Concepts

Explore ideas that the readings explain, use or compare. Each introduction says which sense of the idea is examined here.

A

1 reading
Ability hypothesis
The ability hypothesis proposes that experience supplies abilities to remember, imagine and recognize, not a previously unknown fact.
1 reading
Ableism
Ableism gives disabling force to judgments and arrangements organized around favored capacities. Taylor’s criticism asks how such hierarchies affect access and moral consideration.
1 reading
Abolition
Abolition demands the end of slavery, including the institutions that sustain it. Cugoano tests ownership claims against the liberty of the person being enslaved.
1 reading
Absolute nothingness
Absolute nothingness in Nishida concerns the ground or context of distinctions. It must be distinguished from a blank world and from Madhyamaka’s account of emptiness.
1 reading
Active and passive affects
Spinoza distinguishes affects through the adequacy of their causes. Becoming more active involves understanding, not merely waiting before responding or appearing calm.
4 readings
Actual occasions
Actual occasions are Whitehead’s basic temporal becomings. An enduring thing involves many occasions; familiar objects and whole human actions cannot simply be identified as single occasions.
1 reading
Administrative standards
Public measures and assessment can resist favoritism. What goes unchecked when the authority to define standards and punish failure is concentrated?
1 reading
Aesthetic judgment
Aesthetic judgment can claim more than a report of personal pleasure. Kant asks how such a claim seeks agreement without deriving beauty from a determining rule.
1 reading
Ahiṃsā
In the selected Jain account, avoiding injury makes demands on attention and conduct, and householders and ascetics take on different commitments.
1 reading
Akan personhood
Akan personhood includes distinctions among being human, moral achievement and social recognition. The arguments of Gyekye and Wiredu keep those senses from collapsing into one verdict.
2 readings
Algorithmic accountability
Algorithmic accountability concerns who must explain, justify and repair automated decisions. Effective oversight requires duties and power to change outcomes, not a ceremonial human signature.
2 readings
Alienation
Alienation separates workers from products, activity, human capacities and others in Marx’s early account. The criticism depends on a view of flourishing that also needs examination.
1 reading
Appresentation
Appresentation is Husserl’s term for how another person’s experience is present without being given originally, as one’s own experience is. Pairing and confirmation do not make the other an inner copy.
3 readings
Argument
An argument offers reasons for a conclusion. Test what those reasons establish, apart from agreement, a vivid example or confidence in the person speaking.
1 reading
Artistic form
Artistic form includes relations of rhythm, sequence, silence and arrangement. Those relations can shape meaning and experience beyond a statement of a work’s conclusion.
2 readings
Asabiyya
Asabiyya is a mutual readiness to defend and support one another, including ties beyond ancestry. It can enable rule, but that does not make domination just.
2 readings
Ataraxia
Epicurean and Pyrrhonian accounts both describe freedom from disturbance, but they reach it by different arguments. An expected benefit does not prove either argument true.
2 readings
Ātman
What does the selected account mean by the self, and how does it connect knowing with liberation? Later interpreters disagree about how the self relates to brahman.
1 reading
Attunement
Attunement is the way we find ourselves already situated in a world and affected by it; it discloses how a situation matters. A mood can disclose something without proving an interpretation correct.
1 reading
Authenticity in Heidegger
Authenticity, for Heidegger, is a matter of owning a life, which involves taking over possibilities without having made their whole ground. An authentic commitment can still be morally wrong.

B

1 reading
Basho
Basho, or place, concerns a context within which distinctions can appear. Nishida’s use does not simply name a physical location or a hidden substance behind things.
1 reading
Being and becoming
Compare arguments about continuity, change and the possibility of coming into being. What follows from claims about what-is and what-is-not?
1 reading
Being and beings
Heidegger’s inquiry distinguishes a particular being from its being. Being is neither another object nor a name for whatever matters to someone.
2 readings
Being-in-the-world
Being-in-the-world gathers practical involvement, significance and relations to others into a unified account of Dasein. It is not an inner mind that later makes contact with an outside world.
1 reading
Being-toward-death
Being-toward-death is a life’s relation to its possibility of ending, and Heidegger calls one way of holding that relation anticipation. The readings weigh competing interpretations and distinguish anticipation from predicting demise or producing anxiety.
2 readings
Being-with
Other people belong to a shared world even when someone acts alone. Being-with neither makes others equipment nor establishes agreement or equal power.
2 readings
Bhakti
Bhakti is a loving relation to the divine, and particular accounts of it differ. How do understanding and practice belong to devotion? The different teachings do not share one history or meaning.
1 reading
Bodily habit
Learning a bodily habit can change how a situation becomes available to act in. A habit is neither a stored rule alone nor a demand that good action be effortless.
1 reading
Body schema
The body schema is the bodily organization through which a situation takes practical shape, as possibilities of action. It is not simply an internal picture of the body.
3 readings
Brahman
Brahman is ultimate reality in the selected Upanishadic and Vedānta arguments. They disagree about whether its unity includes real difference, and about how it can be known.
1 reading
Buddha-nature
If awakening is described as already present, why does practice remain necessary? The selected discussion is not one doctrine shared by all Buddhists.
1 reading
Bundle account of the self
Hume’s bundle account challenges an unchanging self encountered apart from perceptions. Relations and memory help explain identity, while the unity of the bundle remains a problem.

C

1 reading
Capabilities
Capabilities concern real opportunities to be and do. Equal resources can yield unequal possibilities, while protecting an opportunity need not require a person to use it.
2 readings
Care in Heidegger
Care names a structure of being ahead of oneself, already in a world and involved with beings. It must be distinguished from kindness and care ethics.
1 reading
Caste
Caste concerns structured hereditary divisions and unequal standing. Ambedkar’s criticism connects social organization with authority, occupation and the possibility of equal freedom.
1 reading
Categorical imperative
The categorical imperative asks whether a maxim can serve as universal law. Specifying circumstances, means and ends matters to the test and to objections against it.
1 reading
Causal efficacy
Causal efficacy is Whitehead’s mode of feeling a world already acting upon us. Bodily dependence matters to the account, while the feeling of dependence still leaves its explanation open to challenge.
4 readings
Causal necessity
An observed conjunction is not the same as a connection that must hold. Compare explanations that appeal to natural powers, conditions and divine action.
1 reading
City–soul analogy
The analogy compares ordered roles in a city with reason, spirit and appetite in a person. Does inner harmony prove that someone treats others justly?
1 reading
Cogito
The cogito finds certainty in the occurrence of thinking while doubt is underway. Further claims about what the thinker is require further argument.
1 reading
Coloniality of power
Coloniality of power concerns structures that can outlast colonial administration. Quijano’s account connects racial classification with labor and authority rather than simply renaming every inequality.
1 reading
Commodity fetishism
Commodity fetishism makes relations among people appear as properties and relations of things. Marx’s account does not reduce market pressures to a mere mistake in thought.
1 reading
Comparative synthesis
Comparative synthesis brings arguments into relation while keeping their grounds and disagreements visible. A question-and-source map can record what remains uncertain and what could change a judgment.
1 reading
Compatibilism
Compatibilism holds that relevant freedom can coexist with causal determination. Hume and later accounts differ over the control needed for action and responsibility.
1 reading
Conceptual valuation
In conceptual valuation, a potential receives a role and importance within becoming. No conscious judgment or moral verdict is implied.
1 reading
Concrescence
Concrescence is Whitehead’s term for a subject becoming definite through its feelings, with no finished observer assembling separate pieces.
3 readings
Conscious experience
What explains the felt character of hearing or seeing? That question is different from explaining how we discriminate and report.
1 reading
Consensus
Deliberation toward consensus can answer objections and seek consent. Shared responsibility does not require everyone to reach the same private judgment.
1 reading
Consequence argument
The consequence argument asks how control over an action could remain if it follows from a past and laws beyond one’s control. Its inference is itself contested.
1 reading
Consequent nature of God
Whitehead’s consequent nature of God receives the achieved world. Examine what this proposed preservation adds to ordinary inheritance, and why its value remains disputed in the face of personal loss and suffering.
2 readings
Constitution in Husserl
Constitution concerns how something has sense and validity through experience. It is not creation of an object by an individual mind or a causal explanation.
1 reading
Counter-archive
A counter-archive challenges an authorized account through other testimony and forms of address. Guaman Poma’s work raises this possibility without speaking for every Indigenous people.
7 readings
Counterexample
A counterexample is a possible case that tests an inference or a general claim. Showing that support fails is not the same as proving the opposite conclusion.
1 reading
Creativity in Whitehead
Creativity names the many becoming a new one in Whitehead’s scheme. The abstraction does not supply an additional producer or replace the actual reasons for a particular becoming.
4 readings
Cultivation
Practice, study and reflection can shape feelings and judgment, and cultivation still leaves room to question inherited forms.
1 reading
Cultural reconstruction
Cultural reconstruction asks how inherited resources can be criticized and transformed. Hu Shi and Liang Shuming differ over renewal without reducing their choices to imitation or rejection.
1 reading
Custom and expectation
Custom connects repeated experience to expectation. Explaining that transition does not by itself prove that an unobserved case must resemble the cases already encountered.

D

2 readings
Dao
The Way does different philosophical work in selected Daodejing and Zhuangzi passages, and no single fixed formula captures it.
1 reading
Dasein
Dasein names the being for whom its own being is at issue. It is not a detached inner subject or a guarantee of superior insight.
1 reading
Deconstruction
Deconstruction examines dependencies and instabilities within a text’s distinctions. It is not simply demolition or replacing a favored term with its opposite.
5 readings
Deductive validity
An argument is deductively valid when its premises could not all be true while its conclusion is false. Whether the premises are in fact true is a separate question.
1 reading
Dependency in care
Dependency in care concerns practical needs that require another’s support. Respecting those needs does not grant the supporter unrestricted authority over the recipient’s life.
2 readings
Dependent arising
In dependent arising, particular conditions support arising and cessation, and the account resists treating existence and nonexistence as unrestricted alternatives.
1 reading
Derivative dependency
Derivative dependency concerns a caregiver’s reliance on resources and support needed to provide care. Kittay’s account makes that reliance visible as a question of justice.
2 readings
Determinism
Determinism concerns the relation between prior conditions and what follows. Spinoza’s necessity, Hume’s account and modern debates must be distinguished; causal determination is not identical to coercion.
1 reading
Dharma in Mīmāṃsā
In the selected Mīmāṃsā inquiry, dharma is prescribed action. Interpretation, qualification and the limits of observation stay central to the question.
2 readings
Dialectic
Dialectic is inquiry that examines its own hypotheses. Compare its ambition to reach an unassumed starting point with reasons to keep judgment open.
1 reading
Différance
Différance names the interplay of difference and deferral in meaning. The concept questions complete self-contained presence without making every interpretation equally warranted.
1 reading
Difference principle
The difference principle asks that social and economic inequalities work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. Rawls places it within an order protecting liberties and opportunities.
2 readings
Disclosure in Heidegger
Disclosure is an opening that makes beings intelligible enough for claims to be tested. It does not turn an incorrect statement into a correct one.
1 reading
Disputed authorship
Disputed authorship separates questions about a text’s reasoning from questions about its origin. Surviving witnesses, attribution arguments and uncertainty each require their own evidence.
1 reading
Divided will
How can someone want to act and still hold back? Augustine answers with an account of competing habits and desires within one person.
1 reading
Divine simplicity
Maimonides thinks divine unity constrains the attribution of distinct properties to God. How does that bear on the ordinary words used in scripture?
2 readings
Double consciousness
In Du Bois, double consciousness is a divided relation to oneself under racial judgment. The reading connects that pressure with Black American belonging and material opportunities, without making the division a fixed racial destiny.
1 reading
Dukkha
Dukkha, suffering, is examined through its relation to attachment and through four tasks: understanding, abandoning, realizing and developing. It is not a verdict that every moment is miserable.
1 reading
Dwelling in Heidegger
Dwelling concerns inhabiting and gathering a place, beyond residence alone. The meaning of dwelling does not settle questions of housing, access or engineering.

E

1 reading
Eidetic variation
Eidetic variation uses imagination to examine what might stay invariant across examples. Familiarity with an example is not by itself proof of necessity.
1 reading
Elenchus
Socratic examination tests an answer against a person’s other commitments and can reveal inconsistency. What does that establish before a better answer has been found?
1 reading
Emanation
Emanation is dependence on a source that neither diminishes nor begins producing at some time. It is not a sequence of earlier and later events.
6 readings
Embodiment
Embodiment concerns how bodily capacities shape experience and action. Perception involves practical access to things, with possibilities that can differ between people and situations.
6 readings
Emptiness
In the Madhyamaka sense followed here, emptiness denies intrinsic nature while keeping dependent existence, ordinary distinctions and consequences.
1 reading
Enframing
Enframing describes a mode of revealing that orders beings for further availability. Criticizing it does not remove the need for effective institutions and technical knowledge.
1 reading
Entitlement theory
Entitlement theory assesses holdings through their history rather than a preferred pattern alone. Acquisition, transfer and rectification each matter to Nozick’s account.
2 readings
Epistemic injustice
Epistemic injustice takes two forms here: prejudice that unfairly lowers a speaker’s credibility, and gaps in shared understanding connected to exclusion. What would each require an institution to change?
1 reading
Equal standing
Equal standing concerns whose claims and judgment count. An appeal to universal rights must also confront education, ownership and institutions that keep people subordinate.
1 reading
Equivocation
Equivocation occurs when an argument shifts between meanings of a term. The conquest debate tests whether different senses of barbarian can support the same conclusion.
1 reading
Essence and existence
Understanding what a thing is differs from establishing that it exists. Avicenna uses the distinction in an argument about dependence.
1 reading
Eternal objects
Eternal objects are pure possibilities for definiteness. They differ from actual things, and from the possibilities relevant to a particular inherited world.
1 reading
Ethical life
Ethical life concerns freedom embodied in shared institutions and practices. Hegel’s account makes their structure matter beyond an individual’s private intentions.
1 reading
Ethnophilosophy
Ethnophilosophy presents a people’s shared outlook as philosophy. Hountondji’s criticism asks what happens when that presentation erases individual argument and disagreement.
1 reading
Eucharist
Catholic teaching gives the Eucharist a specific account of memorial and presence. Comparison with Quaker reflection should preserve the disagreement about outward sacramental rites.
1 reading
Existential commitment
Existential commitment concerns what acting on a conviction demands of a life. The difficulty of commitment does not by itself justify harm or exempt a choice from criticism.
1 reading
Existential temporality
Existential temporality treats future, having-been and present as the unity of care. They are not three positions on a clock, and not other names for retention and protention.
1 reading
Extensive continuum
The extensive continuum concerns potential relations of connection and division that actual occasions make definite. It is not a ready-made coordinate grid or a collection of smaller actual occasions.
1 reading
Exteriority
Exteriority concerns a person whose life and claims exceed a system’s assigned role. Dussel uses it to question the terms of inquiry, not to exempt any claim from reasons.

F

1 reading
Fallibilism
Fallibilism allows a belief to be justified yet open to correction. It supports inquiry without promising that investigators will inevitably reach agreement.
1 reading
Falsifiability
Falsifiability asks whether a claim rules out outcomes that could count against it. A failed prediction still requires examination of assumptions and the test itself.
1 reading
Family resemblance
Can overlapping similarities connect cases when no single feature is shared by every member?
1 reading
Flourishing
In Aristotle’s account, what makes a whole life go well? Virtue, friendship and external conditions each contribute to that judgment.
2 readings
Forms
Intelligible Forms play a role in both Plato and Plotinus. How does each account connect understanding with reality? Their explanations need not be the same.
1 reading
Four causes
The four causes answer different questions: about material, form, a source of change and an end. They are explanatory roles, not four successive events.
1 reading
Four–Seven debate
The Four–Seven debate compared accounts of the Four Beginnings and the Seven Feelings. Does moral goodness require a distinctive role for principle within the embodied life they share?
1 reading
Free choice and grace
How can human choice matter if salvation depends on grace? Erasmus and Luther give different answers, including different readings of what a command implies.
1 reading
Friendship
Aristotle distinguishes friendships of usefulness, of pleasure and of shared goodness. Why does a flourishing life need relationships as well as individual achievement?

G

2 readings
Genealogy
Genealogy examines the formation of practices and values rather than taking them as necessary. Nietzsche and Foucault pursue distinct inquiries that require evidence, not a shared formula.
2 readings
General will
Rousseau’s general will concerns the common interest under conditions of political equality. Counting wishes or declaring dissent mistaken cannot by itself establish it.
3 readings
Genetic and coordinate analysis
Genetic analysis concerns the constitution of an occasion; coordinate analysis divides its achieved extent. Whitehead’s distinction prevents measured intervals from being treated as successive internal phases of becoming.
1 reading
Grounded normativity
Grounded normativity is ethical understanding formed through responsibilities and practices in a particular place, not attachment to a landscape alone.

H

1 reading
Harm principle
The harm principle distinguishes preventing harm to others from enforcing dislike or offense. Showing harm still leaves questions about whether an intervention is justified.
1 reading
Hegelian dialectic
Hegelian dialectic examines tensions through which a position undermines its own claims. One-sided recognition supplies a worked case without imposing a thesis–antithesis–synthesis formula.
3 readings
Hermeneutic circle
The hermeneutic circle describes revision between parts and a provisional whole. It is a pattern of interpretation, not permission to treat circular reasoning as proof.
1 reading
Hermetic self-knowledge
In Poimandres, recognizing humanity’s divine origin is meant to transform a life. What supports that promise?
1 reading
Historical explanation
How does a proposed mechanism connect events, and what competing causes remain possible? A well-supported local account need not establish a universal law.
2 readings
Historicity
Historicity is the way a life takes up inherited possibilities. Claims about a shared destiny still need political and ethical justification.
1 reading
Huayan interdependent arising
A part’s role depends on the whole it helps constitute. Does the rafter example support Fazang’s stronger account of how part and whole relate?
1 reading
Human nature
What comes without learning, and what does moral education develop? The disagreement is more than nature against nurture.
1 reading
Humaneness
Selected Analects passages on care, character and relationships ask what ren, humaneness, requires of a person.

I

1 reading
Ideology
Ideology can name ways an account obscures the social relations that sustain it. Applying that criticism requires an argument; identifying a belief’s origin does not refute it.
1 reading
Ijma
Ijma concerns consensus within Islamic legal reasoning. Its role in Iqbal’s proposed institutions must not be equated with every kind of consensus or parliamentary vote.
1 reading
Ijtihad
Ijtihad concerns disciplined legal interpretation within Islamic thought. Iqbal’s proposals and Hallaq’s historical criticism raise different questions about its practice and institutions.
1 reading
Immanent critique
Immanent critique tests a practice against commitments it makes or relies on. Exposing a contradiction can open further questions about whether those commitments also need revision.
1 reading
Immaterialism
Immaterialism rejects material substance in Berkeley’s account. It does not amount to denying ordinary objects or reducing their order to an individual’s passing wishes.
1 reading
Inclusive concern
Why should outsiders’ welfare enter practical judgment? Concern for everyone is not equal affection, or identical treatment in every situation.
1 reading
Incompatibilism
Incompatibilism denies that determinism and the relevant freedom can both hold. The denial leaves further questions about whether determinism is true and what responsibility requires.
2 readings
Induction
Induction extends belief beyond observed cases. Hume’s challenge asks how past success could justify that extension without already relying on it.
1 reading
Inductive risk
Inductive risk is the risk of error when evidence does not entail a conclusion. Considering its consequences can guide methods and thresholds without licensing wishful evidence.
6 readings
Inference
An inference moves from reasons to a conclusion. What does a reason support, how does a sign connect with a conclusion and what does an objection actually defeat?
1 reading
Instrumental reason
Instrumental reason assesses means in relation to ends. Such calculation remains useful, but it cannot alone justify the purpose being pursued.
4 readings
Intellectual reception
Before claiming a historical connection, look for evidence of access, translation and response. Then ask how later readers preserve, challenge or transform what they inherit.
2 readings
Intentionality
Intentionality is the directedness of experience toward something. It need not involve an inner picture standing between a person and the object they encounter.
1 reading
Intergenerational justice
Intergenerational justice asks what present people owe those who come later. Rawls’s just-savings argument concerns sustaining just institutions without imposing unlimited burdens on poorer generations.
1 reading
Intersectionality
Intersectionality examines how inequalities can work together in ways separate categories obscure. It asks for a specific account of institutions, experience and exclusion.
2 readings
Intersubjectivity
Intersubjectivity is the involvement of distinct subjects in the experience of a common world. Shared objects and coexistence do not imply identical access, agreement or justified norms.
1 reading
Intrinsic and instrumental value
Intrinsic value concerns value in itself; instrumental value concerns value as a means. Something can have both, and distinguishing them does not settle every conflict.
8 readings
Intrinsic nature
Intrinsic nature would be a nature something has independently of conditions. Nāgārjuna challenges it, and an account of change puts it under pressure.
1 reading
Iwa
Iwa is character, cultivated in relationships. Moral worth differs from favorable prospects, worldly success and circumstances beyond a person’s control.

J

1 reading
Jīva
A jīva, in the Jain account, is a conscious living being that changes and endures. It can be bound by material karma and released from it.

K

2 readings
Kantian autonomy
Kantian autonomy is self-legislation under laws valid for everyone. Choosing a private rule or satisfying a preference is not sufficient for autonomy in this sense.
2 readings
Knowing and acting
Does acknowledging a duty count as knowing it? Compare arguments about inquiry, felt response and the effort it takes for conduct to change.
1 reading
Knowledge argument
The knowledge argument moves from Mary’s learning something through experience to the conclusion that complete physical knowledge leaves out a fact. That step is disputed.
2 readings
Knowledge sovereignty
Who governs how knowledge is learned, shared and used? Publication does not by itself grant unrestricted authority over it.

L

1 reading
Language-games
A language-game takes words together with the activities in which they function, including how participants learn and correct their use.
2 readings
Li (principle)
Li 理, principle or pattern, figures in Chinese and Korean Confucian arguments about embodied life and moral feeling. It is distinct from ritual propriety, li 禮.
1 reading
Listening and authority
What can hearing a complaint change? Respect, useful information and an equal power to decide are different things it might offer.

M

1 reading
Maat
The museum descriptions of two Egyptian objects explain maat through the ideas of order, truth and justice. The objects come from different periods, and one identification is uncertain.
1 reading
Many-sidedness
A standpoint can disclose a real aspect of something without exhausting it. The Jain argument for partial understanding does not make every opinion equally sound.
1 reading
Meaning as use
What does an expression do in an exchange? Its established use permits correction, not unrestricted private interpretation.
1 reading
Methodological doubt
Methodological doubt withholds assent to test what can withstand a challenge. Descartes uses it to seek a foundation, giving suspension a different purpose from Sextus’s inquiry.
1 reading
Mind–body distinction
The mind–body distinction asks how thought and bodily existence differ and relate. Descartes’s argument for distinct natures also confronts their intimate union in experience.
2 readings
Misplaced concreteness
A description can select real features while leaving much of an event out. Whitehead’s warning about misplaced concreteness concerns treating such an abstraction as the full actuality it helps us describe.
1 reading
Moderate communitarianism
Moderate communitarianism gives community a central role while preserving individual agency and claims. Gyekye’s account asks how criticism can arise within shared life.
1 reading
Monads
Monads are Leibniz’s simple, perceiving substances. Pre-established harmony explains their coordination without treating them as little material parts pushing one another.
2 readings
Moral responsibility
Moral responsibility asks what makes an action appropriately answerable to praise or blame. Causal influence, coercion, available alternatives and actual control raise distinct questions.
2 readings
Moral standing
Moral standing concerns whose interests count in deliberation. It differs from the capacity to act as a responsible agent or meet a committee’s performance standard.
2 readings
Mortality
How does the prospect of death change a life? Do limits on survival also limit the value of friendship, understanding and shared work?

N

2 readings
Natural law
Natural-law arguments connect reason, human goods and limits on conduct. Aquinas and Locke give distinct accounts, and neither an inclination nor an existing government establishes by itself what is right.
1 reading
Natural relation
Dharmakīrti demands a connection grounded in what things are or how they arise, not just in repeated co-occurrence.
1 reading
Natural theology
What might reasoning from effects establish about God? Demonstrating dependence need not amount to complete knowledge of the divine essence.
1 reading
Necessity and contingency
Something can be necessary in itself or necessary through another. Does explaining contingent things require a necessary being?
1 reading
Negative prehension
Negative prehension excludes a datum from positive contribution to an occasion. This selective exclusion helps determine the experience without erasing the given world or making its history optional.
1 reading
Negative theology
How can denying a limitation teach something about God without giving a positive description of the divine essence?
1 reading
Nepantla
In Maffie’s reading of Nahua ethical balance, nepantla is the middle, a being-between. Responsive adjustment differs here from fixed compromise and from guaranteed safety.
1 reading
Nexus in Whitehead
A nexus is a plurality of actualities related through prehension. Whitehead’s further account of society asks how a shared form is carried forward through their inheritance.
1 reading
Non-apprehension
When does failing to perceive something show that it is absent? The answer depends on the conditions under which it would have been found.
3 readings
Not-self
The teaching of not-self questions identifying changing experience with a secure self. Challenging ownership and permanence is not the same as claiming that nothing exists.

O

1 reading
Object of negation
What exactly does a claim of emptiness deny? Settle that first, before deciding what follows for ordinary things, causation and the distinction between conventional and ultimate truth.
1 reading
Objectification in Whitehead
Objectification concerns how an earlier actuality contributes to a new feeling. Whitehead distinguishes the source of that inheritance from the feeling through which it becomes available to the recipient.
3 readings
Objective immortality
An occasion’s own becoming ends, but its achieved character can condition later becoming. Whitehead calls this objective immortality; it does not by itself establish continuing personal experience.
2 readings
Ontological principle
Whitehead’s ontological principle demands that a condition have its reason in something actual. His appeal to God needs further reasoning.
1 reading
Opacity
Opacity limits access to how a decision is made or justified. Opening a calculation may help while leaving its purpose, authority and avenues of challenge unresolved.
1 reading
Oppression
Oppression restricts people’s possibilities through social relations of domination. Beauvoir’s account distinguishes such restriction from ordinary obstacles or support that respects another person’s choices.
1 reading
Ori and destiny
In the accounts read here, ori is an inner head that bears destiny. What would make receiving or choosing a future relevant to responsibility for a life?
1 reading
Original position
The original position models impartial choice by withholding knowledge of one’s particular place. It retains general knowledge of human circumstances rather than imagining people without needs.
1 reading
Ownness
Ownness is what remains when Husserl abstracts, within the reduced field, from senses that depend on other subjects. It is not a claim that people first lived in isolation.

P

1 reading
Paradigm and normal science
A paradigm supports normal science by organizing questions, methods and exemplars. Anomalies can prompt revision without every difficulty immediately overturning that framework.
1 reading
Personal dependence
Personal dependence makes a person’s choices vulnerable to another’s favor. Rousseau asks how institutions might replace that subjection with equal standing under common laws.
1 reading
Personal order in Whitehead
Personal order adds a serial relation of inheritance to Whitehead’s account of society. The technical distinction helps explain endurance without establishing that every such order is a human person.
1 reading
Perspectival limitation
A limited standpoint can weaken confidence without making every judgment equally good or criticism impossible.
3 readings
Pervasion
Pervasion is a connection that runs in one required direction: a reason must not occur without what it is meant to establish.
2 readings
Phenomenological bracketing
Phenomenological bracketing suspends reliance on a belief while examining how its object appears. Husserl’s method differs from both Cartesian doubt and skeptical suspension.
1 reading
Philology
Philology examines language, textual transmission and the grounds for a reading. Correcting a received text can serve commitments that its readers continue to share.
1 reading
Philosophical questions
What happens, what a claim means and what ought to happen are different kinds of question. Answering one may leave another unresolved.
1 reading
Physicalism
Physicalism claims that once all the physical facts are fixed, no further nonphysical facts about experience remain. The readings weigh arguments that challenge it.
1 reading
Pleasure
Some enjoyments bring trouble, and some pains support a better life. How, then, can pleasure guide choices? Epicurus answers with an account of desire and sufficiency.
1 reading
Political obligation
Political obligation asks what gives a person reason to obey common power. Protection, consent, rights and breached trust can support competing answers.
1 reading
Power–knowledge
Power–knowledge concerns relations between ways of knowing and ways of governing conduct. Institutional categories can organize behavior while producing records that appear merely descriptive.
1 reading
Practical wisdom
Practical wisdom is judgment that sees what matters in a particular situation and pursues fitting ends. It is more than finding an efficient means to any goal.
2 readings
Practice-realization
For Dōgen, practice expresses awakening; it is not merely an external means of acquiring a finished inner state.
2 readings
Pragmatic maxim
The pragmatic maxim clarifies a concept through its conceivable practical consequences. It asks what a difference would make, not whether a belief is pleasant to hold.
1 reading
Pramāṇa
A pramāṇa is a means of knowledge, and it differs from mere confidence. How do the selected South Asian accounts justify relying on one?
4 readings
Prehension
Whitehead calls a constitutive relation of feeling a prehension. It contributes to the subject’s becoming rather than presupposing an already finished observer, and it need not involve consciousness.
1 reading
Presentational immediacy
Presentational immediacy gives a clear field of qualities such as color and shape. Whitehead distinguishes this clarity from what the appearance tells us about the actual thing exerting an influence.
1 reading
Primary and secondary qualities
Locke distinguishes qualities whose ideas resemble features of bodies from powers to produce sensations. Changing appearances raise questions that this distinction alone does not settle.
2 readings
Primordial valuation
God’s primordial valuation is Whitehead’s proposed actual ground for the ordered relevance of possibilities. The argument must explain why worldly capacities cannot supply that ground themselves.
1 reading
Problem of many hands
The problem of many hands arises when many contributors shape an outcome. Dividing work can obscure duties unless responsibility is specified across those contributions.
1 reading
Productive power
Productive power shapes capacities, identities and incentives as well as restricting action. Describing those effects does not prove that every outcome was planned or resistance is impossible.
2 readings
Proposition in Whitehead
A proposition in Whitehead’s account brings a possible pattern to bear on particular actualities. It can lure feeling and affect experience whether or not it is true.
1 reading
Protention
Protention concerns the coming part of an experience without requiring a detailed prediction. It is distinct from existential projection.
2 readings
Public reason
Public reason concerns justification addressed to people affected by a decision. Binns’s application asks more than whether a system accurately predicts an outcome.
1 reading
Pure experience
Pure experience describes experience before a separate subject–object division in Nishida’s early account. It is not a timeless doctrine attributed to Japanese thought as a whole.
1 reading
Puruṣa and prakṛti
Sāṃkhya and Yoga distinguish witnessing consciousness, puruṣa, from changing nature, prakṛti. What reasons support positing a witness beyond the changing mind?

Q

2 readings
Qi
In the selected Confucian arguments, qi is the changing stuff and activity of embodied life. It is not the same as modern matter or energy.

R

1 reading
Racialization
Racialization assigns racial meaning and consequence to people and encounters. Du Bois and Fanon illuminate different conditions rather than one universal racial experience.
1 reading
Readiness-to-hand
Readiness-to-hand is the way equipment is encountered through tasks and relations to other things. It does not require effortless skill, and a breakdown can expose those relations.
1 reading
Reasons-responsive control
Reasons-responsive control concerns capacities to recognize and act on reasons. It offers one account of responsibility that must still answer questions about manipulation and how capacities were formed.
2 readings
Recognition
Recognition concerns whose standing and judgment others acknowledge. The conquest debate and Hegel’s account of mutual recognition raise related questions through distinct arguments.
1 reading
Reflection on the sign
In Uddyotakara’s account, reflection on the sign brings present perception together with a remembered connection. Recognizing this smoke as indicating fire still leaves a further question: what established the connection?
3 readings
Relational obligation
Relationships can give people duties and make the exercise of authority answerable to others.
1 reading
Religious pluralism
Religious pluralism can describe diversity or propose an account of truth and salvation. Careful comparison distinguishes these claims from understanding, endorsement and mere tolerance.
2 readings
Religious reconstruction
Religious reconstruction reexamines inherited commitments and institutions. Ambedkar and Iqbal pursue distinct projects; neither supplies a single model of what all religious change must be.
1 reading
Representation
Vasubandhu challenges the move from an orderly appearance to a claim about its object. Rival interpretations of his argument remain open.
1 reading
Responsibility gap
A responsibility gap appears when an outcome lacks adequate assignment of answerability or repair. Distributed work is a reason to examine that gap, not to accept it automatically.
1 reading
Ressentiment
Ressentiment names a reactive formation of values in Nietzsche’s genealogy. Attributing it to someone does not settle whether their complaint is true or justified.
1 reading
Retention
Retention concerns what has just passed within a temporal experience, rather than recollection or a lingering sensation.
3 readings
Ritual propriety
Inherited forms can train attention and conduct, but performing them correctly does not by itself establish care.

S

1 reading
Sage philosophy
Sage philosophy examines critical reasoning by individuals in oral settings. It distinguishes argument from a report of shared beliefs without making the interviewer invisible.
1 reading
Scholastic question
A scholastic question sets objections apart from the author’s answer and replies. The arrangement exposes a disagreement and helps test whether the response meets it.
1 reading
Scriptural authority
What could warrant relying on scripture? Accepting its authority still leaves questions about meaning, scope and the kind of knowledge it offers.
1 reading
Sense and reference
Sense is a way of presenting a reference, not simply a private image. Frege uses the distinction to explain how learning an identity can add knowledge.
1 reading
Sentience
Sentience is the capacity for experiences such as suffering or enjoyment. Singer gives it moral significance without making intellectual performance a measure of whose pain counts.
1 reading
Situated freedom
Situated freedom joins agency to the conditions in which a person acts. Recognizing constraint need not erase responsibility, and affirming agency need not deny oppression.
1 reading
Skilled responsiveness
Practice changes attention, yet fluent action can still require pausing, care and judgment about the purposes a skill serves.
2 readings
Social contract
Social-contract arguments test political authority through agreement or authorization. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau differ over the parties, conditions and obligations involved.
2 readings
Society in Whitehead
A society in Whitehead’s technical sense sustains a common form through inherited relations among its members. Mere resemblance does not explain that continuity, and the term need not denote a human community.
1 reading
Speaking and spoken speech
Merleau-Ponty distinguishes emerging articulation from use of acquired meanings. Expressive success does not guarantee truth, and vocal fluency is not a test of thought.
1 reading
Speciesism
Speciesism gives species membership unjustified preference in weighing interests. Assessing the charge requires examining the interests and reasons in question, not merely noting a difference in treatment.
1 reading
Speculative philosophy in Whitehead
Whitehead asks a general scheme to be coherent, logically consistent, applicable to experience and adequate to its range. Examine how those demands differ, and what more his ambition for universality requires.
1 reading
Standing-reserve
Standing-reserve is Heidegger’s term for beings that appear primarily as resources kept available for further use. That differs from simply encountering a useful tool.
1 reading
Standpoint
Investigating from a particular social position can expose missing evidence or questions, but it does not confer knowledge automatically.
1 reading
Store consciousness
Store consciousness carries seeds and continuing dispositions in a process like a river. It is neither an enduring self nor a universal mind.
1 reading
Structured society
A structured society combines subordinate forms of order within a supporting environment. Whitehead uses this complexity to resist reducing a living body to one simple line of inheritance.
1 reading
Subject of a life
A subject of a life has experiences and a welfare of its own in Regan’s account. The argument protects individuals without resolving the status of every kind of being.
2 readings
Subjective aim
A subjective aim guides the unity a subject is becoming in Whitehead’s account, with no finished inner chooser behind it. Questions about self-determination remain unresolved.
1 reading
Subjective form
A feeling’s subjective form is its manner of receiving a datum. In Whitehead’s account that manner belongs to the new experience, whose unity is still becoming definite.
4 readings
Substance
Substance explains different things in Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza and Locke, and Berkeley challenges material substance. Their accounts do not add up to one shared definition.
1 reading
Substance monism
Substance monism holds that there is one substance. In Spinoza, its modes and attributes require distinctions that a picture of one ordinary material thing would obscure.
1 reading
Suspended judgment in Whitehead
Whitehead allows a proposition to enter conscious comparison without being affirmed or denied. This place for suspended judgment differs from a general skeptical discipline or a method of bracketing experience.
2 readings
Suspension of judgment
Suspending judgment means withholding assent when reasons remain balanced. It need not assert either a proposition or its denial.
2 readings
Symbolic reference
Symbolic reference connects Whitehead’s modes of perception and helps us encounter an appearance as a thing. The relation also matters to language; its usefulness does not guarantee correct recognition.

T

1 reading
Tacit consent
Tacit consent attributes obligations to a person’s conduct rather than an express promise. Locke’s account asks what enjoying protection can authorize, and for how long.
1 reading
Tarka
Tarka tests a competing supposition by drawing out its consequences. In the selected Nyāya discussion it supports inquiry, while remaining distinct from an independent source of knowledge.
1 reading
Teleology
How can an end explain a process without being anyone’s conscious intention, and what would justify such an explanation?
2 readings
Testimony
When do someone’s words give us knowledge? Trust, correction and unfair judgments of credibility all bear on the answer.
10 readings
Textual transmission
Copying, performance, collection and translation shape what later readers encounter. What do those histories allow us to infer about a work or a claim?
1 reading
The fourfold
In Heidegger’s dwelling essay, earth, sky, divinities and mortals name the relations of the fourfold. The lesson presents Young’s interpretation and its limits without asking for religious assent.
1 reading
The One
Plotinus proposes the One as a source beyond the multiplicity of Intellect. Why must a first principle be simple? That question should not be treated as already settled.
1 reading
The they
The they is Heidegger’s name for the anonymous everyday authority of what one does. It makes things intelligible, and it can also sustain conformity and unequal authority.
1 reading
Thrown projection
In thrown projection, possibilities are understood from conditions a person did not originate. Projection is neither free invention without constraints nor a denial of change.
3 readings
Time
Augustine asks about created time, duration and a threefold present of memory, attention and expectation. Time as experienced should not be equated with reality as a whole.
1 reading
Transcendental idealism
Kant’s transcendental idealism distinguishes objects as experienced from things in themselves. Appearance need not mean illusion, and competing interpretations of the distinction remain open.
1 reading
Transcendental inquiry
Transcendental inquiry asks what makes a kind of experience or knowledge possible. Kant’s conditions are not simply a story about when a person learns concepts.
1 reading
Transubstantiation
Transubstantiation names a doctrinal account of Eucharistic change. Its distinction between substance and appearances is not a claim about detectable chemical alteration.
2 readings
Truth and judgment in Whitehead
Whitehead distinguishes a proposition’s conformity to actuality from a judgment’s correctness. A false proposition can be correctly denied, and its interest or usefulness does not make it true.
6 readings
Two truths
In the selected Madhyamaka interpretation, conventional discourse and ultimate truth are related, but they are not two separate worlds.

U

2 readings
Unanimism
Unanimism presents a contested account of collective thought as if everyone agreed. What is lost when that happens?
1 reading
Upādhi
An upādhi is an additional condition omitted from a proposed inferential relation. Distinguish the countercase that shows a claim failing from the condition that explains why its support was insufficient.

V

1 reading
Varna
Varna organizes inherited duties in the argument examined here. Gandhi and Ambedkar disagree over whether affirming those duties as equal can answer the demand for freedom.
1 reading
Verification and truth
Verification can connect a claim to experience through direct checks or supported reliance. James’s account raises a further question about whether this explains discovery, truth or both.

W

1 reading
What is up to us
Epictetus separates judgment and choice, which are up to us, from reputation and outcomes, which are not. The distinction guarantees neither emotional ease nor control of events.
1 reading
World and earth
In Heidegger’s art essay, a world opens relations of significance, while earth is not exhausted by them. Their strife is not an ordinary disagreement among viewers.
1 reading
Wuwei
Wuwei is accomplishment without excessive direction or taking over. When does restraint let others act, and when does it leave a needed task undone?