| A | B |
|---|
| Egocentric predicament | the human condition of being unable to leave the boundaries of our individual selves to determine what anything is really like, as opposed to how it seems to us |
| Epistemology | the branch of philosophy dealing with the study of knowledge, what it is, and how we acquire it |
| Cogito | the proof by which Descartes established his mental existence |
| Solipsism | belief that only my mind exists and everything else is a perception of that mind |
| Innate | literally “inborn,” present from the moment of birth, not learned or acquired |
| Cartesian Circle | the argument by which Descartes uses his clear and distinct idea of God to prove God’s existence as the justification for the accuracy of his clear and distinct ideas; each proves the other, but there is no outside justification for either |
| Substance | the underlying reality of something, containing its primary qualities; the essence of something that remains constant despite changes in its perceptible qualities |
| Mind-Body Problem | a problem of metaphysics created when Descartes divided reality into mind and matter, making each a separate substance; how can two completely distinct substances interact in one person? |
| Monad | Leibniz’s word for the simple, unextended, teleological substances that make up the universe |
| Preestablished harmony | the harmony between body and soul or between the world of efficient causes and the world of final causes established by God, according to Leibniz |
| Empiricism | the belief that meaningful knowledge can be acquired only through sense experience |
| Skepticism | the philosophical doctrine that knowledge is uncertain and (in its strictest sense) that absolute knowledge is unattainable |
| Hume's Fork | the doctrine that no middle ground exists between necessary truths, based on the relation of ideas, and contingent truths, based on experience; anything other than these two tells us nothing meaningful about reality |
| Logical Positivism | a radical empiricist based on Hume’s Fork, asserting that propositions have meaning only if they are either analytic (true by definition) or synthetic (verifiable, at least in principle, in experience) |
| Phenomena | in Kant’s epistemology, things as they appear to us under the categories of perception |
| Noumena | in Kant’s epistemology, things as they are in themselves; this is always beyond the limits of human perception and knowing |
| Synthetic a priori | in Kant’s epistemology, a description of statements that tell us something meaningful about reality and are logically prior to (not dependent on) experience |
