Library — Paul Maxwell

A Theory of JusticeRawls's 1971 systematic statement of justice as fairness, developing the original position thought experiment, the two principles of justice, and the framework that revived political philosophy as a major analytic subfield.BooksPhilosophy

A Treatise of Human NatureHume's 1739–1740 first major work, in three books, attempting to apply the experimental method to the human mind — the most ambitious early statement of British empiricism.BooksPhilosophy

Act and potencyAristotle's distinction between what a thing is now and what it is capable of becoming.ConceptsPhilosophy

Adam SmithScottish moral philosopher and political economist (1723–1790), professor at Glasgow and confidant of David Hume, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments grounded ethics in sympathy and whose Wealth of Nations founded the modern discipline of political economy, providing the framework within which commercial society has been understood for two centuries.FiguresPhilosophyEnlightenment

Adverse selectionWhen one side of a transaction knows something the other does not, and the ignorant side's attempt to protect itself drives away the cases it wanted.ConceptsBusiness

AestheticsThe philosophical study of beauty, art, and taste.ConceptsPhilosophy

AkrasiaActing against your own better judgment — knowing the better course and taking the worse one, which Socrates argued is impossible and everyone else has observed constantly.ConceptsPhilosophy

al-FarabiKhorasanian philosopher (c. 870–950) commonly regarded as the founder of Arabic-Islamic Aristotelianism, whose commentaries on Aristotle and original works of political philosophy, logic, and metaphysics established the Arabic falsafa tradition and supplied the framework Avicenna would systematize.FiguresPhilosophyMedieval

al-GhazaliPersian Ashʿarite theologian, jurist, and Sufi (1058–1111) whose Tahāfut al-Falāsifa challenged the rationalist program of Avicenna and whose Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn became the most influential work of Sunni piety, reshaping the relationship of philosophy, theology, and mystical practice in Islam.FiguresPhilosophyMedieval

Alasdair MacIntyreScottish-American moral philosopher (1929–2025) whose After Virtue, Whose Justice?FiguresPhilosophyContemporary

Albert CamusThe French-Algerian writer and philosopher whose work on the absurd, revolt, and the limits of revolutionary politics made him the canonical philosophical voice of mid-century European disenchantment and one of the few twentieth-century writers to receive the Nobel Prize for fundamentally philosophical work.FiguresPhilosophy20th Century

Alexis de TocquevilleFrench aristocrat, magistrate, and political writer (1805–1859) whose Democracy in America (1835, 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856) produced the deepest nineteenth-century analyses of the transformation of European and American societies by the equalizing logic of democracy.FiguresPhilosophy19th Century

AlienationMarx's concept naming the structural condition under capitalism in which workers are estranged from the product of their labor, from the activity of labor, from their species-being, and from other workers.ConceptsPhilosophy19th Century

Allegory of the CavePlato's famous image in Republic VII of prisoners chained in an underground cave, mistaking shadows for reality — the canonical illustration of the soul's ascent from ignorance to knowledge.ConceptsPhilosophyClassical Greek

Amara's lawWe tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run.ConceptsBusiness

Amor FatiThe Stoic doctrine of loving fate — actively accepting whatever happens as the working of cosmic logos, rather than merely tolerating it.ConceptsPhilosophyCross-Era

Analogy of beingAquinas's account of how a word like good or wise can be said of God and of a creature: neither in the same sense, which would make God a being among beings, nor in unrelated senses, which would make theology empty, but in related senses with one primary.ConceptsPhilosophy

Analytic PhilosophyThe 20th-century tradition characterized by formal precision, linguistic clarity, piecemeal problem-solving, and close engagement with logic and the sciences.TraditionsPhilosophy20th Century

AnaxagorasIntroduced Mind as the ordering principle of the cosmos, and was prosecuted for saying the sun is a burning stone.FiguresPhilosophyc. 500–428 BC

AnaximanderThe second Milesian philosopher, whose doctrine of the apeiron (boundless) introduced abstract metaphysical thinking into the Western tradition and whose cosmology proposed substantively novel ideas about the structure of the universe and the evolutionary origin of living things.FiguresPhilosophyPre-Socratic

AnaximenesThe third Milesian, who proposed air as the origin of everything and supplied a mechanism for how it becomes other things.FiguresPhilosophyc. 586–526 BC

Anselm of CanterburyThe Italian-born Benedictine theologian and Archbishop of Canterbury whose ontological argument for God's existence and account of the atonement shaped the entire subsequent medieval tradition.FiguresPhilosophyMedieval

AntifragileSome systems gain from volatility, and the practical task is arranging exposures so that surprises help more than they hurt.BooksBusiness2012

AntifragilityThe property of gaining from disorder rather than merely surviving it.ConceptsBusiness

ApatheiaThe Stoic doctrine of freedom from passion — not the absence of feeling, but the absence of the disturbing emotions that arise from mistaken judgments about what is good and bad.ConceptsPhilosophyHellenistic

ApologyPlato's account of Socrates's defense speech at his 399 BCE trial in Athens, the foundational text on the relation between philosophy and the political community that condemns it.BooksPhilosophy

AporiaThe Greek term for productive perplexity — the recognition, often arrived at through dialectical questioning, that one does not in fact know what one thought one knew.ConceptsPhilosophyClassical Greek

AristotelianismThe tradition founded by Aristotle: forms are immanent in things, knowledge starts with observation, ethics aims at virtuous activity, and reality is best studied through its causes and ends.TraditionsPhilosophyClassical Greek

AristotlePlato's most consequential student, who systematized philosophy, founded biology, invented Western formal logic, and gave virtue ethics its canonical form.FiguresPhilosophyClassical Greek

Arthur SchopenhauerThe German philosopher whose World as Will and Representation developed the post-Kantian metaphysics of the irrational Will as ultimate reality, integrated Western philosophy with Buddhist and Hindu thought, and shaped Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Wagner, Tolstoy, Freud, and the broader European cultural engagement with pessimism and the unconscious.FiguresPhilosophy19th Century

AtaraxiaThe Hellenistic ideal of mental tranquility — the settled, undisturbed state of soul that Epicureans and Skeptics took to be the goal of philosophy.ConceptsPhilosophyHellenistic

AufhebungHegel's technical term for the dialectical movement that simultaneously negates, preserves, and elevates a position into a higher synthesis — the central operation of dialectical thinking.ConceptsPhilosophy19th Century

Augustine of HippoThe North African bishop whose synthesis of Christianity and Neoplatonism became the foundation of Latin Christian theology and shaped the metaphysical inheritance of the medieval West.FiguresPhilosophyLate Antiquity

AuthenticityThe existentialist value of being what one is in the deepest sense — living from one's own freedom and recognition of finitude rather than from inherited roles, social conformity, or self-deception.ConceptsTransitions20th Century

AverroesCommentaries on Aristotle that transmitted Aristotelian philosophy to medieval Europe, and the argument that philosophy and revelation cannot conflict.FiguresPhilosophy1126–1198

AvicennaThe distinction between essence and existence, the argument from contingency to a necessary being, and the Canon of Medicine.FiguresPhilosophyc. 980–1037

Bad FaithSartre's name for the mode of consciousness that flees its own freedom by treating itself as a fixed thing rather than the open activity it actually is — self-deception that requires simultaneously knowing and not knowing the same thing.ConceptsPhilosophy20th Century

Barriers to entryAnything that makes it costly, slow or impossible for a new competitor to start doing what an existing business does.ConceptsBusiness

Baruch SpinozaThe Dutch-Jewish philosopher whose Ethics applied geometrical method to substance, mind, and freedom and concluded that there is only one substance, identified with God or Nature.FiguresPhilosophyEarly Modern

Base rate neglectJudging how likely something is from how well the case matches a picture, while ignoring how common the thing is to begin with.ConceptsBusiness

Batch sizeHow much work is accumulated before it moves to the next step.ConceptsBusiness

Baumol's cost diseaseWages rise in sectors with no productivity growth because they must compete for labor with sectors that have it.ConceptsBusiness

Being and becomingThe Pre-Socratic opposition between what is stable and what changes — Parmenides holding that only unchanging being is real and Heraclitus that everything flows.ConceptsPhilosophy

Being and NothingnessSartre's 1943 major work of phenomenological-existentialist philosophy, developing systematic analyses of consciousness, freedom, bad faith, interpersonal experience, and the structures of human existence.BooksPhilosophy

Being and TimeHeidegger's 1927 foundational work, the major philosophical event of the twentieth century in continental philosophy: a systematic phenomenological analysis of Dasein as the entry point into the question of the meaning of being.BooksPhilosophy

Being-toward-DeathHeidegger's analysis of human existence as essentially structured by its relation to its own coming death — the recognition of which is what makes authentic existence possible.ConceptsPhilosophy20th Century

Belief SystemsA set of beliefs held together so that each is supported by the others.ConceptsPhilosophyContemporary

Bernard WilliamsEnglish moral philosopher (1929–2003), Cambridge Knightbridge Professor and Oxford White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, whose Problems of the Self, Moral Luck, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Shame and Necessity, and Truth and Truthfulness defended a humanistic moral philosophy against both the Kantian deontological and the utilitarian-consequentialist traditions.FiguresPhilosophy20th Century

Bertrand RussellThe British philosopher, mathematician, logician, social critic, and public intellectual whose work in the foundations of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the broader analytic tradition shaped twentieth-century philosophy more than any other single figure.FiguresPhilosophy20th Century

Black swansA rare event that was not in anyone's model, has very large consequences, and is explained confidently afterwards as though it had been foreseeable.ConceptsBusiness