Philosophical Thinking and Humanities I - Midterm Review Guide
Guidance and Study Methodology
General Approach to Study Guide:
- Do not memorize exact wording.
- Focus on understanding the differences between concepts, the specific kind of reasoning each concept involves, and how to recognize each concept in new situations.
- Core principle: Study the ideas themselves, not a list of memorized answers.
- Note on assessment examples: Study examples are intentionally constructed to differ from those used in class assessments to test genuine understanding rather than recall.
Four-Step Best Study Method:
- Step 1: Cover the definition.
- Step 2: Explain the concept aloud in your own words.
- Step 3: Invent a new, original example.
- Step 4: Compare the concept with the most similar concept to clarify subtle distinctions.
- Benchmark of Mastery: If all four steps can be completed successfully, the concept is thoroughly understood.
Topic 1: Cognition, Reasoning, Argumentation, and Community
Metacognition:
- Definition: Thinking about your own thinking.
- Core elements: Noticing how you reached an idea, judging whether the thought process worked, and adjusting it when needed.
Metacognitive Regulation:
- Definition: The deliberate adjustment of a learning or thinking strategy after recognizing that the current strategy is not working well.
Intellectual Autonomy:
- Definition: Using your own reasoning to evaluate an idea instead of accepting or rejecting it because of who said it.
Premise:
- Definition: A reason or statement offered in support of another claim.
Conclusion:
- Definition: The claim that an argument is trying to support.
Inference:
- Definition: The reasoning link that connects the supporting reasons (premises) to the conclusion.
Philosophical Argument:
- Definition: A position supported by reasons that others can inspect, challenge, and evaluate.
Humanistic Perspective:
- Definition: A way of approaching people that recognizes their dignity and value beyond usefulness, productivity, or performance.
Problematization:
- Definition: Turning something that seems normal or obvious into a question by examining its assumptions, meaning, foundations, or consequences.
Self-Correction:
- Definition: Revising a position after better reasons or evidence show that it can be improved.
Community of Inquiry:
- Definition: A group that builds understanding through questioning, reasons, listening, and revision of ideas.
Topic 2: Philosophical Questions, Modes of Inquiry, and Thinking Styles
Wonder:
- Definition: A break in familiarity that makes an ordinary or surprising experience appear worthy of deeper questioning.
Doubt:
- Definition: Questioning that begins when a certainty becomes unstable, insufficient, or contradictory.
Limit Situation:
- Definition: A difficult existential experience that confronts a person with fragility, finitude, uncertainty, or meaning.
Empirical Question:
- Definition: A question answered by observing, counting, measuring, checking a record, or consulting specific data.
Scientific Question:
- Definition: A question that seeks a systematic explanation of why or how a phenomenon occurs, often through causal relationships.
Philosophical Question:
- Definition: A question about concepts, foundations, meanings, values, legitimacy, or what ought to be the case.
Universality:
- Definition: The capacity of a philosophical question to matter beyond one isolated case.
Radicality:
- Definition: The effort to examine the root, basic conditions, or foundations of an issue.
Openness:
- Definition: The quality of allowing more than one defensible answer, provided each answer is supported by reasons.
Critical Thinking:
- Definition: Examining the reasons, assumptions, evidence, and justification behind a claim.
Creative Thinking:
- Definition: Generating possibilities, alternatives, and new ways of approaching a problem.
Caring Thinking:
- Definition: Trying to understand another person's experience and perspective before judging it from the outside.
Questioning vs. Dogmatism:
- Definition: Good questioning keeps beliefs open to review without implying that every answer is equally good.
Topic 3: Metaphysics, Categorization, Reality, Time, and Perception
Philosophical Problem:
- Definition: A fundamental problem involving concepts, meanings, or foundations that remains open to reasoned argument.
Categorizing:
- Definition: Grouping things according to selected similarities or criteria.
Conceptualizing:
- Definition: Constructing or refining a general idea so that its meaning, scope, and criteria become clearer.
Context-Dependent Categories:
- Definition: The principle that the same object or phenomenon can fit different categories when different criteria are chosen.
Hyperreality:
- Definition: A condition in which a representation or simulation acquires more force or authority than the original referent.
Reality and Representation:
- Definition: The philosophical problem of distinguishing what is real from what is constructed, represented, simulated, or perceived.
Heraclitean View of Becoming:
- Definition: The metaphysical view that reality is characterized by flow, transformation, and continuing change.
Parmenidean View of Being:
- Definition: The metaphysical view that true being is associated with permanence, while change is treated with suspicion as appearance or instability.
Identity Through Change:
- Definition: The problem of explaining how a person or thing can undergo transformation while still preserving some continuity.
Aristotelian Time:
- Definition: The framework holding that time is connected with movement and ordered through a before and an after.
Chronological vs. Lived Time:
- Definition: The distinction recognizing that measured duration and experienced duration can differ.
Perception and Reality:
- Definition: The principle that what we directly perceive may not exhaust everything that can count as real.
Concepts and Experience:
- Definition: The relationship wherein concepts organize experience, but new experiences can also force us to refine the concepts we use.