Search Everything on the site in one box — 519 entries across the library, the guides and the math notes. Alternate names work too, so “80/20” finds the Pareto principle.
A Theory of Justice Rawls'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. Books A Treatise of Human Nature Hume'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. Books Act and potency Aristotle's distinction between what a thing is now and what it is capable of becoming. Concepts Adam Smith Scottish 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. Figures Enlightenment Adverse selection When 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. Concepts Aesthetics The philosophical study of beauty, art, and taste. Concepts Akrasia Acting 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. Concepts al-Farabi Khorasanian 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. Figures Medieval al-Ghazali Persian 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. Figures Medieval Alasdair MacIntyre Scottish-American moral philosopher (1929–2025) whose After Virtue, Whose Justice? Figures Contemporary Albert Camus The 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. Figures 20th Century Alexis de Tocqueville French 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. Figures 19th Century Alienation Marx'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. Concepts 19th Century Allegory of the Cave Plato'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. Concepts Classical Greek Amara's law We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. Concepts Amor Fati The Stoic doctrine of loving fate — actively accepting whatever happens as the working of cosmic logos, rather than merely tolerating it. Concepts Cross-Era Analogy of being Aquinas'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. Concepts Analytic Philosophy The 20th-century tradition characterized by formal precision, linguistic clarity, piecemeal problem-solving, and close engagement with logic and the sciences. Traditions 20th Century Anaxagoras Introduced Mind as the ordering principle of the cosmos, and was prosecuted for saying the sun is a burning stone. Figures c. 500–428 BC Anaximander The 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. Figures Pre-Socratic Show 20 more · 20 of 519