| Abandonment | There is no God and we must create our own values.
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| Alain Badiou | Agreed with Deleuze that infinite difference is all there is; charged Deleuze with treating multiplicity as a single totality.
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| Albert Camus | A French existentialist writer, emphasized the absurdity of the world and the inability of the individual to meet genuine human needs within it.
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| Archaeological | Digging through historical strata to lay bare the discourses that shaped societies (and shape our own).
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| 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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| Authenticity | A way of understanding the essential nature of the human being by seeing it as a totality.
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| Bad faith | In the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, essential self-deception or lying to oneself, especially when this takes the form of blaming circumstances for one's fate and not seizing the freedom to realize oneself in action.
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| Claude Levi-Strauss | French anthropologist who adapted and applied Saussure's structuralist approach to ethnographic research.
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| Condemned to be free | Sartre wrote that man is free, man is freedom, we are alone without excuses for our actions.
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| Continental philosophy | The philosophical traditions of continental Europe; includes phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and critical theory.
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| Critical theory | A philosophical method that seeks to provide a radical critique of knowledge by taking into account the situation and interests involved.
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| Deconstructive method | Is to lay bare those assumptions about language, to "question" the text about possible multiple meanings.
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| Ding-an-sich | German for "thing-in-itself" a thing as it is independent of any consciousness of it.
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| Edmund Husserl | The first great phenomenologist.
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| Epistemes | Created realities that serve in each era as the ground of the true and the false.
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| Eternal law | In the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the divine reason of God that rules over all things at all times.
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| Everydayness | Human beings can suffer from a kind of "primitive" and unthinking being and fail to fulfill their real potential.
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| Existentialism | A tradition of twentieth-century philosophy having its roots in the nineteenth century but coming to flower in Europe after World War II; of central concern is the question of how the individual is to find an authentic existence in this world, in which there is no ultimate reason why things happen one way and not another.
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| Existential predicament | The world is irrational and absurd leaving the individual to choose how he or she is to live amongst senselessness, separation, and inability to communicate which give birth to anxiety, dread, self-doubt and despair.
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| Existence precedes essence | Sartre meant by this that you are what you make of yourself.
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| Free play of signifiers | The writer of a word "privileges" that word for a moment; this "privileging" becomes the medium for the play of the signifier.
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| Ferdinand de Saussure | Swiss thinker who laid the foundations for modern linguistics.
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| Friedrich Nietzsche | Also reacted strongly against Hegelian idealism; he anticipated important themes of existentialism.
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| Fundamental project | A project that can mobilize and direct all of one's life energies and permit one to make spontaneous choices.
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| Genealogy | It is possible to trace the development of various laws and practices with an emphasis on power, not knowledge. It's not prescriptive but descriptive.
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| Gilles Deleuze | Believed that multiplicity, rather than identity or one-ness, is the basic principle of philosophy.
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| Hermeneutics | Interpretive understanding that seeks systematically to access the essence of things.
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| Jacques Derrida | Influential French deconstructionist.
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| Jean-Paul Sartre | A French existentialist writer, emphasized the significance of abandonment and its implications.
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| Jurgen Habermas | One of the major German contributors to critical theory.
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| Logical positivism | The philosophy of the Vienna Circle, according to which any purported statement of fact, if not a verbal truism, is meaningless unless certain conceivable observations would serve to conform or deny it.
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| Martin Heidegger | Emphasized the importance of returning to Being itself independent of the mental categories we assign to it.
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| Michel Foucault | French philosopher who provided a critique of conventional social attitudes regarding madness and sexuality.
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| Nihilism | The rejection of values and beliefs.
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| Phenomena | Things as they appear to us or, alternatively, the appearances themselves.
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| Phenomenologocial reduction | A method of putting aside the ordinary attitude toward the world and its objects in order to See the objects of pure consciousness through intuition.
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| Phenomenology | A tradition of twentieth-century Continental philosophy based on the phenomenological method, which seeks rigorous knowledge not of things-in-themselves but rather of the structures of consciousness and of things as they appear to consciousness.
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| Richard Rorty | American philosopher who interprets Continental philosophy through a pragmatic perspective.
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| Semiotics | The analysis of sign systems of various types, from advertising slogans to animal communication.
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| Soren Kierkegaard | A nineteenth-century philosopher, rejected the Hegelian idea of a rational universe and anticipated some of the themes of existentialism.
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| Sinn | Sense, meaning, the absence of which in life is the problem of human existence.
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| Structuralism | A methodology that seeks to find the underlying rules and conventions governing large social systems such as language or cultural mythology.
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| The ideal speech situation | Persons are free to speak their minds and listen to reason without fear of being blocked.
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| Thrown into the world | For Heidegger, the human being is thrown into the world and soon experiences both fear and dread when confronted with forces beyond understanding.
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| Transcendental phenomenology | An epistemological method that seeks the certainty of a pure consciousness of objects in the transcendental ego.
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| Universal phenomenology of consciousness | Attempts made by Hegel and Husserl to devise a pure science of knowing.
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