Read Concerning Being And Essence Online

GLOSSARY 

Absolute: Freed or relatively freed from conditions of matter 
and hence from contingency. Abstracted from individu- 
ating conditions. 

Act and Potency: To be understood by the proportion of any 
two things to each other reciprocally. Act: being deter- 
mined. Potency: being determinable. Act and potency 
always import a disposition or the order of a change. 

Accident: That which does not have being in itself, but from 
another. (Ens in alio). Accidents are additions which ad- 
vene to a substance and bring it to a completion. 

Act of Being: Existence. An act, being determined, or the 
determined, or a terminated nature. 

Analysis: A grasp of organization by a scrutiny of relations and 
terms composing simple and complex substances, and 
completed by an apprehension of the relevant operation or 
operations involved, a. Platonic Analysis: Quality is elimi- 
nated, leaving quantity and relations. Platonists are apt to 
reify the relations and to invest them with autonomic 
energy, b. Aristotelian Analysis: Includes Platonic analysis 
and something in addition. Platonic analysis supplies the 
formal cause, but in addition there is the material and 
efficient cause, not to mention the final cause. Essences 
must needs be assigned to their existential operations or 
natures to become actual. Platonic essences are potentiali- 
ties or possibles, but in Aristotelian analysis the process in 
nature supplements the formal statement. 

Being: A transcendental predicate, (Ens), that which is, the 
actual nature of a thing or existence independent of the 
knowing mind. The principle of being (existence) and the 
principle of being primarily intelligible must be in some 
sense commensurate if being and truth are related. Modes 
of operating and knowing are said to follow upon the 

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