- 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.
- Causally sufficient(describing the relationship between brain states and actions)
- Enough to guarantee something will happen on its own—if A is causally sufficient for B, then A happening automatically means B will happen.
- Creature cooperation(in theological theories about causation)
- The idea that created things (like humans or animals) actively participate or work together with God in making things happen.
- Malebranche
- Nicolas Malebranche was a 17th-century French philosopher who developed the idea that God is the only true cause of everything that happens in the world, and that our minds and bodies don't directly interact but are coordinated by God like two synchronized clocks. He's important because his unusual theory tried to solve the puzzle of how a non-physical mind can affect a physical body, and his ideas influenced later European philosophy. His work represents one of the most creative attempts in Western thought to explain the relationship between mind and matter.
- Suárez(the philosopher being discussed)
- Francisco Suárez was a Spanish philosopher from the 1500s-1600s who wrote extensively about metaphysics (the study of what exists and why). He's one of the most influential philosophers of his time, especially in debates about how things relate to each other.
- concurrentism(medieval debates on divine concurrence with creaturely action)
- A position on God's activity vis-à-vis creaturely activity, intermediate in logical strength between mere conservationism and occasionalism
- divine volition(as used in philosophy of religion and theology)
- God's will or God's choice to make something the way it is.
- occasionalism(Malebranche's metaphysics)
- The doctrine that bodies cannot directly cause modifications in minds (or in each other); instead, a causal relation between body and mind obtains only when God intends the mind to undergo a certain modification on the occasion of a certain bodily change.
- secondary causes(Carroll's neo-Thomistic model of divine and natural causation)
- Natural creaturely causes that operate within the world; in Thomistic metaphysics, these are grounded in and dependent upon the primary cause