Vocabulary Part 1

Οὐκ ἐμοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ Λόγου ἀκούσαντας, σοφὸν τὸ πάντ’ εἶναι ἕν. – Heraclitus

“Listening not to me but to the logos, it is wisdom to recognize that all things are one” (translation mine).

1) Hermeneutics: The methodology of interpretation, especially of texts such as literature, religious scripture, legal documents or philosophical works. One uses hermeneutics to understand a text with relation to its context, author’s intent, perspective of the reader and historical interpretations. The word comes from the greek hermeneuein (Gr. ἑρμηνεύειν) which is the verb meaning “to interpret” and is associated with Hermes, the Greek God of communication and the messenger of the gods. 

2) Reductio ad absurdum: a technique in formal logic where you assume a claim is true and then show it leads to an absurd, contradictory or impossible conclusion thereby proving the claim is actually false.

The classic example of the reductio is the claim “all opinions are equally valid.” Using the reductio ad absurdum you can then claim that the opinion that some opinions are not equally valid falls under the set of all opinions and as such if the claim all opinions are equally valid we must also claim that some opinions are not equally valid showing the contradiction in the original statement by drawing out absurd contradictory claims being embedded into the initial axiom.

3) Sensus Communis: originally coined as  koinē aisthēsis (Gr. κοινὴ αἴσθησις), or common sense, by Aristotle, to describe a faculty of the soul that integrates sensory perception into a unified experience and later latinized to sensus communis by Thomas Aquinas as a bridge between raw sense data and higher reasoning, the modern philosophical and scientific use of the term comes mostly from Immanuel Kant. For Kant, the sensus communis was the shared unifying  precondition for experience as such (categories, etc.) which is a pure epigenetic spontaneous event. We seldom have direct access to it as it serves as a precondition for thought and as such is behind the cognitive apparatus, but reveals itself in positive judgements of taste with an increase in the feeling of life (Gm. lebensgefuhl). Sensus Communis, unlike the colloquial idea of common sense, has to do with a fundamental internal attribute in all thinking subjects which if used as a ground (in Kant’s case for both moral and aesthetic judgement) demands subjective universality if individual subjects are to remain free of internal contradiction.

4) Imago dei or “the image of god” is the philosophical concept that there is something which reflects the divine in all humans and gives the human life intrinsic value. The notion that man is imago dei is a key underlying axiom of western civilization and the foundation on which our legal system is predicated. The origin for this comes from Genesis 1:27 and stands as one of the most uncanny and influential ideas of mankind.

5) Material Monism: in the presocratic tradition Material Monism is the belief that reality consists of a single fundamental underlying substance which underpins the multiplicity of reality.  The first philosopher, Thales, was a material monist. At a time when the epoch in Athens was transitioning from paganism to a rational and philosophical monism Thales argued that the arche of the universe was water and from water, like white light changing to a rainbow in a prism, the fractionate multitude of cosmological reality is born. 

6) Phenomena: In philosophy as well as science the Kantian use of the term phenomena is the general usage. Phenomena (singular: phenomenon) refers to things as they appear or are experienced in our consciousness, as opposed to things as they are in themselves (noumena) of which humans have no empirical access or knowledge. Phenomena are only experienced through the senses and as raw data require unification in cognition for intelligibility by the preexisting categories of consciousness which are synthesized with raw sense material in order to form coherent conscious experience.