This is where Wittgenstein agrees and says it's about our practices (language games and our form of life), but Adorno says it's sociohistorical, though not reducible to sociohistorical facts. — Jamal

Isn’t a lot of this just a tacit prohibition on anything that could be considered outside the scope of natural sciences, evolutionary biology, and so on? Don’t mention anything remotely platonic. Has to be something comfortably domesticated.

I'm kind of re-constructing all this from the debris of modern philosophy - rather like forensic pathology, working backwards from scattered remains to understand the cause of death.

More from Thomist psychology:

Everything in the universe is composed of matter and form. Everything is concrete and individual. Hence the forms of cosmic entities must also be concrete and individual. Now, the process of knowledge is immediately concerned with the separation of form from matter, since a thing is known precisely because its form is received in the knower. But, whatever is received is in the recipient according to the mode of being that the recipient possesses. If, then, the senses are material powers, they receive the forms of objects in a material manner; and if the intellect is an immaterial power, it receives the forms of objects in an immaterial manner. This means that in the case of sense knowledge, the form is still encompassed with the concrete characters which make it particular; and that, in the case of intellectual knowledge, the form is disengaged from all such characters. To understand is to free form completely from matter.

Moreover, if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality. — From Thomistic Psychology: A Philosophical Analysis of the Nature of Man, by Robert E. Brennan, O.P.

For Aristotle, nous is the faculty that enables rational thought. It is distinct from sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which other animals possess. Nous is the faculty that enables definitions so be set in a consistent and communicable way, and explains why humans are born with the innate ability to understand the same universal categories in the same ways (which enables language, that other animals lack.)

For empiricism there is no essential difference between the intellect and the senses. The fact which obliges a correct theory of knowledge to recognize this essential difference is simply disregarded. What fact? The fact that the human intellect grasps, first in a most indeterminate manner, then more and more distinctly, certain sets of intelligible features -- that is, natures, say, the human nature -- which exist in the real as identical with individuals, with Peter or John for instance, but which are universal in the mind and presented to it as universal objects, positively one (within the mind) and common to an infinity of singular things (in the real).

Thanks to the association of particular images and recollections, a dog reacts in a similar manner to the similar particular impressions his eyes or his nose receive from this thing we call a piece of sugar or this thing we call an intruder; he does not know what is 'sugar' or what is 'intruder'. He plays, he lives in his affective and motor functions, or rather he is put into motion by the similarities which exist between things of the same kind; he does not see the similarity, the common features as such. What is lacking is the flash of intelligibility; he has no ear for the intelligible meaning. He has not the idea or the concept of the thing he knows, that is, from which he receives sensory impressions; his knowledge remains immersed in the subjectivity of his own feelings -- only in man, with the universal idea, does knowledge achieve objectivity. And his field of knowledge is strictly limited: only the universal idea sets free -- in man -- the potential infinity of knowledge.

Such are the basic facts which Empiricism ignores, and in the disregard of which it undertakes to philosophize. — Jacques Maritain, The Cultural Impact of Empiricism

A lot of this conversation is bedevilled by the absence of any relationship with what used to be known as revealed truth. @Hanover's posts a few pages back touch on it, immediately shot down by@Banno as 'theological meanderings'. It is an article of Banno's faith than anything like religious faith has no place at the table of philosophical discourse. Yet without it, one is condemned to the sisyphean repitition of circular arguments.

In respect of 'why is there anything?', the question naturally arises in a culture which originally accepted the fact of divine creation. In the absence of divine creation, an alternative account is sought, presumably grounded in science. But that always seems to face an aporia of its own which is not surprising, as natural science presumes nature without needing to explain it. There are kinds of 'why' questions that science won't even ask, let alone seek an answer for.

Buddhism offers an alternative, as it starts not with the question 'why is there anything?' but 'why is there suffering?' - usually followed by a catalogue of the kinds of suffering which seem unavoidable for all of us, such as old age, illness and death, the loss of what one cherishes, being united with what one dislikes, and so forth. It then proceeds to analyse the deep psycho-physiological processes which give rise to the human condition, under the rubric of 'suffering and its cause'. But it still requires faith - faith that there is a cause, that it is something that can be understood, that release from it is a real possibility. But the salient point is, Buddhism still contains a kernel in religious revelation, insight into another realm of being, which I think is essential if faith is to have any meaning other than sentimentality or wishful thinking.

Does either 'ousia' or 'substantia' map easily against reality as we now understand it (with relativity, QM, etc.), as opposed to how the Greeks understood reality? — Harry Hindu

Obviously, there are vast differences between ancient and modern, and we know an enormous amount more than did they, in a scientific sense. That is not at issue. The motivation for the original post, though, was a specific confusion arising from a misunderstanding of a key idea, which is still relevant despite all of that. That anyway is the argument spelled out in the OP.

Intuition is knowing without knowing how you know. That, anyway, is my intuition.

And my point is why use the term, "substance" — Harry Hindu

The term οὐσία (oiusia) is an Ancient Greek noun, formed on the feminine present participle of the verb εἰμί, eimí, meaning "to be, I am", so similar grammatically to the English noun "being". There was no equivalent grammatical formation in Latin, and it was translated as 'essentia' or 'substantia'. Cicero coined "essentia" and the philosopher Seneca and rhetorician Quintilian used it as equivalent for οὐσία, while Apuleius rendered οὐσία both as "essentia" or "substantia". In order to designate οὐσία, early Christian theologian Tertullian favored the use of "substantia" over "essentia", while Augustine of Hippo and Boethius took the opposite stance, preferring the use of "essentia" as designation for οὐσία. — Ouisia, Wikipedia

In the long run, 'substantia' became the English 'substance', but again, it developed a different meaning over time, to denote 'a material with uniform properties'. It is that meaning which I claim in the OP is a very misleading translation for the original term, 'ousia', which is nearer in meaning to 'subject' that what we think of as 'substance'.

The use of 'process' as in 'process philosophy' is a much later arrival, associated with the philosopher Whitehead, in the early 20th century. However, 'process' doesn't really map easily against either 'ousia' or 'substantia'.

My own reasoning in regards to this matter is, if determinism is not true - which is to say, if there are events in the history of the universe which, if played back again under the exact same prior conditions, might happen differently - then it seems to me that those events didn't have "sufficient reason" to occur. — flannel jesus

There’s a lot I agree with in this OP, but I think the framing assumes a sharper 'either-or' than the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) really requires.

It’s easy to assume that PSR, if true, must entail strict determinism—that every event is fixed in advance by prior conditions in a fully specifying, Laplacean sense. But I think that’s based on a misunderstanding, both of what “sufficient reason” means, and of how complex systems actually behave.

The essay Karma and Chaos (which I've linked here because it’s well worth reading) offers a useful perspective. It shows how chaos theory and complexity science describe systems that are lawful but not rigidly deterministic. These systems operate according to real constraints—there are rules, boundaries, and patterns—but they do not unfold in a strictly predictable way.

A familiar example is the so-called butterfly effect in meteorology. Weather systems follow physical laws, but small changes in initial conditions can lead to dramatically different outcomes. The system is lawful, but not fully predictable in practice. It doesn’t mean “anything can happen”—the system tends to evolve within certain zones or attractors, but the path it takes can vary widely.

So, if PSR says that every event happens for a reason, that reason might be something like the boundary conditions of a system, or the lawful structure that constrains the range of outcomes—not necessarily a single, fully specified event that had to happen and no other.

In other words, the reason why something happens might be that the system is lawful but open-ended, rather than strictly deterministic. There is sufficient reason why some outcomes are possible and others are not, but that doesn't mean every outcome is rigidly predetermined.

This is close to the Buddhist doctrine of kamma (karma) - the context in which the essay was presented, in fact. Kamma doesn’t mean that every detail of life is predetermined. It does mean that actions have consequences, shaped by past conditions and tendencies, but these are still open to choice and change (which is why, incidentally, the interpretation of karma as fatalism is mistaken). Hence it's a model of lawful but open causality—a dynamic interplay of conditioning and freedom, order and variability. Chaos theory provides a contemporary scientific parallel to this view, describing how systems can be shaped by lawful structures while still allowing for spontaneous shifts and new outcomes. (Interestingly, C. S. Peirce argued for something similar, calling it 'tychism'—the idea that real spontaneity or chance plays a causal role in the universe, but in a way that doesn't undermine its lawful structure, and in fact may be essential for its ongoing development..)

So I’d say that PSR doesn’t necessarily imply determinism. It implies that there are real reasons and structures underlying what happens, but those reasons might allow for a range of lawful possibilities, not a single predetermined outcome.

In short, PSR may invite us to ask why this rather than that, but the answer might be: because the system allows for variation within lawful constraints. That’s not determinism in the classical sense, but it isn’t randomness either. It’s something more dynamic—a lawful openness.

There is a historical relation too in that biosemiotics and the invocation of semiotics in physics almost always involves the tripartite semiotics received through Charles Sanders Peirce. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have read that Peirce held to realism concerning universals. There's a tantalising fragment in a review of a book about Peirce and the 'threat of nominalism':

Peirce understood nominalism in the broad anti-realist sense usually attributed to William of Ockham, as the view that reality consists exclusively of concrete particulars and that universality and generality have to do only with names and their significations. This view relegates properties, abstract entities, kinds, relations, laws of nature, and so on, to a conceptual existence at most. Peirce believed nominalism (including what he referred to as "the daughters of nominalism": sensationalism, phenomenalism, individualism, and materialism) to be seriously flawed and a great threat to the advancement of science and civilization. His alternative was a nuanced realism that distinguished reality from existence and that could admit general and abstract entities as reals without attributing to them direct (efficient) causal powers. — Peirce and the Thread of Nominalism (review)

That mention in passing of the distinction between reality and existence is one which I will guarantee you, nobody (or almost nobody) on this forum will recognise. (And I know this from long experience.)

But again, concepts can be explained in terms of brains ....the entire universe and everything in it is a physical system. — Apustimelogist

Can they? Is it? Those are assumptions - the central assumptions of scientific materialism. And you don't present arguments for it: you present it as a foregone conclusion, something that is 'of course' the case. I don't think it has seriously occured to you that it can be questioned, how it can be questioned, and who questions it.

I can still talk about art, literature, aesthetics, anthropology, psychology without mentioning physics or chemistry. — Apustimelogist

But here we're discussing philosophy, Plato's forms, universals, and nature of mind.

A 'stone' or a 'particle' is an abstract concept as much as 'money' or 'health', all inferred through how the brain interacts with the world, but at the very core and central place that makes this universe of stuff tick is physical concepts. — Apustimelogist

But I say that concepts are not physical - they're the relations of ideas. And the idea that concepts or rational inference can be understood as physical is the central myth of philosophical materialism, which by tying rational concepts to 'brain function' seeks to give them a physical grounding. But that is neural reductionism:

Neural reductionism asserts that psychological phenomena (like perception, cognition, and consciousness) can be explained in terms of the workings of the nervous system, particularly at the neural level. In essence, it argues that understanding the brain and its neural processes is sufficient to explain mental states and behaviors.

Proponents include Australian philosopher D M Armstrong, and also the recently deceased Daniel Dennett.

But I say that there is a vicious circularity in the reductionist view, because in order to interpret neural data, or to say how, or whether, 'the brain' is the source of reason (as distinct from an interpreter of it), we must rely on concepts. Not just the advanced concepts required to understand neurobiology (which is an astoundingly complex science), but those very basic conceptual structures such as 'same as', 'different to' and so on. You won't see anything in the kinds of data that can be observed through fMRI and so on, unless you're a highly trained specialist deeply versed in neuroscience. On which basis, you will then say 'well, this scan shows activity in this area of the brain, which means that....' So again, you're relying on the very faculty of rational inference (if: then) to establish the claim which you're wishing to demonstrate. And it's not something you can see 'from the outside'.

if we want to explain the actual reasons why we use the word 'round', you have to talk about an immensely complicated brain and how it interacts with the rest of a very complicated world in an intractable manner - from the perspective of our own intelligibility - to infer something about how it represents or embodies structure out in the world. — Apustimelogist

But we're not required to know that. It's not necessary to know anything of the complexities of neuroscience to understand the principle of intelligibility. Here, you're simply projecting the inherent limitations of materialist philosophy of mind onto the whole issue.

But anyone using the word 'round' is using it because they are engaging with the world around them and they see 'round' things. — Apustimelogist

That's the empiricist argument in a nutshell. The problem is, many animals other than h.sapiens see round things, but they never form a concept of 'round'. LIkewise with my quoted example of 'equals'. 'Equals' is obviously fundamental to rational argument, symbollically denoting 'the same as'. But how is equality discerned? When we say that two objects are of equal weight or length, we must already possess the concept 'equals' to make that judgement. And no amount of sensory experience will convey that to a subject incapable of grasping the concept. Hence the argument that 'equals' (and other universals') are discerned by reason and cannot be derived from experience alone (a point which Kant elaborated at tiresome length in his master work.)

It's worth repeating the quote from Eric Perl again:

Forms...are radically distinct, and in that sense ‘apart,’ in that they are not themselves sensible things. With our eyes we can see large things, but not largeness itself; healthy things, but not health itself. The latter, in each case, is an idea, an intelligible content, something to be apprehended by thought rather than sense, a ‘look’ not for the eyes but for the mind. This is precisely the point Plato is making when he characterizes forms as the reality of all things. “Have you ever seen any of these with your eyes?—In no way … Or by any other sense, through the body, have you grasped them? I am speaking about all things such as largeness, health, strength, and, in one word, the reality [οὐσίας, ouisia] of all other things, what each thing is” (Phd. 65d4–e1). Is there such a thing as health? Of course there is. Can you see it? Of course not. This does not mean that the forms are occult entities floating ‘somewhere else’ in ‘another world,’ a ‘Platonic heaven.’ It simply says that the intelligible identities which are the reality, the whatness, of things are not themselves physical things to be perceived by the senses, but must be grasped by reason. — Eric D Perl, Thinking Being, p28

This applies to 'roundness' as much as any other universal. (Eric Perl's book, Thinking Being, is a well-regarded current textbook on classical metaphysics, unfortunately out-of-print, although I've managed to acquire a .pdf copy.)

Other than that, I quite agree with @Count Timothy von Icarus's post above, especially this:

Eleonore Stump notes that ‘what Aquinas refers to as the spiritual reception of an immaterial form . . . is what we are more likely to call encoded information’, as when a street map represents a city or DNA represents a protein.

It's not too far of a stretch to see how this suggests biosemiosis (signs and sign relations) as fundamental to cognition (and indeed to organic processes generally.) So here we're encountering the metaphysics of meaning, to which Platonic and Aristotelian principles still have considerable relevance.

There is no substance - only process or relations — Harry Hindu

If you read the OP, the point is that the meaning of substance in philosophy is not 'an unchanging material', but that is how it has come to be (mis)interpreted.

“…. substance is the permanence of the real in time….” — Mww

'Some things will never change' ~ Steely Dan, 'Kid Charlemagne'.

Thanks for the reply, this conversation is requiring that I do some research on concepts of time in relativity and philosophy, which I'm learning from. So, to recap the debate thus far:

As for there being no time outside the awareness of it, that depends on your definition of time.
1) Proper time, which is very much physical and supposedly mind independent. This is what clocks measure.
2) Coordinate time, which is arguably abstract and thus mind dependent since coordinate systems are mental constructs. Coordinate time is that which dilates.
3) One's perception of the flow of time, which is very much only a product of awareness, pretty much by anything tasked with making predictions. — noAxioms

The Planck unit of time is one of proper time (type 1), not the third type (awareness of) time which you seem to have been referencing. Don't confuse the two. There's little point in utilizing Plank units for measuring a specific species' awareness of time. — noAxioms

Proper duration is invariant in both a relativistic and an absolute interpretation of the universe, and coordinate duration (including 'actual' duration in the absolute universe) is not invariant. Neither kind of time has a requirement to be noticed by any observer. Of course, that's different in any mind-dependent sort of ontology where being noticed is a requirement. — noAxioms

So, you are saying I am conflating different levels of analysis when I discussed Planck units in the context of a species' differing perceptions of time based on their planet's cycles. You are saying that Planck time is a fundamental unit of physical duration (proper time at a very small scale), while my thought experiment is about a species' subjective experience and culturally defined units of time (more akin to "awareness of time"). And I've learned from my research that these different "types" of time, with "type 1" (proper time) being the more fundamental (or "physical") concept, is recognised within the framework of relativity.

However, earlier in the discussion, I had introduced a quote from an essay on Bergson and Einstein's debate about the nature of time, which I present here again:

To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’. Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do. This is why Bergson believed that clock time presupposes lived time. — Clock Time Contra Lived Time, Evan Thompson, Aeon Magazine

My bolds. And my claim is that this is true even of so-called 'Type 1', supposedly mind-independent time. Bergson's analysis challenges the idea of a time that exists completely independently of any form of "experiencing" or "measuring" (in the broader sense that includes conscious awareness). Even physical clocks, which we might think of as objective measures, rely on physical processes unfolding in space, which we interpret as temporal intervals.

This suggests that time, insofar as it is meaningful to us, is inherently linked to how we perceive and interpret change and succession. (And if it's not meaningful to us, then what is there to discuss?) Even in the case of physical measurements, we are the ones who interpret the spatial movements as representing the passage of time. Without an observer (human or otherwise) to relate the spatial changes to the concept of time, the clock's movements are just that – movements in space. The distinction between the discrete moments measured by a clock and the continuous flow of lived duration aligns with the distinction of "physical" time (like Planck time or proper time) and "awareness of time." However, a Bergson would likely argue that even the "physical" time we measure with clocks is still dependent on a framework of spatial measurement and our interpretation of it which only an observer can provide.

So if we take Bergson's challenge seriously, we might ask: what does Planck time mean in the absence of any system (even a theoretical one) to "observe" or be affected by events at that scale? Is it a fundamental property of spacetime that exists independently of any interaction or measurement, or is its significance tied to its role within our theoretical frameworks of how the universe operates?

Bergson's analysis provides a philosophical argument for the idea that time, as we understand and experience it, is deeply intertwined with the process of observation and interpretation. While Planck time might represent a fundamental unit of physical duration at the smallest scale, Bergson's perspective suggests that even this concept is embedded within our theoretical framework of measurement and understanding. It reinforces the idea that time is not simply a pre-existing entity that we passively record, but something that emerges through our interaction with the world, whether that interaction is through conscious experience or through the construction and interpretation of physical measurements. (This, incidentally, is in keeping with the 'enactivist' philosophy of Evan Thompson who wrote the article being discussed.)

I also hold sympathies to idealism, to the point where ontology may well just be an ideal even if I'm not an idealist (mind being in any way fundamental). All sorts of traps on that road, but I think it is valid. Is there such a thing as ontic idealism? — noAxioms

Ontic or ontological idealism holds that the world is ultimately mental (or spiritual) in nature. I'm arguing for epistemological idealism which argues that whatever we know of the world has an ineliminably subjective pole. Whilst objectivity is pragmatically possible and useful, the objective stance ought not to loose sight of this broader point: reality is not something we're outside of, or apart from.

Ref: Who Really Won when Bergson and Einstein Debated Time, Evan Thompson, Aeon.

As Paul Keating would observe from time to time, 'the dogs bark. The caravan moves on.'

Rinehart's living in Trump la-la land. She's utterly besotted with the Donald, no idea of the Australian electorate per se. She and all the Sky News commentators will be all crying into their beers for a long time to come.

It's her obvious thirst for power that bugs me. My comment was made in respose to her saying yesterday that 'the Australian people would love to see her as PM.' (I was thinking of posting a gif of a pole-vaulter who's pole breaks in lift-off - does happen - as a comment on her sudden defection to the Liberal Party in the hope of becoming Deputy Leader of the Opposition. But couldn't be bothered.)

Geez this Albert Namatjira Price has tickets on herself. Glad her party is going to be in the wilderness for the next decade or so.

Since drafting this OP a month ago, I've re-visited some of the references I gave at the outset. Looking at the SEP and IEP entries again, it is clear that they exemplify the very philosophical 'flattening' (or reification) that the OP set out to address. Both articles frame substance largely in terms of object-like things or building blocks, reducing a metaphysical distinction to a kind of proto-materialism or object-property schema.

For example, the SEP entry describes Aristotle’s Categories as follows:

The primary substances are individual objects, and they can be contrasted with everything else – secondary substances and all other predicables – because they are not predicable of or attributable to anything else. Thus, Fido is a primary substance, and dog – the secondary substance – can be predicated of him.

This framing presents substance as nothing more than individual objects, like particular dogs - or even stones or marbles, we would be entitled to think —whic is an oversimplification that loses sight of the deeper point that 'substance' is not mere particularity, but what something is in virtue of its form and actuality. Again, it is nearer to think of it as what of being it is, than what kind of object. And there's a difference!

The IEP entry reinforces this flattening by presenting substance as either “object-like” or as the “building blocks of reality”:

In its first sense, ‘substance’ refers to those things that are object-like, rather than property-like. For example, an elephant is a substance in this sense, whereas the height or colour of the elephant is not. In its second sense, ‘substance’ refers to the fundamental building blocks of reality. An elephant might count as a substance in this sense. However, this depends on whether we accept the kind of metaphysical theory that treats biological organisms as fundamental.

Here, substance is again reduced to either discrete objects or material constituents, and offered as a theoretical choice between animals, their properties, or their particles. What is entirely missing is Aristotle’s insight of substance as the unity of form and matter, not just an object plus its properties, nor mere stuff underlying observable traits.

Both examples illustrate a deeper historical forgetting: the tendency to read ancient metaphysical concepts through the lens of modern object-oriented thinking, as if philosophy has always been about cataloguing things and their properties (although perhaps understandable, considering that the whole discipline of taxonomy arguably begins in Aristotle). But what this overlooks is the ontological weight of the original inquiry—the question of what it means to be at all, and the recognition that being appears in degrees, or has modes of actuality, not as interchangeable objects or parts.

This 'flattening' of metaphysical language reflects a broader historical drift in the understanding of philosophy itself. As Pierre Hadot has shown, ancient philosophy was not primarily the classification of entities or the cataloging of phenomena. Rather, it was tied to a transformative way of being—a way of orienting one’s life toward what truly is, through contemplative insight and existential practice. Theoria existed in support of praxis.

For Plato and Aristotle, metaphysics was not a matter of debating which kinds of objects “count” as substances, but inquiry into what it means for something to be—to become aware of the intelligible natures that make reality coherent and meaningful.

I just watched Brian Cox explain the incomprehensible minuteness of the Planck Length: if you expanded a single proton to the size of the solar system, the Planck Length would be the size of a virus. :yikes:

Plato rejects materialist attempts to explain everything on the basis of that of which it was made. According to Plato, the entities that best merit the title “beings” are the intelligible Forms, which material objects imperfectly copy. — SEP. Substance

This definition seems to blur two quite different senses of the term being. In contemporary English, "beings" typically refers to individual entities—what we might call things or particulars—especially living or sentient beings. But in the context of Plato’s metaphysics, "being" refers not to discrete entities, but to what most truly is—that which grounds the very reality and intelligibility of particulars.

The Forms, in Plato’s view, are not "beings" in the same sense as horses or trees. They are not rival “things” set over against the sensible world. Rather, they are what makes the sensible world intelligible and real at all. As Eric Perl puts it:

Plato’s understanding of reality as form, then, is not at all a matter of setting up intelligible forms in opposition to sensible things, as if forms rather than sensible things are what is real. On the contrary, forms are the very guarantee of sensible things: in order that sensible things may have any identity, any truth, any reality, they must have and display intelligible ‘looks,’ or forms, in virtue of which they are what they are and so are anything at all. It is in precisely this sense that forms are the reality of all things. Far from stripping the sensible world of all intelligibility and locating it ‘elsewhere,’ Plato expressly presents the forms as the truth, the whatness, the intelligibility, and hence the reality, of the world. — Eric Perl - Thinking Being p25

Think about this way - take any object. The very first thing you need to do, is identify it. 'Hey, it's an 'X'. If you can't identify it, then you don't know what it is.

I notice in the opening of the SEP article Substance, the description of Brahman as “some fundamental kind of entity” seeks to impose a thing-like characterization on a concept that, in its original context, is expressly beyond all such determinations - which is precisely what the term 'reification' means.

An entity, after all, is typically understood as a bounded, identifiable thing. But Brahman, like Plato’s Being or Heidegger’s Sein, is not an entity among other entities. It is that which makes beings possible, while itself transcending all objectification. The tendency to treat foundational metaphysical principles as “things” or “entities” characterises what Heidegger criticized as 'ontotheology'.

So I was just listening to Fareed Zakaria declare DOGE ‘an abject failure’. Of the $165b savings it claims to have made, media analysis indicates a figure nearer to $65b. (I don’t know if that takes into account repairing the damage accidentally inflicted by the chainsaw.) Musk has practically dropped from view in Washington, presumably to rescue Tesla from its death dive, and DOGE programs have been taken over by Dept of Finance.

Also, Bill Gates has come out with blistering criticisms of DOGE, saying that the richest man in the world has destroyed programs (which Gates as head of Gates Foundation knows backwards) which could lead to literally millions of lives lost. Musk has maintained a sullen silence, although some of the MAGA minions have been trying to find insalubrious rumours to spread about Gates, who has said he plans to sink his entire vast wealth into global health and economic initiatives. The contrast between the two could not be clearer, though. Bill Gates may not be a saint, but he’s at least a good guy.

At least one of you does, anyway. (Or it might only be me.)

It's paywalled. The Telegraph is a conservative outlet. But I'm sure there are leftist threats to free speech. A few years back I looked into the cases of prosecution of preachers in Canada for preaching against same-sex relationships. But both the UK and Canada are parliamentary democracies, and they're light years from anything like the totalitarian tendencies showing up under Trump. These include the abuse of the justice system to take vengeance on perceived enemies, the invocation of emergencies to justify wartime powers, the disregarding of Congressional authority - there's a long list.

Hope this isn't geoblocked, it's from a Sydney morning TV show couple of days back: feature interview with Australian guitar legend Tommy Emmanuel, whom I first saw in, oh, about 1979.



Never learned to read or write music. When I used to see him, he would turn up and stand in as a guest artist, and he's just play anything whatever by ear, on the spot, often with little or no rehearsal. He's a true legend.

Plibersek: from environment to social services. Hardly a demotion although the media seems to want to frame it as such. Michelle Rowlands takes over as A-G. Full list here (The Guardian). Shame about Dreyfus and Husic, but, as the saying goes, that's politics.

Thanks, Banno. I appreciate you pressing for clarity. Let me try to make my position more explicit.

The real issue here is not whether we can use words like “game,” “red,” or “round” without reference to forms—we obviously can, as you say. The deeper question is what makes such uses possible in the first place. What makes it possible, for instance, for different people in different times and places to agree that 2+2=4, or that a circle is defined as form with all points equidistant from a center? These aren’t just verbal habits or social conventions; they are stable, objective insights that transcend their pragmatic use.

On your view, meaning arises from use. Fair enough. But that already presupposes that all meaning is socially constructed or linguistically mediated, which is already nominalist. The trouble with that is that it fails to ground the stability and universality of many basic concepts—not least those in mathematics, logic, and ethics.

For example, the concept 'equals' does not arise from observation. It isn’t the property of any object we can point to. Yet without it, as I said, both language and mathematics would not be possible. So what grounds the universality of this relation? Saying “it’s just how we talk” sounds more like an attempt to dodge a metaphysical question than to account for it.

As I said, I think the origin of forms and universals was as explanatory principles that account for why the world is intelligible in the first place. Forms are not things alongside other things. They are the reason why things are what they are and why we can know them as such. Eliminating them may appear to simplify your ontology, but it actually leaves you with no account of meaning other than habit or social practice, leaving only a consensus reality.

So the choice is not between “plain speech” and “unnecessary metaphysics.” It’s between two competing worldviews—one that treats intelligibility as real and one that reduces it to a social artifact. I’m inviting you to consider that the first may have more going for it than analytic fashion currently allows. And also that the historical reasons for the current ascendancy of plain language and analytic philosophy are plainly discernable.

Imagine some species on another planet, far larger than Earth, with a daily rotation of one of our weeks, and an annual rotation of tens of our decades. Presumably the units they would use for measuring time would be very different to terrestrial units.
— Wayfarer
You are thinking of the Planck units, and yes, a species on another world can independently discover those units.
Under those units, four universal constants (speed of light, gravitational constant, reduced Planck constant, and Boltzmann constant) are all 1. Of course the aliens would give them different names.

There are also some quantum constants like the charge of an electron, and obvious unit charge. — noAxioms

I'm was not familiar with this terminology, so I sought help from the Oracle, who provided some helpful clarifications along these lines, although having read it, I now understand it.

The claim that Planck units (Planck time, Planck length, Planck mass, etc.) are a set of "natural units" derived solely from fundamental physical constants: the speed of light (c), the gravitational constant (G), and the reduced Planck constant (ℏ) is correct. These constants are believed to be universal throughout the cosmos. In this sense, an advanced alien civilization, by studying the laws of physics, could indeed independently arrive at the concept of Planck units and their values. They represent the fundamental scales at which quantum gravity effects are expected to become significant, and they are independent of any specific planet's rotation or orbit. (Remember the Pioneer Plaque? This was attached to a satellite bound for interstellar space, on the basis of the belief that an alien culture capable of intercepting it would know what it meant.)

However the existence of Planck units, while providing a universal and objective scale for duration, does not fundamentally undermine the argument that measurement (or observation from a specific frame of reference) is an essential element of duration, nor does it negate the "subjective" components we discussed.

Even if an event's "true" duration is, say, X Planck units in its own rest frame, an observer moving at a high velocity relative to that event, or an observer in a strong gravitational field, will still measure a different duration for that event due to time dilation. The laws of physics (including those that lead to Planck units) are universal, but the measurement of duration is relative to the observer's frame of reference. So, while Planck time provides a "floor" for how short a meaningful duration can be, and a universal constant to define a second, it doesn't mean all observers will measure the same number of Planck times for a given event. The "objective unit" itself (e.g., one Planck time) still experiences relativistic effects. (Also while Planck units are fundamentally important in theoretical physics, they are incredibly tiny (5.39×10 ⁻⁴⁴seconds) and are not a practical unit of measurement.)

But the structure is more like a 'transcendental' for the world (i.e. a precondition of it). — boundless

My point that "measurement is an essential element of duration" stands. In a relativistic universe, duration isn't an absolute, pre-existing quantity that merely needs to be "counted" by an observer. In other words, it is not transcendental, but phenomenal. The duration of an event itself is dependent on the observer's frame. Therefore, the act of measurement, by defining the observer's frame of reference, is intrinsically linked to the definition of that particular duration for that observer. You're not just measuring a pre-defined duration; you are, in a sense, participating in the definition of its duration by being in a specific frame.

If "they exist in a different manner to phenomenal objects", then an account of this different existence might be offered, and a reason given as to the need for such a thing, especially in the light of what was said above. — Banno

You won't see it because you're representing a philosophical attitude (analytic philosophy) which has long since eschewed any idea of an hierarchical ontology, which is what is required to make sense of the idea that things and principles are real in different ways or exist on different levels; there can be no 'levels'. The default view is that existence is univocal, there is only one meaning to 'it exists' and something either exists or it doesn't. But that sense of univocity, and the corresponding loss of an hierarchical ontology, is itself a subject for metaphysics. And as metaphysics is a dead subject - why, then, there can be no account!

Why should there be a thing that is common to all our uses of a word? — Banno

Again that is the very reification that you previously criticized. ‘Reification’ is derived from the root ‘res’ which means ‘thing’ (it is also the root of 'reality'.) And forms (or universals) are not things. Nor are they thoughts, although when they appear, they appear as thoughts (per Bertrand Russell, previously quoted.) But if they are principles that operate in reality and are grasped by reason, then they exist in a different manner to phenomenal objects. That is the nub of the issue.

And furthermore, being round or being red are not very good examples of forms (principles or ideas). That they can easily be regarded as attributes or properties of particulars is not an argument against the idea of forms. Better examples are those debated in the original texts - such as the form ‘equals’ in the Phaedo. What attribute or shape does 'equals' correspond to? None that I can think of. Yet you and I can both grasp what it means, because we’re possessed of rational skills and the ability to apprehend abstractions. Is 'equals' a thing? Perhaps in the modern vernacular, (‘when did that become a thing?) but not in any other sense. But without the concept equals, verbal communication and certainly basic arithmetic would be impossible.

The difficulty is, we’re some centuries removed from the cultural milieu in which forms were part of philosophy (then known as "realism" with quite a different meaning to what it has today). And they were then part of an alternative conception of knowledge, which provided the broader context within which they were meaningful:

Ockham (a principle instigator of nominalism) did not do away with objective reality, but in doing away with one part of objective reality—forms—he did away with a fundamental principle of explanation for objective reality. In doing away with forms, Ockham did away with formal causality. Formal causality secures teleology—the ends or purposes of things follow from what they are and what is in accord with or capable of fulfilling their natures. In the natural world, this realist framework secures an intrinsic connection between efficient causes and their effects—an efficient cause produces its effects by communicating some formality: fire warms by informing objects with its heat. ....

A genuine realist (concerning forms) should see “forms”...as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.
In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality. Preoccupied with overcoming Cartesian skepticism, it often seems as if philosophy’s highest aspiration is merely to secure some veridical cognitive events. Rarely sought is a more robust goal: an authoritative and life-altering wisdom — Joshua Hochschild, What's Wrong with Ockham?

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@Count Timothy von Icarus

An historical myth. According to my sources it has some truth mixed with exaggeration.

Around 1233, Pope Gregory IX issued a papal bull called Vox in Rama, which described alleged satanic rituals involving black cats. While it did associate cats (especially black ones) with heresy and devil worship, it did not universally declare cats as the "incarnation of Satan" or call for their general extermination across Europe although it did contribute to fear or superstition about cats, especially black cats, which lives on.

While there may have been some localized killings or persecution of cats due to this association, there is no historical evidence that it led to a widespread or systematic reduction of cat populations across all of Europe.

The Black Death (1347–1351) occurred over a century later. It was primarily spread by fleas carried by black rats. A theoretical link is sometimes made that fewer cats meant more rats, and therefore more fleas and more plague. However, it's far from established.

Also, I do have confidence in some of the individual ministers. I think overall Chris Bowen has been effective in Climate Change. Jim Chalmers is highly professional in treasury. There are others. There's much more professionalism there than in the opposition team.

I think the best that can be hoped for is competence. But that is something.

Hey the ABC vote counter how has Labor at 92 - which I think is the largest majority since Federation, unless I’m mistaken.

Non-eliminativist physicalists don't assume the physical world to be totally mindless of course (unless the minds under discussion are defined as being incompatible with physicalism). — wonderer1

I’d be interested in an elaboration of that. Would that be the minds of animals other than h.sapiens, or ‘mind’ in a more abstract sense?

I’m not saying that what they’re proposing is a good thing. I can *kind of* understand the motivation, because the influx of undocumented migrants is a serious issue in North America and Europe. But I think legal ways of dealing with it need to be found, rather than declaring it a ‘military emergency’ in order to justify the suspension of basic human rights. But, make no mistake, this is not a thought-bubble - it’s been the trend of the Trump administration right from the beginning of his first term.

I feel obliged to save God from the fiery pits of Hume’s “to the flames!” — Fire Ologist

One my lecturers in philosophy wryly pointed out that Hume’s condemnation at the end of his Treatise actually applies to the Treatise. ‘Take any book of scholastic metaphysic…’ The lecturer compared Hume, like the positivists after him, to the Uroboros, the mythical snake that swallows itself. ‘The hardest part’, he would say with a mischievous grin, ‘is the last bite’.

(BTW I cross-posted my above reply to you before I saw your reply above that, although I don’t think we’ve crossed purposes.)

I believe anyway. Because God makes no sense either, and really my own existence with all of its questions and knowledge of illusion, makes no sense either. None of it makes sense, so, to me, there is plenty of room to trust God anyway. — Fire Ologist

I know I’ve already said plenty, but your comment has stayed with me—partly because it touches on a deep philosophical issue that I’ve reflected on before.

One of the most insightful books I’ve read on this is The Theological Origins of Modernity by Michael Allen Gillespie. Gillespie challenges the usual story that modernity arose from reason overcoming faith. Instead, he shows that the transition to modern thought was deeply shaped by a theological struggle within Christianity itself—especially the debate over divine reason versus divine will.

Brief summary: Gillespie turns the conventional reading of the Enlightenment (as reason overcoming religion) on its head by explaining how the humanism of Petrarch, the free-will debate between Luther and Erasmus, the scientific forays of Francis Bacon, the epistemological debate between Descarte and Hobbes, were all motivated by an underlying wrestling with the questions posed by nominalism, which according to Gillespie dismantled the rational God / universe of medieval scholasticism and introduced (by way of the Franciscans) a fideistic God-of-pure-will, born of a concern that anything less than such would jeopardize His divine omnipotence. This combined with the emerging nominalism to form the basis of much of modern thought.

Subsequent intellectual history is, in Gillespie's reading, a grappling with the question of free will and divine determinism. Protestantism involved at its core fideistic, denying free will in order to preserve God's absolute power. However, this in turn culminated in an ambivalence about salvation. If God simply wills whom to save, human action has no real merit (ex. Luther's "sin boldly"). Gillespie's chapter on the debate between Erasmus-Luther was among the most interesting in bringing this out. — Christopher Blosser

In medieval scholasticism, especially in the work of Aquinas, God was understood as transcendent but also rational. The universe was seen as ordered in a way that human reason could, at least in part, comprehend—since human reason reflected the divine logos. But Gillespie argues that a shift occurred with the rise of theological voluntarism, particularly through the influence of Franciscan thinkers. They insisted that God’s will was absolutely free and not bound even by rationality. To suggest otherwise, they argued, would limit divine omnipotence.

This paved the way for a more fideistic view of God, where faith meant trusting in the unknowable will of God, even when it seemed to make no sense. This tension played out dramatically in the Reformation, especially in Luther’s rejection of scholastic rationalism and his emphasis on trust in God’s inscrutable will.

So your comment, about trusting God because nothing makes sense, actually reflects a deep-standing thread in Christian culture —a move away from the idea of a rationally ordered universe toward a faith based on trust in God’s sheer will. In that light, what feels like a modern attitude is actually rooted in a much older theological shift. This is what Gillespie brings out. But, be assured, Thomist philosophy lives on, and there are many profound Thomist philosophers to this day.

It isn’t settled yet, until the final announcements are made by Albanese. I should wait until then.