Philosophy

Faith · Interpretation · Causality

An event someone understands as help, guidance, or influence from the divine. The event, its interpretation, and evidence for a cause are different questions.

Space · Ether · Sanskrit philosophy

A Sanskrit word usually translated as 'space' or 'ether' — the subtlest of the classical elements, the medium in which everything else exists.

Duty · Order · Way of life

A Sanskrit term with no single English equivalent — somewhere between law, duty, order, righteousness and the nature of a thing.

Mind · Awareness · Existence

The fact that there is something it is like to be you — and the long argument about what that fact is.

Knowledge · Experience · Understanding

Not the amount you know, but what you do with it — judgement formed by knowledge, experience and restraint.

Element · Medium · Discarded science

A word that has meant the upper air, the fifth element, and a medium for light — and was eventually abandoned by physics without quite leaving the language.

Extension · Void · Field

Whether space is a container things sit in or a relation between things is one of the oldest live arguments in thought.

Union · Discipline · Practice

A family of disciplines aimed at steadying the mind — far older and far wider than the postural practice the word now names globally.

Love of wisdom · Method · Inquiry

Literally the love of wisdom: the practice of asking questions carefully enough that the answers can be examined.

Being · Journey · Purpose

Both a biological category with fuzzy edges and the name for the thing we are trying to make sense of.

Word · Reason · Order

A Greek word meaning word, account, ratio and reason at once — and one of the most consequential ambiguities in Western thought.

Way · Path · Course of things

The way — both the course things naturally take and the path a person might align with.

Personhood · Community · Southern Africa

A Nguni Bantu term for a view of personhood in which a person becomes a person through other people.

Ephesus · c. 500 BCE · Flux

The Greek thinker who argued that change is not what happens to reality but what reality is.

Tradition · Interpretation · Self

A family of Indian philosophical schools reading the Upanishads, disagreeing sharply about the relationship between self and ultimate reality.

Action · Consequence · Intention

A Sanskrit word meaning 'action' that became a theory of consequence — and, in English, a rough synonym for cosmic payback it never was.