This glossary defines terms found throughout the text that are preceded by an asterisk (*) symbol.
Abstract: In the discipline of philosophy, this term refers to properties (e.g., redness, hardness; see also the entry for “property” below) and relations (e.g., taller than, heavier than) that do not exist by themselves in space or time, but can exist potentially in many different places and times (e.g., redness can exist in both an apple and a ball; a dog can be heavier than a rock, while a rock can be heavier than a leaf). This term is often contrasted with spatial/temporal objects that are concrete or physical (e.g., a house, a cow, a bracelet).
Act of will: A volition or choice, an exercise of power, an endeavoring to do a certain thing, usually for the sake of some purpose or end.
Annihilationism: The view that immortality is conditional and that some will be completely destroyed, as opposed to existing in eternal punishment in hell.
Anti-Cartesian principle: There can be no purely mental beings because nothing can have a mental property without having a physical property as well.
Belief: A person’s view, accepted to varying degrees of strength, of how things really are.
Cartesian dualism: The mind is a substance with the ultimate capacities for consciousness, and it is connected to its body by way of a causal relation.
Causal reduction: The causal activity of the reduced entity is entirely explained in terms of the causal activity of the reducing entity.
Consciousness: Broadly, what you are aware of when you engage in first-person introspection.
Creationism: Our bodies are passed on to us through normal reproduction by our parents, but God creates each individual soul out of nothing, most likely at fertilization.
Desire: A certain inclination to do, have, avoid, or experience certain things.
Dualism: The view that the soul is an immaterial thing different from the body and brain.
Eliminative materialism: Mental terms get their meaning from their role in folk psychology, and will eventually be replaced with some neurophysiological theory.
Emergent dualism: a substantial, spatially extended, immaterial self emerges from the functioning of the brain and nervous system, but once it emerges, it exercises its own causal powers and continues to be sustained by God after death.
Emergent supervenience: The view that mental properties are distinctively new kinds of properties that in no way characterize the subvenient physical base on which they depend.
Epiphenomenalism: The mind is a by-product of the brain, which causes nothing; the mind merely “rides” on top of the events in the brain.
Epiphenomenon: Something that is caused to exist by something else but that itself has no ability to cause anything.
Event: a temporal state that occurs in the world (e.g., water freezing or a dog barking).
Event-event causation: The first event, combined with the laws of nature, are sufficient to determine or fix the chances for the occurrence of the second event.
Extinction/re-creation view: When the body dies the person ceases to exist since the person is in some sense the same as his or her body. At the future, final resurrection, persons are re-created after a period of non-existence.
Faculty of the soul: A “compartment” of the soul that contains a natural family of related capacities.
First-person point of view: The vantage point that I use to describe the world from my own perspective.
Folk psychology: A common sense theory designed to explain the behaviors of others by attributing mental states to them.
Functionalism: The physicalist view that reduces mental properties/states to bodily inputs, behavioral outputs, and other mental state outputs.
Immediate resurrection view: At death, in some way or another, each individual continues to exist in a physical way.
Individual ontological reduction: One object (a macro-object like a dog, a molecule, or a person) is identified with another object or taken to be entirely composed of parts characterized by the reducing sort of entity.
Intentionality: The “of-ness” or “about-ness” of various mental states.
Knowledge: To represent reality in thought or experience the way it really is on the basis of adequate grounds.
Knowledge by acquaintance: Knowledge of a thing when one is directly aware of that thing.
Know-how: The ability to do certain things.
Linguistic reduction: One word or concept (pain) is defined as or analyzed in terms of another word or concept (the tendency to grimace when stuck with a pin). These kinds of reductions are definitional.
Mental holism: The notion that a given mental state gets its identity from its entire set of relations to all the other mental states in one’s total psychology.
Metaphysics: In philosophy, this refers to the study of the most fundamental aspects of reality that underlie what we experience through our senses. Common topics of study in metaphysics include existence, substance, properties, causation, events, and mind/body questions.
Middle knowledge: God’s knowledge of what creatures would freely do in any given set of circumstances.
Mind: That faculty of the soul that contains thoughts and beliefs along with the relevant abilities to have them.
Mind-body dependence: What mental properties an entity has depend on and are determined by its physical properties.
Mind-body problem: The problem of understanding the relationship between the apparently immaterial mind and the physical body and brain.
Ontology (Ontological): A branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being and existence. Ontological questions include whether humans possess a soul, and whether abstract entities such as numbers truly exist.
Physicalism (or strict physicalism): The view that the only things that exist are physical substances, properties, and events. In relation to humans, the physical substance is the material body, especially the brain and central nervous system.
Properly basic belief: A belief that is not inferred from any other belief(s), but is rationally justified by experience (by perception, for example).
Property: An existent reality that is universal, immutable, and can (or perhaps must) be in or had by other things more basic, such as a substance. Thus, a cow (a substance) can have the property of being brown. The brownness (property) is had by the cow (the substance).
Property dualism: A human being is one material substance that has both physical and mental properties, with the mental properties arising from the brain.
Property ontological reduction: One property (heat) is identified with another property (mean kinetic energy).
Proposition: A declarative sentence that is either true or false. Examples of propositions include: “The earth orbits the sun,” “Greg is six feet tall,” and “I lived in Canada when I was seven.”
Propositional attitude: An attitude (such as hoping, fearing, wishing, regretting) toward a certain proposition. For example, “I hope that the test will be cancelled,” or “I fear that the economy is slowing down,” or “I regret that I didn’t have a second piece of cake.”
Propositional knowledge: Knowledge that a proposition is true.
Qualia: A quale (plural, qualia) is a specific sort of intrinsically characterized mental state, such as seeing red, having a sour taste, feeling a pain.
Self-presenting property: A property, such as being appeared to redly (that is, experiencing an appearance of the color red), that presents both its intentional object (e.g., a red apple) and itself (the redness) to the subject experiencing it.
Spirit: That faculty of the soul through which the person relates to God.
Structural supervenience: The view that mental properties are structural properties entirely constituted by the properties, relations, parts, and events at the subvenient level.
Substance: a particular, individual, continuant and basic, fundamental existent thing that is a unity of parts, properties, and capacities, and has causal powers.
Substance dualism: A human person has both a brain that is a physical thing with physical properties and a mind or soul that is a mental substance and has mental properties.
Supervenience: A relationship of dependence between properties such that one level of the properties correlates to conditions at a different level. For example, when water molecules come together, the property of wetness supervenes upon them. In mind/body discussions, some philosophers (such as certain property dualists) hold that mental events supervene upon (or emerge from) brain events.
Temporary disembodiment view: A person is (or has) an immaterial soul/spirit deeply unified with a body that can enter a temporary intermediate state of disembodiment at death, however unnatural and incomplete it may be, while awaiting a resurrection body in the final state.
Theoretical or explanatory reduction: One theory or law is reduced to another by biconditional bridge principles (for example, x has heat if and only if x has mean kinetic energy).
Thomistic substance dualism: The view that the (human) soul diffuses, informs (gives form to), unifies, animates, and makes human the body. The body is not a physical substance, but rather an ensouled physical structure such that if it loses the soul, it is no longer a human body in a strict, philosophical sense.
Thought: A mental content that can be expressed in an entire sentence and that only exists while it is being thought.
Token physicalism: Fundamentally, the claim that every token (that is, particular) mental event is identical to a particular physical event.
Traducianism: Both the body and soul are passed on to us by our parents.
Type-Identity physicalism: The view that mental properties/types are identical to physical properties/types.
Universalism: The view that God will eventually reconcile all things to himself, including all individuals, even if this means that God will continue to draw them to Himself in the afterlife.