Words! Words! Words!

Aristotle, the ancient Greek, is still considered the greatest teacher and philosopher of all time. He died on this date in 322 B.C. Or did he? Take our word quiz and see if Aristotle still lives on…in you.

1. monad:

1. a language that is spoken, written, or signed by humans for general-purpose communication;
2. the intellectual conception of a thing as it is in itself, not as it is known through perception;
3. an elementary individual substance which reflects the order of the world and from which material properties are derived;
4. a statement or sentiment that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense.

2. syllogism:

1. the belief that events occur with a natural purpose or design, or in order to achieve some specific goal;
2. a deductive scheme of a formal argument consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion (as in "every virtue is laudable; kindness is a virtue; therefore kindness is laudable");
3. the intellectual and cultural climate of an era (literally, "the spirit of the age");
4. the capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives.

3. epistemology:

1. the study of the fundamental nature of being and reality;
2. the study of philosophy concerned with questions of existence;
3. the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity;
4. the study of a characteristic that is not essential to the nature of a thing.

4. moral absolutism:

1. the position that there are absolute standards against which moral questions can be judged, and that certain actions are right or wrong, regardless of the context of the act;
2.  a political theory that argues that one person should hold all power;
3. any system of thought that denies the causal nexus and maintains that events succeed one another haphazardly or by chance (not in the mathematical but in the popular sense);
4. the belief that people have a moral obligation to serve others or the "greater good".

5. cognitivism:

1. a theoretical system of social organization and a political movement based on common ownership of the means of production;
2. a group of related but distinct philosophies that began in the late 20th century, opposing aspects of liberalism and capitalism while advocating phenomena such as civil society;
3. a theory that holds that free will and determinism are compatible;
4. the philosophical view that ethical sentences express propositions, and hence are capable of being true or false.

6. subjectivism:

1. the attempt to reconcile disparate, opposing, beliefs and to meld practices of various schools of thought;
2. the doctrine that knowledge pertains to persons individually, as opposed to everyone as a whole, and that there is no external or objective truth;
3. the supposition that there is design, purpose, directive principle, or finality in the works and processes of nature, and the philosophical study of that purpose;
4. the argument that religious language, and specifically words like "God" (capitalized), are not cognitively meaningful.

7. empirical:

1. a methodological term which characterizes the procedure of dividing parts and elements of the whole in order to comprehend the whole by means of these elements or parts;
2. an epistemological concept, which indicates its origin and the nature of the knowledge;
3. an ontological concept and refers to the essential characteristics of a substance, without which such a substance cannot exit;
4. relying on experience or observation alone often without due regard for system and theory.

8. determinism:

1. a theory or doctrine that acts of the will, occurrences in nature, or social or psychological phenomena are causally determined by preceding events or natural laws;
2. an epistemological doctrine which purports that there is no knowledge which does not derive from experience;
3. a philosophical discipline to inquire into the nature of morally good, and the criterion of morally right action as well as nature of virtue;
4. a philosophical approach which centers in its inquiry the concrete human-being in its existence in Europe since the end of the 19th century.

9. anthropocentrism:

1. the practice, conscious or otherwise, of regarding the existence and/or concerns of human beings as the central fact of the universe;
2. the idea that members of a particular religious group are under no obligation to obey the laws of ethics or morality as presented by religious authorities;
3. any position involving either the denial of the objective reality of entities of a certain type or the insistence that humans should be agnostic about their real existence;
4. the view that human beings are to be held responsible for their actions even if determinism is true.

10. existentialism:

1. a philosophy that uses data obtained from experiments in order to ascertain the integrity of an idea or proposed concept;
2. the theory that justification can hold elements not known to the subject of the belief;
3. a chiefly 20th century philosophical movement embracing diverse doctrines but centering on analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad;
4. a philosophy that holds that there is no material world but rather a collection of illusions formed by human consciousness that results in an environment for all humans to live in.

Answers:

1c; 2b; 3c; 4a; 5d; 6b; 7d; 8a; 9a; 10c

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