Categorical Imperative - in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), a moral law or command not dependent on any conditions; a rule enjoining us to act so that we could will our act as a universal maxim. Catholic - the official title of the Western Church after the rift between the Eastern and Western Christian Churches. [from the Greek, meaning "universal"]. Catholicism - the religion of Western Christianity up to the Reformation; the religion also of the Church of Rome. Causality - the theory that every event has a rational cause. Aristotle identified four causes to everything: material, formal, efficient, and final. Coherence theory of truth - the theory that a statement is true if and only if it coheres with a given system of statements or beliefs. Collective unconscious - in Jungian psychology (Carl Jung, 1875-1961), the part of the unconscious that contains symbolic representations, or archetypes, of ancient ways of thought inherited from humanity's past experience. Contingent - a proposition whose truth depends on facts about the world, not on the rules of logic. In modal logic, all true propositions that are not necessary are contingent. Contradiction, law of - first put forth by Aristotle, the axiom that nothing can both have and not have a given property or characteristic. Cosmology - the study of the origin and structure of the universe. Cynicism - 1. a Greek school of philosophy originally based on the doctrine that nothing can be known. In the Roman era cynicism became an ethical doctrine emphasizing the need to live an austere, abstemious life. 2. more recently, the view that people act in ways to further their own ends and self-centered ambitions.
