154 terms · 22 philosophers · 77 links between them
Each philosopher's working vocabulary, in the original language: what the word means, where it is introduced, and which later thinkers reworked, translated or attacked it. Drafted from the primary texts; in review.
c. 470–399 BCE
refutation · cross-examination
Testing someone's claim to know by questioning them until their answer clashes with other things they believe. It exposes ignorance rather than proving a thesis, and Socrates presents it as a service to the person examined.
What is it? · the definitional question
The question Socrates puts about a virtue: not examples of piety or courage, but the one character by which every instance is what it is. Aristotle credits him with seeking universal definitions without setting them apart from things.
“to tell the essential aspect, by which all holy acts are holy”
virtue · excellence
The excellence that makes a human life go well. Socrates argues that it is a kind of knowledge of good and bad, so that no one who knows the good does wrong willingly.
“knowledge is something noble and able to govern man”
care of the soul
The task Socrates presses on every Athenian: to care for wisdom, truth and the state of one's soul before money, reputation or the body.
the divine sign
A voice Socrates says he has heard since childhood. It only ever holds him back from an action, never urges him on, and he gives it as the reason he kept out of politics.
“it is a sort of voice that comes to me”
human wisdom
The only wisdom Socrates claims: not supposing he knows what he does not know. He reads the oracle's verdict that no one is wiser as saying that this is the most a human being can have.
“Just that which is perhaps human wisdom.”
c. 428–348 BCE
Form · Idea
The unchanging, intelligible pattern a thing shares in to be what it is: the beautiful itself, as against the many beautiful things. Particulars are what they are by participation (methexis) in it.
“it is beautiful for no other reason than because it partakes of absolute beauty”
recollection
Learning as the soul's recovery of what it knew before birth. Questioning or perception prompts it, as when an untaught slave works his way to a geometrical truth in the Meno.
“research and learning are wholly recollection”
knowledge · opinion · belief
Knowledge is set over what fully is and cannot err; opinion is set over what changes and can be true or false. A true opinion becomes knowledge only when it is tied down by an account of its reason.
the Form of the Good · the Good
The highest object of study, which gives the Forms their being and their knowability as the sun gives visible things light and growth. It is said to surpass being itself in rank and power.
“the good itself is not essence but still transcends essence in dignity and surpassing power”
dialectic
Reasoned question and answer that tests hypotheses and climbs to a first principle that rests on none, then comes down again through Forms alone. Later dialogues add collection and division.
“doing away with hypotheses, up to the first principle itself”
justice
In city and soul alike, each part doing its own work: reason ruling, spirit supporting it, appetite obeying. So understood, justice is the health of the soul and worth having for its own sake.
“to do one’s own business and not to be a busybody is justice”
craftsman · Demiurge
The divine maker of the Timaeus, who shapes the visible cosmos by looking to an eternal model and makes it as good as its material allows. He brings disorderly motion into order rather than making the world from nothing.
becoming like god · likeness to god
The aim the Theaetetus gives philosophy: to escape the evils of mortal life by becoming as like god as a human can, which means becoming just, holy and wise.
“to escape is to become like God, so far as this is possible”
384–322 BCE
substance · being
What is in the primary sense; qualities, quantities, places and the rest are said to be by belonging to a substance. The Categories makes individual things primary substances; the Metaphysics asks whether form is substance most of all.
matter · form
A natural thing is a compound of matter, what it is made of, and form (also eidos), what makes it the kind of thing it is. Form is in the thing, not apart from it; the soul is the form of the living body.
actuality · activity · potentiality · capacity
A capacity to be or do something, as against its exercise or realisation: the builder asleep and the builder building. Actuality is prior to potentiality, and the first principle is actuality with no potentiality in it.
productive intellect · agent intellect
The intellect that makes all things intelligible, as light makes colours actual, beside the intellect that becomes all things. Only it is called separable, deathless and eternal.
the unmoved mover · prime mover
The eternal first cause of motion, itself unmoved, which moves as an object of love and desire. It is pure actuality, and its life is thought thinking itself.
happiness · flourishing
The highest human good, chosen for itself and never for anything else. It is the human function done well: activity of the soul in accord with virtue over a complete life, and above all contemplation.
“the active exercise of the soul’s faculties in conformity with rational principle”
virtue of character · moral virtue
A settled state (hexis) of choosing, formed by habituation, that lies in a mean relative to us, the mean being fixed by reason as the practically wise person would fix it.
“a settled disposition of the mind determining the choice of actions and emotions”
practical wisdom · prudence
The virtue of thought that deliberates well about what is good for a human life as a whole. It cannot be had without virtue of character, nor full virtue of character without it.
“a truth-attaining rational quality, concerned with action”
341–270 BCE
atoms and void · bodies and space (Hicks)
All that exists is bodies and void. Compound bodies are made of indivisible atoms, unlimited in number and moving through unlimited void; nothing comes from nothing or passes into nothing.
“the whole of being consists of bodies and space”
criteria of truth
The tests of truth set out in Epicurus' Canon: sensations, preconceptions and feelings. Every belief about what is not evident has to be checked against them.
preconception · basic grasp
A general notion stored up from repeated perception, such as "man" or "horse", which lets us recognise things and gives words their meaning. Inquiry starts from these notions and is checked against them.
pleasure
The first good, natural to every living thing and the starting point of every choice. Its limit is the removal of all pain, so the pleasure Epicurus praises is a settled state, not a round of indulgence.
“we call pleasure the alpha and omega of a blessed life”
tranquillity · freedom from disturbance
The untroubled mind that, with the body's freedom from pain (aponia), makes up the blessed life. It comes from clearing away false beliefs about the gods, death and desire.
“health of body and tranquillity of mind”
what depends on us · our own agency
Some things happen by necessity, some by chance and some through us. Only what comes from us is open to praise and blame, which is why Epicurus rejects the fate of the natural philosophers.
“some things happen of necessity, others by chance, others through our own agency”
prudence · practical wisdom
Sober reasoning about what to choose and avoid, ranked even above philosophy. The other virtues spring from it, and it shows that a pleasant life and a just one cannot come apart.
“prudence is a more precious thing even than philosophy”
c. 204–270
the One · the Good
The first principle, wholly simple and beyond being and thought, from which everything else derives without the One being lessened. It can be named only by what it is not, or as the Good.
Intellect · Mind
The second level of reality, which comes from the One and turns back to contemplate it. In Intellect thinking and what is thought are one: the Forms are its contents, not objects outside it.
Soul
The third level, proceeding from Intellect, which gives life and order to the cosmos and to every body and is present whole throughout what it animates. Individual souls are never wholly cut off from the intelligible.
procession · return
Each level of reality flows from the one above without diminishing it, and becomes itself by turning back to contemplate its source.
union
The soul's union with the One, reached by setting aside everything, thought included. Porphyry reports that Plotinus reached it four times while he was with him.
likeness to god
The goal of virtue. The civic virtues give measure to the passions; the higher, purifying virtues separate the soul from the body and make it like Intellect.
354–430
illumination
We know unchanging truths not by recalling them or by a teacher's words, but because God, the inner teacher, lights them up for the mind as the sun lights visible things.
if I am mistaken · I am
Against the Academic sceptics: even if I am deceived, I must exist to be deceived. So I know for certain that I am, that I know it, and that I love both.
privation of good
Evil is not a substance but the lack or corruption of a good that should be there. Whatever exists is good insofar as it exists.
use · enjoyment
To enjoy is to cling to something for its own sake; to use is to refer it to something else. Only God is to be enjoyed, and rightly ordered love (ordo amoris) uses all else in relation to him.
city of God · earthly city
Two cities made by two loves: love of self to the contempt of God, and love of God to the contempt of self. They are mixed together in history and parted only at the end.
free choice of the will
The will's power to choose, given for living rightly and the cause of sin when misused. It is compatible with God's foreknowledge; in the later works, only grace frees it to choose the good.
distension of the mind
Time is not the motion of bodies but a stretching of the mind itself, which holds the past in memory, the present in attention and the future in expectation.
c. 872–950
the virtuous city · the excellent city
The city whose members cooperate in the things by which true happiness is reached, its ranks ordered under a first ruler as the body's organs under the heart. Against it stand the ignorant, wicked and erring cities, which aim at lesser goods or mistake the good.
the first ruler · the supreme ruler
The ruler who is ruled by no one: his intellect is joined to the Active Intellect and his imagination receives its gifts as revelation, so he is philosopher, lawgiver, prophet and imam in one.
the Active Intellect · agent intellect
The last of the separate intellects, below the moon's sphere. It does for the human intellect what the sun does for sight, making the forms held in imagination actually intelligible, and union with it is the soul's happiness.
the acquired intellect
The human intellect when it has actualised all or nearly all the intelligibles and thinks itself; it stands next to the Active Intellect and is the stage at which the soul can subsist without matter.
emanation · overflow
The way the existence of other things proceeds from the First's perfect existence, necessarily and without its seeking anything: intellect from intellect down to the Active Intellect, with a sphere at each step.
happiness · felicity
The good sought for itself: the soul's perfection in existence to the point where it no longer needs matter, reached through the theoretical, deliberative and moral virtues and the practical arts, in a city and completed after death.
imitation · representation
Representing a thing by a likeness of it. Poetic statements imitate, and religion imitates in images, for those who cannot know them by demonstration, the principles that philosophy knows in themselves.
980–1037
existence · essence · quiddity
What a thing is differs from that it is: one can grasp what a triangle is without knowing whether any exists. In everything but the necessary existent, existence comes to the essence from a cause.
the necessary existent
A being that exists of itself, as against possible beings (mumkin al-wujūd), which need a cause to exist. Even taken as a whole, a chain of possible beings needs a cause outside it: one necessary existent, wholly simple.
the active intellect · agent intellect
A separate intellect, the last of the celestial intelligences, which gives forms to matter and intelligibles to minds prepared to receive them. Human understanding is the soul's contact with it.
the rational soul
The human soul is an immaterial substance that uses the body but does not depend on it. A person created in mid-air, with no sensation of his body, would still affirm that he exists.
the universal
A nature such as horseness is in itself neither universal nor particular. It is particular as it exists in things, and universal only as the mind takes it as said of many.
happiness · felicity
The soul's true perfection: to become an intellectual world that mirrors the order of all things, and after death the pleasure of that perfection, beside which bodily pleasure is faint.
1058–1111
concomitance · connection; custom · habit
What we call cause and effect is only things occurring together, which God creates in a regular order by his custom. The connection is not necessary, so God can create one without the other, as in miracles.
the eternal will
God's will, which from eternity decides that the world begin at the moment it does. To single out one of two equal possibilities is what will is, so an eternal will can produce a world that begins.
certainty · certain knowledge
Knowledge in which what is known is disclosed so that no doubt remains and none is possible, and no wonder worked against it could shake it. He found that sense and reason could not secure it by themselves.
tasting · direct experience
Knowing a state by being in it, as knowing drunkenness by being drunk rather than by its definition. It is the Sufis' way to what lies beyond the intellect and a token of prophecy.
the heart
In its inner sense, a subtle spiritual reality that is the true self: it knows, perceives and is addressed by God, and rules the body as a king his realm. Like a mirror, once polished it can receive the realities of things.
light
What is manifest in itself and makes other things manifest. In the true sense it is God, from whom every lesser light, of sight, of intellect and of prophecy, is borrowed.
love
The inclination to what gives pleasure, whether through the senses or through the heart's perception of inner beauty. Since all beauty and goodness are God's, he alone deserves love fully, and seeing him is the greatest pleasure.
1126–1198
demonstration
The most perfect kind of syllogism, from true and necessary premises, which yields certainty. The Law addresses it to those able to follow it, as it addresses dialectic and rhetoric to others.
interpretation · figurative interpretation
Taking a word of the Law from its literal to its figurative sense, by the usage of the Arabic language. Where demonstration conflicts with the outward sense, those able to demonstrate must interpret it; they should not publish their interpretations to the many.
the material intellect · intellectus materialis · possible intellect
The capacity that receives the intelligibles. Having no form of its own, it is neither a body nor a power in one, and so is one separate substance for all humans, joined to each through his imaginative forms.
conjunction · continuation
The joining of the human intellect with the agent intellect, when the intelligibles are fully actualised and the agent intellect becomes form for us; it is the ultimate human happiness.
perpetual origination · perpetual creation
The world is eternal yet made: it is always being brought about by the First, so it is originated without a first moment. Calling it eternal or originated is close to a dispute over names.
cause
Things act through natures God gave them, and their definitions state those natures; to know a thing is to know it through its causes, so whoever denies causes denies knowledge.
1154–1191
light · darkness
Light is what is manifest in itself and makes other things manifest; darkness is whatever is not. Every reality is a light or a darkness, either self-subsistent or a state of something else, and lights differ from one another only as more or less intense.
the Light of Lights
The light that depends on nothing: one, simple, aware of itself and the source of every other light. A series of dependent lights cannot go on without end, so it ends in this light.
illumination · the rising of light
The shining of a higher light on a lower one, and the knowledge it gives the receiver, which in turn witnesses (mushāhada) the light above it. Suhrawardi names his philosophy after it and ties it to the wisdom of the ancient Persian and Greek sages.
knowledge by presence
Knowing a thing by its own presence to the knower, with no form or concept between them. The self's awareness of itself is the model; sight and the soul's knowledge of the higher lights follow it.
the commanding light · the human soul
The immaterial light that governs a human body, as a commander governs his troops (isfahbad is a Persian title). It is aware of itself, is tied to its body by love and governance, and longs for the lights above it.
lords of the species · the Platonic Forms
Immaterial lights, each of which governs one natural species and holds its perfections. Suhrawardi identifies them with Plato's Forms; they are individual lights, not universals said of many.
mental consideration · intellectual construct
A concept the mind forms about things that has no counterpart of its own in them, such as existence, unity, possibility and necessity. If existence were something in things it would need an existence of its own, without end.
suspended images · the world of images
Images that subsist on their own, neither in matter nor in a mind, in a world between bodies and pure lights. Visions, dreams, images in mirrors and the afterlife of souls not yet pure take place there.
1201–1274
from the one only one proceeds
A cause that is one and simple in every respect produces, as such, only one effect, since producing two would require two aspects in it. Tusi defends the rule against al-Razi and lets multiplicity enter through the aspects of the first effect.
knowledge by presence
Knowing a thing by its presence to the knower, without a form of it. Tusi uses the soul's knowledge of itself and of its own forms as the model for the First's knowledge of what it causes.
rational good and evil
Some acts are good or evil in themselves, and reason knows them as such before any command: justice is good and wrongdoing evil whether or not God commands them, and God does no evil.
law · regulator
What keeps equality among people. The divine law is the greatest nāmūs, the just ruler the second, and money the third, which measures unequal goods against one another in exchange.
political by nature
Human beings cannot live or reach perfection alone; they need cooperation, and so a city with a law and a ruler to regulate it.
imaginative speech
What makes speech poetic for the logician: it moves the soul by the images it raises, not by proof. Metre and rhyme are what the prosodist adds to it.
c. 1225–1274
act of being · essence
In every creature what it is (essence) differs from its act of being (esse), which it receives from another. Only in God are the two the same: God is subsistent being itself (ipsum esse subsistens).
act · potency
Whatever can change is partly in potency and partly in act, and potency is actualised only by something already in act. God is pure act, with no potency at all.
agent intellect
A power of each human soul that abstracts intelligible forms from sense images (phantasmata). Without it nothing material could be understood, since nothing in matter is actually intelligible.
the soul · form of the body
The intellectual soul is the one substantial form of a human being, not a separate thing steering a body. Because it has an activity, understanding, in which the body has no part, it subsists and survives death.
the five ways
Five arguments from features of the world (motion, efficient causes, contingency, degrees of perfection, order) to a first cause "that all call God". They show that God is, not what God is.
natural law
The rational creature's share in God's eternal law. Its first precept, that good is to be done and evil avoided, is self-evident, and the rest follow the natural inclinations of human beings.
truth as the agreement of thing and intellect
Truth lies first in the intellect, when it conforms to what is; things are called true by their conformity to the divine intellect that made them.
beatitude · perfect happiness
The last end of human life is the vision of God's essence, which no created good can supply. The happiness possible in this life is real but imperfect.
c. 1562–1640
craft · art · making
Anything human reason and practical skill make. The Treatise on the Crafts defines and divides the crafts and ranks them by their ends and uses, the noblest being the one whose end is in itself.
the first mover
The mover to which every motion goes back, itself unmoved; the Treatise on Motion argues for it in the Peripatetic way.
gradation · being more and less
Whether one essence can be found in things more and less, as more and less intense. Findiriski denies it of essences, against the Illuminationists.
the Platonic Forms
Separate archetypes of the species. The Treatise on Motion rejects them; the ode's forms above, of which things below are likenesses, have been read as a return to them.
c. 1572–1640
the primacy of existence · existence as fundamentally real
Existence, not quiddity, is what is real in things and has effects; a quiddity is the outline the mind draws from the limits of a given existence. Sadra says he first held the opposite.
the gradation of existence · modulation of existence
Existence is one reality that comes in degrees of intensity, priority and perfection, so that what distinguishes existents is what they share. The highest degree is God; the lowest is prime matter.
substantial motion
Material things change continuously in their very substance, not only in their accidents, and time is the measure of this renewal. By it the natural world is new at every instant, and the soul rises from a bodily form to an immaterial intellect.
the union of the intellect and the intelligible
In knowing, the knower does not receive a form as a container receives a thing but becomes, in its existence, what it knows; the soul grows in being as it comes to know.
bodily in origination · spiritual in survival
The soul begins as the form of a body and, through substantial motion, becomes an immaterial substance that survives the body.
the simple reality is all things
What is wholly simple lacks no perfection of existence, so it holds every existent in a higher way, without their limits: God is all things and none of them.
bodily resurrection
The same person returns after death, soul and body. The body is made by the soul's own imaginative power, and it is the same body because a body's identity lies in its soul.
the transcendent philosophy · transcendent wisdom
Sadra's name for a philosophy in which demonstration, the unveiling of the mystics and revelation agree, set out as the soul's four journeys from creation to God and back.
1596–1650
I think · therefore I am
The one thing that survives the most radical doubt: while I think, I cannot fail to exist. The Meditations puts it as "I am, I exist", true whenever I think it.
thinking thing · extended thing
Mind and body are two substances, each with its own principal attribute, thought and extension. Because each can be clearly understood without the other, God can make them exist apart.
to perceive clearly and distinctly
A perception is clear when it is present and open to the attentive mind, and distinct when it is so sharply set apart from all others that it holds only what is clear. What is so perceived is true, since God is no deceiver.
innate ideas
Some ideas seem innate, some adventitious (from outside), some made up by me. Innate ideas, such as those of God, mind and mathematical essences, come from the mind's own power of thinking, not from the senses.
methodical doubt
Once in life, withhold assent from everything that can be doubted at all (the senses, mathematics, the world) by supposing a deceiving evil genius. What survives can found the sciences.
objective reality (of an idea)
The reality an idea has through what it represents, as against its reality as a mode of thought. Since a cause must have at least as much reality as its effect, the idea of an infinite God must come from God.
generosity · nobility of soul
The crowning virtue of the Passions: knowing that nothing is truly one's own but the free use of one's will, with a firm resolve to use it well. Descartes calls it the key to all the other virtues.
1711–1776
Perceptions are either impressions, the lively ones of sensation and feeling, or ideas, their fainter copies in thought. Every simple idea is copied from an impression, so a word with no impression behind it has no meaning.
Objects of reasoning are either relations of ideas, known by thought alone and certain, as in mathematics, or matters of fact, whose contrary is always conceivable and which only experience can settle.
habit
After seeing one kind of event constantly followed by another, the mind is carried by habit to expect the second. Custom, not reason, underlies every inference from experience.
We never perceive a power binding cause to effect, only constant conjunction. The idea of necessity is copied from an inner impression: the felt push of the mind from one to the other.
Looking inward, I never catch a self without some perception. The mind is a bundle of perceptions in constant flux, and the identity we give it is a work of the imagination.
Virtue and vice are not found by reason but felt: approval or blame arises in a spectator who views a character from a general point of view. Reason informs about facts; sentiment decides.
The way another's feelings become ours: the idea of their passion grows lively until it becomes the passion itself. It explains why we approve of what is useful or agreeable to others, not only to us.
1724–1804
prior to experience
Knowledge independent of all experience, marked by strict necessity and universality. Kant's question is how synthetic a priori judgments, which extend knowledge yet are not drawn from experience, are possible.
transcendental
Concerned not with objects but with our way of knowing objects, so far as that is possible a priori. Transcendental philosophy asks what makes experience possible at all.
intuition
The immediate, singular way knowledge relates to objects, for us always sensible. Space and time are its pure forms, supplied by the mind; without concepts, intuitions are blind.
categories · pure concepts of the understanding
Twelve a priori concepts, such as substance and cause, by which the understanding unifies intuitions into experience of objects. They hold for objects of possible experience and no further.
thing in itself
A thing as it is apart from how it appears to us. We can think it but not know it, since knowledge reaches only appearances; as noumenon it marks the limit of knowledge.
I think · transcendental apperception
The "I think" that must be able to accompany all my representations: the unity of self-consciousness that makes them mine and makes experience of objects possible. It gives no knowledge of the soul as a substance.
categorical imperative
The moral law as it binds a rational being unconditionally: act only on a maxim you can at the same time will as a universal law. Reason gives this law to itself, so morality is autonomy.
the highest good
Virtue joined with happiness in proportion to it. Since we cannot bring this about ourselves, practical reason postulates the immortality of the soul and the existence of God.
1770–1831
spirit · mind
Reality as self-knowing activity: the whole that comes to know itself through nature, history and human institutions. The true is to be grasped not only as substance but also as subject.
the Concept · the Notion
Not a general idea abstracted from cases but the self-developing unity of universal, particular and individual. As concrete universal it is the inner form of things, not only of thought.
dialectic
The movement in which a fixed determination of thought, pressed to its limit, passes into its opposite, and the opposition is resolved in a richer unity. It drives the whole system forward.
sublation · supersession
Cancelling and preserving at once: a stage of thought or life is negated as one-sided but kept as a moment of what follows. The German verb carries both senses.
determinate negation
Refuting a position does not leave an empty nothing: the negation of this particular position has a content and so yields a new one. This is what moves the Phenomenology forward.
recognition
Self-consciousness exists only in being acknowledged by another self-consciousness. Lordship and bondage show one-sided recognition failing; freedom needs mutual recognition.
ethical life
Freedom made actual in living institutions (family, civil society, state), as against Moralität, the individual conscience judging its own duty. Here duty has content because it belongs to a shared way of life.
1844–1900
will to power
The drive of every living thing to grow, extend itself and command, which Nietzsche proposes, as an experiment, as the basic character of life and of the world. Self-preservation is only one of its effects.
eternal recurrence · eternal return
The thought that this life will return, the same in every detail, countless times. It is offered as a test: could one will that, and so affirm one's life without reserve?
overman · superman
The goal Zarathustra sets after the death of God: a human type that overcomes humanity as it now is and creates its own values. Man is a rope stretched between animal and overman.
God is dead
Belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable, and the morality and meaning built on it begin to give way. The madman's announcement is a diagnosis whose consequences are not yet understood.
resentment
The vengeful feeling of the powerless, which turns creative when it invents values: the slave revolt in morality calls the strong "evil" and itself "good".
revaluation of all values
The task of questioning the value of values themselves and overturning the Christian moral ranking, which Nietzsche holds denies life.
perspectivism
There is only perspectival seeing and knowing; the more eyes and affects we bring to a thing, the fuller our grasp of it. A pure, will-less knower is a fiction.
the Dionysian · the Apollonian
Two drives in art: the Apollonian of image, measure and individual form, the Dionysian of intoxication and dissolution into the whole. Greek tragedy is born from their union.
1859–1938
intentionality
The defining mark of conscious experience: to be consciousness of something, directed at an object whether or not that object exists.
bracketing · suspension
Suspending the natural attitude's belief in the world's existence, not to doubt it but to put it out of play, so that experience can be described just as it is given.
act of meaning · object as meant
Every experience has two correlated sides: the act of meaning (noesis) and what is meant, just as it is meant (noema). Phenomenology describes both and how they correspond.
intuition of essences
Seeing an essence (Eidos) by freely varying an example in imagination until what cannot vary stands out. Essences are given in intuition, not reached by induction.
evidence · self-givenness
The experience of truth: an intention fulfilled by the object itself, given just as it was meant. Truth is the correlate of that fulfilment.
lived body · physical body
My body as I live it, the zero point from which things are oriented and the organ of my will, as against a body among bodies. It is constituted through touch, movement and feeling.
life-world
The world of everyday experience, always already there and taken for granted, from which the sciences abstract and on which their meaning depends. Forgetting it is the crisis of the European sciences.
1889–1976
being-there · existence
Heidegger's word for the human being: the entity whose own being is an issue for it and which always has some understanding of being. Its essence lies in its existence.
being · beings
Being is not itself a being: it is that on the basis of which beings are understood as beings. Heidegger later calls this the ontological difference and charges metaphysics with forgetting it.
being-in-the-world
Dasein's basic state is not a subject facing objects but one involvement with a world of things, others and tasks; "in" means dwelling and familiarity, not being inside a container.
readiness-to-hand · presence-at-hand
Things first show up as equipment ready to hand in use, like a hammer in hammering; bare objects present at hand, with properties to observe, appear when use breaks down or we stand back to look.
care
The unified being of Dasein: ahead of itself in projecting possibilities, already in a world it has been thrown into, and alongside the things it deals with.
being-toward-death
Death is Dasein's ownmost possibility, certain yet indefinite as to when, and not to be outstripped. Running ahead toward it frees one from what "they" say and makes an authentic whole possible.
unconcealment · aletheia
Truth at root is not the agreement of a statement with a thing but beings' coming out of concealment; statements can be correct only within such disclosure. Heidegger hears it in the Greek alētheia.
enframing
The essence of modern technology: a way of revealing that challenges everything, nature and people included, to stand ready as resource (Bestand) for further ordering.
No terms match.