6.6: Key Terms
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- Actuality
- in Aristotelian thought, the level to which a being has realized its purpose.
- Anatman
- a Buddhist concept of the self as no-self (as not retaining identity through time).
- Compatibilism
- the view that a lack of freedom for the human moral agent is compatible with moral culpability for that same agent.
- Cosmological argument
- a type of argument for the existence of God based upon consideration of cosmic causality.
- Determinism
- the belief that human actions are governed by the laws of nature.
- Dualism
- a view that posits two types of being in order to account fully for the nature of the thing under scrutiny.
- Libertarianism
- within the problem of freedom, the view that human actions are freely chosen and outside of the causality that governs natural objects.
- Metaphysics
- the field of philosophy concerned with identifying that which is real.
- Monism
- the view that reality is comprised of one fundamental type of being.
- Naturalism
- the rejection of any non-natural or appeal to supernatural explanatory concepts within philosophy.
- Ontological argument
- an argument for the existence of God built upon a consideration of the attribute of God’s existence.
- Ontology
- a field within metaphysics dedicated to the study of being.
- Particular
- when discussing being, the instance of a specific being.
- Physicalism
- the notion that being is material or physical.
- Pluralism
- asserts that fundamental reality consists of many types of being.
- Potentiality
- in Aristotelian thought, the level to which a being’s purpose might reach.
- Substance
- the most enduring and underlying reality of a thing; from the Latin substantiaI or that which supports a thing.
- Teleological argument
- an argument for the existence of God based upon the presence of ends (goals or purpose) as observed within nature.
- Universal
- when discussing being, a reality or concept that accounts for the shared whatness of a specific type of being.