-===glossarium philosophia===-

= analytic knowledge =
opposite of which would be self contradictory. Necessarily true as denial would involve contradiction" e.g.: all bachelors are unmarried.

"They are called analytic because the predicate is obtained by merely analyzing the subject" [Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy, p. 83]

= autonomy =
"refers to beign a law unto oneself, so that one's thinking is independent of any outside authority, including God's. Autonomous reasoning takes itself philosophically as the final point of reference and interpretation, the ultimate court of appeal; it presumes to be self-governing, self-determinative, and self directing." [Bahnsen1998, 1]

"not controlled by others or by outside forces; independent" [The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition]

"autonomous agents are self-legislating; they act according to the categorical imperative of willing only what is universalizable as moral law." [Noesis Philosophical Research]

= axiom =
"in a logic or an axiomatic theory an axiom is a sentence which is accepted as true without demonstration. The axioms are the starting points for the derivations of all other theorems." [Factasia Glossary]

"a proposition formally accepted without demonstration, proof, or evidence as  one of the starting-points for the systematic derivation of an organized body of knowledge." [Noesis Philosophical Research]

= contingent =
'a term referring to being or states of affairs whose existence is not necessary. A coningent being is one that has the potential for nonexistence; a dependent being." [Cowan2000, 21]

= conceptual ontology =
the conceptual nature of a being that would have to be sufficient to explain its own existence and the existence of everything else.

= epistemology =
"is the study of the nature and limits of human knowledge; it addresses questions about truth, belief, justification, etc." [Bahnsen1998, 2]

"the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge, its presuppositions and foundations, and its extent and validity." [The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition]

"the theory or science of the method or grounds of knowledge." [Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary]

= epistemologically contingent =
when we inquire about a belief’s justification (knowledge is justified true belief) another belief is brought forward. Usually this belief is epistemologically contingent as well. That is, it depends on something else in turn for an explanation. Nature is a contingent fact for example, it is a "brute" or uninterpreted or meaningless fact.

= foundationalism =
"an epistemological theory that claims that knowledge is ultimately based on certain foundational beliefs that are acquired and known independently of other beliefs. That is, these foundational or 'basic' beliefs are acquired directly or immediately from experience (or in some case, reason). Classic foundationalism is a particular theory for distinguishing such basic beliefs from nonbasic beliefs (ie, beliefs that are derived from other beliefs). Classic foundationalism says that a belief is basic if and only if it is either self-evident, incorrigible, or evident to the seneses." [Cowan2000, 22]

= materialism =
"the view that everything that actually exists is material, or physical. Many philosophers and scientists now use the terms `material' and `physical' interchangeably. Characterized in this way, as a doctrine about what exists, materialism is an ontological, or a metaphysical, view; it is not just an epistemological view about how we know or just a semantic view about the meaning of terms." [Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind]

"belief that only physical things truly exist. Materialists claim (or promise) to explain every apparent instance of a mental phenomenon as a feature of some physical object. Prominent materialists in Western thought include the classical atomists, Hobbes, and La Mettrie." [Noesis Philosophical Research]

= metaphysics =
"is the study of the nature, conditions, extent, origin, structure, and relationships of whatever exists (especially that which may be beyond sense experience)." [Bahnsen1998, 11]

= monism =
"the theory that everything in the universe is composed of, or can be explained by or reduced to, one fundamental (type of) substance, energy, or force: materialists take this one thing to be matter; idealists take the one fundamental (type of) thing to be mind." [Hauser's Philo Glossary]

= naturalism =
"the worldview that claims that the natural, physical world is all that exists; synonymous with atheism." [Cowan2000, 22]

"the system of thought holding that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws without attributing moral, spiritual, or supernatural significance to them." [The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition]

"the doctrine of those who deny a supernatural agency in the miracles and revelations recorded in the Bible, and in spiritual influences; also, any system of philosophy which refers the phenomena of nature to a blind force or forces acting necessarily or according to fixed laws, excluding origination or direction by one intelligent will." [Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary]

"In relation to mind, the view that mental phenomena can be explained as part of the natural order and are empirically accessible features of the world." [Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind]

= noetic effects of sin =
"the detrimental effects of sin upon the mind. The term 'noetic' comes from the Greek nous (mind)." [Cowan2000, 23]

= nominalism =
"in the middle ages, someone who maintained that there wer no universals above and beyond particular individual things and words (marks on paper) in particular languages. See realist. Today, we tend to call someone a nominalist whose general account of the universe tries to get along without sanctioning things that are not realized completely in our experience. Goodman is often said to be a nominalist, and Quine may be said to have such tendencies (though Quine sanctions sets)." [Leiber's Philo Glossary]

= omnipotent =
completely potent and powerful enough to bring about ultimate purposes or plans; unable to be hindered or thwarted from achieving desired ends; never ultimately overpowered; has nothing to do with the concept of performing any and every act that can be imagined or concocted.

= predication =
"Predication is the mental or verbal act of attributing or denying a property or characteristic (a predicate) to a subject - as when someone affirms, 'The sky is blue,' or 'George Washington fought at Valley Forge.' or 'Driving seventy-five miles per hour is no longer permitted by law.' Predication requires one intelligibly to differentiate and select individial things (particulars), to make sense out of general or abstract concepts (universals, classes, definable sets), and to distinguish them (so as not to make them identical) while in some sense identifying or relating them to each other. In the ordinary affairs of life, people readily engage in predication without difficulty - until they are called upon to give an analysis or philosophical account of just what it is that they are doing, what it assumes about reality, and how anyone could know." (Bahsen, 1998)

= presupposition =
"is an elementary assumption in one's reasoning or in the process by which opinions are formed. In this book, a 'presupposition' is not just any assumption in an argument, but a personal commitment that is held at the most basic level of one's network of belies. Presuppositions form a wide-ranging foundational perspective (or starting point) in terms of which everything elese is intgerpreted and evaluated. As such, presuppositions have the greatest authority in one's thinking, being treated as one's least negotiable beliefs and being granted the highest immunity to revision." [Bahnsen1998, 2]

= principle of bivalence =
"The principle that any (significant) statement is either true or false." [Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy]

"The principle of bivalence is that for any proposition P, either P is true or P is false. This follows because any statement has to have a truth value, such as true, false, or if neither of those hold, it has to have a third truth value (which is the fuzzy logic way out). But that is the classical way of thinking about logic, and no longer holds in intuiitionist logic." [Wikipedia]

"Supposition that every proposition must be either true or false. The status of this supposition is controversial, especially with respect to future propositions about human action. Thus, for example, if "I will vacuum the carpet tomorrow." were regarded as already true (or false) today, it would seem that I cannot freely choose whether or not to clean."

= principle of excluded middle =
The Law of the Excluded Middle is that “if a given proposition is not true then its denial must be true”. See also The Law of Non-Contradiction which says that “if a given proposition is true then its denial cannot be true”. Whereas formal logic places an absolute ban on Contradiction, Intuitionism is a branch of Logic which holds that the Law of Excluded Middle is not valid.

"The law of excluded middle states that for any proposition, either it or its contradictory obtains; for any proposition P, either P or not-P." [Wikipedia]

"The principle that the disjunction of any (significant) statement with its negation is always truel e.g., 'Either there is a tree over 500 feet tall or it is not the case that there is such a tree'. The principle is often confused with the principle of bivalence." [Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy]

= transcendental argument =
"the term 'transcendental' should not be confused with the similar sounding word 'transcendent' (an adjective for whatever goes beyond human experience). Transcendental reasoning is concerned to discover what general conditions must be fulfilled for any particular instance of knowledge to be possible; it has been central to the philosophies of secular thinkers such as Aristotle and Kant, and it has become a matter of inquiry in contemporary, analytically minded philosophy. Van Til asks what view of man, mind, truth, language, and the world is necessarily presupposed by our conception of knowledge and out methods of pursuing it. For him, the transcendental answer is supplied at the very first step of man's reasoning - not by autonomous philosophical speculation, but by transcendent revelation from God." [Bahnsen1998, 5]

"…the transcendental argument seeks to discover what sort of foundations the house of human knowledge must have in order to be what it is. It does not seek to find whether the house has a foundation, but it presupposes that it has one" [Bahnsen-VT Seminar Tape 5]

"unless we are larger than God we cannot reason about him any other way, than by a transcendental or circular argument. The refusal to admit the necessity of circular reasoning is itself an evident token of opposition to Christianity. [Van Til, Survery of Christian Epistemology, 12]

"a transcendental argument, distinguished from other deductive arguments by its modality and its particular subject matter, is an anti-skeptical argument that establishes the necessary conditions of possible contingent experience. The argument is modal because it is an inquiry into the conditions of possibility, and not merely into the conditions of actuality. A transcendental argument may be expressed in the form of Modus Ponens. Its particular subject matter consists of (i) a major premise, the transcendental principle, that states the conditions of the possibility of performing some intentional operation; and (ii) a minor premise that provides a phenomenological description of that intentional operation. From these premises, an inference is drawn about the necessary conditions of the possible performance of that operation. The utility of a transcendental argument in defeating global skepticism consists of the performative inconsistency generated by rejection of the argument: denial of the transcendental principle on the one hand, and on the other hand (in the very act of denial) performance of the intentional operation that presupposes the denied principle. Thus, a transcendental argument is indirect in the sense that it seeks to establish the truth of some synthetic, a priori proposition (the consequent in the transcendental principle) by arguing that any denial of that transcendental principle demonstrably   undermines the possibility of rational inquiry as such. From the truth of the transcendental principle and of  its antecedent, the truth of its consequent is seen to follow." [David Byron, Van Til list]

= worldview =
"a conceptual framework for interpreting and organizing experience. This framework comprises a set of basic assumptions about the nature of reality (what is real and unreal, possible and impossible) and about the existence and nature of God, man, knowledge, and ethics." [Cowan2000, 24]

"the overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world." [The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition]