Key Philosophical Concepts: Abstraction to Truth
Key Philosophical Concepts
Abstraction: The capacity to extract universal or specific understandings from individual things, eliminating the material. Concepts arise from sensory experience through this process. Metaphysics resides at the third level of abstraction, dealing with abstract forms of being.
Act: The realization of potential, making something what it is. It is opposed to potency and explains the transition from potentiality to actuality. This concept is crucial in the first way (of Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways). Act has multiple meanings: change, action, form, and being.
Analogy: A property of words attributable to several individuals with partly identical and partly different meanings. St. Thomas uses analogical preaching ontologically and theologically. Theological discourse is mediated by predicates from sensible reality, applied to God analogically. This involves a dialectical process: affirmation, negation, and excellence.
Cause-Effect: Something that precedes and necessitates an effect. Following Aristotle, there are four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. Causality on the ontological level implies a similarity between cause and effect, allowing identification of the cause through its effect.
Definition: According to Aristotle, an essential definition expresses a thing’s permanent essence through genus and specific difference. Scientific definitions connect terms through demonstration. This text uses real definitions (essence) and nominal definitions (name).
Demonstration: A procedure deriving a proposition’s truth. Aristotle defined proof through syllogism, deriving true conclusions from true premises. Averroes distinguished deductive and inductive reasoning, the latter starting from a real background to establish a consistent reality.
Theological Concepts
God: Essential theology defines God’s essence through attributes: simplicity, perfection, goodness, infinity, immensity, immutability, eternity, and unity. God is a being whose essence is to exist, where essence and existence are identical. God is the necessary, supreme being, distinct from and creator of the contingent world.
Additional Concepts
Evidence: Truth clear to understanding, manifested in a proposition. A proposition is evident if the terms (subject and predicate) are known. It is self-evident if the predicate is included in the subject’s definition. Some propositions are self-evident but not to us.
Faith (Fe): Defined by St. Thomas as the intellect assenting to divine truth, influenced by the will moved by divine grace. It involves the understanding’s effective action.
Necessary: That which requires no external cause to exist, having the ability to exist by itself. In the third way, God is the reason for His own necessity.
Possible: That which can exist or not exist. Contingent beings are generators and corruptible, needing an external cause.
Potency: An intermediate state between being and non-being, often indicating a lack of form. St. Thomas refers to passive potency (ability to be changed) in the first way, opposing it to measure.
Principle: Something from which something else originates. Principles are logical (truths needing no proof) or ontological (causes giving reason to effects).
The Infinite Process: A succession without end (e.g., of engines or causes). St. Thomas denies an infinite series in metaphysics, arguing for a first cause.
Proposition: The minimum unit of meaning, consisting of a subject and predicate. It can be true or false, universal or particular, affirmative or negative, analytical or synthetical.
Reason: Rational knowledge explained by the theory of abstraction. It starts from the senses but is complemented by the subject’s cognitive abilities, with evidence as its criterion of truth.
Truth: For St. Thomas, truth is the correspondence between intellect and thing, confirmed or denied in a proposition. This is semantic or logical truth, compared to ontological truth.