It can be said, in a certain sense, that nominalism becomes absurd if it is carried to its ultimate consequences. For it would deny the very possibility of identity as repetition and permanence. We need time and permanence in order to distinguish and identify. Identity and difference imply each other — JuanZu

Derrida's chain of deconstructive tropes (difference, gramme, trace) directs us to the futural difference within presence, the way that a would-be identity comes back to itself differently as the same . Derrida's notion of iterability is informed by a radical view of temporality he shares with Heidegger. The repetition of the same meaning intention one moment to the next is the fundamental origin of the contextual break, and our exposure to otherness. Iterability, as differance, would be an

"imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself..it is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition... Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion.”

Derrida's thinking here bears a remarkable resemblance to Heidegger's insistence that identity is never simply present to itself, but differs from itself as the same.

“The same never coincides with the equal, not even in the empty indifferent oneness of what is merely identical...The same…is the belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of the difference. We can only say "the same" if we think difference.”

Nietzsche arrived at a similar conclusion:

“Just as mathematics and mechanics were long considered sciences with absolute validity, and only now does the suspicion dare show its face that they are nothing more and nothing less than applied logic on the strength of the particular, indemonstrable assumption that 'identical cases' exist ­and logic itself is a consistent notation based on that assumption (that identical cases exist) being carried out…

Deleuze explains the meaning of Nietzsche Eternal Return in the following way:

“When we say that the eternal return is not the return of the Same, or of the Similar or the Equal, we mean that it does not presuppose any identity. On the contrary, it is said of a world without identity, without resemblance or equality. It is said of a world the very ground of which
is difference, in which everything rests upon disparities, upon differences of differences which reverberate to infinity (the world of intensity). The eternal return is itself the Identical, the similar and the equal, but it presupposes nothing of itself in that of which it is said. It is said of
that which has no identity, no resemblance and no equality. It is the identical which is said of the
different, the resemblance which is said of the pure disparate, the equal which is said only of the
unequal and the proximity which is said of all distances. Things must be dispersed within difference, and their identity must be dissolved before they become subject to eternal return and to identity in the eternal return.”(Difference and Repetition)

What of the cogito. I think therefore i am? What is this relative too? Fichte says it's related to others but the existent of a single personality seems objective to me — Gregory

Good question.

You exist.

Your existence encompasses your entire existence.

Your thoughts and your experiences are aspects of your existence.

Each part of your existence illuminates the other aspects. Your conception of consciousness is that it is not everything else.

Each of your individual conceptions is a network of relationships.

Your concept of a tree has a link to your concept of a leaf, of roots, of bark, of dogs peeing, of the one summer you climbed and scraped your shin...

A sufficiently dense web of relationships creates a compelling shape that we experience as meaning. The components of that shape are relationships.

A personality can (should) feel compelling without needing to be objective. The relationships between your experiences form something real and unique - just not something objective.

You, a thing, are describing things. You cannot describe a relationship in the absence of things. X is a thing. Everything else are things. — NOS4A2

It depends what we mean by "thing".

Various people have spent significant effort in trying to describe intrinsic properties, essence or identity in an objective, context independent way. These efforts have failed.

All definitions are circular. A describes B and B describes A.

Objective definitions don't exist.

We can, and do, describe things in relation to other things. We measure, for example, distance by taking one thing (a ruler) and comparing it to the distance we wish to measure.

Our understanding of everything is by comparison with everything else.

The relationships between things is all we ever see. We never see anything between relationships.

You experience relationships with tables and chairs. You don't experience the table and chair themselves. When you describe a table, you are describing relationships of the table.

The distinction between the table and the table's relationships is of little concern when sitting down to eat but is critical in meta-language and metaphysics discussions.

Axiomatic Mathematics

Axiomatic Mathematics specifically tries to describe tables while excluding table's relationships. This is impossible. The effort invested is wasted.

All our descriptions have always described the relationships of a thing. Your conception of a table is of a table's relationships, not the table itself.

If you’ve seen a relationship, and in fact it is all you ever see, what does one look like?

Why would you say the philosophy of Hegel has nothing to say about nominalism? The OP points out that realism tries to bring in spiritual realit8es as formative principles in matter. This would be a middle ground between the reality of extension and the reality of idealism as two parallel aspects of reality. I would disagree with this specific middle ground because, for one reason, matter is self-evidently material. To make it half spiritual half general matter is to have an odd idealism on your hands



So you are saying "I think therefore I am" is not a rigourus argument. But the substantial reality of experience is that consciousness is as "there", is as "out there", is as objective as are material objects that surround us. The sun shines everywhere and so does consciousness within us

In a sense my point is very similar to what Derrida says about how the identity of the self in order to transcend and have a certain ideality implies the particular disappearance of that self. Derrida suggests that when someone writes "I am X" we are in the presence of the identity of the self beyond its mere presence, and suggests to us that its factical absence is necessary and implied.

Isn't this the ideality of a universal that, in a sense, detaches itself from its particular ground and projects itself onto a repetition as the condition of possibility of identity? Derrida suggests to us that identity, the Being of things is always in transcendence and that transcendence is necessary for identity (just as in a book about me, read by someone else is an inelidible transcendence [Derrida would call it Spectrum] of my being and my identity ).

Nominalism would not take into account the repetition and transcendence in the identity of things, thus depriving itself of any discourse on Being. And like all skepticism it would fall into its own pragmatic contradiction by speaking of the being of things while denying the condition (transcendence, spectralization if you will) that allows it to speak precisely of things and to be a philosophical stance.

How does theory of universals/platonism handle borderline cases where you have something that has qualities of both x and y, say a couch that folds into a bed? As you're manipulating the thing, there's going to be a point in time where half the people think it's a couch, and the other half think it's a bed.

I don't know off the top of my head. Maybe someone else can answer.

Maybe the answer is that objects are similar enough to mentally classify them as without saying that participate in a Form which is individual and distant. Objects have their own reality and support their own existence through their materiality

Your post is not coherent. If you rewrite it I can give a reply.

If two objects, say two bowling balls, are identical in everyway according to science, we don't have to posit them sharing something higher from them in order to use the same word for them. The same would be true is one was green and the other black although identical in all other respects. Classification is not depentent on Platonism or platonism. We use language however in a Platonic way

Classification is not depentent on Platonism or platonism. — Gregory

I would agree with that, but that is because I am not a platonist or a Platonist, I lean towards nominalism.

We use language however in a Platonic way — Gregory

I don't think we can use language in a Platonic or nominalistic way, since these two are already related to how we use language.

When we classify two objects in a language set we are more focused on the use of language then with the objects. The latter are discerable by the senses while language is understood by the mind. Therefore langauge uses more of a generalization then the senses use

"Those who put forward such assertions really themselves say, if we bear in mind what we remarked before, the direct opposite of what they mean: a fact which is perhaps best able to bring them to reflect on the nature of the certainty of sense-experience. They speak of the 'existence' of external objects, which can be more precisely characterized as actual, absolutely particular, wholly personal, individual things, each of them not like anything or anyone else; this is the existence which they say has absolute certainty and truth. They 'mean' this bit of paper I am writing on, or rather have written on: but they do not say what they 'mean'. If they really wanted to say this bit of paper which they 'mean', and they wanted to say so, that is impossible, because the This of sense, which belongs to consciousness, i.e. to what is inherently universal. In the very attempt to say it, it would, therefore, crumble in their hands; those who have begun to describe it would not be able to finish doing so: they would have to hand it over to others, who would themselves in the last resort have to confess to speaking about a thing that has no being. They 'mean', then, doubtless this bit of paper here, which is quite different from that bit over there; but they speak of actual things, external or sensible objects, absolutely individual, real, and so on; that is, they say about them what is simply universal. consequently what is called unspeakable is nothing else than what is untrue, irrational, something barely and simply 'meant'.
if nothing is said of a thing except that it is an actual thing, an external object, this only makes it the most universal of all possible things, and thereby we express its likeness, its identity, with everything, rather than its difference from everything else. when I say 'an individual thing', I at once state it to be really quite a universal, for everything is an individual thing: and anything we like. More precisely, as this bit of paper, each and every paper is a 'this bit of paper', and I have thus said all the while what is universal. If I want, however, to help out speech- which has the divine nature of directly turning the mere 'meaning' right round about, making it into something else, and so not letting it ever come the length of words at all- by pointing out this bit of paper, then I get the experience of what is, in point of fact, the real truth of sense-certainty. I point it out as a here, which is a Here of other Heres, or is in itself simply many Heres together, i.e. is a universal. I take it up then, as in truth it is; and instead of knowing something immediate, I 'take' something 'truly', I perceive (wahrnehme, per-cipio)." [The Phenomenology of Mind, chapter 1)

Where does it do that? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Electrons, chairs, tables, humans, donkeys. These are words. His argument is that by saying such words, one is referencing universals. His entire argument is that its contradictory to not believe in such universals and yet refer to them when making an argument against them. Hence, one saying "All chairs are quite different" is contradictory.

If you have a different interpretation of his argument then please present it, but I think your response here is merely semantics surrounding "word".

Presumably it has something to do with them since you're able to refer to them with words right here. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You took this statement out of its context within an argument. Language has nothing to do with universals because its purpose is communication, not metaphysical truth. Communication is flawed and based upon prediction by others, it cannot be 100% precise and so cannot refer to a universal, just as one is unable to describe colour to the blind. There are limitations to language.

I am not sure how this is supposed to be taken. If there is "no truth in language," am I supposed to take it that nothing you have just expressed (in language) is true? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Again, this is semantics. When I am referencing truth, I am describing the non-static and arbitrary nature of signs and definitions. If I define X as Y, it doesn't mean it is the "true" definition, in fact there is no such thing. Language is entirely relational, you can swap out anything and it doesn't become "false" for doing so. Hence, any term such as "chair" will never be able to have a single agreed upon definition. Everyone will have a different conception of how X is defined.

Someone is able to refer to the concept of a chair knowing this, that they are referring to a broadly understood but vague notion, which can nevertheless illicit the idea they wish to impose on other minds.

If I make up the world ishblaqwer and say it refers to dressers that have been painted green is this now an English word? Is it a Chinese word? Can I make up new Chinese words even though I don't speak Chinese? — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is entirely semantic. The simplist answer is that it doesnt matter to my argument or the broader question of nominalism.

Wittgenstein tried to apply logicism to language. The unsaid though is said all the time, being so basic it's almost impossible to overlook. Like a two-faced roman Janus, logic has to have it's foot in two places at once, language and logic. Words say what is universal above and beyond what it presented by the pure senses purely as sensation. Nominalism, if it is using words at all, points out that each particular is *unique* as a thing we experience (with the senses)

Mathematical nominalism seems to be an aberration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalism

Leśniewski denied the existence of the empty set and held that any singleton was identical to the individual inside it.

If that is true, then Von Neumann ordinals cannot exist. Example 3 = {{},{{}},{{},{{}}}}. It wouldn't work because it would be reduced to the empty set which does not even exist according to Leśniewski, So, that view is very unproductive.

Another gem in nominalist absurdity:

The principle of extensionality in set theory assures us that any matching pair of curly braces enclosing one or more instances of the same individuals denote the same set. Hence {a, b}, {b, a}, {a, b, a, b} are all the same set. For Goodman and other proponents of mathematical nominalism,[30] {a, b} is also identical to {a, {b} }, {b, {a, b} }, and any combination of matching curly braces and one or more instances of a and b, as long as a and b are names of individuals and not of collections of individuals.

Structure is arguably more important than what individuals are contained in the structure. According to the structuralist ontology of mathematics, structure is even the only thing that matters. That is also what the Von Neumann ordinals actually suggest. Therefore, Goodman's views look very unproductive.

In the foundations of mathematics, nominalism has come to mean doing mathematics without assuming that sets in the mathematical sense exist. In practice, this means that quantified variables may range over universes of numbers, points, primitive ordered pairs, and other abstract ontological primitives, but not over sets whose members are such individuals. Only a small fraction of the corpus of modern mathematics can be rederived in a nominalistic fashion.

Not only this view rejects the admiral ship of mathematics proper, i.e. set theory, but it also makes any definition of truth impossible, because that requires at least some fragment of set theory.

Nominalism looks like a complete aberration in mathematics.

I do not know what kind of absurdities nominalism leads in other fields, but I am absolutely not impressed with its abysmal performance in mathematics. Mathematical nominalism looks like a smorgasbord of bad ideas.

If that is true, then Von Neumann ordinals cannot exist. Example 3 = {{},{{}},{{},{{}}}}. It wouldn't work because it would be reduced to the empty set which does not even exist according to Leśniewski, So, that view is very unproductive. — Tarskian

That is one single nominalist out of the several nominalists. Stop misrepresenting the view that you found out about by reading a Redditpedia article two hours ago.
And your criticism is spurious.

That is one single nominalist out of the several nominalists. Stop misrepresenting the view that you found out about by reading a Redditpedia article two hours ago.
And your criticism is spurious. — Lionino

Did I ask for your opinion? Stop giving unsolicited feedback. As you already know, yours is not appreciated.

It is not feedback, I am not interested in your self-improvement as you are an incorrigible fool. I am showing once again you have no clue what you are talking about.

Have you found a job already? In my opinion, absolutely nobody can work with you. I guess that you may find a job, but you will not be able to keep it for long. As soon as they find out who you are, they will be done with you.

I don't see how Chesterton's comment commits him to realism vis-á-vis universals. It seems completely consistent with many forms of nominalism as well, e.g. most forms of trope nominalism I am aware of. The point is simply that each particular can't be wholly sui generis or else there is no way to group them and no way to point to any sort of grouping.

You took this statement out of its context within an argument. Language has nothing to do with universals because its purpose is communication, not metaphysical truth. Communication is flawed and based upon prediction by others, it cannot be 100% precise and so cannot refer to a universal, just as one is unable to describe colour to the blind. There are limitations to language.

I didn't mean to. I am also not really sure how this is supposed to show that language cannot refer to universals. Why must language be 100% precise in order for it to refer to universals? Why is being "based on prediction by others" a barrier to speaking of "redness" as a universal, but presumably not the "redness we experience vis-á-vis all red things?"

There are certainly limitations to language, but I don't see how the precludes talk of universals. Why does this lack of precision not preclude talk of other sorts of things like states of affairs, facts, properties, etc.?

Either way, you seem to be using language to say something about universals. Is the idea that we can only say what they are not, a sort of via negativa? But then this would seem to beg the question on realism since universals are called in precisely to explain phenomena, not vice versa.

Again, this is semantics. When I am referencing truth, I am describing the non-static and arbitrary nature of signs and definitions. If I define X as Y, it doesn't mean it is the "true" definition, in fact there is no such thing. Language is entirely relational, you can swap out anything and it doesn't become "false" for doing so. Hence, any term such as "chair" will never be able to have a single agreed upon definition. Everyone will have a different conception of how X is defined.

I would disagree with the idea that language is arbitrary. It isn't. We don't have the words we do for "no reason at all." There is a reason every culture has words for color and size, rather than say, breaking the color spectrum in half and having some words for 'blue and green + size' and other words for 'orange, red, and violet + texture.' Terms like "grue" and "bleen" which denote color and age together don't exist in any language. This is for a good reason - sense perception does not immediately give us any good indication for "how old something is," and the question of "when something was created" is itself fraught.

Likewise, words follow a power law distribution across languages where the most commonly used words are always short and longer, multi-syllable words are always much rarer. It's easy to see why this is the case; it would be a barrier to rapid communication to replace words like "I," "the," "at," "you," "up." etc. with seven syllable words. There are other commonalities in sign systems.

All humans point and the object pointed to is determined with a line going out from the hand or finger in the direction of the object. As Wittgenstein points out, this could conceivably be otherwise (i.e. it is not logically impossible). Pointing could refer to whatever is behind the shoulder of the pointing hand. It's obvious why no one does this. Our eyes are on the front of our head and thus we would not be able to see what we were pointing at if pointing worked like this.

Human signs systems are grounded in what Wittgenstein terms a "form of life," and while this includes elements that are relatively malleable it also includes elements grounded in human biology, our world's physics, etc. As such, the sign systems won't be arbitrary.

Someone is able to refer to the concept of a chair knowing this, that they are referring to a broadly understood but vague notion, which can nevertheless illicit the idea they wish to impose on other minds.

I'm not sure how this is a problem for realism. Plato, the foundational realist, allows that people often only understand forms in a relative fashion. The universal is called in to explain why people can agree at all, not to put forth the thesis that agreement must always occur; it clearly doesn't.

This is entirely semantic. The simplist answer is that it doesnt matter to my argument or the broader question of nominalism.

It doesn't? It seems relevant to the claim that signs are arbitrary and that "anyone can make a word and an arbitrary definition for it." It seems to me that anyone can stipulate a definition, preform an utterance stating "x is defined as y," but this doesn't seem to be enough to make it a word in a language. Languages are emergent social phenomenon; they don't come down to one person.

If you’ve seen a relationship, and in fact it is all you ever see, what does one look like? — NOS4A2

Relationships look like everything you experience.

If you only ever experience relationships - then relationships look like everything you experience.

So you are saying "I think therefore I am" is not a rigourus argument. — Gregory

I'm saying the usual interpretation (that we can only know our own existence with certainty) is limited.

It is true that we can only know our own existence with certainty.

However - our existence encompasses our entire existence. Everything you think, feel and do is part of your existence.

Using our (certain) existence as a basis, we can make statements about the nature of our existence:

• Sensory Data exists.
• For each X we perceive in Sensory Data: X is not(Everything Else).
• We do not perceive anything that is not Sensory Data.
• We cannot describe X without relation to other Sensory Data.

Thus we have a clear and certain statement regarding the limits of knowledge and description.

We can describe things in relation to other things. Our understanding of things is contained entirely within the relationships between things.

We can describe the relationships of tables and chairs. We cannot describe implicit properties, essence or identity of tables and chairs (absent relationships).

imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself..it is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition... Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion.”

Interestingly, even on a reductive physicalist account, the general notion here should be true. Sign relations involving human cognition are incredibly complex and dynamic, and will never repeat in exactly the same way. But then again they will not be entirely different either. Commonalities will probably defined in terms morphisms between some set of processes, and then these could potentially be given the status of "abstract objects."

I don't know if physical reality being inherently processual should be a problem for realism. On the face of it, they don't seem to match up, but you can turn any 3D process into a 4D static abstraction.




Yes, as commonly interpreted. Although Aristotle is often still interpreted in fairly "idealist" terms, which makes eidos (form/pattern) and universals quite a bit different than a sort of immanent realism that tries to work with most modern forms of physicalism. For Aristotle eidos is what is "most real," while matter is simply what explains what stays the same when eidos changes—and there is no matter without eidos since this would entail being of which nothing can be said (Parmenides' "speaking nothing").

We can think of how eidos comes from the Greek iden, "to see." In Latin and then English these evolve into "idea," which is obviously now taken to be quite different from "to see" or "image." Now we might think of "what is seen," as studying arbitrarily far from "what is," but for Aristotle the eidos both makes a thing what it is and gives us grounds to say anything about it at all.

I had wondered if we also get "identity" from eidos, which would be instructive since identity, what a thing is, comes from eidos, but this is actually from the Old French "idem et idem," "same and same," and idem comes from Latin and develops from proto-Italiac not the Greek.




Consider that things can only be what they are in virtue of relation and process. This idea has been embraced in a number of disparate schools and the reasoning seems impeccable to me:

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"

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.

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 the maker is always existent Being, but they exist in potentiality before they exist in actuality It is impossible for the infinite to exist on the same level of being as finite things, and no argument will ever be capable of demonstrating that being and what is beyond being are the same, nor that the measured and immeasurable can be put in the same class, nor that the absolute can be ranked with that which exists in relation to other things, nor that that which has nothing predicated of it and that which is constituted by predication belong together. 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 - 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 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

There is also the more science-based arguments for the primacy of process and relation: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/826619

Here we might also consider Roveli's relational quantum mechanics as an example. Then there is Jaegwon Kim's convincing arguments that any sort of strong emergence is impossible under a building block metaphysics where "things are the thing-units they are made of," which in turn seems to lead to either panpsychism or the denial of conciousness. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/837241

Interestingly, even on a reductive physicalist account, the general notion here should be true. Sign relations involving human cognition are incredibly complex and dynamic, and will never repeat in exactly the same way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

One of the many differences between what Derrida is getting at with ‘iterability’ and a reductive physicalist account is that the latter presupposes subject and object, cause and effect. This grammar assumes that quantitative changes in a process are subservient to qualitatively determined identities constraining the sense of those quantitative changes. The qualitative nature of a cause is not allowed to be changed by the effect, it is transcendent to what is immanent to it.

Greek iden — Count Timothy von Icarus

Idein or idin (ἰδεῖν)

but this is actually from the Old French "idem et idem," — Count Timothy von Icarus

It comes from "identité", but it is correct that it comes ultimately from idem. I don't think 'idem et idem' was a phrase in Old French, though I don't have strong means of confirmation, it raises my eyebrows at least. Εἶδος is where the -oid and -id at the end of taxonomic words come from (gibbons are not Hominids like all great apes but they are Hominoids) — but that is not Greek or Latin, it is ISV.

My sincere apologies for my entirely unjustified "rant" towards you in another thread. It was immature of me.

I must admit, I was somewhat discombobulated by the extent of your (prior) understanding.

In any case, my response was irrational. I am sorry for my behaviour.

Nicholas Rescher - "Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy"

W. Norris Clarke - "The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics"

-St. Maximus - Ambiguum 7

-Charles Taylor - Hegel

Thank you for linking me up with Process Philosophy.

I had intended a more substantive post than this... But I find myself digesting your linked posts and process philosophy.

I'll be back.

For epistemology, sure, the knowledge of a thing requires process and relation. But being does not require our knowledge of it, and metaphysics is not epistemology.

You're quote from St. Maximum is interesting although many arguments have been put forward for pandeism, pantheism, and panentheism. In the Summa Theologica Aquinas himself says that God is IN everything in His essence, although he says otherwise elwhere. To me this is panentheism, while pantheism would be an emanation of the simple God... SPINOZA himself had an argument similar to that of Alan Watts and modern non-dualists- that the essence God must be fully manifested *always in everything* (and we just don't see it in our delusion) otherwise God would not be unlimited. Matter is forms of that which can be extended (dirt, water, trees, ect) yet this an -atomistic material reality- can still have an other, unrestricted reality to it which our delusions can not fathom<>

Universals have to do with forms, which are immaterial. — Gregory

That is a platonist view. The alternative (and my preference) is immanent universals: they exist exclusively in their instantiations.

Example: a 90 degree angle is instantiated in objects that have this angle. "90 degree angle" doesn't exist independently in some "platonic heaven".

They still are "forms" according to Aristotle, spiritual instantiations. It seems important to me to that with our eyes we see and recognize matter as types of extentions and not as informed by spiritual principles; while at the same time we see in our soul the world as irreducibly mystical. These are not on the same level of reality, these thoughts. Logo vs nous. The first is Cartesian matter (and nominalistic as i argue) while the other is seeing with the eyes of romanticism's idealism. One is reality, common, while the other is Reality, personal. Maybe there are levels even beyond. Nietzsche said the human experience is like an onion (a "glass onion"?) that has levels that never end



Are you really a relativist?