leaves a trace and produces effects, in this life or in another. For the Buddha, it is intention that makes karma. For Śaṅkara, karma governs the world of experience, but no action can bring about liberation, which is a matter of knowledge alone.
See also: Saṃsāra, Liberation
Spinoza's three ways of knowing. The first kind, imagination or opinion, comes from the senses and from hearsay: it is the only source of error. The second, reason, knows things through notions common to all of them. The third, intuitive knowledge, grasps the essence of singular things directly, through God: it is what leads to blessedness.
See also: Adequate / inadequate idea, Blessedness
An inscription at the temple of Apollo at Delphi, which Socrates made his own: before claiming to know the world, one must know what one is and recognise the limits of one's own knowledge.
See also: Knowledge of one's ignorance, Care of the soul
Socrates' own wisdom: he considers himself wiser than others on one point only, that he does not think he knows what he does not know. This, according to the Apology, is how he understands the oracle at Delphi that had declared him the wisest of men. It is often summed up as “I know that I know nothing”, a phrase that does not, however, appear as such in Plato.
See also: Know thyself, Socratic irony
The capacity to work, which the worker, owning no means of production, is forced to sell like a commodity. Marx distinguishes labour power, which the capitalist buys, from actual labour, which produces more value than it cost.
See also: Surplus value, Alienation
The three activities of the human condition according to Arendt. Labour meets vital needs and leaves nothing lasting behind. Work fabricates durable objects that form a common world. Action, carried out through words and deeds before others, in the public space, is the properly political activity.
A notion from the Philosophical Investigations: speaking is not only describing the world, it is taking part in rule-governed activities, such as giving an order, telling a story, joking, praying or thanking. A word has meaning only within such a game, which is itself part of a form of life.
See also: Meaning is use, Form of life
A sea monster from the Bible, which Hobbes makes the image of the state: a “mortal god” formed from the multitude of citizens, who have entrusted it with their power to guarantee peace. Its authority must be absolute and indivisible, since divided power falls back into civil war; but if it no longer protects the lives of its subjects, they no longer owe it obedience.
See also: Social contract, War of all against all
Rites in the broad sense: ceremonies, but also politeness, customs and proprieties that regulate social life. For Confucius, they are not empty formalities: they give form to humaneness (ren) and educate the feelings. Mencius makes it one of the four virtues, growing from the seed of respect.
See also: Ren, Filial piety
The figure proposed by Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989). The ironist knows that their own final vocabulary is contingent and could be otherwise; the liberal thinks that cruelty is the worst thing we do. One can be both at once, without grounding them in a single theory.
See also: Final vocabulary, Solidarity
Direct knowledge of reality, not learned knowledge: seeing that the Self is Brahman. For Śaṅkara, it alone liberates, just as light alone shows that the snake was only a rope.
See also: Liberation, Ignorance
Release from the cycle of rebirth. For Śaṅkara, no action, no rite, no devotion is enough to produce it, because it is not a new state to be attained: it is the recognition of what has always been the case, the identity of the Self and Brahman.
See also: Liberating knowledge, Ātman, Karma
The energy of the sexual drives, in the broad sense Freud gives to sexuality, which includes the pursuit of pleasure from childhood onwards. It can be invested in very different objects and can be transformed.
See also: Drive, Sublimation
The path by which something escapes a system, an organisation or a power. To flee is not to give up acting: it is to invent, to trace a new path through which a system comes undone.
See also: Deterritorialisation
An Epicurean maxim advising us to live apart from public life, honours and politics, which are sources of agitation and fear, in order to preserve our tranquillity among friends. For Epicurus, friendship is one of the greatest goods of the happy life.
See also: Ataraxia
A Stoic principle: living in harmony with the reason that orders the universe and with our own nature as rational beings. This means accepting what happens as part of the order of the world, and doing our best in what is up to us.
See also: What is up to us, Metaphor of the actor
A word coined after Machiavelli to describe cynical and unscrupulous political cunning. This everyday meaning partly betrays his thought: Machiavelli lucidly describes the means of power, but he subordinates them to the safety of the state and the freedom of the city.
See also: Better feared than loved, Effectual truth of the matter
The “school of the middle”, stemming from the thought of Nāgārjuna, its first great master. It extends the Buddha's Middle Way by rejecting both the idea that things exist by themselves and the idea that they do not exist at all.
See also: Middle Way, Emptiness, Tetralemma
“The art of midwifery”: Socrates, the son of a midwife, compares himself to a midwife of minds. Through his questions, he does not teach ready-made knowledge, but helps the other person bring forth the ideas they carry within them, and tell the true from the false.
See also: Socratic irony, Refutation
The principle that Heaven entrusts power to a ruler as long as he governs virtuously and takes care of the people. For Mencius, a tyrant who oppresses his people loses this mandate: overthrowing him is not killing a ruler, but punishing a mere criminal.
See also: Government by virtue
Master morality arises from self-affirmation: “good” is what is noble, strong, proud. Slave morality arises from ressentiment: it begins by saying no to what is superior to it and calls humility, pity and obedience “good”. For Nietzsche, Christian morality is of this second type.
See also: Ressentiment, Genealogy
The thesis that nothing exists but matter, variously organised. For Diderot, thought and sensibility do not come from a separate soul: they emerge from matter when it is organised in a certain way, as in a living being. He even imagines a sensibility diffused throughout all matter.
See also: Determinism, Historical materialism
The status of the world according to Śaṅkara: it is not real in the absolute sense, since only Brahman is, but neither is it purely unreal, like a square circle, since it appears and functions. It is called mithyā, “illusory”: neither real nor unreal, it is indeterminable (anirvacanīya), comparable to a dream until one has woken up. Māyā refers to the power of illusion that makes this multiplicity appear.
See also: Superimposition, Two truths
In most cases, the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Instead of looking for what a word “designates”, like a label stuck on a thing, we must look at how it is used. Wittgenstein thereby criticises the view he himself had defended in the Tractatus.
See also: Language-game, Tractatus
The “thought at the meridian” (pensée de midi), inspired by Greece and the Mediterranean, which Camus opposes to ideologies of excess: a way of thinking that knows its limits, rejects the absolute and maintains the tension between revolt and respect for life.
See also: Revolt
An image from the Handbook: you are an actor in a play whose author has chosen your role, short or long, that of a beggar, a lame man or a magistrate. Choosing the role is not yours to do; your business is to play well the one you have been given.
See also: Living according to nature
The procedure by which Descartes rejects as false everything that can be doubted — the senses, which sometimes deceive, dreams, and even mathematics, by supposing a deceiving God, then an evil demon — in order to find absolute certainty. It is not scepticism: doubt is a means, not an end. Peirce would later criticise it as a feigned doubt, with no real effect on our beliefs.
See also: Cogito, Belief and doubt
The path that avoids two extremes: the pursuit of pleasure and ascetic self-mortification, both of which the Buddha had practised before his awakening. More broadly, it rejects extreme positions, such as the idea of an eternal self and that of total annihilation. This is the origin of the name of the school stemming from Nāgārjuna, the Madhyamaka, “the school of the middle”.
See also: Noble Eightfold Path, Madhyamaka
An image criticised by Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979): the mind would be like a mirror tasked with faithfully reflecting reality, and philosophy's job would be to check the quality of that reflection. Rorty proposes to abandon this metaphor, inherited from Plato and Descartes, rather than to refute it.
See also: Final vocabulary, Critique of the spectator theory of knowledge
A reasonable doubt that, without claiming to refute everything, recalls the limits of our understanding: it invites modesty, proportioning belief to evidence, and distrust of speculations that go beyond experience. It is on this principle that Hume judges that testimony cannot establish a miracle as firmly as experience establishes the laws of nature.
See also: Problem of induction
What exists in something else and is conceived through something else. Singular things — a stone, a tree, a human being — are modes of the one substance: ways of being of God, or Nature, under a given attribute.
From the Greek monas, “unit”. For Leibniz, reality is made of simple substances without parts, the monads. They have “no windows through which anything could come in or go out”. Yet each one reflects the whole universe from its own point of view, like a town seen from different sides.
See also: Pre-established harmony, Petites perceptions
The fact that every human being, by being born, is a new beginning. For Arendt, this is what makes action possible: people can always begin something new and unpredictable, and this is what grounds hope in human affairs.
See also: Labour, work, action, Plurality
Two ways of considering the same Nature. Natura naturans is God as cause, the power that produces everything by the sole necessity of its nature. Natura naturata is everything that follows from that power: all modes, all things produced. There is not a creator on one side and a world on the other, but a single reality seen both as cause and as effect.
See also: Deus sive Natura, Mode
Rousseau's thesis: man is naturally good, and it is society that makes him wicked. Rousseau himself never speaks of the “noble savage”: he means that vices are not inscribed in human nature, but arise from life in society, from property and from comparison with others.
See also: State of nature, Amour de soi / amour-propre, Pity
For Thomas Aquinas, natural law is the participation of God's eternal law in the rational creature: a set of moral principles that everyone can know by reason alone, before any revelation, the first being that good is to be done and evil avoided. For Hobbes, the laws of nature are rules that reason discovers in order to secure peace, the first being to seek peace when there is hope of obtaining it.
See also: Faith and reason, State of nature
The being whose very essence is to exist, and which therefore cannot not be. All other things are “possible in themselves”: they could fail to exist and receive their existence from a cause. Since the chain of causes cannot go back to infinity, there must be a Being necessary in itself, which is God.
See also: Essence and existence, Emanation
A principle of Emile: early education should not instil virtues or truths, but protect the child's heart from vice and the child's mind from error. It follows the natural development of the child and lets them learn from the experience of things rather than from books.
See also: Natural goodness
For Kwame Nkrumah, the most dangerous form of imperialism: a state has all the outward trappings of sovereignty — flag, army, seat at the UN — but its economic policy is dictated from outside by former colonial powers or foreign financial interests. He analyses it in Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965).
See also: Pan-Africanism, Consciencism
The situation in which the highest values devalue themselves: nothing seems to have meaning or purpose any more. For Nietzsche, it is the consequence of the death of God, but also the hidden core of a morality that already despised life in the name of another world. It must be gone through in order to create new values.
See also: Death of God, Revaluation of all values
Literally “extinction”, like that of a flame that is no longer fed. It is the cessation of craving, hatred and delusion, and therefore of suffering and of the cycle of rebirth. It is neither a place nor a paradise, but a state of liberated peace. Nāgārjuna adds that nirvāṇa does not differ from saṃsāra in its nature: what changes is the right way of seeing things.
See also: Saṃsāra, Four Noble Truths, Awakening
Socrates' thesis that no one does evil knowingly: whoever acts badly is mistaken about what is really good for them. Virtue is therefore a form of knowledge, and vice a form of ignorance; education and self-examination are the remedies for evil.
See also: Care of the soul, Knowledge of one's ignorance
The path that leads to the end of suffering, in eight aspects practised together: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. “Right” here means appropriate, conducive to peace.
See also: Four Noble Truths, Middle Way
For Tolstoy, the heart of Christ's teaching, drawn from the Sermon on the Mount: do not answer evil with evil, nor violence with violence. This idea, which also condemns war and the courts, inspired Gandhi, with whom Tolstoy corresponded.
See also: The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Critique of the state
The absence of a self: there is no permanent, fixed and separate “I” within us. What we call “I” is a changing combination of five components — the body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness. Believing oneself to be an unchanging self feeds attachment, and therefore suffering.
See also: Impermanence, Dependent origination
The process by which spirit, living and free, hardens into a world of objects subject to necessity, the impersonal and the collective. For Berdyaev, this objectified world is a fall of spirit; the task of existence is to break through it towards true freedom and communion.
See also: Person / individual
For Freud, the set of loving and hostile desires a child feels towards its parents, like the Greek hero who killed his father and married his mother without knowing it. Going through it shapes the personality and the formation of the superego. Deleuze and Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus, reproach psychoanalysis for confining desire within this family triangle.
See also: Id, ego, superego, Desire as production
In The Coming of Age (1970), Simone de Beauvoir shows that old age is not only a biological fact, but a condition constructed by society, often by relegating the elderly to the rank of useless objects. She sees it, as with the condition of women, as a situation to be transformed.
See also: Situation
The famous sentence from The Second Sex (1949). What is called “feminine nature” is not a biological destiny, but the result of upbringing, history and a social situation. No biological, psychological or economic destiny alone defines the figure that woman presents in society.
See also: The Other, Existence precedes essence, Situation
Opinion concerns the sensible, changing world: it may be true by chance, but it cannot give an account of itself. Knowledge concerns the Forms: it is stable because it knows causes. The whole of Plato's philosophy aims to move from the one to the other.
See also: Sensible world / intelligible world, Forms
Marx's phrase about religion, which he also calls “the sigh of the oppressed creature”. Religion offers consolation for real misery while turning people away from fighting it: to criticise religion is first of all to criticise the world that needs this consolation.
See also: Ideology
For Rousseau, there are indeed natural differences between people, of strength or health, but they matter little. Real inequality, moral and political, is not natural: it arises from society, and above all from the institution of property. “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.”
See also: Amour de soi / amour-propre, Perfectibility
The fault of Adam and Eve which, according to Augustine, was passed on to all humanity and wounded human nature: ignorance and disordered desire (concupiscence) are its consequences. Since then, without God's help, human beings can no longer effectively will the good.
For Emerson, a single universal Spirit of which each individual soul is like a ray. That is why everyone can find truth within themselves, and why nature, seen with fresh eyes, speaks to us and teaches us.
See also: American Transcendentalism, Self-Reliance
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “man is a rope, tied between beast and overman”. The overman is neither a race nor a biologically superior being: he is the human being who overcomes himself, creates his own values and says yes to life as a whole.
See also: Will to power, Eternal recurrence
The project of the political unity of Africa. For Nkrumah, the independence of each isolated African state remains fragile as long as it is not matched by a united government of the continent, the only scale at which Africa can resist the powers that dominate it one country at a time. His book Africa Must Unite (1963) is its manifesto.
See also: Neo-colonialism
The faculty of self-improvement, which distinguishes humans from animals. It is what has allowed the development of the arts, the sciences and reason; but it is also, according to Rousseau, the source of all human misfortunes, since it tore man away from his peaceful original state.
See also: Origin of inequality
Berdyaev distinguishes the individual, a biological and social category, a mere part of the species or of society, from the person, a spiritual, free and creative reality, which cannot be absorbed by any totality — neither society, nor the state, nor race, nor the institutional Church.
See also: Uncreated freedom, Objectification
The idea that there is no view from nowhere: all knowledge is an interpretation, made from a perspective and in the service of a form of life. “There are no facts, only interpretations,” Nietzsche notes in his posthumous fragments.
See also: Will to power
Perceptions too faint to be noticed one by one, but whose sum produces a conscious effect: the roar of the sea is made of the sound of each wave, which we do not hear separately. Nature never makes leaps: between the conscious and the unconscious there are infinitely many degrees.
See also: Monad, Unconscious
The thing as it appears to us, shaped by space, time and the categories of our mind. We know only phenomena: this is the domain of science, which is certain precisely because it confines itself to possible experience.
See also: Thing in itself, Categories
A thesis of the Republic: cities will have no rest from their ills until philosophers become kings, or kings become philosophers. Only one who knows the Good can govern justly.
See also: Form of the Good, Tripartite soul
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide,” writes Camus at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus. He rejects both physical suicide and what he calls philosophical suicide: the leap into religious or metaphysical hope, which makes the absurd disappear instead of keeping it alive.
See also: The absurd
For the later Wittgenstein, philosophical problems arise when language is “like an engine idling”, detached from its ordinary use. The philosopher's task is not to build a theory, but to dispel these confusions. To the question “What is your aim in philosophy?”, he replies: “To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”
See also: Meaning is use, Tractatus
A small gland in the centre of the brain, where Descartes located the principal seat of the union between soul and body: through it the soul would receive impressions from the body and act upon it. This hypothesis shows how difficult it is to unite two such different substances.
See also: Dualism
A natural repugnance at seeing any sentient being suffer, and above all our fellow humans. Prior to reason, it tempers self-love in the state of nature, and it is the source of the social virtues.
See also: Amour de soi / amour-propre, Natural goodness, Sympathy
For Deleuze there is only one plane of reality, with no beyond: neither God, nor a sovereign subject, nor an ideal model grounds reality from outside. The plane of immanence is the ground on which philosophy creates its concepts. Deleuze sees Spinoza as the “prince of philosophers” for having thought this immanence.
See also: Creation of concepts, Deus sive Natura
For James, the universe is not a finished rational block, in which everything would already be determined, but a plural and unfinished world, in which novelty, chance and human effort really count. The future is not written in advance.
See also: Radical empiricism
The fact that men, not Man, inhabit the earth: each person is unique, and yet all are equal. For Arendt, plurality is the condition of all political life; power arises when people act together.
See also: Power and violence, Labour, work, action
Human beings are by nature political animals: they can only fully realise their nature by living in a city. Endowed with speech, they can discuss with others what is just and unjust. Whoever lived outside any city would be, says Aristotle, either a beast or a god.
See also: Happiness
Freedom, the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. They cannot be proved, since they lie beyond all experience, but morality requires us to assume them. They are not knowledge: they are conditions that practical reason accepts so that the moral law can make sense.
See also: Antinomy, Thing in itself
Arendt sharply distinguishes power, which arises from people's ability to act together and rests on their agreement, from violence, which relies on instruments and can destroy power, but never create it. Where violence rules absolutely, power has disappeared.
See also: Plurality
Prudence: the capacity to deliberate well about what is good, for oneself and for others, in a concrete situation. It is not learned from books alone, but through experience; it is what makes it possible to discern the mean.
See also: Golden mean
The rule by which Peirce proposes to make our ideas clear: to know what a conception means, we must consider what conceivable practical effects its object might have. Our whole conception of the object lies in our conception of these effects. To say that a thing is “hard”, for instance, is to say that it will not be scratched by many other substances.
See also: Pragmatism, Belief and doubt
A philosophical movement born in the United States at the end of the 19th century, which judges ideas by their practical effects. Peirce gave its first formulation, as a method for clarifying the meaning of concepts. James extended it to truth itself: the true is what works in experience. Dewey made it a theory of inquiry and action. Rorty radicalised it: we should stop looking for a truth that would correspond to reality.
See also: Pragmatic maxim, Truth, Inquiry, Final vocabulary
Monads do not act on one another; if they agree, it is because God set their development from the beginning so that they correspond perfectly, as two well-regulated clocks show the same time without communicating. This is how Leibniz explains the agreement between soul and body.
See also: Monad
The first principle of all motion in the universe: an eternal, unmoving being that moves without being moved, as an object of love attracts without moving. Aristotle describes it as thought thinking itself. Thomas Aquinas draws on it in the first of his five ways to God.
See also: Act and potency, Five ways
Nothing happens without there being a reason why it is so rather than otherwise, even if that reason usually remains unknown to us. Together with the principle of contradiction, it is one of the two great principles of our reasoning according to Leibniz.
See also: Truths of reason / truths of fact, Best of all possible worlds
A language that only its speaker could understand, because it would refer to their inner sensations. Wittgenstein argues that such a language is impossible: following a rule, even to name one's own pain, presupposes a public practice, in which one can distinguish actually following the rule from merely believing one is following it.
See also: Form of life
Nothing logically guarantees that the future will resemble the past: the fact that the sun has risen every day does not prove that it will rise tomorrow. We believe it out of habit, not by reasoning. Hume does not invite us to stop believing it, but to recognise that our knowledge of matters of fact never reaches the certainty of a demonstration.
See also: Causation and custom, Mitigated scepticism
The class of wage workers, who do not own the means of production and must sell their labour power to live. For Marx, it is destined to overthrow the bourgeoisie and to abolish classes themselves.
See also: Class struggle, Communism
The provisional rules of conduct Descartes gives himself while rebuilding knowledge, so as not to remain irresolute in action: obey the laws and customs of his country, be firm in his decisions once taken, and try to master himself rather than fortune.
See also: Rules of method
Wood that has not yet been carved: an image of original simplicity, before distinctions, desires and artificial knowledge. To return to the uncarved block is to recover a simple life, without ambition or artifice.
The doctrine that we must admit only what is given in experience, but everything that is given in it, including the relations between things. James thereby opposes the classical empiricists, who saw in experience only isolated sensations.
See also: Stream of consciousness, Pluralism
A dialogue by Diderot between “Me”, the reasonable philosopher, and “Him”, the nephew of the composer Rameau, a cynical and brilliant bohemian. It portrays a personality shot through with contradictions and puts the moral certainties of its time to the test.
See also: The Paradox of the Actor
A phrase from the Treatise of Human Nature: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” Reason alone can never move us to act; it only shows us the means of attaining what our passions desire. It is feelings, and especially moral sentiment, that move us to act and to judge good and evil.
See also: Sympathy, From is to ought
The thesis that learning is remembering: the soul contemplated the Forms before being embodied, then forgot them. In the Meno, Socrates leads a young slave, through simple questions alone, to rediscover a truth of geometry he had never been taught.
Making names correspond to reality: let the ruler truly be a ruler, the father truly a father, the son truly a son. For Confucius, disorder begins when words no longer designate what they should; to govern is first of all to rectify.
See also: Government by virtue
Socrates' method of examination: he questions someone about what they claim to know — courage, justice, piety — and then shows them that their answers contradict each other. The aim is not to humiliate, but to free them from the false belief that they know, the first step towards inquiry.
See also: Socratic irony, Maieutics
For Zhuangzi, our distinctions — big and small, beautiful and ugly, true and false — hold only from a certain point of view: what is “this” from one side is “that” from the other. The sage takes no side; he stands at the “pivot of the Way”, from which all points of view appear together.
See also: Dao, Butterfly dream
In The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud calls religion an illusion, that is, a belief born of a wish: the wish to be protected, as by a father, against helplessness in the face of nature and death. An illusion is not necessarily false, but we believe in it because we wish it to be true.
See also: Opium of the people
In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James studies religion not through its dogmas, but through the lived experience of believers and its fruits in their lives. Whatever the excesses of its historical forms, it seems to him to reveal something real about existence.
See also: The Will to Believe
The virtue of humaneness: the quality that makes us fully human in our relations with others. Confucius gives several formulas for it: to love others, or not to do to others what you would not want done to yourself. Mencius sees in every human being a seed of humaneness, compassion, which only needs to be cultivated.
See also: Li, Yi, Four sprouts
The mechanism by which the mind pushes back into the unconscious desires or memories judged unacceptable. What is repressed does not disappear: it seeks to return, in disguised form, in dreams, slips of the tongue or neurotic symptoms.
See also: Unconscious, Dream
In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli shows himself a supporter of the republic, on the model of Rome: a regime founded on laws and citizen militias, in which conflicts between the nobles and the people, far from being an evil, keep freedom alive. A well-ordered republic lasts longer than a principality.
See also: Virtù
The rancorous feeling of one who, too weak to act, takes revenge in imagination. According to On the Genealogy of Morality, it becomes a creator of values: unable to say yes to itself, it first says no to what is strong, and calls “evil” what dominates it and “good” its own weakness.
See also: Master morality / slave morality, Genealogy
A current of thought with which Dostoevsky was associated: the educated Russian elite, cut off from the people by its Western education, must return to the “soil”, that is, to the simple people and their Orthodox faith, which preserve a truth that rationalism and socialism imported from the West have lost.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan rejects a universal harmony bought with the suffering of a single innocent child. It is not God he rejects, he says, but he “most respectfully returns him the ticket” of entry into this world.
See also: If God does not exist, everything is permitted, Suffering
The overturning of the values inherited from Christian and Platonic morality, which devalue earthly life in favour of another world. The task is to create values that affirm life, the body and this world.
See also: Death of God, Nihilism
The movement by which a person says no to an injustice, and yes to a value they discover to be common to all. “I rebel — therefore we exist,” writes Camus in The Rebel. Revolt has its limits: when it allows itself murder in the name of a radiant future, it betrays itself and becomes totalitarian revolution.
See also: The absurd, Measure
An image taken from botany (like the underground stem of couch grass), proposed in A Thousand Plateaus. Unlike the tree, with its trunk and hierarchical branches, the rhizome has neither centre nor origin: any point can be connected to any other. It is a model for thinking about thought, cultures and networks.
See also: Deterritorialisation, Becoming
For Simone Weil, the soul has needs as real as those of the body: order, freedom, truth, and above all rootedness, that is, living participation in a community that hands down a past and prepares a future. A people uprooted by war, conquest or soulless labour wastes away.
See also: The workers' condition
The four precepts of the Discourse on the Method: accept as true only what is evident; divide each difficulty into as many parts as necessary; conduct one's thoughts in order, from the simplest to the most complex; make enumerations so complete that one is sure of omitting nothing.
See also: Clear and distinct idea, Provisional morality
The cycle of births and deaths, kept going by ignorance, craving and karma. The aim of the Buddhist path is to leave it through awakening. For Nāgārjuna, no real boundary separates saṃsāra from nirvāṇa: they differ in the way of seeing, not in their nature.
The title of a famous essay by Emerson: everyone should trust their own thought and their own voice rather than the opinion of others or the authority of the past. “Imitation is suicide.” “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.”
See also: Foolish consistency, Over-Soul
The two levels of reality in Plato. The sensible world, perceived by the senses, is changing and gives rise only to opinions. The intelligible world, the world of the Forms, is stable and the object of true knowledge. The first is only an image of the second.
See also: Forms, Opinion / knowledge, Allegory of the cave
For Peirce, all thought takes place in signs, and a sign always relates three terms: the sign itself, the object it represents and the interpretant, that is, the effect it produces in a mind — which is in turn a sign, in an endless chain. He distinguishes in particular the icon, which resembles its object (a portrait), the index, which is physically connected to it (smoke for fire), and the symbol, which designates it by convention (a word).
See also: Pragmatic maxim
After the moral crisis recounted in his Confession, Tolstoy looks for the meaning of life in the simple life of the peasantry: giving up luxury, working the land with his own hands, living on little. He sees more truth in it than in all the refinements of art and thought.
See also: The Kingdom of God Is Within You
A hero of Greek mythology, condemned by the gods to roll a rock eternally to the top of a mountain, from which it immediately falls back. For Camus, Sisyphus, aware of his fate and yet faithful to his task, is the absurd hero: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
See also: The absurd, Revolt
The set of concrete conditions — body, era, social class, sex, age — in which each freedom is exercised. For Beauvoir, we are free, but always in a situation; some situations, such as those imposed on women or on the elderly, limit freedom by confining people to an imposed role.
See also: One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman, Old age
The agreement by which human beings leave the state of nature to found a political society. For Hobbes, each transfers their rights to an absolute sovereign in exchange for security. For Rousseau, each gives themselves entirely to the community, so that by obeying the general will they obey only themselves and remain as free as before.
See also: Leviathan, General will, State of nature
Socrates' attitude of presenting himself as ignorant and questioning the other person as if he expected to learn from them. Little by little, the questions reveal that the other does not know what they thought they knew. The word comes from the Greek eirôneia, “dissembling”: appearing to know less than one does.
See also: Maieutics, Knowledge of one's ignorance
For Rorty, human solidarity is not grounded in a common human nature demonstrated by philosophy: it is built, above all through literature, storytelling and testimony, which make us sensitive to the suffering of others and widen the circle of those we call “we”.
See also: Liberal ironist
For Leibniz, space and time are not absolute containers in which things are placed, but the order of relations between things: the order of what coexists and the order of what follows in succession. For Kant, they are not properties of things in themselves either, but the forms through which our sensibility receives everything given to it: spectacles we can never take off. Everything we perceive is therefore necessarily located in space and time.
See also: Phenomenon, A priori / a posteriori
The imagined condition of human beings without political power. For Hobbes, it is a war of all against all, in which the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, not out of wickedness but because everyone is vulnerable and a rival to the others. For Rousseau, on the contrary, natural man, solitary and moved by pity, is peaceful: it is society and property that have corrupted him.
See also: War of all against all, Social contract, Natural goodness
An image proposed by James in his Principles of Psychology: consciousness is not a series of separate states, like beads on a string, but a continuous flow, like a river, in which nothing ever recurs exactly the same. The expression later inspired a literary technique.
See also: Radical empiricism
“Under the aspect of eternity”. To understand a thing sub specie aeternitatis is to grasp it as following necessarily from the nature of God, and not as a mere event located at some moment in time. This is how reason and intuitive knowledge know things.
See also: Kinds of knowledge
The process by which a sexual drive is diverted towards a non-sexual, socially valued aim, such as artistic creation or intellectual research. It is one of the sources of culture.
See also: Drive, Civilization and Its Discontents
The name Thomas Aquinas gives to God: not one being among others, but being itself, in whom essence and existence are one. All other things receive being; God alone is being by himself.
See also: Essence and existence, Act and potency
What exists by itself, needing nothing else in order to be, and what persists through change. For Aristotle, primary substance is the concrete individual — this man, this horse — which bears qualities. For Descartes, there are two kinds of created substance, thought and extension, really distinct from each other. For Spinoza, there is only one, infinite substance: God, or Nature, of which everything else is a way of being, a mode. For Leibniz, reality is made of infinitely many simple substances, the monads.
See also: Attribute, Mode, Dualism, Monad, Form and matter
For Dostoevsky, suffering is not merely an evil to be eliminated by calculating the greatest happiness: it may be the very origin of consciousness, and it can purify and lead to redemption, as for Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.
See also: Underground man, Returning the ticket
The mechanism of illusion according to Śaṅkara: we project onto a reality what it is not, as when, in the half-light, we take a rope for a snake. In the same way, we superimpose the body, limits and multiplicity onto the Self. When light comes, the snake vanishes, and only the rope remains.
See also: Ignorance, Māyā / mithyā
The difference between the value a worker produces and the wage he receives. The worker sells his labour power for a day, but in part of the day he already produces the equivalent of his wage; for the rest of the time, he works without being paid. This additional value, appropriated by the capitalist, is according to Marx the source of profit.
See also: Labour power, Capital
The natural disposition by which we share the feelings of others, like strings vibrating in unison. For Hume, it is at the source of our moral judgements: we approve of what is useful or agreeable to others because we feel their pleasure.
See also: Reason, the slave of the passions, Pity
A Chinese expression for the totality of existing things. According to the Dao De Jing, the Dao gives birth to the One, the One gives birth to the Two, the Two gives birth to the Three, and the Three gives birth to the ten thousand things.
See also: Dao, Yin and yang
A form of argument that examines four possibilities: a thing is, it is not, it both is and is not, or it neither is nor is not. Nāgārjuna often rejects all four, to show that no thesis captures reality and that he himself has no position to defend.
See also: Madhyamaka, Emptiness
For Camus, the absurd lies neither in man nor in the world, but in their confrontation: man demands meaning and clarity, and the world meets him with an unreasonable silence. The point is neither to flee it nor to deny it, but to live in full awareness of it.
See also: Sisyphus, Philosophical suicide, Revolt
The title of an essay by Tolstoy (1894). True Christianity, stripped of the dogmas, miracles and rites added by the Church, is not an institution but a way of life: it is proved by the life it transforms, not by ceremonies.
See also: Non-resistance to evil by violence
When someone catches me looking through a keyhole, I feel shame: under their gaze, I become an object, and I discover that I have a dimension of my being that escapes me. The other is indispensable to my knowledge of myself. The line from No Exit, “Hell is other people”, refers to relationships in which we judge ourselves only through other people's eyes.
See also: In-itself / for-itself
For Simone de Beauvoir, woman has been constituted as man's Other: man sets himself up as the Subject, the reference, the essential, and woman is defined in relation to him, as the inessential. There is nothing natural about this relation; it is the product of history.
Diderot's thesis: the great actor is not the one who really feels the emotions of his character, but the one who keeps a cool head and imitates them with art. Paradoxically, it is the lack of sensibility on stage that makes it possible to move the audience most.
When Hume looks within himself, he never finds a stable “self”, but only some particular perception: heat or cold, pleasure or pain. The self is nothing but a bundle of perceptions succeeding one another with great rapidity, whose unity is produced by the imagination.
See also: Impressions and ideas, Non-self
The title of an essay by James (1896). When the evidence is not enough to decide, the question is vital and the decision cannot be put off — as with religious faith — we have the right to believe beyond what reason can demonstrate. Refusing to choose is still a choice.
See also: Truth, Religious experience
A philosophy teacher, Simone Weil worked for several months in factories in 1934-1935 to know the condition of workers from the inside. There she discovered work that crushes thought and reduces a person to a cog, and sought ways to restore dignity to labour.
See also: Rootedness, Affliction
A word coined by Leibniz from the Greek theos (“God”) and dikē (“justice”): the justification of God in the face of evil. How can a good God permit evil? Leibniz answers that evil is part of the best of all possible worlds, of which we see only a small part.
See also: Best of all possible worlds
The thing as it is, independently of the way we perceive it. We can think it, but never know it, since we have access only to what appears to us through space, time and the categories. The word noumenon refers to the thing in itself as an object that is merely thought.
See also: Phenomenon, Space and time
For Arendt, thinking is a silent dialogue with oneself, which obliges us to live in agreement with who we are. It is not a privilege of scholars: it is a capacity everyone has, and its absence makes the banality of evil possible.
See also: Banality of evil
Averroes distinguishes three ways of reaching the truth: by demonstration (philosophers), by dialectic, that is, by probable arguments (theologians), and by rhetoric, that is, by images and exhortations (the majority of people). The sacred text speaks to each according to their capacity.
See also: Allegorical interpretation
In the Confessions, Augustine asks: what is time? If no one asks him, he knows; if he wishes to explain it, he does not know. The past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist: time exists only in the soul, which stretches towards the past through memory, towards the present through attention and towards the future through expectation.
See also: Inwardness
Respect for other people's freedom to think and believe. Voltaire made it a cause, notably with his Treatise on Tolerance, written after the execution of the Protestant Jean Calas in 1762. To persecute someone for their opinions is, in his eyes, the greatest of crimes against society.
See also: Écrasez l'infâme
For Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Nazism and Stalinism are not mere tyrannies, but a radically new form of power. Based on ideology and terror, with the camps as laboratories, it seeks total domination over human beings by destroying their plurality and spontaneity.
See also: Plurality, Banality of evil
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Wittgenstein's first book. Language is conceived there as a logical picture of the world; what cannot be said — ethics, the meaning of life, the mystical — can only be shown. It ends with the sentence: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Wittgenstein later criticised much of it.
See also: Meaning is use, Philosophy as therapy
Concerning the a priori conditions that make knowledge possible, rather than objects themselves. Not to be confused with transcendent, which refers to what lies beyond all possible experience. Kant's philosophy is called transcendental because it examines how the mind makes experience possible.
See also: A priori / a posteriori, Categories
Everything is constantly turning into something else: life into death and death into life, as the seasons follow one another. When his wife died, Zhuangzi, after mourning her, began to sing while drumming on a basin: to grieve endlessly, he said, is not to understand the course of things.
See also: Butterfly dream, Dao
An image from the essay Nature (1836): alone in the woods, Emerson says he becomes “a transparent eye-ball”. He is nothing, he sees all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through him. It is the experience of merging with nature, freed from egotism.
See also: Over-Soul, American Transcendentalism
The soul has three parts: reason, which should rule; spirit (thumos), the seat of courage and anger; and appetite, turned towards bodily pleasures. Justice, in the soul as in the city, is the harmony in which each part performs its proper function.
See also: Philosopher-king
For William James, an idea is true insofar as believing it guides us successfully in experience. Truth is not a fixed property of ideas: “truth happens to an idea”, which becomes true by being verified through its effects.
See also: Pragmatism, The Will to Believe
Truths of reason are necessary: their opposite is impossible, as in mathematics. Truths of fact are contingent: their opposite is possible, as in “Caesar crossed the Rubicon”; they rest on the principle of sufficient reason rather than on logical necessity.
See also: Principle of sufficient reason
A theme of the City of God: two loves have made two cities. Love of self, reaching even to contempt of God, made the earthly city; love of God, reaching even to contempt of self, made the heavenly city. The two are intermingled in this world until the end of time, and no state is identical with the city of God.
See also: Grace
A distinction between two levels of truth. For Nāgārjuna, conventional truth is that of language and everyday life, in which carts, persons and causes work; ultimate truth is that none of these exists by itself. The second can only be reached by relying on the first. Śaṅkara similarly distinguishes the empirical level (vyāvahārika), where the manifold world has practical reality, and the absolute level (pāramārthika), where Brahman alone is real.
See also: Emptiness, Brahman, Māyā / mithyā
Two doctrines of Peirce's cosmology. Tychism, from the Greek tychē (“chance”), holds that chance plays a real role in the universe; the laws of nature themselves are not fixed in advance, but have formed gradually, like habits. Synechism, from the Greek synechēs (“continuous”), holds that everything in reality is continuous, without absolute breaks.
See also: Fallibilism
The part of mental life that escapes consciousness and cannot be reached by simple introspection. For Freud, it is made up of repressed desires and memories, which go on acting upon us and show themselves in dreams, slips of the tongue, bungled actions and symptoms.
See also: Repression, Id, ego, superego, Petites perceptions
For Berdyaev, inspired by the mystic Jakob Böhme, freedom is more primordial than being, and even than God: it springs from a bottomless abyss (Ungrund), which God did not create. That is why evil, which is born of this freedom, cannot be imputed to God.
See also: Person / individual, Creative act
The narrator of Notes from Underground refuses to let man be a “piano key” played by the laws of nature. Even showered with well-being, he would commit some folly to prove that he is a man: he prefers his whim to a calculated happiness, and rebels against the self-evidence of “twice two makes four”.
See also: Suffering
A thesis drawn from Averroes's commentary on Aristotle's treatise On the Soul: the intellect by which human beings think universals is single and common to all, not proper to each individual. It was vigorously opposed by Thomas Aquinas.
See also: Active Intellect
Everyone knows the usefulness of the useful, but no one sees the usefulness of the useless. A gnarled, twisted tree that no carpenter wants escapes the axe and lives for centuries. Zhuangzi thus invites us to be wary of the obsession with productivity and ambition.
See also: Free and easy wandering
For Machiavelli, virtù is not moral virtue: it is the energy, boldness and skill that enable a statesman to act effectively and seize the opportunity. It is opposed to fortune, which it strives to master.
See also: Fortune, Effectual truth of the matter
The state of nature according to Hobbes: without a common authority, everyone fears the others and seeks to strike first. It is not necessarily constant fighting, but a constant disposition to war, which makes work, the arts and security impossible. The idea is often summed up by the ancient saying “man is a wolf to man”.
See also: State of nature, Leviathan
The last sentence of Candide. Having given up grand speculation about the meaning of the world, Candide and his companions find a kind of wisdom in concrete, useful work, which keeps away from us “three great evils: boredom, vice and need”.
See also: Critique of optimism
The distinction that opens Epictetus's Handbook: some things are up to us — our judgements, desires and aversions — and others are not — our body, reputation, possessions, events. All unhappiness comes from treating as ours what is not ours. Wisdom consists in focusing our efforts on what is up to us and accepting the rest.
See also: Impressions, Faculty of choice, Inner freedom
For Nietzsche, the core of life is not the instinct of self-preservation, but a will to grow, to expand and to surpass oneself. It is not primarily a desire to dominate others: it is the drive by which all life seeks to increase itself and to give form to the world.
See also: Overman, Perspectivism
“Non-action”. It does not mean remaining idle, but acting without forcing, following the natural course of things, like water that flows around an obstacle and ends up wearing away the stone. The ruler who practises wu wei governs without imposing himself, so that the people believe they have accomplished everything by themselves.
The sense of what it is fitting to do, regardless of self-interest. The gentleman is guided by righteousness, the petty man by profit. Mencius makes it one of the four virtues, growing from the seed of shame, the feeling that holds us back from wrongdoing.
See also: Gentleman, Ren, Four sprouts
The two complementary forces whose alternation animates all things: yin, dark, yielding and receptive; yang, bright, firm and active. According to the Dao De Jing, the ten thousand things carry yin on their backs and embrace yang. Laozi readily favours the yin side: the soft, the low, the feminine.
See also: Ten thousand things, Dao
Spontaneity: what happens of itself, without outside constraint. According to Laozi, the Dao itself takes as its model what is so of itself. It is the way of being that wu wei seeks to preserve.
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