Anyone who reads much philosophy will encounter a lot of Latin phrases. Leaving formal and informal fallacies out of it, the following are some of the most common. I have translated for the uninitiated.<\/p>\n
a fortiori<\/span> – all the more so; e.g., if you can refute a more general or more plausible version of a thesis, then it follows a fortiori<\/span> that more specific and\/or less plausible versions of that same thesis have been refuted.<\/p>\n a posteriori<\/span> – known or believed on the basis of looking around and seeing that it is so; e.g., we know a posteriori<\/span> that cats like milk–no one could have arrived at that conclusion apart from observation.<\/p>\n a priori<\/span> – assumed or knowable at the outset, without looking around to see if it’s so; e.g., we know a priori<\/span> that, necessarily, a part cannot be greater than the whole of which it is a part–we see<\/span> this with the “eye of the mind”, so to speak; no set of empirical observations could show that this is a necessary truth.<\/p>\n ceteris paribus<\/span> – all other things being equal.<\/p>\n ex hypothesi<\/span> – according to the hypothesis currently under discussion.<\/p>\n mutatis mutandis<\/span> – with the appropriate changes.<\/span><\/p>\n pace<\/span> – contrary to, as in “pace<\/span> Hume, the self is not just a ‘bundle of impressions.'”<\/p>\n simpliciter<\/span> – without qualification of any sort; e.g., one might say that a proposition is true-at-a-time<\/span> if and only if what it posits is true at that time, but what then does it mean to say that a proposition is true simpliciter<\/span> (i.e., independently of the “at a time” qualifier)?<\/p>\n sui generis<\/span> – in its own unique category; not reducible to other categories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Anyone who reads much philosophy will encounter a lot of Latin phrases. Leaving formal and informal fallacies out of it, the following are some of the most common. I have translated for the uninitiated. a fortiori – all the more so; e.g., if you can refute a more general or more plausible version of a\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}