Avicenna's distinction between essence and existence treats existence as an accident added to quiddity, which Aquinas and later scholastics recognized as generating infinite regress problems.
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Medieval and Renaissance philosophers who used logical arguments and careful distinctions to defend religious beliefs and explore big questions about reality.
essence(Medieval realist metaphysics)
The defining nature of a species, held by some to be distinct from and capable of surviving the destruction of all individual members of that species
existence(Kant's analysis in the Critique of Pure Reason as applied to the ontological argument)
Not a real predicate or positive determination; it does not add to or enlarge the concept of a subject.
infinite regress(modes of argumentation available to a dogmatist)
An argument structure in which grounds are offered for a claim P, then grounds for those grounds, and so on indefinitely without ever repeating a proposition
quiddity(Used in Fârâbî's account of existence-as-quiddity)
The essential nature or 'what-it-is' of a thing; for composite things it is spelled out by the definition and may be partially cited by any constituent cause; for simples it is identical with the thing itself