IB Philosophy

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" is the opening line of Volume II of The Second Sex and the single most influential sentence in feminist philosophy, encapsulating de Beauvoir's argument that femininity is not a biological given but a social construction produced through a lifetime of gendered socialisation.

A posteriori knowledge is knowledge that is justified through sensory experience and empirical observation rather than through pure reasoning alone. The concept, contrasted with a priori knowledge, is central to the analytic/synthetic distinction: while analytic truths hold by definition, synthetic a posteriori truths, such as "water boils at 100 degrees Celsius," require investigation of the world to be confirmed or refuted.

A priori knowledge is knowledge that is justified independently of sensory experience, derived through reason alone. Classic examples include mathematical truths such as "2 + 3 = 5" and logical principles.

In de Beauvoir's existentialism, active transcendence is the purposeful engagement with the world through which human beings create meaning, pursue projects, and assert their freedom against the forces of immanence and oppression.

Actor-Network Theory, developed by Bruno Latour, argues that both humans and non-human artefacts function as "actants" that participate equally in networks of action, dissolving the traditional boundary between persons and tools. Agency is distributed across the entire network rather than residing solely in human intentions.

Adaptive preferences are desires and values that have been shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by unjust conditions of deprivation or oppression. For example, a person denied education from birth may not desire it, but this absence of desire does not show the deprivation is acceptable.

Aesthetic emotivism extends emotivist analysis to judgments about beauty, art, and taste. On this view, statements like 'This painting is beautiful' express the speaker's aesthetic response rather than describing an objective property of the artwork.

Aesthetic experience: a distinctive mode of perception in which a subject attends to an object for its sensory, formal, and expressive qualities, valued for their own sake rather than for instrumental purposes.

Aesthetic judgement: an evaluative claim about the beauty, quality, or significance of an artwork or natural phenomenon, whose status as subjective, objective, or culturally conditioned is itself a core philosophical dispute.

Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of art, beauty, and taste, examining what art is, what makes something beautiful, and how we form judgements about artistic value.

in Nussbaum's capabilities approach, one of the ten central human capabilities, encompassing both the ability to live with and toward others and the social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation. Without affiliation, Nussbaum argues, other capabilities lose much of their value because human flourishing is irreducibly relational.

Agency is the capacity of an individual to act intentionally and make choices, exercising control over actions and their consequences.

the libertarian view of self-originating causal power, holding that rational agents can initiate causal chains not fully determined by prior events or laws of nature. Unlike mere event causation, where one event mechanically produces another, agent causation holds that persons are genuine originating causes of their actions.

Central to Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist ethics, ahimsa is the principle of non-violence toward all living beings, requiring the minimisation of harm to animals, plants, and the natural world through compassionate action and restraint.

a condition in which a person is estranged from the products of their own activity and from their own human capacities. In Fanon's application, alienation names the psychic and social condition of the colonized person who is estranged from their own body, culture, and selfhood by the imposed meanings of the colonial racial order, a condition that can only be overcome through the transformation of the social structures that produced it.

The Allegory of the Cave is Plato's famous image in Book VII of the Republic, depicting prisoners chained in a cave who mistake shadows for reality, illustrating the ascent of the soul from ignorance to knowledge of the Forms.

In de Beauvoir's existentialism, ambiguity refers to the fundamental condition of human existence in which consciousness is simultaneously free and situated, capable of transcendence yet always embedded in a concrete social and bodily reality.

Analogy in Aquinas's philosophy of religious language holds that terms applied to God are neither purely literal (univocal) nor purely metaphorical (equivocal) but bear a proportional resemblance to their ordinary meaning. This doctrine allows theists to make meaningful claims about divine attributes such as goodness and wisdom while respecting the infinite qualitative difference between Creator and creation.

The analytic/synthetic distinction divides meaningful propositions into analytic statements, which are true by virtue of meaning alone (e.g. 'all bachelors are unmarried'), and synthetic statements, which are true or false by virtue of how the world is (e.g. 'the cat is on the mat'). Quine challenged and Kripke complicated this division.

Anatta (Sanskrit: anatman) is the Buddhist doctrine of not-self: there is no permanent, unified self underlying experience. What we call “the self” is instead a collection of impermanent mental and physical processes with no fixed core.

The Anthropocene is the proposed geological epoch in which human activity has become the dominant influence on the Earth's climate and ecosystems, marking a fundamental shift in the relationship between humanity and nature.

Anthropocentrism is the view that human beings are the central or most important entities in the world, and that the natural environment has value only insofar as it serves human needs and interests. Deep ecology and ecocentrism challenge this position.

Arguments from illusion highlight how our senses can present the world as being other than it actually is, as when a straight stick appears bent in water or a white wall looks pink under coloured lighting. These cases are taken to show that what we directly perceive are sense data or mental representations rather than physical objects themselves, motivating indirect realist and idealist theories of perception.

Artistic accountability concerns the question of to whom an artist owes responsibility for the content, effects, and social consequences of their work, with possible answers ranging from accountability to a community or moral standards to full artistic autonomy.