Philosophers and Their Buzzwords: A Primer on Metaphysics

A Table of Western Philosophers and Their Metaphysical Systems

Philosopher	Buzzword
Thales	Arche (Latin for "first principle")
Heraclitus	Becoming
Parmenides	The One
Socrates	Dialectic
Plato	The Forms
Aristotle	being qua being
Thomas Aquinas	God as Being
Descartes	The Cogito (Latin for "I think")
Spinoza	God as Causa Sui
Leibniz	Monads
Hume	Experience
Kant	The Transcendental
Hegel	Absolute Spirit
Nietzsche	Will-to-Power
Kierkegaard	Relation
Marx	Capital
Freud	Ego
Heidegger	Dasein (Literally in Germain, "being-there")
Sartre	Existence precedes essence
Lacan	Symbolic
Foucault	Power
Derrida	Différance (with an “a”)
Bataille	Eros
Deleuze	Flow
Baudrillard	Simulacrum
Desmond	The Metaxu (The Between)
Butler	Inscribed Body
Žižek	Ideology

Greig Roselli — Teacher, Writer, Philosophy Sprinkles Maker