Key Philosophical Concepts
Abstraction
The capability by which understanding draws the shape of universal or specific individual things and eliminates the material. Through this process, concepts are formed from sensible experience. These concepts are the effects of the five ways to start.
Events
The realization of what is in power and what makes it so. It serves to explain the move as the passage from potency to act. This is used in the First Way. It has a plurality of meanings, the most important of which are change or movement, action, form, and being.
Analogy
A property that words have, allowing them to be attributable to several individuals with a meaning partly identical and partly different. Thomas Aquinas uses this concept on ontological and theological levels. Theologically, it mediates predicates taken from sensitive reality and applies them to God in analogical form. Analogy is subject to a dialectical process consisting of affirmation, denial, and excellence.
Cause and Effect
A cause is the principle from which something comes or necessarily follows (the effect). Aristotle identified four types of causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. The principle of causality, on the ontological level, establishes a similarity between cause and effect, enabling the identification of the cause through the effect.
Definition
According to Aristotle, a definition expresses the permanent essence of a thing through its genus and specific difference. It is scientific if the connection between the terms is demonstrable. There are two types: the actual definition, which states the essence of a thing, and the nominal definition, which indicates what a name signifies.
Demonstration
A discursive process to derive the truth of a proposition. Aristotle analyzed and defined the notion of proof by syllogism, concluding a result from true premises. Averroes distinguishes between deductive reasoning (propter quid) and inductive reasoning (quia).
God
God has the following attributes: simplicity (no composition), perfection, goodness, infinity, immensity, immutability, eternity, and unity. God is the being whose essence is to exist. Essence and existence are identified in God as a necessary being. God is the supreme being, distinct from the contingent world and its creator.
Evidence
A truth patent to understanding. This truth is found in judgment, and its expression is the proposition that is evident when the subject and predicate are known. It is clear in itself and for us if we know both the subject and the predicate. It is clear in itself but not for us unless we know one of the terms.
Faith
A human faculty where understanding assents to divine truth by the influence of the will, which is moved by God. Reason is the efficient action of the object on understanding and the activity of understanding over the object.
Necessary Being
That which does not need an external cause to exist and has the capacity to exist by itself. The Third Way posits that God has within himself the reason for his necessity.
Possible Being
That which may or may not exist. This pertains to contingent beings, subject to generation and corruption, which need an external cause to exist and to account for their existence.
Power
An intermediate state between being and not being in action. Privation indicates one mode of being. Power is ordered to act and requires the intervention of a being in act. The First Way refers to passive power or the capacity to be changed.
Principle
All that from which something comes. There are two types: logical and ontological. The logical principle is the antecedent in relation to the consequent. These are truths that do not need proof; they are self-evident. The ontological principle is that from which something comes and that by which something is. These are causes that give reason for their effects.
Infinite Regress
The endless formulation of a series of engines, efficient causes, necessary causes, causes of perfections, and guiding intelligences, one of which causes another insofar as it is another cause. St. Thomas Aquinas used this concept in metaphysics. The denial of the infinite regress is the impossibility of an endless journey in the series of causes that account for the fact we observe, leading to the formulation of a First Cause.
Proposition
The smallest unit of meaning, consisting of a subject and a predicate or attribute. It can be true or false, universal or particular, affirmative or negative. There are two types: analytical and synthetic.
Reason
Rational knowledge is the natural knowledge of humankind and explains the theory of abstraction. It is caused by the action of the object on the cognitive abilities of the subject, starting from what is manifest to the senses, but it is complemented by the dynamism of the subject’s powers. Its criterion of truth is evidence.
Truth
The adaptation or correspondence between understanding and the thing itself. It provides the basis for confirming or denying a statement or proposition. This is the semantic or logical approach to truth, as opposed to the ontological.