Particular

as opposed to abstract, in philosophy

In metaphysical philosophy, particulars are concrete entities existing in space and time as opposed to abstractions.

Philosophers do not claim that God does not know particulars; they rather claim that He does not know them the way humans do. God knows particulars as their Creator whereas humans know them as a privileged creations of God might know them.
-- Attributed to Averroes.

Quotes

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  • Philosophers do not claim that God does not know particulars; they rather claim that He does not know them the way humans do. God knows particulars as their Creator whereas humans know them as a privileged creations of God might know them.
    • Attributed to Averroes in Voices of Islam: Voices of change (2007) by Vincent J. Cornell, p. 35.
  • Where a man speaks upon a subject of his own accord, he naturally tells the whole of what he knows; but where he is examined on interrogatories formally administered to him, his answers are naturally confined to the particulars to which he is so interrogated; and as the examining party generally knows beforehand the scope of the witness's evidence, he has an opportunity of so shaping his questions as that they may elicit everything in his favour with which the witness is acquainted, and keep back everything of a contrary tendency.
    • Sir John Bayley, 1st Baronet, Berkeley Peerage Case (1811), 4 Camp. 405; reported in James William Norton-Kyshe, Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 106.
  • Particulars are frequently fallible, but universals never. Occult philosophy lays bare Nature in her complete nakedness, and alone contemplates the wisdom of universals by the eyes of intelligence. Accustomed to partake of the rivers which flow from the Fountain of Life, it is unacquainted with grossness and with clouded waters.
    • Robert Fludd, cited in: Arthur Edward Waite (1887). The Real History of the Rosicrucians Founded on Their Own Manifestoes. p. 290
    • Waite commented: Like others of his school, Fludd insists on the uncertainty of a posteriori and experimental methods, to which he unhesitatingly attributes all the errors of the natural sciences..."
  • συνάψιες ὅλα καὶ οὐχ ὅλα, συμφερόμενον διαφερόμενον, συνᾷδον διᾷδον
    • Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.
    • Heraclitus, Fragment 10
    • Variant translation: From out of all the many particulars comes oneness, and out of oneness come all the many particulars.
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