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    Aquinas's doctrine of analogical predication allows God t... — Carmelics
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    Challenges→God cannot be a member of any extant ontological category.

    Aquinas's doctrine of analogical predication allows God to instantiate categories like 'substance' or 'being' in an eminent, non-univocal mode without reduction to creaturely membership.

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    Key Terms

    Aquinas
    Thomas Aquinas was a medieval Italian priest and philosopher (1225-1274) who became one of the most influential thinkers in Western history. He attempted to show that Christian faith and human reason are compatible, arguing that we can use logic and observation to understand God and the natural world. His ideas deeply shaped Catholic theology and continue to influence how religious and secular institutions think about ethics, knowledge, and the relationship between science and belief.
    Creaturely(contrasted with divine instantiation in the statement)
    Relating to created things (anything that isn't God); the way finite beings like humans and objects exist.
    Eminent mode(how God instantiates categories according to Aquinas)
    A superior or more perfect way of having something; like how God might possess 'power' in a supreme way that transcends how creatures have power.
    analogical predication(Aquinas's theory for how positive terms like 'good' can be truly applied to God despite divine transcendence.)

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    A mode of predication in which a term applied to God has a sense that is neither univocal with nor purely equivocal to its creaturely use; instead, the creaturely property preexists in God in a higher mode.
    being(Aristotle's rejection of being as a genus)
    The class that contains all and only things that exist; proposed candidate for a highest kind.
    instantiate(as used in metaphysics)
    To be a concrete example of something, or to have and display a particular property or category.
    non-univocal(The author's characterization of how 'good' actually functions)
    A term is non-univocal when its meaning or the property it picks out varies across different contexts of application, making its paraphrases non-interchangeable
    substance(Spinoza's metaphysics; criteria include (i) necessity and (ii) self-subsistence)
    The fundamental existent that is wholly necessary and self-subsistent, not depending on anything else for its existence
    univocal(Contrasted with homonymy in Aristotle's predication theory)
    A term applied in the same sense across all its predications.

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    God cannot be a member of any extant ontological category.

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