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Aquinas follows the distinction found in Aristotle's Physics 8.5, and developed by Simplicius, Maimonides, and Avicenna that a causal chain may be either accidental (Socrates' father caused Socrates, Socrates' grandfather caused Socrates' father, but Socrates' grandfather only accidentally caused Socrates) or essential (a stick is moving a ...
A first cause is essential: Later members exercise no independent causal power in continuing the series. In the example illustrated above, the rock derives its causal power essentially from the stick, which derives its causal power essentially from the hand. All members in the causal series must exist simultaneously in time, or timelessly.
Important trichotomies discussed by Aquinas include the causal principles (agent, patient, act), the potencies for the intellect (imagination, cogitative power, and memory and reminiscence), and the acts of the intellect (concept, judgment, reasoning), with all of those rooted in Aristotle; also the transcendentals of being (unity, truth, goodness) and the requisites of the beautiful ...
1579 drawing of the Great Chain of Being from Didacus Valades , Rhetorica Christiana. The great chain of being is a hierarchical structure of all matter and life, thought by medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God. The chain begins with God and descends through angels, humans, animals and plants to minerals. [1] [2] [3]
Aquinas presents an Augustinian view of teaching being divided into "interior" and "exterior" processes; that is modified by Aristotelian ideas. [22] The former process is inventio , a means of teaching that is reserved to God, the principal teacher, a process of "natural reason [arriving] by itself at the knowledge of things previously unknown ...
The argument from degrees, also known as the degrees of perfection argument or the henological argument, [1] is an argument for the existence of God first proposed by mediaeval Roman Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas as one of the five ways to philosophically argue in favour of God's existence in his Summa Theologica.
The question does not include the timing of when anything came to exist. Some have suggested the possibility of an infinite regress, where, if an entity cannot come from nothing and this concept is mutually exclusive from something, there must have always been something that caused the previous effect, with this causal chain (either deterministic or probabilistic) extending infinitely back in ...
The transcendentals (Latin: transcendentalia, from transcendere "to exceed") are "properties of being", nowadays commonly considered to be truth, unity (oneness), beauty, and goodness.