 Derives from Greek words meaning Love of Wisdom

 Is the philosophical examination of the most fundamental questions concerning the nature of reality.  Realism: Things exist and would exist without minds to comprehend them.  Nominalism: no universals without minds to think them.

 Concerns questions of the source and nature of knowledge,  The nature of consciousness,  And other questions of personal identity as distinguished from ontology.

 According to ‘The Theaetetus’, Protagoras says that a man is the measure of all things.

Declares that the unexamined life is not worth living.

 Divides reality into two distinct worlds,  A natural world of particular objects, subject to perceptual error, and,  An ideal world of universals (forms).  His Parable of the Cave illustrates this notion that reality is hierarchical – the world, available to the senses, is but the distorted shadow a higher world of forms.

 Substance is not simple but rather a complex of both matter and form, i. e., informed matter.  Essentialism:  Essential properties are Necessary, i. e., such that it is inconceivable that the substance lack the property and yet remain numerically one and the same object.  Accidental properties are not necessary to preserve the identity of the substance.

 Maintains that all change is produced as a result of design or prior purpose. This sometimes leads to the assumption of a prime mover or intelligent creator.  Teleological explanation is sometimes expressed as inverse cause and effect wherein a change in x is ‘caused’ by a later natural end state which end is the purpose of x.

 Dualism argues that, in addition to physical substance (the body), there exists a (separate but parallel) mental substance (the mind).  Famously, he wrote, “I think therefore I am”  His philosophical arguments tend to proceed from sheer deductive reasoning to conclusions with little or no trust in induction reasoning. He is therefore considered a Rationalist, maintaining that knowledge comes from reason alone.

 Argues that Mind and Body are ONE kind of thing Physical in nature.

 Conceived of God as the being greater than which cannot be conceived.

 Maintained that all of reality is nothing over and above minds and their ideas.  Idealism – material substance is never perceived, only properties or qualities are perceived, and only these non physical qualia have reality.

 Claimed that knowledge is the result of empirical investigation, i. e., knowledge comes from experience.  primary qualities - the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of insensible parts  Secondary qualities - colors, sounds, tastes, &c.

 Considers that belief in the concepts of cause and effect is simply an unjustified dogma.  This is called “Hume's problem” or “Humean Skepticism”

 We can know a priori that like causes produce like effects – this is possible because  Causation is in a class of synthetic a priori truths. Like mathematical truths,  Mathmatical truths are studied via the principles governing the concepts that we ourselves construct.  Other such principles include space and time.  Using these the mind constructs the objects of experience.

 Truths discovered by the understanding are synthetic because they are not logical truths and a priori because they apply to all possible experience.  Synthetic a priori truths, then, describe those features of the world that are necessitated by our construction of it.  It’s not that concepts come from experience, rather, experience is derived from fundamental concepts.

 The world in itself, the noumena, is unknowable.

 Non-Normative : descriptive  Normative: seeks grounds for determining good  Consequentialism: rightness determined by cause or effects of action  Egoism: rightness determined by maximizing personal long term best interests.  Utilitarianism: rightness determined by the general good of all collectively  Act: case by case consideration  Rule: the rules trump the individual case considerations.  Fallibilism: value is subject to revisions. So no end justifies every means.  Deontic  Kant: do no harm

 Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law

 The view that right action is the action most likely to produce the greatest overall utility

 Existentialism: Maintained that existence proceeds essence  And we are therefore condemned to be free.  He argues that we ignore freedom through acts of bad faith.  This is the inverse of Heidegger's phenomenology which maintains that Essence precedes existence.