| A priori principle | A proposition whose truth we do not need to know through sensory experience and that no conceivable experience could serve to refute.
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| Anaxagoras | Maintained that all things are composed of infinitely divisible particles; the universe was cause by mind (nous) acting on matter.
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| Anaximander | Held that the original source of all things is a boundless, indeterminate element.
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| Anaximenes | Said that the underlying principle of all things is air.
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| Atomism | The ancient Greek philosophy that holds that all things are composed of simple, indivisible minute particles.
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| Determinism | The doctrine that a person could not have acted otherwise than as she or he did act.
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| Dualism | Two-ism; the doctrine that existing things belong to one or another but not both of two distinct categories of things, usually deemed to be physical and nonphysical or spiritual.
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| Empedocles | Held that apparent changes in things are in fact changes in the positions of basic particles, of which there are four types earth, air, fire, and water. Two forces cause these basic changes love and strife.
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| Epistemology | The branch of philosophy concerned primarily with the nature and possibility of knowledge.
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| Heraclitus | Held that the only reality is ceaseless change and that the underlying substance of the universe is fire.
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| Logos | Heraclitus saw all change as determined by this cosmic order, Greek for "word."
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| Metaphysics | The branch of philosophy that studies the nature and fundamental features of being.
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| Myth | Western philosophy was born observing and systematically understanding Greek myths. A traditional, typically ancient story dealing with supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes that serves as a fundamental type in the worldview of a people, as by explaining aspects of the natural world or delineating the psychology, customs, or ideals of society.
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| Nous | A Greek word variously translated as "thinking," "mind," "spirit," and "intellect."
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| Parmenides | Said that the only reality is permanent, unchanging, indivisible, and undifferentiated being and that change and motion are illusions of the senses.
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| Pre-Socratic philosophers | Greek philosophers who lived before Socrates.
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| Principle of reason | An a priori principle.
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| Problem of identity | Sameness over change that applies to everything over time.
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| Problem of personal identity | The problem of identity as it applies to people.
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| Pythagoras | Maintained that enumerability constitutes the true nature of things.
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| Pythagoreans | Pythagoras and his followers, whose doctrine - a combination of mathematics and philosophy - gave birth to the concept in metaphysics that fundamental reality is eternal, unchanging, and accessible only to reason.
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| The Atomists (especially Leucippus and Democritus) | Said that all things are composed of imperceptible, indestructible, indivisible, eternal, and uncreated atoms. Motion needs no explanation.
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| Thales | Held that the basic stuff out of which all else is composed is water.
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| Zeno | Devised clever paradoxes seeming to show that motion is impossible.
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