Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

neo-Platonism:
a philosophy developed in the late classical world,
from roughly the middle of the third to the middle of
the sixth century AD. The neo-Platonists, of whom
the most important was Plotinus (205-c. 270 AD),
claimed to preserve the philosophy of Plato, but were
ready to incorporate the doctrines of other Greek
philosophical schools provided that these could be
reconciled with what they saw as Platonism. Neo-
Platonism is a form of pantheism (q.v.); everything is
regarded as flowing timelessly from a supreme
principle, ‘the One’, which is such that it cannot be
grasped by mere rational thought.
see ‘universals’.
nominalism:
non-contradiction, law of: see ‘contradiction, law of’.
occasionalism:
occult quality:
ontological argument:
ontology:
GLOSSARY 401
the thesis that causal activity belongs to God, and to
God alone. According to the occasionalist, to say that
the movement of a billiard ball is the effect of its being
struck by a cue is inaccurate; strictly, one should say
that God causes the ball to move on the occasion of
the cue’s making contact with the ball.
a concept of the scholastics, traceable back to the
medical writings of Galen (129-c. 199 AD) and
severely criticized in the seventeenth century by
rationalist philosophers and others, such as Newton.
To explain something by means of an occult quality
was to explain the observed behaviour B of a thing by
saying that there exists some hidden B-producing
quality.
a term used to describe a group of related arguments
for the existence of God, which have in common a
move from a definition of God to the conclusion that
the being defined must exist. The argument was first
stated by St Anselm (1033–1109), who defined God
as a being than which a greater cannot be thought.
Descartes argued along similar lines, defining God as
a most perfect being and saying that existence is a
perfection. Spinoza’s definition of God involved the
thesis that God is a necessary being, that is, a being
such that it must be thought of as existing.
(a) a branch of metaphysics (q.v.) which is concerned
with the study of pure being, that is, being in its most
abstract aspects, (b) The assumptions about what
exists that underlie any conceptual scheme. So if we