greguería

 A greguería is a short statement, usually one sentence, in which the author expresses a philosophical, pragmatic, or humorous idea in a witty and original way. A greguería is roughly similar to an aphorism or a one-liner joke in comedy. It is a rhetorical and stylistic device used in Spanish and Latin American literature. 

 

Some examples of greguerías by Ramón Gómez de la Serna, originally in Spanish.

• The couple of eggs we eat look like identical twins, and they're not even third cousins. (El par de huevos que nos tomamos parece que son gemelos, y no son ni primos terceros.)
• The peacock is a retired myth. (El pavo real es un mito jubilado.)
• Doors get angry with the wind. (Las puertas se enfadan con el viento.)
• Fragrance is the flowers' echo. (El perfume es el eco de las flores.)

 

onism

 

onism

n. the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time, which is like standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.

umwelt

 In the semiotic theories of Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok, umwelt (plural: umwelten; from the German Umwelt meaning "environment" or "surroundings") is the "biological foundations that lie at the very epicenter of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal". The term is usually translated as "self-centered world". Uexküll theorised that organisms can have different umwelten, even though they share the same environment.

weltanschauung

 

weltanschauung

1. A person's or a group's conception, philosophy or view of the world; a worldview.

   Your background and experiences must give you a unique weltanschauung.

aporia

 In philosophy, an aporia (Ancient Greek: ᾰ̓πορῐ́ᾱ, romanized: aporíā, lit. 'literally: "lacking passage", also: "impasse", "difficulty in passage", "puzzlement"') is a conundrum or state of puzzlement. In rhetoric, it is a declaration of doubt, made for rhetorical purpose and often feigned.

unknowable

 

unknowable (comparative more unknowable, superlative most unknowable)

Not knowable; not able to be known.

noumenon

 

In philosophy, a noumenon (plural noumena) is a posited object or event that exists independently of human sense and/or perception. The term noumenon is generally used in contrast with, or in relation to, the term phenomenon, which refers to any object of the senses. Immanuel Kant first developed the notion of the noumenon as part of his transcendental idealism, suggesting that while we know the noumenal world to exist because human sensibility is merely receptive, it is not itself sensible and must therefore remain otherwise unknowable to us. In Kantian philosophy, the unknowable noumenon is often identified with or associated with the unknowable "thing-in-itself" (in Kant's German, Ding an sich). However, the nature of the relationship between the two is not made explicit in Kant's work, and remains a subject of debate among Kant scholars as a result. 

 

Weltanschauung

Weltanschauung f (genitive Weltanschauung, plural Weltanschauungen)

1. Worldview, weltanschauung, philosophy of life

Quietism

Quietism in philosophy is an approach to the subject that sees the role of philosophy as broadly therapeutic or remedial. Quietist philosophers believe that philosophy has no positive thesis to contribute, but rather that its value is in defusing confusions in the linguistic and conceptual frameworks of other subjects, including non-quietist philosophy. By re-formulating supposed problems in a way that makes the misguided reasoning from which they arise apparent, the quietist hopes to put an end to man's confusion, and help return to a state of intellectual quietude.

Accidentalism

Accidentalism may refer to:

• In philosophy, it is used for any system of thought which denies the causal nexus and maintains that events succeed one another haphazardly or by chance (not in the mathematical but in the popular sense). In metaphysics, accidentalism denies the doctrine that everything occurs or results from a definite cause. In this connection it is synonymous with Tychism (τύχη, chance), a term used by Charles Sanders Peirce for the theories which make chance an objective factor in the process of the Universe.
• In music, the term Accidentalism refers to a style which finds its roots in IDM, Glitch and Breakcore. Its main characteristic is the use of randomization and chaos theory to control aspects of some sounds and effects parameters and even the melodic and harmonic structure of the work, resulting in a produced yet unique sound in each performance. As a musical term, Accidentalism was coined by Electronic musician/Multi-media artist, Computo.

teleology

A teleology is any philosophical account that holds that final causes exist in nature, meaning that, analogous to purposes found in human actions, nature inherently tends toward definite ends. The adjective "teleological" has a broader usage, for example in discussions where particular ethical theories or types of computer programs are sometimes described as teleological because they involve aiming at goals.
Teleology was explored by Plato and Aristotle, by Saint Anselm during the 11th century AD, and later by Carl Jung and Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment. It was fundamental to the speculative philosophy of Hegel.
A thing, process, or action is teleological when it is for the sake of an end, i.e., a telos or final cause. In general, it may be said that there are two types of final causes, which may be called intrinsic finality and extrinsic finality.

• A thing or action has an extrinsic finality when it is for the sake of something external to itself. In a way, people exhibit extrinsic finality when they seek the happiness of a child. If the external thing had not existed that action would not display finality.

• A thing or action has an intrinsic finality when it is for none other than its own sake. For example, one might try to be happy simply for the sake of being happy, and not for the sake of anything outside of that.

philistinism

In the fields of philosophy and æsthetics, the term philistinism describes the social attitude of anti-intellectualism that undervalues and despises art, beauty, spirituality, and intellect; "the manners, habits, and character, or mode of thinking of a philistine". A philistine person is the man or woman who is smugly narrow of mind and of conventional morality whose materialistic views and tastes indicate an indifference toward cultural and æsthetic values. Since the 19th century, the contemporary denotation of philistinism, as the behaviour of "ignorant, ill-behaved persons lacking in culture or artistic appreciation, and only concerned with materialistic values" derives from Matthew Arnold’s adaptation to English of the German word Philister—as applied by university students in their antagonistic relations with the townspeople of Jena, Germany, where, in 1689, a row resulted in several deaths. In the aftermath, the university cleric addressed the town-vs-gown matter with an admonishing sermon "The Philistines be upon thee", drawn from the Book of Judges (Chapter 16, "Samson vs the Philistines"), of the Tanakh and the Christian Old Testament.

prolepsis

prolepsis (plural prolepses) NOUN

1. (rhetoric) The assignment of something to a period of time that precedes it.
2. (logic) The anticipation of an objection to an argument.
3. (grammar, rhetoric) A construction that consists of placing an element in a syntactic unit before that to which it would logically correspond.
4. (philosophy, epistemology) A so-called "preconception", i.e. a pre-theoretical notion which can lead to true knowledge of the world.
5. (botany) Growth in which lateral branches develop from a lateral meristem, after the formation of a bud or following a period of dormancy, when the lateral meristem is split from a terminal meristem.

Qualia

Qualia is a term used in philosophy to refer to individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term derives from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind." Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the experience of taking a recreational drug, or the perceived redness of an evening sky. Daniel Dennett writes that qualia is "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us." Erwin Schrödinger, the famous physicist, had this counter-materialist take: "The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so."

Biocentrism

Biocentrism (Greek: βίος, bio, "life"; and κέντρον, kentron, "center"), in a political and ecological sense, is an ethical point of view which extends inherent value to non-human species, ecosystems, and processes in nature - regardless of their sentience. It stands in contrast to anthropocentrism which centers on the value of humans.

nescience

nescience (uncountable)

1. The absence of knowledge; ignorance, especially of orthodox beliefs.
2. (philosophy) The doctrine that nothing is actually knowable.

anti-realism

In analytic philosophy, the term anti-realism is used to describe any position involving either the denial of an objective reality or the denial that verification-transcendent statements are either true or false. This latter construal is sometimes expressed by saying "there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not P." Thus, we may speak of anti-realism with respect to other minds, the past, the future, universals, mathematical entities (such as natural numbers), moral categories, the material world, or even thought. The two construals are clearly distinct and often confused. For example, an "anti-realist" who denies that other minds exist (i. e., a solipsist) is quite different from an "anti-realist" who claims that there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not there are unobservable other minds (i. e., a logical behaviorist).

intuitionism

In the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism, or neointuitionism (opposed to preintuitionism), is an approach to mathematics as the constructive mental activity of humans. That is, mathematics does not consist of analytic activities wherein deep properties of existence are revealed and applied. Instead, logic and mathematics are the application of internally consistent methods to realize more complex mental constructs.

Antinomy

Antinomy (Greek αντι-, for or instead of, plus νομος, law) literally means the mutual incompatibility, real or apparent, of two laws. It is a term used in logic and epistemology.

The term acquired a special significance in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who used it to describe the equally rational but contradictory results of applying to the universe of pure thought the categories or criteria of reason proper to the universe of sensible perception or experience (phenomena). Empirical reason cannot here play the role of establishing rational truths because it goes beyond possible experience and is applied to the sphere of that which transcends it.

Post-structuralism

Post-structuralism is a label formulated by US academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals. The label primarily encompasses the intellectual developments of certain mid-20th-century French and continental philosophers and theorists. The movement is difficult to summarize, but may be broadly understood as a body of distinct responses to structuralism, which argued that human culture may be understood by means of a structure-—modeled on language—that is distinct both from the organizations of reality and the organization of ideas and imagination—a "third order." The precise nature of the revision or critique of structuralism differs with each post-structuralist author, though common themes include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of the structures that structuralism posits and an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute those structures. Writers whose work is often characterised as post-structuralist include Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva.