| Anne Conway | Argued against parts of the philosophies of Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza. An essentialist who argued that everything other than God has both physical and mental essences - God is totally mental - she had a big influence on Leibniz's monadology.
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| Benedictus de Spinoza | A neutralist and Continental rationalist. He maintained that thought and extension are attributes of a single substance.
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| Clear and distinct criterion | Rene Descartes's criterion of truth, according to which that, and only that, which is perceived as clearly and distinctly as the fact of one's own existence is certain.
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| Cogito, ergo sum | "I think, therefore I am"; the single indubitable truth on which Descartes's epistemology is based.
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| Double aspect theory | The idea that whatever exists is both mental and physical; that is, that the mental and physical are just different ways of looking at the same things.
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| Dream conjecture | The conjecture, used by Descartes, that all experience may be dream experience.
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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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| Emile du Chatelet | Adopted Leibniz's metaphysical principles to Newtonian science.
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| Empiricism | The philosophy that all knowledge originates in sensory experience.
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| Epistemological detour | The attempt to utilize epistemological inquiry to arrive at metaphysical truths.
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| Esse est percipi | Latin for "to be is to be perceived," a doctrine that George Berkeley made that basis of his philosophy Only that which is perceived exists; Berkeley held, however, that the minds that do the perceiving also exist.
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| Evil demon conjecture | The conjecture used by Descartes that states For all I know, an all-powerful "god" or demon has manipulated me so that all I take as true is in fact false.
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| Extension | A property by which a thing occupies space; according to Descartes, the essential attribute of matter.
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| George Berkeley | A British empiricist and idealist who denied the existence of material substance and held that sensible objects exist only in the mind.
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| Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz | A Continental rationalist who held that the ultimate constituents of reality are monads, which are nonmaterial, indivisible units of force.
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| 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.
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| John Locke | A British empiricist who held that we perceive objects indirectly by means of our perceptions of them, some of which he believed were accurate copies of the real properties of objects.
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| Materialism | The theory that only physical entities exist, and that so-called mental things are manifestations of an underlying physical reality.
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| Modified skeptic | A skeptic who does not doubt that at least some things are known but denies or suspends judgment on the possibility of knowledge about some particular subject.
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| Monad | From the Greek word meaning "unit." Pythagoras used the word to denote the first number of a series, and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz used the word to denote the unextended, simple, soullike basic elements of the universe.
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| Nihil in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu | Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses; an epistemological principle formulated by Thomas Aquinas as an extrapolation of Aristotle's thinking.
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| Occasionalism | A variant of parallelism according to which an act of willing your body to do something is the occasion for God to cause your body to do it.
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| Oliva Sabuco de Nantes | Proposed that the connection between body and soul occurs throughout the brain.
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| Parallelism | The doctrine that there are two parallel and coordinated series of events, one mental and the other physical, and that apparent causal interaction between the mind and the body is to be explained as a manifestation of the correlation between the two series.
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| Perception | A modern word for what Thomas Hobbes called "sense," the basic mental activity from which all other mental phenomena are derived.
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| Principle of sufficient reason | The principle that there is a sufficient reason why things are exactly as they are and are not otherwise.
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| Principle of the identity of indiscernibles | The principle according to which, if entity X and entity Y have exactly the same set of properties, they X = Y.
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| Rationalism | The epistemological theory that reason is either the sole or primary source of knowledge; in practice, most rationalists maintain merely that at least some truths are not known solely on the basis of experience.
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| Rene Descartes | The "father" of modern philosophy, a Continental rationalist, and a dualist. He said there are two separate and distinct substances material substance and mind.
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| Representative realism | The theory that we perceive objects indirectly by means of representations (ideas, perceptions) of them.
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| skepticism (lowercase "s") | The doctrine that true knowledge is uncertain or impossible.
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| Tabula rasa | Latin for "blank tablet"; also, John Locke's metaphor for the condition of the mind prior to the imprint of sensory experience.
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| Thomas Hobbes | The first great modern materialist. He held that all that exists is bodies in motion.
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| Thought | According to Descartes, the essential attribute of mind.
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2002 McGraw-Hill Higher Education