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 (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 (S. T. Coleridge): The power of generalizing from data and associating stable names to sense impressions.
- Imagination (S. T. Coleridge): The power that crystallizes the ideas of reason into categories of understanding.
- 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.
- Object: A thing or phenomenon that is perceived, experienced, or acted upon by a subject.
- Form: The essential structure, pattern, or organizing principle of a thing that makes it what it is.
- Nature: 1. The inherent character or essence of something. 2. The physical universe and its phenomena as a whole, operating according to discoverable laws.
- Polarity: The presence of two opposite, contrasting, yet complementary and interdependent principles (e.g., subject/object, order/disorder, yin/yang).