Traditions

• Physicalism

  The claim that what exists is physical, or depends on the physical without remainder of a second kind of substance.

• Idealism

  A family of views on which mind, experience, or an ideal order is fundamental to reality.

• Empiricism

  The inclination to give observation a leading role in what we can know about the world.

• Rationalism

  The inclination to treat reasoning as able to reach truths about reality that a particular observation does not first deliver.

• Consequentialism

  The family of views on which the rightness of an act depends primarily on the outcomes it brings about.

• Deontology

  The family of views on which some acts are wrong even when their outcomes are better.

• Virtue ethics

  Traditions that begin from character, practical wisdom, and a life that goes well, rather than from outcomes alone or from rules alone.

• Determinism

  The claim that, given the past and the laws, the choice could not have been otherwise.

• Libertarian free will

  The metaphysical claim that a genuine choice is not settled by the past and the laws until the agent settles it.

• Compatibilism

  The view that moral responsibility does not require an uncaused or unsettled will.

• Discovered meaning

  The thought that a life can answer to worth that the person did not invent.

• Existentialism

  A modern family of philosophies of freedom, situation, and the absence of a given human essence.

• Individual priority

  Traditions that treat the person as a limit on what a group may do.

• Communal priority

  Traditions that treat membership as a source of duties that can outweigh a preference to be left alone.

• Confucianism

  The Ru tradition of ritual, humaneness, and moral cultivation in relationships.

• Mohism

  The Warring States school of impartial concern, benefit, and criticism of wasteful partiality.

• Madhyamaka

  The Buddhist philosophy of emptiness, dependent arising, and the two truths, centered on Nāgārjuna.

• Daoist philosophy

  Philosophical Daoism, here centered on the composite Zhuangzi, not on the whole later religious tradition.