IB Philosophy 1. Being Human Key Definitions

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

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.

Authenticity is the quality of living in accordance with one’s own genuine self, values, and commitments rather than conforming to external pressures, social conventions, or the expectations of others. In existentialist philosophy (Heidegger, Sartre, Kierkegaard), authenticity involves confronting the anxiety of radical freedom and taking full responsibility for one’s choices and identity.

John Searle's Chinese Room argument challenges the claim that computers can genuinely understand or think. A person in a room follows rules to manipulate Chinese symbols without understanding Chinese, showing that syntax (rule-following) is not sufficient for semantics (meaning).

Compatibilism is the philosophical position that determinism and free will are compatible. Free will, on this view, requires not the ability to have done otherwise in a strict causal sense, but the ability to act in accordance with one's own reasons and rational deliberation, unimpeded by external constraint.

Consciousness: the state of subjective awareness in which an individual experiences thoughts, sensations, and perceptions with a first-person, qualitative character: the 'what it is like' quality of mental life.

A constitutive belief is one so central to a person's self-understanding that abandoning it would fundamentally alter who they take themselves to be, regardless of whether the belief is empirically true or false.

A person's cultural identity is the sense of belonging and self-understanding derived from membership in a particular cultural group, shaped by shared language, traditions, values, and social practices. It functions not merely as a label but as a framework through which the individual interprets their experience and relates to others.

Determinism is the thesis that every event in the universe is necessitated by prior causes together with the laws of nature, so that given the complete state of the world at any moment, every subsequent state is uniquely determined.

Dualism is the metaphysical thesis that mind and body are two fundamentally distinct kinds of substance, with mental states such as thoughts, beliefs, and sensations belonging to an immaterial domain that cannot be reduced to physical processes. The position, most influentially defended by Descartes, raises the persistent question of how two radically different substances can causally interact.

Empiricism is the epistemological position that all substantive knowledge originates in sensory experience, denying that the mind possesses innate ideas or can arrive at factual truths through reason alone. Championed by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, the tradition grounds scientific method in observation while facing the challenge of explaining knowledge of abstract truths such as mathematics and logic.

Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene expression caused by environmental factors rather than alterations to the DNA sequence itself, demonstrating that nature and nurture interact at the molecular level.

In Aristotle's ethics, eudaimonia refers to human flourishing understood as the active exercise of distinctively human capacities in accordance with virtue over a complete life. Often translated as "happiness," it more precisely means living and faring well through the full realisation of what a human being is capable of becoming.

Existential angst (also called anguish or anxiety) is a profound feeling of dread that arises from awareness of one's own radical freedom, the absence of a predetermined essence, and the inescapable responsibility for creating oneself through one's choices.

a philosophical movement associated with Sartre and de Beauvoir holding that human existence precedes essence, meaning individuals are radically free to define themselves through their choices and actions. Fanon engages critically with existentialism, arguing that racial categorization imposed by colonialism constrains the colonized person's freedom in ways that abstract existentialist frameworks fail to capture.

Functionalism is a theory of mind holding that mental states are defined by their causal roles rather than by the physical substrate that realises them. According to this theory, what makes something a mental state is the functional role it performs in mediating inputs, outputs, and other mental states, not whether it occurs in neurons or silicon.

Human nature refers to the set of characteristics, capacities, and dispositions thought to be shared by all human beings, independent of culture, upbringing, or historical context, and that define what it fundamentally means to be human.

I-Thou Relation: in Martin Buber's philosophy, the mode of relating in which another person is encountered as a full, irreducible subject rather than an object, in contrast to the I-It relation where the other is reduced to a category or tool.

Incompatibilism holds that free will and causal determinism cannot both be true, so that if every event is necessitated by prior causes then no one ever genuinely could have acted otherwise. The position encompasses both hard determinism, which accepts determinism and denies free will, and libertarian free will, which preserves agency by denying that the physical world is fully determined.

Inter-subjectivity is the shared domain of experience and meaning between subjects, through which selves come to be constituted through mutual recognition, embodied engagement, and dialogue with others rather than in isolation.

Junzi: the Confucian ideal of the morally exemplary person who embodies virtue through disciplined self-cultivation, defined not by birth or rank but by fully realising the virtues appropriate to each of their relational roles.

Li: in Confucian philosophy, the system of ritual propriety and social norms that govern conduct within the five cardinal relationships, providing the social grammar through which ren is expressed and sustained.

Libertarian free will (in the metaphysical sense, not the political sense) is the view that human beings possess a genuine capacity to choose between alternatives, that at least some actions are not determined by prior causes, and that this indeterminacy is essential for genuine moral responsibility.

Logical behaviourism is the philosophical view that statements about mental states can be translated without loss of meaning into statements about actual and potential behavioural dispositions, eliminating the need to posit hidden inner experiences.