Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Philosophy of matter is the branch of philosophy concerned with issues surrounding the ontology, epistemology and character of matter and the material world. The word matter is derived from the Latin word materia , meaning "wood", or “timber”, in the sense "material", as distinct from "mind" or "form". [ 1 ]
Creatio ex nihilo is the doctrine that all matter was created out of nothing by God in an initial or a beginning moment where the cosmos came into existence. [13] [14] The third-century founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus, argued that the cosmos was instead an emanation from God.
In alchemy and philosophy, prima materia, materia prima or first matter (for a philosophical exposition refer to: Prime Matter), is the ubiquitous starting material required for the alchemical magnum opus and the creation of the philosopher's stone. It is the primitive formless base of all matter similar to chaos, the quintessence or aether.
In their interaction with earlier Greek philosophers who accepted this argument/dictum, Christian authors who accepted creatio ex nihilo, like Origen, simply denied the essential premise that something cannot come from nothing, and viewed it as a presumption of a limitation of God's power; God was seen as in fact able to create something out of ...
The process inverse to particle annihilation can be called matter creation; more precisely, we are considering here the process obtained under time reversal of the annihilation process. This process is also known as pair production , and can be described as the conversion of light particles (i.e., photons) into one or more massive particles .
To materialists, matter is primary, and mind or spirit or ideas are secondary—the product of matter acting upon matter. [ 6 ] The materialist view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically by René Descartes ; by itself, materialism says nothing about how material ...
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
The classical elements typically refer to earth, water, air, fire, and (later) aether which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Ancient cultures in Greece , Angola , Tibet , India , and Mali had similar lists which sometimes referred, in local languages, to "air" as "wind ...