Philosophy — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BonaventureThe Italian Franciscan whose Augustinian-Neoplatonist synthesis was the major thirteenth-century theological alternative to Aquinas's Aristotelian framework, and whose Itinerarium Mentis in Deum is the canonical Franciscan mystical theology.FiguresPhilosophyMedieval

Charles Sanders PeirceThe American polymath who founded pragmatism with the 1878 paper How to Make Our Ideas Clear, made fundamental contributions to formal logic and semiotics, and produced one of the most original philosophical bodies of work in the nineteenth century — most of it published only after his death.FiguresPhilosophy19th Century

Daniel DennettArgued that consciousness is not what it seems to be, and that the appearance of a unified inner theatre is itself what needs explaining.FiguresPhilosophy1942–2024

David HumeThe Scottish empiricist whose analysis of causation, induction, and the self produced some of the most consequential skeptical arguments in modern philosophy.FiguresPhilosophyEnlightenment

De AnimaAristotle's treatise on the soul as the form of a living body, analyzing the faculties of nutrition, sensation, and intellect across plants, animals, and human beings.BooksPhilosophy

DualismThe view that mind and matter are fundamentally different kinds of thing, so mental states are not simply physical states of the body.ConceptsPhilosophy

Duns ScotusThe Scottish Franciscan whose technical revisions to the dominant Thomist framework — the univocity of being, the formal distinction, the primacy of the will, the haecceity of individuation — produced the major Franciscan alternative to Thomism in late-medieval and early-modern scholasticism.FiguresPhilosophyMedieval

EnchiridionEpictetus's handbook of Stoic ethics, compiled by his student Arrian as a short, portable distillation of the longer Discourses.BooksPhilosophy

EpictetusThe Stoic philosopher, born a slave, whose Discourses and Enchiridion are the most rigorous surviving applications of Stoic ethics to daily life.FiguresPhilosophyRoman

EqualityThe principle that people are in some fundamental respect to be treated as equals — and the long argument about which respect, since equality in one dimension usually produces inequality in another.ConceptsPhilosophy

FalsifiabilityKarl Popper's criterion for scientific status: a theory is scientific if it forbids something, so that a statable observation would refute it.ConceptsPhilosophy

FateThe idea that events are fixed in advance and will arrive regardless of what anyone does — distinguished from determinism, in which your actions are themselves causes.ConceptsPhilosophy

FormThe structure that makes something the kind of thing it is.ConceptsPhilosophy

Friedrich NietzscheThe German philosopher and philologist whose late nineteenth-century works on morality, religion, art, and the will to power produced one of the most influential and most contested philosophical bodies of work in modern thought.FiguresPhilosophy19th Century

Hannah ArendtGerman-Jewish political theorist (1906–1975) who fled Nazi Germany, became one of the major American public intellectuals of the postwar period, and produced in The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem the most influential analyses of mass politics, action, and the banality of evil written in the twentieth century.FiguresPhilosophy20th Century

How to Make Our Ideas ClearPeirce's 1878 Popular Science Monthly paper containing the founding statement of the pragmatic maxim and the central methodological proposal of the pragmatist tradition.BooksPhilosophy

IdealismThe view that reality is fundamentally mental — that what exists is minds and their contents, and the physical world depends on being perceived or thought.ConceptsPhilosophy

IdeologyA system of beliefs and assumptions that presents a particular social arrangement as natural or inevitable, and which the people holding it usually do not experience as a position at all.ConceptsPhilosophy

IkigaiA Japanese word for what makes life feel worth living.ConceptsMeaning

Intrinsic and instrumental valueSomething has instrumental value if it is worth having for what it gets you, and intrinsic value if it is worth having for itself.ConceptsMeaning

Isaiah BerlinLatvian-born British philosopher and historian of ideas (1909–1997), Oxford professor and founding president of Wolfson College, whose essay Two Concepts of Liberty (1958) shaped postwar liberal political theory and whose essays on Russian thought, the Counter-Enlightenment, and value pluralism made him one of the most influential public philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century.FiguresPhilosophy20th Century

Itinerarium Mentis in DeumBonaventure's 1259 short work organizing the six-stage ascent of the mind to God, modeled on the six-winged seraph that Francis of Assisi had seen at La Verna, and integrating Augustinian theology with the Franciscan contemplative tradition.BooksPhilosophy

John RawlsThe American philosopher whose A Theory of Justice (1971) revived political philosophy as a major analytic subfield and whose subsequent work on political liberalism and the law of peoples produced the most influential single body of work in twentieth-century English-language political theory.FiguresPhilosophy20th Century

Karl PopperProposed falsifiability as what separates science from everything else, and argued that theories are tested rather than proved.FiguresPhilosophy1902–1994

Letters to LuciliusSeneca's 124 surviving philosophical letters to his friend Lucilius, the most extensive and accessible body of practical Stoic ethical writing in the Roman corpus.BooksPhilosophy

MaterialismThe view that everything that exists is physical, so mental states are states of the brain and nothing further is required to explain them.ConceptsPhilosophy

Memento moriRemember that you will die — a practice, not a mood.ConceptsMeaning

MetaphysicsAristotle's foundational treatise on being qua being, substance, causation, potentiality and actuality, and the unmoved mover — the work that gave Western metaphysics its name and most of its categories.BooksPhilosophy

Moral luckThe problem that our moral judgments of people depend heavily on factors they did not control, which sits badly with the principle that we are assessed only on what is up to us.ConceptsPhilosophy

Moral relativismThe view that moral claims are true only relative to a culture or framework, so there is no standpoint from which one moral code can be judged better than another.ConceptsPhilosophy

Nicomachean EthicsAristotle's foundational treatise on virtue, practical wisdom, friendship, and the structure of the good human life — the work that gave Western virtue ethics its canonical form.BooksPhilosophy

NominalismThe view that only particular things exist, and that general terms are names we apply to things that resemble each other rather than labels for real shared entities.ConceptsPhilosophy

On the Genealogy of MoralityNietzsche's 1887 work of three essays analyzing the historical and psychological sources of moral judgment, organized around the contrast between aristocratic and slave moralities.BooksPhilosophy

Paradigm shiftThomas Kuhn's term for a scientific revolution that replaces the whole framework — the questions, methods and standards — rather than adding to what was known.ConceptsPhilosophy

ParmenidesThe Pre-Socratic philosopher of Elea whose poem On Nature argued that being is one, eternal, indivisible, and unchanging — the founding statement of Western metaphysics and the framework against which subsequent Greek philosophy defined itself.FiguresPhilosophyPre-Socratic

Personal identityWhat makes someone the same person over time, despite continuous change in body, memory and character — and what, if anything, that sameness consists in.ConceptsTransitions

PhaedoPlato's dialogue on the immortality of the soul, set on the day of Socrates's execution and containing the first systematic statement of the Theory of Forms.BooksPhilosophy

PlotinusThe third-century philosopher who founded Neoplatonism, systematizing Plato's thought into a hierarchical metaphysics of emanation from the One that shaped Christian, Islamic, and Jewish theology for over a thousand years.FiguresPhilosophyLate Antiquity

PoeticsAristotle's short treatise on tragedy, epic, and the principles of literary composition — the founding work of Western literary theory.BooksPhilosophy

PoliticsAristotle's foundational treatise on the political community, the varieties of constitutions, and the relation between political life and human flourishing.BooksPhilosophy

QualiaThe felt qualities of experience — the particular redness of red, the specific character of a pain — and the part of the mind that physical description seems least able to capture.ConceptsPhilosophy

RealismThe view that something exists independently of our minds, beliefs or language — used of the external world, of universals, of moral facts and of scientific entities, with a different dispute in each case.ConceptsPhilosophy