Key terms glossary spanning our core areas - complexity science, contemplative studies, philosophy, and cognitive science
This can also be a quick guide to see what areas you can learn to join the conversation!
Philosophy
- Reason: The capacity for logical, analytical, and abstract thought; the process of drawing conclusions from evidence or premises.
- Reason (S. T. Coleridge): The one power that generates all reality, both in nature and in thought, by separating and detaching in order to reunite.
- Understanding: The holistic grasp of meaning, significance, or the nature of something, often integrating reason, experience, and intuition.
- Understanding (S. T. Coleridge): The power of generalizing from data and associating stable names to sense impressions.
- Imagination: The faculty of forming new ideas, images, or concepts not present to the senses; essential for creativity, empathy, and counterfactual thinking.
- Imagination (S. T. Coleridge): The power that crystallizes the ideas of reason into categories of understanding.
- Idea: A mental representation, concept, or formulation of thought about a thing or phenomenon.
- Idea (S. T. Coleridge): A constituent "part" of reason, expressed as law in nature and as concept in the understanding.
- Spirituality: awareness of the ineffable content of experience and practices for its cultivation
- Material ontology (ontological realism): A view that reality is fundamentally made of discrete, independent things or substances (e.g., atoms, objects) with inherent properties.
- Process ontology: A view that reality is fundamentally made of unfolding processes, events, and becoming rather than static things. Being is a verb.
- Relational ontology: A view that reality is fundamentally made of the relationships and interactions between things. Entities are defined by their connections.
- Consensus reality: The agreed-upon view of reality that is constructed and maintained through a shared social and cultural consensus.
- Post-structuralism: A philosophical movement skeptical of stable meanings, objective truth, and fixed structures, emphasizing instead how knowledge is shaped by language, power, and context.
- Being: The state or essence of existing; the fundamental nature of reality and existence itself.
- Subject: The conscious self or mind that perceives, experiences, and acts upon the world.