A Non-Philosopher's Guide to Philosophical Terms

Believe it or not, this started out as a genuine attempt to sort out confusions that arise between philosophers and everyone else in the world, before I got carried away ... Basically, the problem is this. Philosophers are, in a manner of speaking, in a certain rarefied sense of the term I am about to use, boring. - No, really, we are. Philosophers, clumped together in any group where the ratio of philosophers to non-philosophers is 1:1 or greater, excluding the limit case where there are only two people in toto and only one of them is a philosopher, will actually talk about philosophy. They will automatically correct each other's use of quantifiers and disambiguate statements where the intended meaning was perfectly plain. At any rate this is what I do.

Exactly how the glossary I am offering helps either party is no longer clear to me, but I had vaguely honourable intentions at the time I started writing it.

Also, since writing this glossary only a short while ago, I have received evidence that it has been read by at least six other people, none of whom were in any way prodded by me! Isn't the net amazing? Of these six, James Chase and Daniel Nolan have once again performed their invaluable service as proofreaders and advisors; and Daniel and Hamish Cowan have suggested some new entries which I have incorporated into the revised version.

TERM	WHAT IT MEANS TO A LAYMAN	WHAT IT MEANS TO A PHILOSOPHER
hooker	one who can be hired to engage in sexual intercourse	one who thinks that "if A, then B" is logically equivalent (in some sense) to "either not-A, or B"; can be hired to tutor undergraduates, and costs much less
utilitarian	almost precisely cubical and made of concrete, probably a multi-storey car park	one who believes that the morally right action is the one with the best consequences, so far as the distribution of happiness is concerned; a creature generally believed to be endowed with the propensity to ignore their own drowning children in order to push buttons which will cause mild sexual gratification in a warehouse full of rabbits
Benthamite	substance from the planet Bentham capable of draining the super powers of Wonder Woman, or Spiderman, or some such person	someone who really would ignore their own drowning child in order to push the rabbit-gratification button
supervenience	that's it! ... he's the guy that gets killed by Benthamite	a one-way dependence relation between properties or facts of one type and properties or facts of another
personal identity	the subject of self-help books and those modern Broadway songs which involve the use of a spotlight	that by virtue of which I am the same person I was yesterday
logic	...dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, Captain	involves upside-down As and reversed Es
existential quantifier	an angst-ridden statistician	a reversed E: see above
a posteriori	things you think of when you're sitting down	knowledge which is the result of and is based upon experience of some kind
a priori	something you've thought of to head your "things to do" list	things you think of when you're sitting down, in an armchair, usually with a snifter of brandy in one hand
Platonic	the sort of love which is all very well in its way	a philosophical position which posits abstract objects almost palpable enough to trip over
Platonic heaven	this is a contradiction in terms: see above	a place where one might find triangles, the square root of two, and the abstract property of being a mountain goat
Lewis	author of books about Narnia	a contemporary philosopher with a formidable reputation and a truly colossal beard
Quine	an alternative spelling of the Old Scottish word "quean", a synonym for "strumpet" which one might just get away with using in a game of Scrabble; indeed, which one often has to resort to using if all of the U's are already on the board	a contemporary philosopher of formidable reputation who I've never actually met, and whose beard I am told does not exist, but who I imagine has quite an impressive snort
Kripke	the name of a policeman who is the subject of a song in West Side Story, spelled so that New Zealanders will pronounce it correctly*	a contemporary philosopher of formidable reputation who, I am reliably informed, does have something of an impressive snort
Locke	thatte whyche prevents rogues and arrant knaves from burgling Ye Olde English Tea Shoppe	a dead philosopher of politics, language and mind
Moore	Dan Quayle's description of Othelloe	a dead philosopher fond of mentioning that he had two hands
Hobbes	the butler	a dead political philosopher (who I also think of as having a snort to be reckoned with)
t	a letter of the alphabet	a moment in time
grue	another one of those Old Scottish words so invaluable in a game of Scrabble, this one meaning "a creeping of the flesh"	either green and first observed before time t or blue and first observed after or at time t
modal	something to do with different tonal centres and flattened leading notes, as in "Scarborough Fair"	the phrase "possible worlds" is going to be mentioned any second now
possible world	a phrase which I seem to recall was used as a lyric in a recent animated movie from the Walt Disney studios	either the biggest spatio-temporally connected thing of which we are all part, in which case there is only one; or some sort of weird abstraction, in which case there are uncountably many; but for a different view see Lewis
realist	hard-headed	someone who believes in the existence of trees; usually hard-headed, but if you mean "realist about everything", decidedly soft-headed
idealist	see tree-hugging, below	one who doesn't actually disbelieve in trees, but who thinks that they can't be bumped into, take up no space, and are in constant danger of winking out of existence if they are not properly attended to
pragmatist	as hard-headed as they come	someone whose belief in the existence of trees depends on their belief in the disposition of scientifically-minded angels to believe in trees
slab	the noise made by a semi-literate, almost sub-sentient, drunken creature, in order to indicate that it wishes to be given twenty-four cans of beer	the noise made by a semi-literate, almost sub-sentient, drunken creature, in order to indicate that there is a piece of masonry in the immediate vicinity
Descartes	a mathematician	a philosopher
Leibniz	a mathematician	a philosopher
Davies	a philosopher	a physicist
classical	Helen of Troy, Beethoven, Corinthian architecture and similar things	a stodgy, old-fashioned logic which produces wildly implausible results: for example, according to classical logic, no proposition is both true and false
deviant	someone who does unspeakable things to furry animals	a logic which probably would do unspeakable things to furry animals, if it could
absurd	silly	very silly
Republic	a nation defined chiefly by its lack of a monarch	a nation which may well have a monarch, so long as the monarch believes everything Plato believes, and has Plato's taste in music
France	a country in Europe	a nation defined chiefly by its lack of a monarch
the folk	the people responsible for maintaining the national supply of macrame wall hangings	a collection of more or less sensible chaps who more or less know what they mean, and it's more or less what I mean
gunk	matter which was once made of atoms like ordinary matter but which is now a formless substance blocking your drains	matter which is not made of atoms like ordinary matter, as it is infinitely divisible
deconstructing the other	???	???
Continental	croissants, fruit juice, coffee	deconstructing the other
rabbit	rabbit	contiguous and bi-laterally symmetric (when considered three-dimensionally) fusion of temporal slices, chronologically ordered, of what you are so pleased to call a "rabbit" (rabbit, indeed)
metaphysics	somewhere between "crystal healing" and "tree hugging" in the Dewey decimal system	No! How many times do I have to tell you? Nothing whatever to do with this New Age stuff! Now move my book away from the stand containing Shirley MacLaine, or I shall be very upset