What sort of thing is a concept? — Banno
As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, intellect is that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts (like the concepts man and mortal), put them together into judgments (like the judgment that all men are mortal), and reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal). It is to be distinguished from imagination, the faculty by which we form mental images; and from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the goings on in the external material world and the internal world of the body. ...
Concepts that are the constituents of intellectual activity are universal while mental images and sensations are always essentially particular. Any mental image I can form of a man is always going to be of a man of a particular sort -- tall, short, fat, thin, blonde, redheaded, bald, or what have you. It will fit at most many men, but not all. But my concept "man" applies to every single man without exception. Or to use my stock example, any mental image I can form of a triangle will be an image of an isosceles , scalene, or equilateral triangle, of a black, blue, or green triangle, etc. But the abstract concept triangularity applies to all triangles without exception. 1 — Ed Feser
We're moving about a single chair, and some annoying shit wants to point out that since the chair is made up of molecules, and those molecules don't have a determinate boundary, that we can't say exactly which molecules make up the chair. — Marchesk
Nobody knows what anything really is. That is what philosophical scepticism really means. Our situation as intelligent beings is still such that everything we experience could still be an elaborate charade, and we'd have no way of knowing. (This even describes the situation of natural science, as a sufficiently elaborate charade might appear as consistent). Philosophy suggests should be disturbed by this possibility, otherwise one is not taking the question seriously. — Wayfarer
I want to know what the world is like — Marchesk
Nobody knows what anything really is. — Wayfarer
A good example is the universe beyond our light cone. We know the universe is bigger than our light cone, but we can’t know anything specific about that region of space. — Marchesk
then how does physics works. I certainly don’t experience the wave function. — Marchesk
The puzzle is the difference between how the world appears to us and how it is. — Marchesk
How something is, is how it is independent of any view - not relative to any sensory organs. It seems to me that we're simply making category errors when we confuse appearances with how things are. — Harry Hindu
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