I think Bertrand Russell provided a good solution for any problem caused by this concept in his famous essay, "On Denoting " — Wittgenstein
Suppose I express my idea of a blue apple by painting a picture of five blue apples. I point my finger at it and say, "This represents five blue apples." If later I discover that blue apples really exist, I can still point to the same picture and say, "This represents five real blue apples." And if I can't discover the existence of the blue apples, I can point to the painting and say, "This represents five imaginary blue apples." In all three cases the picture is the same. The concept of five real apples does not contain one more apple than the concept of five possible apples. The idea of a unicorn will not get more horns just because unicorns exist in reality. In Kant's terminology, one does not add any new properties to a concept by expressing the belief that the concept corresponds to a real object external to one's mind. — Martin Gardner
Aquinas thought existence actualizes what some thing is (form) to makes its existence in reality (essence as accidents and substances). But doesn't a form have to exist in a sense before being actualized? — Gregory
Ye I think the book Frankenstein applies to all of use. We are fashioned by the gods (evolution?) in ways we really don't understand. We approach the world with love, expecting acceptance, but we find things happen to use that don't make sense (Camus's "absurd") and we become resentful and doubtful. We don't know who is to blame for the whole situation but we feel like we shouldn't be on this earth in this condition. We feel like the world owes us more. In the final analysis, we oscillate between pure idealism ("I create reality") and perfect realism ("only matter exists"). I think this dialectic is what "phenomenology" means. — Gregory
Necessity and contingency in Aquinas's sense don't exist because a thing doesn't have form\matter — Gregory
An object is one thing composing necessity and contingency and everything is related to something else. — Gregory
his arguments presupposes God's existence although he is trying to prove it — Gregory
It says there is design which by definition means "done by an intellect". So he assumes God's mind in trying to prove it — Gregory
the first 3 ways assume contingency and God's necessity in the premises. — Gregory
...essence, or what makes a thing what it is, is distinct from its existence.
Imagine a unicorn... — Walter Pound
I dont see why the interaction problem would apply to Aquinas any less than to Descartes. The soul is the same for both. — Gregory
Descartes described a human as one substance composed of body and soul. — Gregory
This conclusion in the Sixth Meditation asserts the well-known substance dualism of Descartes. That dualism leads to problems. As Princess Elisabeth, among others, asked: if mind is unextended and matter is extended, how do they interact? This problem vexed not only Descartes, who admitted to Elisabeth that he didn't have a good answer (3:694), but it also vexed Descartes' followers and other metaphysicians. It seems that, somehow, states of the mind and the body must be brought into relation, because when we decide to pick up a pencil our arm actually moves, and when light hits our eyes we experience the visible world. But how do mind and body interact? Some of Descartes' followers adopted an occasionalist position, according to which God mediates the causal relations between mind and body; mind does not affect body, and body does not affect mind, but God gives the mind appropriate sensations at the right moment, and he makes the body move by putting it into the correct brain states at a moment that corresponds to the volition to pick up the pencil. Other philosophers adopted yet other solutions, including the monism of Spinoza and the pre-established harmony of Leibniz. — René Descartes, SEP
One of the deepest and most lasting legacies of Descartes’ philosophy is his thesis that mind and body are really distinct—a thesis now called “mind-body dualism.” He reaches this conclusion by arguing that the nature of the mind (that is, a thinking, non-extended thing) is completely different from that of the body (that is, an extended, non-thinking thing), and therefore it is possible for one to exist without the other. This argument gives rise to the famous problem of mind-body causal interaction still debated today. — Descartes, the Mind-Body Distinction
You would have to convince me that Descartes said something different from Aquinas. — Gregory
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