you’re an essentialist wrt to fundamental particles. And if you believe that on the basia of standard model you also have to accept there are multiparticle systems whose states cannot be a product of particle-states, read the SEP link I provided

ah so you are an essentialist, if humans aren’t reducible to co figuration of matter it doesn’t follow that there’s no identity criterion for humans and identity criterion for when matter is a part of a human.

In your view matter has identity? Like electrons have dispositions proper to them by which we can recognize they are electrons? Under variabilism how is scientific theory possible?

In your examples you treat of artefacts which most philosophers agree are mere accidental configurations of matter. But reductionism wrt humans is far more controversial. Read up about what quantum mechanics says on the issue of holism:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physics-holism/

Why would it affect reasoning? Of course causal reasoning has uncheckable assumptions like no outside cause intervenes, the system will evolve such and such. But the certainty of assumptions is not required to get logic going. Also causal reasoning is most of times in itself probabilistic.
There’s an issue of necessity at play akin to Hume’s critique of causation. Hume first of all from the lack of necessity implies the lack of causality which is ridiculous. Of course causality was never assumed to be unfailing because for example free will is causally efficacious, the world (at least for monotheists) in itself is contingent etc. So Hume’s critique only shoots at some misguided notion of laws of nature having the necessity of logical ones. Certain very general aspects of causality were assumed necessary. For example an effect rarely if never is necessarily is implied by the existence of the cause. But existence of an effect with certain features like complexity, change etc. does imply the existence of SOME cause although its nature is unspecified.

The problem is the popular philosophers did something new and for this reason alone they can be deemed somewhat interesting. For me Heidegger is absolutely predictable and boring after reading one book I know them all, that's a style of philosophy easily replacable by chat gpt. Also these cheap tropes of authenticity and independence, that's just annoyingly childish. I find his critique of ontotheology interesting but it's anticipated by Kant so no news there. What's surprising is a theologian and medieval scholar falling for the old trap of mistaking scholasticism for Wolffianism.

wow I didn't know this guy will certainly check out because arguing this point is hard (which is why I limited myself to stating what scholastics thought)

This is certainly relevant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theorem
In scholastic metaphysics truth is convertible with being. Truth is jsut a property of a being and only derivatively it's a property of judgements (and even more remotely a property of sentences). Truth, just like being is undefinable, because there's nothing untrue to differentiate it. Wrt to predication of existence look up free logics and Abstract Object Theory of Zalta where existence is a predicate, look up Meinongianism, pluralism and neo-fregeanism in metaontology.

No, never been out of my village

3 because monotheism appears wherever humans begin to seriously write what they're thinking. The most respectable philosophical schools are monotheist starting from Xenophanes and Heraclitus, the most respectable schools in Hindu philosophy Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Yoga. Monotheism is just the most reasonable view given the history of philosophy and some would even argue there can be certain knowledge of God's existence. Having said that, it would be painful because loving Jesus is much easier than loving God who didn't incarnate and also I would say I'm more certain of Jesus' Divinity than my ability to figure out everything.

And I think the assumption that scientific method generally assumes physicalist reductionism is a pretty safe, even if there are those who dissent from it or question it. The scientific status of psychology and the social sciences is often called into question — Wayfarer

It is not safe since it causes you to arbitrarily reject psychology (because it doesn't even claim not to be reducible to physics, it leaves the issue unspecified) and physics itself is not making a claim of being able to reduce other sciences.

The difference can be found in the justification report for the claim they are making. A historian will supply a collection of scrutinized and corroborated witness depositions while the scientist will provide an experimental test report.

The scientist must be able to control the observations recorded while that is pretty much impossible for the historian. He cannot just go to the lab and repeat the Battle of Hastings all over again. — Tarskian

A historian can go into ground and look for artifacts, his claims are falsifiable. Doesn't a scientist aim to explain the observations he already did by coming up with a causal mechanism? And once he has a theory, he looks to disprove it. The same a historian, he comes up with a causal mechanism and looks to disprove it which is much harder because the event was singular in the past. But he still has some tools of falsifying his claims in principle. Also it's not like falsification is such an easy thing to do in hard sciences. We have the Duhem-Quine thesis.

But they don’t. How interactions between physical objects and forces is observed and understood is completely different to what makes a valid syllogism. The nature of the methods used in science is not itself a scientific but a philosophical. Historians and philosophers are not scientists, and none the worse for not being so. — Wayfarer

Where did I say that the mind is a result of physical objects interacting? I said it has parts, modules with different functions. Not all reduction to first principles is physicalistic. Historians do share a methodology with other scientists. They just look for particular causes of particular events instead of natural causes of common phenomena. An argument for a distinction between historians and scientists is yet to be made in this thread. You tend to assume that scientific method equals physicalistic reductionism. First of all scientists don't have a criterion of physicalty second biology, psychology, sociology, even chemistry aren't explicitly reductive. You could make an argument for physicalism from chemistry maybe, but it's not explicit in the behavior of ethanol as put out by organic chemistry that it's a quantum-mechanical standard model system. It's not even explicit that a ethanol molecule is a straight-forward sum of parts. Because quantum-mechanical molecules aren't, their behavior is not a product of the wave-functions of individual particles: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physics-holism/.

But is ‘abstract reasoning’ among those ‘complex phenomena’ that are ‘a result’ of simpler things combining?

Why not? And why does it matter to the discussion about the criterion of demarcation between why and how? There is a point in case it is a complex phenomenon studied by epistemology, psychology and cognitive sciences. They dissect the acts of mind into various layers and modules, is that surprising? My argument was - there is no demarcation between humanities and sciences. Because they share the methodology by which we understand anything whatsoever. Insofar as humanities make theories and are aimed at understanding anything. And especially the demarcation between how and why is shallow and doesn't reflect the scientific practice at all.

it is self-contradictory to attempt to explain everything, including abstract reasoning, purely in terms of lower-level physical processes like particles and forces. — Wayfarer

Of course physics isn't concerned with explaining abstract reasoning. Complex phenomena are by definition a result of simpler things combining. I didn't argue for physicalism by saying that, just like Aristotle didn't:

For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements. Plainly therefore in the science of Nature, as in other branches of study, our first task will be to try to determine what relates to its principles.

The sciences are concerned with “what,” whereas the humanities are concerned with “how.”

Write an elaboration of what you think this means. — ucarr

Well there was a guy called Comte and he camed up with this idea. That sciences deal with how and philosophy deals with why. Then Russell and a bunch of other people repeated it mindlessly. With no argument or justification, just to make an arbitrary demarcation to rule out mainly metaphysical realism. The thing is, they were ruling out scientific realism with this approach too. It got too ridiculous proportions like seriously claiming that scientific theories don't posit any real beings to exist. Sciences do look at why. It's their main question. The answers mainly consist of positing the dispositions of objects of specific natural kinds. Electrons vibrate at specific frequencies, gold melts at some temperature, humans optimally operate at some narrow range of temperatures. By assigning dispositions to specific objects we can analyse many systems in terms of their simpler components. We can isolate these simpler components in experiments to check if they really have these dispositions posited. This way we can get to an answer why a system behaves like this and not the other way. "How" doesn't differentiate anything specific about it. Humanities are also concerned with causal analysis. The grammatical structure of the sentence - we group words by kinds and assign functions and relations between them. We can infer declensions and conjugations just by using some abstract terms assigned to words. In literature we can interpret works by their leading ideas, themes and styles. We can speak of a work of art, again, in terms of synecdoches, charactonyms, tones and motifs. Once again we understand the why of a complex phenomenon, why is it artistically appealing, intellectually engaging or socially impactful. Philosophy is aware of the problem of demarcation for a long time now. And it's not without reason. Because science is just the process of understanding the first, simple principles in terms of which a complex phenomenon arises and it pretty much characterizes all intellectual endeavors.

Per se causes bring out the effect through themselves. Per accidens causes are merely conjoined with the per se cause. So the the wisdom of Aristotle does not directly cause him to be hungry. It can only be an accidental cause of his hunger insofar as it for example makes him use his brain more.


This is from Physics book 2:

That which is per se cause of the effect is determinate, but the incidental cause is indeterminable, for the possible attributes of an individual are innumerable.

I can make an argument that per se causes can't possibly be identical with the effect (I thought it's obvious but ok):

First of all, it's a title of a chapter in Physics VII: "It is necessary that whatever is moved, be moved by another." Another is not identical. Unless you say that Aristotle says that beside the immediate mover there is yer another cause of an effect which is identical with the effect.

Second Aristotle admits chains of per se causes. Multiple things can't be identical. The prime mover is a per se cause of all movement. Are you to suggest that the prime mover is identical to every movement? That would be ridiculous in Aristotle.


Also the amount of people with their own completely ignorant interpretation is saddening. It's not you, you make sense and the essential/simultaenous distinction is subtle and it's a wide problem in the litterature). The definition you quoted concerns Scotus, not all scholastics definitely. Aquinas and Suarez wouldn't agree. And they're taken to be the orthodox Aristotellians, Scotus' doctrines are controversially Aristotellian.

As to the non--simultaneity of immediate cause and effect - ok I just found a passage in Aquinas' commentary to Posterior Analytics touching just on this issue:

But although the motion has succession in its parts, it is nevertheless simultaneous with its movent cause. For the moveable object is moved at the same time that the mover acts, inasmuch as motion is nothing else than the act existing in the moveable object from the mover, such that in virtue of that act the mover is said to move and the object is said to be moved. Indeed, the requirement that the cause be simultaneous with what is caused must be fulfilled even more in things that are outside of motion whether we take something outside of motion to mean the terminus of the motion-as the illumination of air is simultaneous with the rising of the sun--or in the sense of something absolutely immovable, or in the sense of essential causes which are the cause of a thing’s being.

It seems you're right - an immediate mover must be simultaneous with the actualization. But it's not identical. Also there are per se causes which are not simultaneous with the effect. (consider a transformation of an element, an efficient cause ceases to be once the effect is in actuality).

Are you guys arguing whether there is something like simultaneous causation in Aristotle? Of course there is. Substantial form actualizes its prime matter here and now. And there is a causal relation between the two. The relation of formal causality. And of course the distinction between per se and per accidens causality is a different one. Some thomists nowadays portray essential causality as necessarily simultanoues but this is clearly not the case. Essential causality is per se. But it's not necessarily simultaneous and there are clear examples in Aristotle and the scholastics. And as far as I recall there's no distinction between a per se and an essentially caused thing., they are translated interchangeably.

First of all you guys speak as if God was changing His mind in the result of prayer. Did you even study philosophy bros, every monotheist from Aristotle to Descartes will say that God is unchaning, just creates things such that they will answer the petition of a person because of that petition. And yes prayer can be a reason for things being different, because ultimately God decides the fate of a person based on the goodness of her soul. I don’t know if it’s the main reason for prayer because the first reason is to increase in the love of God and prepare for eternity in His presence but this also happens through grace, i.e. supernatural intervention of God, because humans can’t increase in the knowledge and love of God by natural means. It just means things don’t operate by their natural powers. There begins in things something with a relation of being immediately created by God. That’s the change in the world brought about by a miracle. The decision to create the whole world as it is is one.

Another issue is yes it is asking a lot, but there’s nothing impossible for God and we are His creatures so why not ask Him. A theist assumes her life is for a reason anyway.

The word you're looking for is a posteriori. There are things we know with certainty which are known after experiencing them, usually having an implicational form. For example if our chemical theories are true, water is H2O. Kripke gave it as an example of analytic a posteriori. And yes, the guys like Aristotle, who was an empiricist, would say that certain knowledge in philosophy comes from finding necessary conditions of the observed affairs. And they would hold their theses as certain, excluding irrational doubt in the principles of logic and very general observations.
I think I know what OP means by empirical logics. For example there are kinds of temporal logics which assume discrete time. Modal logics differ in the concept of possibility. So it's arguable their axioms and rules aren't known a priori. Imo the fact of the matter would be that a priori logics are fictitious. Unless by a priori you mean assumed, then yeah. All axioms and rules of primitive rules of derivation are assumed, but then all logic would be a priori. But what we mean is where the axioms come from. It’s certainly not a priori structures of the mind at least not in the case of all logics.

What was his "information"? If we are robots, are robots conscious according to him? Was he just a panpsychist? If he was a fictionalist, what was his account of this fiction emerging?

Isn’t existential thomism a child of Gilson, only christened like that by Maritain? It’s a reading of Thomas in which existence is taken as a principle in a being actualizing the essence, as opposed to „essentialism” which is supposed to take existence as derivative or even an accident of being and sometimes taking the subject of metaphysics as possible being is added to essentialist thomism. It isn’t necessarily connected to phenomenology, hell some existential thomists I know dunk on Husserl horribly. Lublin thomists are known from looking at phenomenology with thomistic ontology. But the founder of the school, Krąpiec, was known for debating local phenomenologists. But it may be the case that all phenomenological thomists are existential thomists, because nowadays it’s the only position really. There’s just differing views on the subject and procedure of metaphysics. Like Maritain starts with the intuition of being, Rahner with the act of knowing, Krąpiec in Lublin starts with an existential judgement, Gogacz starts with verbum cordis, River Forest thomists start with natural sciences. Maybe rare cases after Gilson, like McCool, wouldn’t call themselves existential but its definition is so minimal and apparent in Thomas that no thomist denies the thesis really.

Definitely we should abolish religious views in politics. The right to life? Abrahamic nonsense. Only Aryans get to live.

No, this is not the claim. The claim is that if something is a belief, it is a proposition. This may not hold for the pigeons outside my window, but their existence is not ours. — Astrophel

I made an entire argument to the effect that beliefs aren't propositions and certainly not propositions of a formal system obeying the usual laws. If they were, the use of truth predicate would be impossible and understanding of the Godel sentences would be impossible. And we do understand (are able to asses the truth conditions of) the Godel sentences like "this statements is unprovable". As I said, understanding must be something more more than a set of sentences. That's why Carnap's syntactic view of theories failed and he himself changed sides to the semantic one.

If a proposition represents some state of affairs, then one has to say what it means for something to be a state of affairs, and this would itself be done cast in more propositions. Then the post modern madness hits the fan”

„The search for such a correspondence is logically absurd, Hegel argued, since every such search must end with some belief about whether the correspondence holds, in which case one has not advanced beyond belief”

This kind of argument runs through the thread and, as someone pointed out, it ties into overall confusion between statements and facts.

It doesn’t follow that if something is a statement then it’s a belief. It can be knowledge or deliberate fiction. What foundatonalists claim is that there are statements whose truth is directly known to the subject. The task of providing justification of each sentence is futile. But it's no threat to ontology and not an argument for replacing it with epistemology.

I would say it's very probable that knowledge is not a set of sentences or a formal system in the mind. Because if it was, it would be possible to formalize in this system a Godel sentence "this sentence is unprovable in the system". And its truth is rather obvious, but the system is not able to derive it, even assuming foundationalism. That's a basic reasoning behind Ajdukiewicz argument against transcendental idealism from Godel's incompleteness.

Once again, understanding is not a formal system if we're able to assess the truth of Godel sentences and we are. And the other hint is Tarski's undefinability theorem. We need a notion of a model, or a world to which the sentences conform. And their truth can be consistently defined in this model-theoretic setting. We all know there's a need for an infinite regress of meta-linguistic definitions in order to define stuff like truth and existence. But it's not an argument against realism. If anything, it's an argument against formalism or nominalism, if we are able to employ a notion of truth, we're operating outside of the given formal system. So my answer to the regress of justification you guys posed would be that understanding is (at least) an imperfect copy of reality, and reality is not a set of sentences. My intuition is reverse to yours. When we make an attempt at justification, at finding the necessary preconditions of knowledge, we're doing ontology of mind. Assumptions about existence, truth and quantifcation are all there.

Bonevac provides a nice interpretation here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3xQwFIUJ80
And Koons formalized it here: https://robkoons.net/the-rigorous-thomist/the-third-way-a-new-interpretation
Basically they claim it's a mistranslation to attribute to Aquinas an obviously fallacious: "if all things could not exist sometimes, sometimes they all don't exist". It's a matter of Latin adverbs that "sometimes" also means "in some case", or "it's possible that". So a better translation would sound like "If for all things it's possible they don't exist, it's possible they all don't exist which is an obvious tautology in most predicate modal logics. So the argument is modal in nature and it's a classic contingency argument. Idk about its metaphysical background and my Professor for example thinks it's not even thomistic, it's Avicennian, Thomas just uses it as an example of philosophical ways to God like most of the five ways. It's not a proof he himself would pur forward since he views existnce as an act of essence, not an accident of essence. In my Prof's view the argument requires a reification of possible essences which Aquinas wouldn't endorse.

Imo it's pretty straightforward and establishes the existence of a necessary being, but like in all modal logics, the meaning of possible and necessary is very vague. It's harder to prove the unicity, goodness, personhood of a necessary being. Assumptions behind contingency arguments are generally poorly understood. What do they quantify over? Do they take temporal structure into account? Do we need bimodal temporal logic to distinguish the sences of possibility? How do I distinguish possible and necessary objects?

Also there are trained philosophers like Tim Maudlin who say that physics is metaphysics because physical theories have ontologies. That’s the kind of confusion we don’t want. There are physicalists among metaphysicians but even they recognize that they’re not doing physics just because they make use of physical ontology. That’s why I like Aristotle’s distinction, the sciences may not differ in object, a difference in aspect suffices. And certainly existence as such is not the aspect under which physics study the world.

You could make an argument from some basic results of model theory that mathematical formalism in most cases can`t be specific about the objects it`s supposed to speak about. When a set of axioms "uniquely" (up to the isomorphism) specifies a model we say that the theory is categorical. Hilbert and earlier Peano achieved a categorical axiomatization of Euclid`s geometry, Tarski proved this version of "Euclidean" geometry is consistent, complete and decidable. The "unique" model of it is the Cartesian plane. Beside Godel incompleteness features (undecidability and either consistency or completeness) any set theory pretending to be an axiomatization of mathematics can't hope to be categorical. There are weaker notions of the classes of models but I don't think it's possible to define a class of models zfc does specify. Isn't isomorphism weak enough to say a theory doesn't specify a mathematical object? Well an ignorant mathematical nominalist could make such an argument. There's nuance to it, you could step back and not even pretend that what mathematicians study are classes of models.

I gave the arguments for why I think there’s a distinction and it’s not without precedent in the litterature. There are different understandings of the word but the ones I gave: deriving an exhaustive list of natural kinds or categories is not a proper part of metaphysics as conceived by Aristotle. See for example On the Early History of 'Ontology'. Ontology was a word popularized in the XVIIIth century by Wolff and Baumgarten, it`s a project rationalistic at heart.

It was claimed that ontology has being as its object; but upon examination, we see that its object is really the concept of being or possible being rather than being as such. — „H. McDonald"

Wolffian ontology is the proper target of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. He even calls it ontotheology. Because It assumes that we know the perfect notion of being a priori. Kant even called it ontotheology for this reason.

Ontotheology is for Kant a theory of God obtained by pure reason with pure transcendental concepts, which imply God’s existence as ens realissimum. To put it even more precisely ontotheology is a theory of being wherein being makes possible what Kant calls an “ontological proof". — O. Boulnois

If ontology is a proper part of metaphysics then we can know the notion of being which somehow includes the information about all kinds of possible existents. In Aristotle’s metaphysics the notion of being is equivocal, you can’t know all information about other beings just by knowing one’s object way of being. Ontology was only recognized as a proper part of metaphysics under early-modern conception of rationalistic metaphysics. Not without reason it has immediately come under fire. Deriving a list of all possible kinds of beings is an ambitious project and earlier conception of metaphysics was a little subtler.

The problem with many answers here is metaphysics ends up very inflated, encompasing physics and epistemology and not distinguishing metaphysics and ontology. Physics and epistemology do use the notion of existence, but it`s just not very subtle to therefore say they are metaphysics. Physics isn`t mathematics, the theories within physics have additional assumptions and just make use of the theorems of mathematics. The same way things which can be results of metaphysics may be used in other sciences (please, can we not get pedantic about the use of the word science here).

There is a very old resolution for this problem going back to the definition of metaphysics given by Aristotle. Seriously one person quoted the definition of Aristotle in this thread and drew no conclusions. Sciences study things under a certain aspect, qua some aspect. Physics studies the objects as moving, qua moving. Metaphysics studies things as existing, it`s a study of being qua being. What it means for an object to exist. What are the necessary conditions of its existence. So it has a very specific subject matter, it does not encompass the equations of motion, moreover it can even not encompass ontology.

If ontology gives as the list of natural kinds, then certainly it`s not a matter of metaphysics to settle this. In this way physical theories have ontologies (according to scientific realists). Ontology is not necessarily derived from the very notion of being. In Parmenidean monism it is.

Ontology if it gives as the list of basic categories is not a result of metaphysics too. In Aristotle there`s a possible world where there is no place. But place is one of the categories. It`s not a matter of the notion of being to derive categories. Ontology is distinct from metaphysics. The list of categories may be derived from the notion of being in the Kantian aprioristic conception of metaphysics or in what Heidegger calls ontotheology. But for Aristotle all knowledge is a posteriori. So there are reasons to distinguish physics and metaphysics not even presupposing the existence of a separate objects of metaphysics. Just a separate subject matter or aspect suffices. Unless, for example, a thing`s being is identical with its motion.