// Archive
Ideas
86 key concepts, in roughly the order they were first articulated.
86 results
Era · Pre-Socratic
The Arche (the underlying stuff)
What is the one substance behind the many things we see?
600 BCE
Logos
The rational order through which the world coheres.
500 BCE
Flux
Everything flows; nothing stays.
500 BCE
Being
What is, is. What is not, is unthinkable.
480 BCE
Atomism
The world is made of indivisible particles in empty space.
430 BCE
Era · Classical Greek
The Socratic Method
Ask, don't tell. Define and refute until knowledge proves itself or fails.
420 BCE
The Examined Life
The unexamined life is not worth living.
399 BCE
The Forms
Eternal, perfect originals of which everything in this world is a copy.
380 BCE
The Allegory of the Cave
We mistake shadows for the real world.
375 BCE
The Philosopher-King
Cities will know peace when philosophers rule, or kings learn philosophy.
375 BCE
The Four Causes
What it's made of, what it is, what made it, what it's for.
340 BCE
Virtue Ethics
The good life is the life of cultivated excellence of character.
340 BCE
The Unmoved Mover
There must be a first cause that itself is uncaused.
340 BCE
Era · Hellenistic & Roman
Era · Late Antiquity
The One
Beyond being. The unsayable source from which everything emanates.
260 CE
The Inner Self
I have become a great question to myself.
400 CE
Evil as Privation
Evil is not a thing. It is the absence of a good that should be there.
400 CE
The City of God
Two cities, founded by two loves: the love of God and the love of self.
426 CE
Era · Medieval
Essence vs. Existence
What a thing is, vs. that it is.
1025
The Five Ways
Five compact arguments for the existence of God.
1265
Natural Law
Moral law is rooted in human nature and accessible to reason.
1265
Ockham's Razor
Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.
1320
Nominalism
Universals are names, not things.
1320
Era · Renaissance & Reformation
Era · Early Modern
Cogito, ergo sum
I think, therefore I am.
1637
Mind-Body Dualism
Mind and body are two essentially different kinds of stuff.
1641
Methodic Doubt
Doubt everything that can be doubted until you find what cannot.
1641
Substance Monism
There is only one substance. Everything is a mode of it.
1677
Deus sive Natura
God, or Nature — two names for the same thing.
1677
Tabula Rasa
The mind at birth is a blank slate, written on by experience.
1689
Natural Rights
Life, liberty, and property — by nature, not by grant of the state.
1689
Consent of the Governed
Legitimate authority comes only from those it governs.
1689
Best of All Possible Worlds
A perfect God chose this world; therefore it is the best one possible.
1710
The Monad
An indivisible, perspectival, soul-like atom of reality.
1714
Principle of Sufficient Reason
Nothing happens without a reason why it is so rather than otherwise.
1714
The Bundle Theory of the Self
There is no inner observer. Only a bundle of perceptions.
1739
Causation as Custom
We don't perceive causes. We perceive sequences and form habits.
1739
The Is-Ought Problem
You cannot derive an ought from an is.
1739
The Noble Savage
Humans are born good. Society corrupts them.
1755
The General Will
The collective will aimed at the common good — not the sum of private wills.
1762
The Social Contract
Legitimate society is a contract among equals to live by a common will.
1762
Things-in-Themselves
What things are independent of how they appear to us. Forever unknown.
1781
The Synthetic A Priori
Knowledge that is both genuinely informative and known independent of experience.
1781
The Categorical Imperative
Act only on a maxim you could will to be universal law.
1785
Era · Nineteenth Century
The Dialectic
Every concept generates its opposite. Their tension resolves at a higher level.
1807
Geist (Spirit)
The collective mind of humanity, gradually realizing its own freedom.
1807
The Master-Slave Dialectic
Self-consciousness arises only through being recognized by another.
1807
The Will to Live
Beneath the world of appearance, a blind, purposeless striving.
1818
Philosophical Pessimism
Existence is a problem to be endured, not a gift to be celebrated.
1818
The Leap of Faith
Some commitments cannot be made on the basis of reasons.
1843
Anxiety (Angst)
The dizziness of freedom.
1844
Alienation
Under capitalism, workers become strangers to their work, their products, and themselves.
1844
Truth Is Subjectivity
What matters most cannot be known objectively. It can only be lived.
1846
Class Struggle
All hitherto existing history is the history of class struggles.
1848
The Harm Principle
The only legitimate use of power against an individual is to prevent harm to others.
1859
Historical Materialism
Material conditions of production shape consciousness, not the other way around.
1859
The Principle of Utility
The right action is the one that maximizes the happiness of those affected.
1861
Higher and Lower Pleasures
It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.
1861
God Is Dead
We have killed Him — and we do not yet know what we have done.
1882
Eternal Recurrence
Live so that you could will to live this same life over, infinitely.
1882
The Übermensch
The human being who creates their own values rather than inheriting them.
1883
Will to Power
All life is the will to grow, expand, dominate, become more.
1888
Era · Twentieth Century (to mid-century)
Phenomenology
The rigorous description of experience from the first-person point of view.
1900
Intentionality
Consciousness is always consciousness of something.
1900
Theory of Descriptions
'The present king of France is bald' is meaningful — because it is logically complex.
1905
Epoché (Bracketing)
Suspend the assumption that what you experience is or is not real.
1913
Logical Atomism
Reality breaks down into the simplest facts; the world is everything that is the case.
1918
Picture Theory of Language
A sentence is true if it pictures the world correctly.
1921
Dasein
Being-there: the kind of being that we are, for whom Being is a question.
1927
Being-Toward-Death
Authenticity comes from resolutely facing one's own finitude.
1927
Thrownness (Geworfenheit)
We did not choose to be born, in this body, into this language, this century.
1927
The Absurd
The collision between our hunger for meaning and the universe's silence.
1942
The Myth of Sisyphus
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
1942
Bad Faith (mauvaise foi)
The lie one tells oneself in order to escape freedom.
1943
Radical Freedom
We are condemned to be free.
1943
Existence Precedes Essence
First we exist, then we make ourselves.
1946
Ethics of Ambiguity
We are at once free subjects and conditioned objects. Ethics begins there.
1947
The Other
Identity is constructed in relation to the one who is not Me.
1949
One Becomes a Woman
Womanhood is a situation, not a destiny.
1949
Metaphysical Revolt
I rebel, therefore we are.
1951
Language-Games
Meaning is use within a form of life.
1953
The Private Language Argument
A language only you could understand is not a language at all.
1953