AP®︎ European History: Topic 7.5 Flashcards

Belief that accumulating scientific knowledge, industrial growth, and rational organization demonstrated civilization's advance and enabled social improvement

Philosophy that genuine knowledge comes only from observable evidence and scientific methods, which can be applied to society as well as nature

French thinker most closely associated with positivism who coined sociology and sought scientific laws that could guide rational social organization

Comte's theory that thought progresses from theological explanations through metaphysical abstractions to positive, empirically discovered scientific laws

Post-1848 emphasis on concrete conditions and the world as it existed rather than romantic ideals, emotional fantasy, or imagined harmony

Explanation of reality and historical change primarily through physical, economic, or environmental causes rather than spiritual purposes

Late nineteenth-century emphasis on instinct, intuition, will, emotion, myth, and subconscious desire rather than conscious rational calculation

Philosopher who rejected universal morality, treated values as historical creations, and emphasized self-creation, struggle, and the will to power

Nietzsche's declaration expressing Christianity's declining authority and the resulting crisis of inherited moral certainty

Nietzsche's concept of the drive to overcome resistance, impose form, create values, and reject passive conformity to inherited morality

Thinker who argued that emotionally powerful myths and revolutionary violence could mobilize movements and generate creative moral energy

An emotionally compelling image, such as a future general strike, valued for inspiring collective action rather than accurately predicting events

Philosopher who distinguished measured time from lived duration and argued that intuition could grasp realities inaccessible to mechanical analysis

Bergson's concept of time as the continuous, subjective flow experienced by consciousness rather than equal units measured by a clock

A way of apprehending lived movement, becoming, and continuous consciousness without dividing experience into fixed analytical categories

Bergson's 1907 work describing life as creative development driven by an élan vital rather than entirely predictable mechanical causation

Bergson's creative life force, which he argued could not be reduced to predictable mechanical causation

Thinker whose psychoanalysis argued that unconscious desires, fears, memories, and conflicts strongly shape apparently rational human behavior

The portion of mental life outside conscious awareness whose hidden desires, memories, fears, and conflicts influence behavior

Freud's method of uncovering unconscious conflicts by interpreting dreams, free associations, resistance, symptoms, and slips of speech

Psychoanalytic method in which a patient speaks without deliberate censorship so an analyst can identify patterns and repressed conflicts

Freud's process by which disturbing desires or memories are excluded from awareness yet return indirectly through dreams, symptoms, anxiety, or mistakes

Freud's 1900 work arguing that dreams express unconscious wishes and conflicts rather than meaningless mental accidents

Classical model of matter moving predictably through absolute space and time according to universal laws, accurate but not universally sufficient

Physicist who proposed in 1900 that energy is emitted or absorbed in discrete quanta, helping initiate quantum theory

Theory originating with Planck's proposal that energy is emitted or absorbed in discrete quanta rather than in an entirely continuous flow

Physicist whose 1905 special relativity made measurements of space and time dependent on relative motion and established mass-energy equivalence

Einstein's 1905 theory that space and time measurements depend on relative motion while the vacuum speed of light remains constant

Einstein's relationship E = mc², establishing the equivalence of mass and energy

Weakening confidence in fixed, universally accessible standards as knowledge and values appeared shaped by perspective, culture, history, or level of analysis

Intellectual and cultural response to weakened certainty that emphasized fragmentation, ambiguity, subjectivity, experimentation, and skepticism toward inherited forms