Chiaroscuro is an Italian word literally meaning "light dark", most usually used to describe a painting created with strong contrasts, such as Caravaggio.
Utilitarianism is a "consequentialist" ethical theory. Utilitarianism is usually connected with the more specific doctrines of Bentham and Mill, who took the goodness of consequences to be measured by their effect on the happiness or welfare of sentient creatures. (This is sometimes referred to as ...
A sophism is a bad argument presented as if it were a good one to deceive, mislead, or cheat someone; sophistry is the practice of doing this. In Ancient Greece, the sophists were itinerant teachers of the fourth and fifth centuries B.C., some of whom, such as Protagoras and Gorgias, Socrates ...
Rationalism is an epistemological position that emphasizes reason as a source of knowledge itself, not merely a way of organizing and drawing further hypotheses from knowledge gotten by sense perception. Continental rationalism is a term sometimes applied to Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and other ...
Platonism refers to the philosophy of Plato (428–348 B.C.) and the movements specifically inspired by it. Uncapitalized, platonism has become a technical term in ontology for those who countenance abstract entities that are not merely abstractions from or constructions out of particulars, and ...
In discussions about the philosophical problem of evil, a distinction is commonly made between moral evil and natural evil. Moral evil is (roughly) evil that is brought about by the bad actions of human beings (or other created beings), whereas natural evil is evil that is (seemingly) brought about ...
Naturalism is a powerful if somewhat vague philosophical view, with both epistemological and metaphysical sides. All knowledge derives from the methods we use to study the natural world, sense-perception extended by the methods of the natural sciences. The only objects and properties that we should ...
The mind-body problem is the problem of accounting for the way in which our minds interact with or are related to our bodies. The mind-body problem thus comprises a central area of the subfield of philosophy called philosophy of mind.
