AMP

Question 1

Negative Theology

Answer 1

the attempt to form a conception of an ineffable God by saying what God is not, without ascribing to Him “positive” attributes and features.

Question 2

Hylomorphism

Answer 2

metaphysical view according to which every natural body consists of two intrinsic principles, one potential, namely, primary matter, and one actual, namely, substantial form (aristotle)

Question 3

Parmenides

Answer 3

there is only being – and there is no non-being: non-being or what-is-not is not real.
(then how is movement possible?)

Question 4

Anaxagoras

Answer 4

the immaterial mind/intellect. “everyone has a portion of everything, but the mind is unique and autonomous”

Question 5

Protagoras

Answer 5

-Sophist
-ethical and epistemic relativist, there is no absolute good or truth

Question 6

Socrates

Answer 6

-recollection
-The good

Question 7

Plato

Answer 7

-Platonic forms
-The line analogy
-The cave analogy
-Eudaemonia (happiness as highest goal)
-3 part splitted soul
-The Just city

Question 8

Aristotle

Answer 8

-The unmoved mover
-Eternal first cause
-cosmological
-three principles of natural things: matter, form, and privation
-Potentiality” and “actuality
-Hierarchy of goods

Question 9

Galen

Answer 9

Connection of body and soul, of ethics, physics, and medicine
he was a major player in the philosophical scene of his day – as proven by his prominence in the school discussions in Plotinus’ school in Rome only few years after his death.

Question 10

Plotinus

Answer 10

Considered the father of Neoplatonism
-system of three primary hypostases

Question 11

Maximus the Confessor

Answer 11

-neoplatonist
-negative theology

Question 12

Augustine

Answer 12

The pursuit of happiness continues: wisdom is God, hence the true philosopher (“lover of wisdom”) is a true lover of God.
-The principle of this is God – and Christ, who is present in our souls as
an “inner teacher”; Augustine compares God to the Sun. Christ is our natural rationality against which we test propositions.
-There is an ethical dimension: “while all human beings are by nature capable of accessing intelligible truth, only those succeed in doing so who have a sufficiently good will”-Augustine opts for “illumination”: knowledge is not innate, slumbering within our souls – but it occurs within our souls through the light of God within us.
-God: the one true teacher

Question 13

Averroes

Answer 13

The Creator is the first cause – and so, if God is understood as the first cause here, philosophy is simply defined as science in the Aristotelian sense: knowledge is knowledge of causes. What does the Law say about such an investigation? – It commands it. In fact, the Law makes it obligatory to pursue this investigation with the intellect and, hence, as a rational inquiry guided by logic, esp. by syllogistic reasoning

Question 14

Anselm of Canterbury

Answer 14

Anselm argues that one cannot really believe that God does not exist if God is understood
as “something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought.
-ontological argument

Question 15

al-Ġazālī

Answer 15

In Kalamthe cosmological proof of God’s existence is based on two principles:
Everything originated requires a cause for its origination.
The world is something originated.

Question 16

Abelard

Answer 16

-guy from love story
-Morals are virtues/vices (i) of the mind (not the body) which (ii) make
us prone to good or bad works. Yet, mental vices are not identical with (iii) sins or (iv) bad actions. We “earn a crown” by resisting vices not by resisting (v) external force

Question 17

john of Salisbury

Answer 17

all power is from God. The prince is an image of the majesty of God and his power the “substitute for His hand. whoever resists this power, resits God and His will. He divine aims at equity: granting everyone what is his/her own.

Question 18

Maimonides

Answer 18

-jew
-creationism vs eternalism
Aristotle’s proofs for eternity are inconclusive.
– Creation as taught by Scripture is not impossible and was also not shown to be impossible by rational arguments. –> So, both eternity and creation are “admissible”, while rational argumentation is unable to prove or disprove either of them.

Question 19

al-Ṭūsī

Answer 19

For example, he argued that God’s essence does not have existence as
every other existing essence has; instead His essence is existence. This has many repercussions for ontology and the question whether existence is univocal or not: al-Rāzī argues for the “univocity” of existence, whereas al-Ṭūsī argues for “modulation.

Question 20

St. Bonaventure

Answer 20

In epistemology, he takes up Augustinian illumination (Christ as inner teacher, divine light as ultimate cause of knowledge), fusing it with: (i) Aristotelian abstraction (study of the natural world with its inherent “signs” of God and the role of the human intellect), and (ii) Francis’ vision of Christ as a six-winged Seraphim, each pair of wings indicating one route towards knowledge: physical – intellectual – metaphysical, surpassed only by mystical direct experience. Regarding creation, he emphasises that the attempt to understand the
world as an eternal creation is absurd: either creation (with God) oreternity (without God) – but not both!

Question 21

Thomas Aquinas

Answer 21

Thomas rejects Augustinian/Bonaventurian illuminationism, convinced that we do not have to receive the divine light – we have it already! the Active Intellect is in us. Intellectual virtues are good but not everything: theological virtues (charity, faith, hope) exceed the ambit of purely philosophical ethics.

Question 22

al-Īǧī

Answer 22

kalām does not depend on another science: its principles are either self-evident or established within kalām.