17/11/2014

A Non-Philosopher's Guide to Philosophical Terms

A Non-Philosopher's Guide to Philosophical

Terms
Believe it or not, this started out as a genuine attempt to sort out confusions that arise between
philosophers and everyone else in the world, before I got carried away ... Basically, the problem is
this. Philosophers are, in a manner of speaking, in a certain rarefied sense of the term I am about to
use, boring. - No, really, we are. Philosophers, clumped together in any group where the ratio of
philosophers to non-philosophers is 1:1 or greater, excluding the limit case where there are only two
people in toto and only one of them is a philosopher, will actually talk about philosophy. They will
automatically correct each other's use of quantifiers and disambiguate statements where the intended
meaning was perfectly plain. At any rate this is what I do.
Exactly how the glossary I am offering helps either party is no longer clear to me, but I had vaguely
honourable intentions at the time I started writing it.
Also, since writing this glossary only a short while ago, I have received evidence that it has been read
by at least six other people, none of whom were in any way prodded by me! Isn't the net amazing? Of
these six, James Chase and Daniel Nolan have once again performed their invaluable service as
proofreaders and advisors; and Daniel and Hamish Cowan have suggested some new entries which I
have incorporated into the revised version.

TERM

hooker

utilitarian

Benthamite

WHAT IT MEANS TO A
LAYMAN

WHAT IT MEANS TO A PHILOSOPHER

one who can be hired to engage

in sexual intercourse

one who thinks that "if A, then B" is logically

equivalent (in some sense) to "either not-A, or
B"; can be hired to tutor undergraduates, and
costs much less

almost precisely cubical and

made of concrete, probably a
multi-storey car park

one who believes that the morally right action

is the one with the best consequences, so far as
the distribution of happiness is concerned; a
creature generally believed to be endowed with
the propensity to ignore their own drowning
children in order to push buttons which will
cause mild sexual gratification in a warehouse
full of rabbits

substance from the planet

Bentham capable of draining the
someone who really would ignore their own
super powers of Wonder
drowning child in order to push the rabbitWoman, or Spiderman, or some
gratification button
such person

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A Non-Philosopher's Guide to Philosophical Terms

a one-way dependence relation between

that's it! ... he's the guy that gets
supervenience
properties or facts of one type and properties or
killed by Benthamite
facts of another
personal
identity

logic

the subject of self-help books

and those modern Broadway
that by virtue of which I am the same person I
songs which involve the use of a was yesterday
spotlight
...dictates that the needs of the
many outweigh the needs of the involves upside-down As and reversed Es
few, Captain

existential
quantifier

an angst-ridden statistician

a posteriori

things you think of when you're knowledge which is the result of and is based
sitting down
upon experience of some kind

a reversed E: see above

things you think of when you're sitting down,

in an armchair, usually with a snifter of brandy
in one hand

a priori

something you've thought of to

head your "things to do" list

Platonic

the sort of love which is all very a philosophical position which posits abstract
well in its way
objects almost palpable enough to trip over

Platonic
heaven

this is a contradiction in terms:

see above

a place where one might find triangles, the

square root of two, and the abstract property of
being a mountain goat

Lewis

author of books about Narnia

a contemporary philosopher with a formidable

reputation and a truly colossal beard

Quine

an alternative spelling of the Old

Scottish word "quean", a
synonym for "strumpet" which
one might just get away with
using in a game of Scrabble;
indeed, which one often has to
resort to using if all of the U's
are already on the board

a contemporary philosopher of formidable

reputation who I've never actually met, and
whose beard I am told does not exist, but who I
imagine has quite an impressive snort

Kripke

the name of a policeman who is

the subject of a song in West
a contemporary philosopher of formidable
Side Story, spelled so that New reputation who, I am reliably informed, does
Zealanders will pronounce it
have something of an impressive snort
correctly*

Locke

thatte whyche prevents rogues

a dead philosopher of politics, language and
and arrant knaves from burgling
mind
Ye Olde English Tea Shoppe

Moore

Dan Quayle's description of

Othelloe

a dead philosopher fond of mentioning that he

had two hands

Hobbes

the butler

a dead political philosopher (who I also think

of as having a snort to be reckoned with)

a letter of the alphabet

a moment in time

another one of those Old

Scottish words so invaluable in
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grue

a game of Scrabble, this one

meaning "a creeping of the
flesh"

either green and first observed before time t or

blue and first observed after or at time t

modal

something to do with different

tonal centres and flattened
leading notes, as in
"Scarborough Fair"

the phrase "possible worlds" is going to be

mentioned any second now

possible
world

a phrase which I seem to recall

was used as a lyric in a recent
animated movie from the Walt
Disney studios

either the biggest spatio-temporally connected

thing of which we are all part, in which case
there is only one; or some sort of weird
abstraction, in which case there are
uncountably many; but for a different view see
Lewis

hard-headed

someone who believes in the existence of trees;

usually hard-headed, but if you mean "realist
about everything", decidedly soft-headed

see tree-hugging, below

one who doesn't actually disbelieve in trees, but

who thinks that they can't be bumped into, take
up no space, and are in constant danger of
winking out of existence if they are not
properly attended to

as hard-headed as they come

someone whose belief in the existence of trees

depends on their belief in the disposition of
scientifically-minded angels to believe in trees

the noise made by a semiliterate, almost sub-sentient,

drunken creature, in order to
indicate that it wishes to be
given twenty-four cans of beer

the noise made by a semi-literate, almost subsentient, drunken creature, in order to indicate
that there is a piece of masonry in the
immediate vicinity

Descartes

a mathematician

a philosopher

Leibniz

a mathematician

a philosopher

Davies

a philosopher

a physicist

classical

Helen of Troy, Beethoven,

Corinthian architecture and
similar things

a stodgy, old-fashioned logic which produces

wildly implausible results: for example,
according to classical logic, no proposition is
both true and false

deviant

someone who does unspeakable a logic which probably would do unspeakable

things to furry animals
things to furry animals, if it could

absurd

silly

very silly

a nation defined chiefly by its

lack of a monarch

a nation which may well have a monarch, so

long as the monarch believes everything Plato
believes, and has Plato's taste in music

France

a country in Europe

a nation defined chiefly by its lack of a

monarch

the folk

the people responsible for

maintaining the national supply
of macrame wall hangings

a collection of more or less sensible chaps who

more or less know what they mean, and it's
more or less what I mean

realist

idealist

pragmatist

slab

Republic

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gunk

matter which was once made of

atoms like ordinary matter but
matter which is not made of atoms like
which is now a formless
ordinary matter, as it is infinitely divisible
substance blocking your drains

deconstructing
???
the other
Continental

rabbit

metaphysics

???

croissants, fruit juice, coffee

deconstructing the other

rabbit

contiguous and bi-laterally symmetric (when

considered three-dimensionally) fusion of
temporal slices, chronologically ordered, of
what you are so pleased to call a "rabbit"
(rabbit, indeed)

somewhere between "crystal

healing" and "tree hugging" in
the Dewey decimal system

No! How many times do I have to tell you?

Nothing whatever to do with this New Age
stuff! Now move my book away from the stand
containing Shirley MacLaine, or I shall be very
upset

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