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Absolute, the  That which is unconditioned and uncaused by anything else; it is frequently thought of as God, a perfect and solitary, self-caused eternal being that is the source or essence of all that exists but that is itself beyond the possibility of conceptualization or definition.
Absolute Idealism  The early-nineteenth-century school of philosophy that maintained that being is the transcendental unfolding or expression of thought or reason.
Absolute Idealists  Fichte, Johann Gottlieb; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Shelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joeseph von.
Arthur Shopenhauer  Held that the world is structured and driven by will.
Conceptualism  The theory that universals are concepts and exist only in the mind.
Constant conjunction  Hume didn't experience an event X causing another event Y, he experienced only X and Y. We mistake their constant conjunction for causation.
Copernican revolution in philosophy  A new perspective in epistemology, introduced by Immanuel Kant, according to which the objects of experience must conform in certain respects to our knowledge of them.
David Hume  Held that there is no metaphysical knowledge and maintained that knowledge is limited to what we experience. He summoned powerful arguments to question our supposed knowledge of the self, causality, God, and the external world.
Ding-an-sich  German for "thing-in-itself" a thing as it is independent of any consciousness of it.
Georg Hegel  Was the premier exponent of Absolute Idealism. He rejected the concept of "the thing-in-itself" and held that all reality is the expression of thought or reason.
Idealism  The doctrine that only what is mental (thought, consciousness, perception) exists and that so-called physical manifestations of things are manifestations of mind or thought.
Immanuel Kant  Believed the mind imposes a certain form and order on experiencable objects. He held that there can be no knowledge of things "as they are in themselves," independent of experience.
Materialism  The theory that only physical entities exist, and that so-called mental things are manifestations of an underlying physical reality.
Noumena  In the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, things as they are in themselves independent of all possible experience of them.
Phenomena  In Kant's philosophy, objects as experiences and hence as organized and unified by the categories of the understanding and the forms of space and time; things as they appear to us or, alternatively, the appearances themselves.
Realism  The theory that the real world is independent of the mind.
The future will resemble the past  If you say that the next flame you encounter will be accompanied by heat, you assume the future will be like the past.
Thing-in-itself  English for Ding-an-sich a thing as it is independent of any consciousness of it.
Unified  Kant held, to qualify as experience, sensory stimulation must be unified in a single connected consciousness.







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