Philosophy reference data
Major philosophical traditions, schools of thought, key thinkers, and fundamental questions.
Topic guide
What Philosophy covers
Philosophy reference data gives names and definitions for the questions philosophers have argued about for millennia: what we can know (epistemology), what exists (metaphysics), how we should act (ethics), how to reason well (logic and the fallacies that violate it), and who said what across the major traditions from ancient Greece, China and India to modern Europe. Definitions here are accepted, but positions are not: for nearly every concept there are competing views, and a short entry can only state the standard meaning. The useful habit is to attribute a position to a person or school instead of presenting it as the answer.
Key ideas
- Argument
- A set of premises offered in support of a conclusion. It is valid if the conclusion follows from the premises and sound if it is valid and the premises are true.
- Epistemology
- The study of knowledge: what it is, how we get it and what justifies belief.
- Metaphysics
- The study of what exists and its nature: being, time, causation, identity and the relation between mind and matter.
- Normative vs descriptive
- A normative claim says what should be; a descriptive claim says what is. Ethics is mainly normative.
- Consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics
- Three major approaches: judge actions by outcomes, by duties and rules, or by the character they express.
- Rationalism and empiricism
- Rationalists give reason a central role in knowledge; empiricists ground knowledge in sensory experience.
- Thought experiment
- A hypothetical scenario used to test a concept or principle, such as the trolley problem.
Common pitfalls
- Presenting one school's view as the answer. Name the philosopher or tradition behind a claim.
- Calling any disagreement a fallacy. Fallacies are specific errors of reasoning, not a label for positions one dislikes.
- Compressing a philosopher's thought into a slogan. 'I think, therefore I am' is a step in an argument, not a summary of Descartes.
- Treating Western philosophy as the only tradition; the datasets cover Greek, Chinese, Indian and Islamic thought where noted.
Using it from an agent
- Give the standard definition, then the main competing positions with their proponents.
- When asked 'what is the answer to a philosophical question', explain the options and the strongest objections to each.
- Use the fallacy list to name an error in an argument, quote the part of the argument that commits it, and avoid labeling a person.
Start with: Logical Fallacies · Major Philosophers
Datasets in Philosophy
-
Epistemology Terms
Key terms in the theory of knowledge.
17 entries -
Ethics and Moral Philosophy
Normative ethical theories: utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, social contract theory, and applied ethics dilemmas (trolley problem, privacy, bioethics).
5 entries -
Logical Fallacies
Common errors in reasoning.
20 entries -
Major Philosophers
Influential philosophers and their primary contributions.
27 entries -
Metaphysics Concepts
Fundamental concepts in metaphysics.
16 entries -
Philosophical Traditions and Schools of Thought
Major philosophical traditions: ancient Greek philosophy, Eastern philosophy (Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism), Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism, and existentialism.
6 entries
Fetch this category
One request returns the category with all of its dataset summaries. Append
?format=yaml or ?format=toon for the other encodings.
GET https://yjtoon.yunusemrevurgun.com/api/category/philosophy?format=json