I’ve been reading up some philosophy books, and I’m having difficult time understanding them. Could anyone give me simple, first-grader definitions of the following?
- Socratic method - eliminating hypotheses and ideas through dialogue. For example, if we’re trying to find out what “Justice” is, then people would propose different ideas of what Justice is and we’d point out flaws. Hopefully, we’d eventually get an idea about what Justice actually is.
- Empiricist - the epistemological theory that knowledge can only be acquired through sense experience
- Rationalism - the epistemological theory that knowledge can be acquired through reason and logic
- Idealism - Philosophically speaking, it’s the idea that reality is fundamentally constructed by our minds
- Epistemology - method of acquiring knowledge? - more accurately the school of philosophy that deals with knowledge, how things can be known, what knowledge is, etc.
- Materialism - ** the belief that all things can be explained by material forces**
- Sophist - someone who uses philosophical jargon and trickery to appear intelligent
- Sense experience - that which we detect through physical perception - with our eyes, ears, etc.
- Sense image a particular instance of sense experience
- Induction vs. deduction ** deduction - start with a theory. Observe something, and then apply that theory to draw a conclusion. For example: All fruit is good for you. An apple is a fruit. Therefore an apple is good for you.
Induction - start with observations, then create a theory to describe those observations. Example: Observe - Every apple I’ve seen is red. Theory - therefore all apples are red.
Note that inductive theories are not necessarily true and can be falsified. Science generally works through induction.**
- Reductionism - Incorrectly generalizing something has a simple cause? More accurately - the belief that a system can be explained by the interworkings of its parts. It’s the opposite of “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. Most likely you’ll see this being used to describe the position that life can be fully described by physical and chemical laws.
- Skepticism - doubting everything is true as the starting point, until given proof? More accurately: the position that belief is not justified until sufficient evidence has been provided
- Nominalism - ** In metaphysics, it’s the theory that abstract objects (such as numbers and things like “beauty”) do not exist objectively, but that the terms can be used to describe things that do exist. It’s a pretty fuzzy area in philosophy.
- Dialectic (Communism) - ** Don’t know a lot about communism****
- Realist (as opposed to idealist) ** Being more practical than acting on principle. Also known as a pragmatist**
And a question - what was wrong with Descartes’ statement “I think, therefore I am?” It seems a good starting off point to me, that at least, while you’re awake, you exist.
Special tyia to anyone who has time to answer them…there were a lot more than I initially thought there would be.
Some of these can be a bit fuzzy, but I added some basic definitions
bolded. Hope it helps.
