Definitions
Philosophy & Theology
Absolute: That which is independent of or unconditioned by anything outside itself.
Abstract entity: an object which is not detectable by the senses but which nevertheless exists.
Abstraction (abstract idea): A general idea from which particularizing features of existing things have been removed, or which results when what a number of things have in common is abstracted (e.g., “redness”).
Accident: a feature or property of a substance without which the substance could still exist. The color of a car is an accident because changing the color would not change the car’s identity as a car.
Actuality: the state of being something in reality as opposed to be something merely taken potentially.
Agency: the capacity for humans to make choices and to impose those choices on the world.
Agnosticism: belief that the nature and existence of gods is unknown and inherently unknowable because we don’t have sufficient evidence to either affirm or deny God’s existence.
Ambiguity: a state in which the meaning of a phrase, statement, situation, or resolution is not explicitly defined, making for several plausible interpretations.
Analytic Proposition: a proposition that is true by definition, e.g., all unmarried men are bachelors.
an sich: world as it is in itself (see also noumenan)
Antirealism: the philosophical position that scientific theories should not be interpreted as providing knowledge about unobservable entities—such as electrons, genes, or dark matter—despite their predictive and explanatory success. Unlike scientific realism, which holds that successful scientific theories are approximately true and that their theoretical posits (like quarks or black holes) genuinely exist, antirealists argue that such theories are merely useful tools for organizing and predicting observable phenomena.
A posteriori: where knowledge is possible only subsequent, or posterior, to certain sensory experiences, in addition to the use of reason (empirical).
A priori: where knowledge is possible independently of, or prior to, any experience, and requires only the use of reason (non-empirical).
Atheism: the belief that there is not god or gods or any kind.
Axiology: the systematic study of values
Axiom: a proposition that is not proved or demonstrated but considered to be self-evident and taken for granted.
Causality: the law that states that each cause has a specific effect, and that this effect is dependent on the initial identities of the agents involved.
Consciousness: the faculty which perceives and identifies things that exist, and the relationship between oneself and one’s environment.
Consequentialism (or Teleological Ethics): an approach to Ethics that argues that the morality of an action is contingent on the action’s outcome or consequence. Thus, a morally right action is one that produces a good outcome or result, and the consequences of an action or rule generally outweigh all other considerations (i.e. the ends justify the means).
The Cosmological Argument: the argument that the existence of the world or universe implies the existence of a being that brought it into existence (and keeps it in existence).
Contingency: the status of facts that are not logically necessarily true or false (the possibility of something happening or not happening).
Deism: form of Monotheism in which it is believed that one God exists, but that this God does not intervene in the world, or interfere with human life and the laws of the universe. It posits a non-interventionist creator who permits the universe to run itself according to natural laws.
Deontology (or Deontological Ethics): an approach to Ethics that focuses on the rightness or wrongness of actions themselves, as opposed to the rightness or wrongness of the consequences of those actions (Consequentialism) or to the character and habits of the actor (Virtue Ethics).
Dialectic: the exchange of arguments and counter-arguments, respectively advocating propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses), in arriving at a conclusion (synthesis).
Entity: something that has a distinct and separate existence, although not necessarily a material existence.
Eschatology: concerns expectations of the end of present age, human history, or the world itself.
Essence: the attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and that it has necessarily.
Ethics (or Moral Philosophy): concerned with questions of how people ought to act, and the search for a definition of right conduct (identified as the one causing the greatest good) and the good life (in the sense of a life worth living or a life that is satisfying or happy).
Exegis: a critical explanation or interpretation of a text.
Fallacy: any sort of mistake in reasoning or inference (essentially, anything that causes an argument to go wrong).
Final Cause:
Forms (Platonic Forms): the universal concepts or ideas which make all of the phenomenal world intelligible (the essences of objects, rather than their physical forms or appearances).
Free Will: the capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives.
Freethought: the general philosophical viewpoint that holds that beliefs should be formed on the basis of science and logic, and should not be influenced by emotion, authority, tradition, or dogma.
Henotheism: a belief in many gods, but restricts allegiance to only one of them.
Hermeneutics: the study of theories of the interpretation and understanding of texts (often the Bible)
Humanism: a broad category of ethical, metaphysical, epistemological and political philosophies in which human interests, values and dignity predominate. It has an ultimate faith in humankind, believes that human beings possess the power or potentiality of solving their own problems, through reliance primarily upon reason and scientific method applied with courage and vision.
Hylomorphic Composition: matter-form composition, the view that all natural things require for their existence both passive “stuff” and active, determining essence.
Identity: whatever makes an entity definable and recognizable, in terms of possessing a set of qualities or characteristics that distinguish it from entities of a different type (essentially, whatever makes something the same or different).
Inductive Reasoning: reasoning that proceeds from particular information to derive general principles (arriving at a reliable generalization from observations).
Infinite Regress: a causal relationship transmitted through an indefinite number of terms in a series, with no term that begins the causal chain (going back through a chain forever).
Instantiation: the representation of an idea in the form of an instance or example of it.
Indeterminism:
Law of Non-Contradiction: the basic law of logic which states that it is not possible for something to be and not be at the same time.
Logical Fallacies:
Monotheism: the belief in the existence of one deity, or in the oneness or uniqueness of God Who is personal and moral and seeks a response from His creatures, Who exists outside of space and time. It is a type of Theism, and is usually contrasted with Polytheism (the belief in multiple gods) and Atheism ( the absence of any belief in gods). The Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), as well as Plato’s concept of God, all affirm monotheism
Natural Language: a language that is spoken, written, or signed by humans for general-purpose communication (ordinary language as opposed to formal or constructed languages).
Natural Theology: a branch of theology that seeks to understand the existence and attributes of God through reason and observation of the natural world, rather than relying on divine revelation or sacred texts.
Naturalism: the belief that every aspect of our lives, including the religious, can be accounted for by natural processes.
Nature: that condition or reality which outwardly is the source of the life and death, or, in other words, of the composition and decomposition, of all things. This nature is subject to a sound organization, to inviolable laws, to a perfect order, and to a consummate design, from which it never departs.
Necessary Being: the only kind of being whose existence requires no explanation, a being that could not have failed to exist. The ultimate cause of everything must therefore be a necessary being, such as God.
Normative: indicative of how things should or ought to be (as opposed to positive or descriptive).
Noumenon: a thing as it is in itself, not as it is known through perception (c.f. Phenomenon).
Oikonomia:
Object: a thing, an entity or a being, that can have properties and bear relations to other objects. They are usually types of particulars, but there can also be abstract objects.
Ontological Argument: initially proposed by St. Anselm and Avicenna in the 11th Century, attempts to prove the existence of God through a priori abstract reasoning alone. It argues that part of what we mean when we speak of “God” is “perfect being”, or one of whom nothing greater can be conceived, and that is essentially what the word “God” means. A God that exists, of course, is better than a God that doesn’t, so to speak of God as a perfect being is therefore necessary to imply that he exists. So God’s existence is implied by the very concept of God, and when we speak of “God” we cannot but speak of a being that exists. By this argument, to say that God does not exist is a contradiction in terms. Immanuel Kant argued against the ontological argument on the grounds that existence is not a property of objects but a property of concepts, and that, whatever ideas may participate in a given concept, it is a further question whether that concept is instantiated.
Ontological Dependence: a crucial notion in metaphysics is that of one entity depending for its existence upon another entity—not in a merely causal sense, but in a deeper, ontological sense. In theology, it is often claimed that the universe (creation) is ontologically dependent on God, meaning that if God did not exist, neither would the universe.
Ontology: the study of conceptions of reality, existence and the nature of being.
Pantheism: the view that God is equivalent to Nature or the physical universe – that they are essentially the same thing – or that everything is of an all-encompassing immanent abstract God.
Paradox: a statement or sentiment that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense, and yet is perhaps true in fact, or a statement that is actually self-contradictory (and therefore false) even though it appears true.
Particular: a concrete individual object which cannot be copied without introducing new distinct particulars.
Phenomenon: a thing as it appears to be, as constructed by the mind and perceived by the senses (c.f. Noumenon).
Philosophy of Religion: the branch of philosophy that is concerned with the philosophical study of religion, including arguments over the nature and existence of God, religious language, miracles, prayer, the problem of evil, and the relationship between religion and other value-systems such as science and ethics.
Polytheism: the belief in, or worship of, multiple gods, usually each one of them ruling over a particular compartment of life.
Postmodernism:
Predicate: that which is affirmed or denied concerning the subject of a proposition (i.e. how we describe the subject of a proposition). The predicate is one of the two main constituents of a sentence (the other being the subject), containing the verb and its complements.
Premise: one of the propositions in a deductive argument. Essentially, it is a claim that is a reason for, or objection against, some other claim.
Property: an attribute or abstraction characterizing an object, but distinct from the object which possesses it.
Proposition: the content or meaning of an assertion or declarative sentence, which is capable of being either true or false.
Probability Causation:
Qualia: properties of sensory experiences, or the nebulous concept of “the way things seem to us”.
Realism: the philosophical view that the universe described by science (including both observable and unobservable aspects) exists independently of our perceptions, and that verified scientific theories are at least approximately true descriptions of what is real. Scientific realists typically assert that science, when successful, uncovers true (or approximately true) knowledge about nature, including aspects of reality that are not directly observable.
Skepticism: doubting, sometimes with good reason and sometimes without one.
Social Contract: that idea people give up some rights to a government and/or other authority in forming nations in order to jointly preserve or maintain social order and security.
Society: a collection or grouping of individuals with some shared interactions and common interests.
Substance: the unchanging essence of a thing, that exists by itself, and which has attributes and modes which, however, may change.
Syllogism: a logical argument in which one proposition (the conclusion) is inferred from two others (the premises) of a certain form.
Tabula Rasa: the idea that individual human beings are born with no innate mental content, but their knowledge is built up gradually from their experiences and sensory perceptions of the outside world (literally, “blank slate”).
Teleology: the belief that events occur with a natural purpose or design, or in order to achieve some specific goal.
Temporal Cosmological Argument:
This argument, also known as the Kalam Argument for the medieval Muslim school of philosophy of al-Kindi (801 – 873) and al-Ghazali (1058 – 1111) which first proposed it, argues that all indications are that there is a point in time at which the universe began to exist, (a universe stretching back in time into infinity being both philosophically and scientifically problematic), and that this beginning must either have been caused or uncaused. The idea of an uncaused event is absurd, because nothing comes from nothing. The universe must therefore have been brought into existence by something outside it, which can be called “God”.
Theism: Belief in a personal deity The belief in the existence of one or more divinities or deities, which exist within the universe and yet transcend it. These gods also in some way interact with the universe (unlike Deism), and are often considered to be omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent.
Theodicy: an attempt to reconcile the existence of evil or suffering in the world with the belief in an omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent God.
Theology: the study of the nature of God and religious truth, which seeks to justify or support religious claims.
Theorem: a statement which has been proven to be true by a rigorous argument
Virtue Ethics (or Virtue Theory): an approach to Ethics that emphasizes an individual’s character as the key element of ethical thinking, rather than rules about the acts themselves (Deontology) or their consequences (Consequentialism).
Science
Antiparticle: a subatomic particle, such as an antiproton, having the same mass as its corresponding particle, but opposite values of other properties such as charge, parity, spin, and direction of magnetic moment. For example, the antiparticle of the electron is the positron, which has a charge that is equal in magnitude to that of the electron but opposite in sign. Some particles, such as photons, are nondistinct from their antiparticles. When a particle and its antiparticle collide, they may annihilate one other and produce other particles.
Antirealism: the philosophical position that scientific theories should not be interpreted as providing knowledge about unobservable entities—such as electrons, genes, or dark matter—despite their predictive and explanatory success. Unlike scientific realism, which holds that successful scientific theories are approximately true and that their theoretical posits (like quarks or black holes) genuinely exist, antirealists argue that such theories are merely useful tools for organizing and predicting observable phenomena.
Antimatter: matter made up of antiparticles.
Astronomy: a natural science that studies celestial objects and the phenomena that occur in the cosmos.
Astrophysics: a science that applies the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena.
Big Bang: a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. Various cosmological models based on the Big Bang concept explain a broad range of phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and large-scale structure. The uniformity of the universe, known as the horizon and flatness problems, is explained through cosmic inflation: a phase of accelerated expansion during the earliest stages. Extrapolating this cosmic expansion backward in time using the known laws of physics, the models describe an extraordinarily hot and dense primordial universe.
Black Hole:an astronomical body so compact that its gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping. Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will form a black hole.[4] The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon.
Boson:
Causality:
Classical Physics:
Cosmogony:
Cosmology:
Creation Science:
Dark Matter:
Dark Energy:
Entropy:
Electro-Magnetism:
Electron:
Evolution:
Force:
Four Fundamental Forces:
Fermion:
Field:
Gravity:
Gluon:
Galaxy:
General Relativity:
Higgs Boson:
Higgs Field:
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle:
Lepton:
Magnetism:
Meson:
Nucleus:
Neutron:
Pauli Exclusion Principle:
Proton:
Quark:
Quantum:
Quantum Physics:
Scientific Method: the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.
Special Relativity:
Steady State Theory:
Sokol Affair:
Strong Nuclear Force:
Space:
Space-time:
Thermodynamics
Time:
Weak Nuclear Force: