I'd be happy to consider alternatives - if they could be given clearly. — Banno
The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies. — Neils Bohr
The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies. — Neils Bohr
definition of essence — MoK
We might even go a step further and ask if the idea of essences is worth keeping. — Banno
Come on people. We all know what essence is. — Fire Ologist
What does mind deal in, if not essential form? — Fire Ologist
patterns — wonderer1
This doesn't suggest that you are willing to consider — wonderer1
The recognition you have, of the patterns you recognize is a characteristic of your mind rather than a recognition of something essential to things — wonderer1
And what is whatness?Essence is whatness. — Fire Ologist
you need to explain what the essence is. — MoK
A being is something that objectively exists and has a set of properties and abilities. — MoK
You miss the abilities. Other than that, we are on the same page. Now, going back to the Trinity, why are three beings with different properties and abilities needed? To me, a single being with the ability to create and who is knowledgeable suffices.So why do you need more? You seem to be in full agreement with all that I said. What do you think as essence is, that you have not invoked “essence” by talking about a being that objectively exists with a particular set of properties? — Fire Ologist
To be a substance (thing-unit) is to function as a thing-unit in various situations. And to have a property is to exhibit this property in various contexts. ('The only fully independent substances are those which-like people-self-consciously take themselves to be units.)
As far as process philosophy is concerned, things can be conceptualized as clusters of actual and potential processes. With Kant, the process philosopher wants to identify what a thing is with what it does (or, at any rate, can do). After all, even on the basis of an ontology of substance and property, processes are epistemologically fundamental. Without them, a thing is inert, undetectable, disconnected from the world's causal commerce, and inherently unknowable. Our only epistemic access to the absolute properties of things is through inferential triangulation from their modus operandi-from the processes through which these manifest themselves. In sum, processes without substantial entities are perfectly feasible in the conceptual order of things, but substances without processes are effectively inconceivable.
Things as traditionally conceived can no more dispense with dispositions than they can dispense with properties. Accordingly, a substance ontologist cannot get by without processes. If his things are totally inert - if they do nothing - they are pointless. Without processes there is no access to dispositions, and without dispositional properties, substance lie outside our cognitive reach. One can only observe what things do, via their discernible effects; what they are, over and above this, is something that always involves the element of conjectural imputation. And here process ontology takes a straight-forward line: In its sight, things simply are what they do rather, what they dispositionally can do and normally would do.
The fact is that all we can ever detect about "things" relates to how they act upon and interact with one another - a substance has no discernible, and thus no justifiably attributable, properties save those that represent responses elicited from it in interaction with others. And so a substance metaphysics of the traditional sort paints itself into the embarrassing comer of having to treat substances ·as bare (propertyless) particulars [substratum] because there is no nonspeculative way to say what concrete properties a substance ever has in and of itself. But a process metaphysics is spared this embarrassment because processes are, by their very nature, interrelated and interactive. A process-unlike a substance -can simply be what it does. And the idea of process enters into our experience directly and as such.
Nicholas Rescher - "Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy
To be a substance (thing-unit)... — Count Timothy von Icarus
I think we can agree that God is simple and irreducible. To me, that is the definition of the mind, too. The mind is a substance with the ability to experience, freely decide, and create. These abilities are needed to guarantee that a change in things could exist, such as ideas that we are entertaining right now. Mind itself can do one thing at any given moment since it is simple, so I think more minds are involved in intelligent creatures like humans. God, however, is a different beast. It is a mind, but has access to Knowledge. God has the ability to create stuff, too. Our minds create ideas always. The act of creation and the point that God exists must lie at the same point, though since otherwise you need a time, you need time for time, etc. which leads to a regress. The act of creation was necessary, too, necessary in the sense that it was a must-do since no other points were available to God. Saying all these, I think God/mind is not subject to change, going from potentiality to actuality, whereas the stuff, non-mind thing, such as matter, are subject to change, so they are going from potentiality to actuality. So we have two sorts of substances, mind-sort and non-mind-sort.As far as process philosophy is concerned, things can be conceptualized as clusters of actual and potential processes. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Fucksake.Essence is the meaning of a word that might be compiled from an analysis of all of the uses of a word - if we quantify and collect all of the uses of a word and find its mean use, we’d hold the essence. — Fire Ologist
But it seems you can never quite say what "catness" is....catness... — Count Timothy von Icarus
67. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait,
temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: 'games' form a family.
And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way. Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto
been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And
the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.
But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties"—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread— namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres". — Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Should put the whole thing to bed. — Apustimelogist
Essence is the meaning of a word that might be compiled from an analysis of all of the uses of a word - if we quantify and collect all of the uses of a word and find its mean use, we’d hold the essence. — Fire Ologist
Essence is the meaning of a word that might be compiled from an analysis of all of the uses of a word - if we quantify and collect all of the uses of a word and find its mean use, we’d hold the essence.
— Fire Ologist
What does this even mean? — Hanover
Actually it's don't look to the meaning, look instead to the use.Meaning is use. — Fire Ologist
look instead to the use. — Banno
Another difficulty with ignoring substances — Count Timothy von Icarus
But it seems you can never quite say what "catness" is. — Banno
Think on this a bit, if you will. It carried the very point Wittgenstein and others have made against essences.Neither does anyone say how “catness” is used. You just use it. — Fire Ologist
As if this were an explanation. Somewhat circular, no?
It is through action, and only through action, that real beings manifest or “unveil” their being, their presence, to each other and to me. All the beings that make up the world of my experience thus reveal themselves as not just present, standing out of nothingness, but actively presenting themselves to others and vice versa by interacting with each other. Meditating on this leads us to the metaphysical conclusion that it is the very nature of real being, existential being, to pour over into action that is self-revealing and self-communicative. In a word, existential being is intrinsically dynamic, not
static.
...by metaphysical reflection I come to realize that this is not just a brute fact but an intrinsic property belonging to the very nature of every real being as such, if it is to count at all in the community of existents. For let us suppose (a metaphysical thought experiment) that there were a real existing being that had no action at all. First of all, no other being could know it (unless it had created it), since it is only by some action that it could manifest or reveal its presence and nature; secondly, it would make no difference whatever to any other being, since it is totally unmanifested, locked in its own being and could not even react to anything done to it. And if it had no action within itself, it would not make a difference even to itself....To be real is to make a difference.
One of the central flaws in Kant’s theory of knowledge is that he has blown up the bridge of action by which real beings manifest their natures to our cognitive receiving sets. He admits that things in themselves act on us, on our senses; but he insists that such action reveals nothing intelligible about these beings, nothing about their natures in themselves, only an unordered, unstructured sense manifold that we have to order and structure from within ourselves. But action that is completely indeterminate, that reveals nothing meaningful about the agent from which it comes, is incoherent, not really action at all [or we might say, cannot be meaningfully ascribed to any "thing," i.e. as cause].
The whole key to a realist epistemology like that of St. Thomas is that action is the “self revelation of being,” that it reveals a being as this kind of actor on me, which is equivalent to saying it really exists and has this kind of nature = an abiding center of acting and being acted on. This does not deliver a complete knowledge of the being acting, but it does deliver an authentic knowledge of the real world as a community of interacting agents—which is after all what we need to know most about the world so that we may learn how to cope with it and its effects on us as well as our effects upon it. This is a modest but effective relational realism, not the unrealistic ideal of the only thing Kant will accept as genuine knowledge of real beings, i.e., knowledge of them as they are in themselves independent of any action on us—which he admits can only be attained by a perfect creative knower. He will allow no medium between the two extremes: either perfect knowledge with no mediation of action, or no knowledge of the real at all.
W. Norris Clarke - "The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics"
For all created things are defined, in their essence and in their way of developing, by their own logoi and by the logoi of the beings that provide their external context. Through these logoi they find their defining limits.
-St. Maximus the Confessor - Ambiguum 7
Hegel's basic demarche in both versions [of the Logic] is to trade on the incoherencies of the notions of the thing derived from this modern epistemology, very much as in the PhG. The Ding-an-sich is first considered: it is the unity which is reflected into a multiplicity of properties in its relation to other things, principally the knowing mind. But its properties cannot be separated from the thing in itself, for without properties it is indistinguishable from all the others. We might therefore say that there is only one thing in itself, but then it has nothing with which to interact, and it was this interaction with others, which gave rise to the multiplicity of properties. If there is only one thing-in-itself, it must of itself go over into the multiplicity of external properties. If we retain the notion of many, however, we reach the same result, for the many can only be distinguished by some difference of properties, hence the properties of each cannot be separated from it, it cannot be seen as simple identity.
Thus the notion of a Ding-an-sich as unknowable, simple substrate, separate from the visible properties which only arise in its interaction with others, cannot be sustained. The properties are essential to the thing, whether we look at it as one or many. And so Hegel goes over to consider the view which makes the thing nothing but these properties, which sees it as the simple coexistence of the properties. Here is where the theories of reality as made up of ' matters' naturally figure in Hegel's discussion.
But the particular thing cannot just be reduced to a mere coexistence of properties. For each of these properties exists in many things. In order to single out a particular instance of any property, we have to invoke another property dimension. If we want to single out this blue we have to distinguish it from others, identify it by its shape, or its position in time and space, or its relation to other things. But to do this is to introduce the notion of the multipropertied particular, for we have something now which is blue and round, or blue and to the left of the grey, or blue and occurring today, or something of the sort.
-Charles Taylor - Hegel
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