- Aristotle
- Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher who lived over 2,000 years ago and is one of the most influential thinkers in Western history. He studied nearly every subject—from animals and plants to politics and ethics—and developed practical ways of thinking that shaped how people understand the world. His ideas on logic, nature, and how to live a good life are still taught and debated today because he focused on observing the real world rather than just abstract theories.
- Binary(as used in logic and epistemology)
- Something that only has two options or states—like an on/off switch, with no middle ground.
- Borderline cases(The unclear middle ground between definite heaps and definite non-heaps)
- Situations where it's genuinely unclear whether a label applies—like wondering if 500 grains of sand count as a heap or not.
- Exhaustive disjoint categories(the kind of clear-cut division the law of excluded middle supposedly creates)
- A set of groups that cover all possibilities with no overlap—like 'animals' split into 'mammals' and 'non-mammals' with nothing fitting both.
- Gradations(ways that dependence relations might exist in degrees)
- Small, continuous steps or degrees of difference, like a spectrum from light to dark rather than just black or white.
- Lowe(the subject of this philosophical critique)
- E.J. Lowe is a contemporary philosopher who developed a theory about what exists in the world, particularly focusing on objects and their properties.
- Truthmaker theorists(contemporary philosophers being grouped with Aristotle)
- Philosophers who believe that true statements must be made true by something real in the world, and they study how that relationship works.
- analogical predication(Aquinas's theory for how positive terms like 'good' can be truly applied to God despite divine transcendence.)
- 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.
- dependence relation(used in metaphysics)
- A relationship where one thing relies on another thing to exist or happen—if the second thing didn't happen, the first couldn't happen either.
- law of excluded middle(Classical logic; shown to be incompatible with smooth infinitesimal analysis)
- The classical logical principle that for any proposition, either the proposition or its negation holds — applied here as: every real number is either equal to 0 or not equal to 0.