- 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.
- Being Itself(Aquinas's core theological claim)
- The idea that God is not just a thing that exists, but is existence or being in its purest form—the ultimate source of all existence.
- Idol (in philosophical context)(used as a polemical (argumentative) label in the statement)
- Here, a false or inadequate concept or image of God—something that misrepresents what God truly is.
- Ontology(Carnap argues this enterprise is based on a mistake)
- The philosophical discipline that tries to answer hard questions about what there really is.
- Parmenidean ontology(the philosophical tradition the statement says Aquinas draws from)
- A way of thinking about existence that comes from Parmenides, an ancient Greek philosopher, who argued that true reality is unchanging, eternal, and unified—influencing how later thinkers thought about what it means to truly 'be.'
- Polemical(describing a type of intellectual work)
- Argumentative or combative in nature; focused on attacking or defending against opposing views rather than developing new ideas.
- theology(Hobbes 1655, 1.8)
- The doctrine about the nature and attributes of the eternal, ungenerable, and incomprehensible God, in whom no composition and no division can be established and no generation can be understood