Sentence examples for an existing thing from inspiring English sources

This ontological argument for God's existence, introduced by the medieval English logician St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033/34 1109), is at the heart of Descartes's rationalism, for it establishes certain knowledge about an existing thing solely on the basis of reasoning from innate ideas, with no help from sensory experience.

However, an 'absolutely unreal' thing can have no properties, and hence a fortiori no properties in common with an existing thing.

some new state of an existing thing or substance, or, more shortly, causing a change of state of some existing thing.

Existence can consequently be said to be external to essence, so that an existing thing, whose essence or quiddity is possible, can be said to be composed of essence and existence.

To do so, the cause must be an existing thing and coexist with its effect.

"At a certain point in the project, it became important to me that I appropriate the forms I was going to work with, as well as the images used to make them, so that I'm not sculpting so much as exploring an existing thing," tells Jones.

In chapter 3 Anselm argues that all existing things exist through some one thing.

Shape is not an independently existing thing, but is always a modification of an independently existing thing.

Relationism, as this view of the nature of space is called, asserts that space is not an independently existing thing but merely a mathematical representation of the infinity of different spatial relations that particles may have to each other.

Plato mentioned and attempted to refute alternative accounts of the relationship of soul and body, including a Pythagorean view that described the soul as an "attunement" of the body and thus tried to explicate it as a form or structure rather than an independently existing thing.

For from the potentially existing the actually existing is always produced by an actually existing thing, e.g. man from man, musician by musician; there is always a first mover, and the mover already exists actually.