Doing Philosophy: Key Terms and Concepts

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms and thinkers from the lecture on Doing Philosophy, its origins, major Western and Eastern approaches, and analytic, speculative, reductionist, and holistic methods.

Philosophy

The systematic study of fundamental questions about existence, knowledge, truth, values, reason, mind, and language; literally the “love of wisdom.”

Philosophia

Greek word coined by Pythagoras meaning “love of wisdom,” the root of the term philosophy.

Philo

Greek root meaning “love.”

Sophia

Greek root meaning “wisdom.”

Mother Discipline

Nickname for philosophy as the foundational field from which all other sciences eventually emerged.

Hard Sciences

Fields such as physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and geology that grew out of early philosophical questions about nature.

Soft Sciences

Disciplines like sociology, psychology, political science, anthropology, and economics that also trace their origins to philosophical inquiry.

Phusis

Greek term for ‘nature’; early thinkers sought rational explanations of phusis instead of mythic stories.

Mythos

Pre-philosophical, myth-based explanations of reality; replaced by rational inquiry in early Greece.

Cosmos

The orderly, law-governed universe assumed by early Greek philosophers.

Pre-Socratic Philosophers

Early Greek thinkers before Socrates who explained the world through reason and observation rather than myth.

Thales of Miletus

First Western philosopher; asserted that water is the fundamental substance of reality and predicted a solar eclipse.

Anaximander

Pre-Socratic who proposed the Apeiron—an indefinite, boundless substance—as the origin of all things.

Apeiron

Anaximander’s concept of the infinite, formless, eternal source from which all things arise.

Anaximenes

Pre-Socratic who claimed that air is the primary substance and that Earth floats like a saucer in it.

Milesian Triumvirate

Collective name for Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, the first philosophers to explain nature via reason.

Hylozoism

Belief that all matter is alive; characteristic of the Milesian school.

Pythagoras

Greek philosopher–mathematician who taught that numbers underlie reality and founded the Pythagorean brotherhood.

Pythagoreans

Religious-philosophical group seeing mathematics as a path to purify the soul and achieve harmony.

Heraclitus

Pre-Socratic who argued that change is the only constant—“You can’t step twice in the same river”—and likened reality to ever-living fire.

Parmenides

Philosopher who maintained that being is one, unchanging, and complete; change is an illusion.

Empedocles

Pluralist who posited four root elements—earth, air, fire, water—as reality’s components and claimed mystical powers.

Anaxagoras

Pluralist who said matter is composed of infinitely divisible ‘seeds’ and introduced nous (Mind) as the cosmic ordering principle.

Nous

Infinite, pure Mind that initiates motion and organizes the cosmos in Anaxagoras’ philosophy.

Phenomenology

Philosophical study of how things appear in conscious experience—how we see and feel ‘being.’

Existentialism

Philosophical outlook emphasizing individual freedom, choice, and the creation of meaning within existence.

Western Philosophy

Tradition that seeks knowledge through reason, logic, and categorization, viewing the universe as an orderly system explainable by laws.

Eastern Philosophy

Tradition in which philosophy and religion are intertwined; aims at oneness with the universe and guides practical living.

Analytic Philosophy

Approach that strives for clarity by breaking complex ideas into simpler parts and critiquing assumptions and language.

Speculative Philosophy

Approach that constructs broad, unified theories to explain reality as a whole, often using abstraction.

Reductionism

Method of understanding complex systems by analyzing their individual components; the whole equals the sum of its parts.

Holism

View that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and that relationships and interactions shape each part’s behavior.

Epistemological Holism

Idea that scientific theories are tested as interconnected wholes; evidence for one claim depends on many background assumptions.

Semantic Holism

Theory that words and sentences obtain meaning only within the context of an entire language system.

Idealism

Philosophical position claiming that reality is fundamentally mental or constructed by the mind.

Realism

View asserting that there is one objective reality independent of observers’ perceptions or interpretations.

Scientific Inquiry

Systematic investigation employing observation and (in modern times) experimentation to understand natural phenomena.