Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

GLOSSARY 405
substance:
Summa:
syllogistic:
synthesis:
teleology:
third world:
truth, correspondence
theory of:
‘quintessence’ (‘fifth essence’), which is free from
generation and destruction.
when Renaissance philosophers and the seventeenthcentury
rationalists discussed problems of substance,
they were dealing with concepts which go back to
Chapter 2 of Aristotle’s Categories. A substance,
Aristotle said, is (a) that which is not ‘in’ a subject,
that is, it has an independent existence. (b) It is that
which is not ‘said of a subject, that is, it is an ultimate
subject of predication, (c) It is that which remains the
same through qualitative change. Much of the
controversy about the nature of substance among the
seventeenth-century rationalists was about the correct
answer to the question of what satisfied one or other
of these criteria.
literally, a ‘summary’, this was a literary form which
was characteristic of scholasticism (q.v.). The
Summa was a systematic and comprehensive treatise,
and it contained both a statement of relevant
authorities and rational arguments for the conclusions
presented. The greatest of the Summae were the
Summa contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologiae of
St Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74).
the theory of the syllogism, which was first stated
systematically by Aristotle and which forms a large
part of what is termed ‘traditional logic’. A syllogism
is a form of deductive argument (see ‘deduction’) in
which there are three and only three terms, and in
which one proposition, the Conclusion’, is inferred
from two other propositions, the ‘premises’ (q.v.). For
example: ‘All Greeks are rational, all Athenians are
Greeks, therefore all Athenians are rational.’
see ‘analysis and synthesis’.
having to do with an end or purpose (Greek, ‘telos’).
See also ‘cause, final’.
more exactly, ‘world 3’. A term introduced into
philosophy by Karl Popper in Objective Knowledge
(1972). World 1 is the physical world; world 2 is the
world of our conscious experience, also termed
‘subjective knowledge’; world 3 is objective
knowledge, e.g. theories published in journals or
books.
a theory of the nature of truth, which states that truth
consists in the agreement of a proposition with a fact.