Key Philosophical Concepts: Absolute to Culture

Absolute

Absolute, as traditionally understood in philosophy, is that which exists by itself and does not need or depend on anything else. When referring to truth, it means complete and total truth.

Abstract and Abstraction

Abstract, etymologically, means to extract or to get something from something else. More rigorously, abstraction means the process by which the understanding obtains (extracts) the universal concept from the sensory image, which is particular and specific. The concept of 'home' is universal because it applies to all objects called "home," which share common characteristics. The image of a "home" is unique because it refers only to a specific house.

For Ortega, the "I" is a concrete reality, mobile and plural. All knowledge that is intended to be universal must be abstract. Any individual who wishes to obtain absolute knowledge is an abstract subject.

Stagnation

Stagnation is the halting of a thing in progress.

Antinomy

Antinomy is the opposition or conflict between two ideas, two propositions, two attitudes, or two interpretations. Ortega uses the term "antinomy" to refer to the opposition that has been established since the Renaissance between culture and life. Culture refuses life (as it is relative and changing), and life refuses culture (as it is objective and immutable).

Archetype

Archetype: A model, an example; a perfect model that serves as an example or for imitation.

Authentic

Authentic: Said of something that is authentic when it is established definitively what it is supposed to be. A human being is authentic when they are what they truly and radically are. Authenticity in Ortega's philosophy is an ontological feature of human reality. The authentic self is the incorruptible self and cannot stop being what it is.

Candor

Candor: Simplicity, sincerity, innocence.

Sieve

Sieve: An instrument consisting of a ring and a cloth, more or less dense, which serves to separate the thinner parts from the thicker parts, which are those left in the sieve.

Congruent

Congruent: Convenient, suitable, provided; that which belongs. A congruent portion of truth is the truth that applies to an individual, a people, or an era.

Knowledge

Knowledge: The process by which a subject "grasps" an object, seizes it, although not physically, only mentally. For rationalism, the subject can know reality as it is in itself. For Ortega, this is not possible because the subject, which is concrete and historical, is equipped with capabilities that are also practical and historical. The subject knows the part of reality that their capabilities allow, but not all of reality.

Outline

Outline: A group of lines bounding a shape or composition.

Contradiction

Contradiction: To say one thing and its opposite. Two statements are contradictory when what is said in one is denied in the other.

Culture

Culture: The idea of culture refers to the cultivation of human skills and the outcome of that cultivation. This result is a set of knowledge, skills, and artistic expressions, man-made and with universal validity. When opposed to life, "culture" refers to the universal and immutable, and "life" to the particular and changing.