- Creatures(theology and metaphysics)
- In philosophical and theological contexts, living beings—particularly used here to mean individual entities like individual people (Socrates being an example).
- Ockham
- # Ockham
Ockham refers to William of Ockham, a medieval English philosopher (1287-1347) famous for the principle "Ockham's Razor," which states that simpler explanations are usually better than complicated ones—you shouldn't add unnecessary ideas or assumptions when a straightforward answer works. He's influential in philosophy and science because his thinking encouraged people to cut away needless complexity and focus on what's actually necessary to explain something. Today, scientists and thinkers still use his principle when choosing between competing theories.
- abstractions from particulars(as used in metaphysics)
- General ideas we create in our minds by looking at specific individual things—like forming the concept 'cat' by observing many different individual cats.
- divine simplicity(Central to both Malebranche's theodicy and his epistemology)
- A divine attribute functioning as a side constraint on God's actions, requiring God to act through simple means.
- essence-existence distinction(Medieval philosophy, employed by Descartes in the ontological argument)
- The traditional medieval distinction holding that one can say what something is (its essence) prior to knowing whether it exists, with God as the sole exception whose essence just is to exist
- essences(as used in metaphysics)
- The core qualities or properties that make something what it fundamentally is—like 'being a dog' is part of what makes a dog a dog, rather than a cat.
- mind-independent universals(as used in metaphysics)
- General qualities or patterns (like 'redness' or 'being round') that exist objectively in reality, separate from what anyone thinks about them.
- nominalism(Metaphysics; opposed to realism about universals)
- The view that abstract entities such as properties or universals do not exist, and that predicative facts must be explained without appealing to such entities.