Rationalism and Idealism: Kant, Herbart, and Hegel

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms and concepts from lecture notes on Immanuel Kant, Johann Friedrich Herbart, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Phenomenological Experience

The result of the interaction between sensations and categories of thought in Kantian philosophy.

Categorical Imperative

The rational principle that governs or should govern moral behavior: to do the right thing because it is right, not because of what you get out of it.

Psychic Mechanics

Johann Friedrich Herbart's theory that ideas have the power to attract or repel other ideas depending on their compatibility, and that an idea is never destroyed or completely forgotten.

Self-preservation

Herbart's term to describe an idea's tendency to seek and maintain conscious expression.

Apperceptive Mass

An individual's existing knowledge and attention, which shapes how new experiences are understood and determines whether compatible new ideas enter consciousness.

Repression

The force used to hold ideas incompatible with the apperceptive mass in the unconscious when an idea is pushed out of consciousness by a stronger, opposing idea.

Limen

The border between the conscious and the unconscious mind.

Johann Friedrich Herbart

The Father of Educational Psychology who viewed the mind as an integrated whole, introduced the unconscious threshold, and bridged philosophical rationalism to experimental psychology.

Herbart's Educational Psychology

A teaching model built on the apperceptive mass that connects new ideas to existing student knowledge through preparation, presentation, association, and application.

The Absolute

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's concept of the universe as an interrelated unity, where true understanding requires relating isolated instances to the whole.

Dialectic Process

The attempt to arrive at truth through back-and-forth argumentation among conflicting views, moving all things toward the Absolute.

Thesis

One initial point of view in Hegel's dialectic process.

Antithesis

The opposite point of view in Hegel's dialectic process.

Synthesis

A compromise between the thesis and the antithesis in Hegel's dialectic process.

Alienation (Self-estrangement)

The mind's realization that it exists apart from the Absolute, apart from that which it is striving to embrace.

Hegel's Influences

A combined system drawing from Spinoza ('everything is connected'), Heraclitus ('everything changes'), and Kant ('the mind shapes reality'), framing history as Spirit gradually becoming aware of itself.