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

I've been considering the Absolute vs relativism. I think there is something objective but that it's so far out there it can't be grasped. So relativism is true in that things are only proprtionally true. Abortion is wrong might be more true than abortion is right. But nothing is the Absolute. That's what came to mind when i read your post

The Absolute is a place holder

It sounds like nominalism drowns in contingecies (and infinity?) But numbers in general do this. 1 can be divided unlessly so that there is no base unit

I don't respect G. K Chesteron as an intellectual. He had too much fun(ny) doing what he did. He didn't work hard enough

If realists are say thought is in matter in some way then they are definitely idealists in some way. And nominalism, if it's just about naming things without a basis for the designation, doesn't seem to be saying anything philosophical at all. That's were i'm at in the discussion. Why bring iideas from without and should common traits be grouped together? Is there a middle ground here?

The fact that two chairs can be different seems to me to say that the "realist" position is wrong. If you imagine a classical painting of a lake, with ducks, moss, tress, ect, it can be asked "how many forms are there there". This can't be answred at least to my satisfaction. Universals have to do with forms, which are immaterial. What a single "thing" is doesn't have to be specified by science. This is the difference between realism philosophically and basic scientific materialism: the former has trouble explaining the unity of objects while science is not so much concerned with that, or even wants to be

I believe pansychism would say that the fundamental laws are both material and conscious. If multiverses exist in reality then maybe part of us is in one of those. It seems our bodies are whatever is enclosed in our skin. But hypothetically there could be another body that mirrors ours and is us except they are in another place. Or say soul. Or one can dropped the materialist paradigm and believe the human body is mystical and consciousness, although coming from the brain, dies only to go into a quantum reality, or call it a mutiverse (who's to say where is where). These theories loop around together, but seriously you would have to have a true satori to know what it's like to be a brick. You don't in order to know that consciousness can't cease

Nature, essence, and substance are all identical. They may not be for a hairsplitter. Nor are they different from accidents. A things reality is what we perceive it to be. Things are upon for observation. That is all there is. There is no spooky people or things behind them. The world is what there is. What constitues a thing is what is "there". A thing cant be one thing yet another like Thomism tries to argue for. As per my question you didnt answer, why isnt it possible that God clothed your "car" with the accidents of a car and its really a horse. Or maybe thats a fact since Pius X loving people are Catholic Amish. You believe in God, grace, mystical bodies, nature, quiddity, essence substance, accidents, properties, such a load of garbage it should boggle your mind. But your mind has been poisined since 1994!

See you on a another thread

Thomism leads to skepticism. No longer is what a thing is enough to define what it is. I dont think Aristotle would approve

So we have a host here and a pineapple there. Jesus in the true essence of the host. What stops a horse from being the substance of the accidents of the pine apple by a miracle of God. If you keep refusing to answer this conversation is over.

You not doing any kind of metaphysics. You havent proven a single thing philosophically

You're a biased thinker like Aquinas. You've avoided the question about why God can take the substance out of bread and put Jesus inside but cant take the substance of the sun out and replace it with whatever pleases him. Also, how many bilocated bodies are in a host?

Take the smallest piece of bread possible. Divide it any further and it's no longer bread. Now where is Jesus in there? His body and blood are spatial so why cant we say "maybe his arm is here, ect." It becomes ridiculous upon examination. Why would you want to eat someone anyway? You're trying to defend the slavery you put yourself into. Does the bread have no substance or is Jesus the substance? Now you can see why Thomism is joke. The distinctions become too fine to make sense! Descartes position made more sense but he was condemned. Earlier in his life he rejected Thomism because scholasticism in general contained far too many subtleties answerable in many ways. He uponed to door in Europe for true philosophy. Thomism is dead to those who are free

If Jesus's "body blood soul and divinity" are acting as the substance of the matterial piece of bread, then the body and blood are accidents acting as substance. How does that make sense?

Why cant God take the substance out of the sun and replace it with whatever pleases him?

Maybe Ignatius believed in Thomism but translations of religious texts are open to innumerable variation. And again, is it possible that God put the essense of a lady bug in your phone so that it's not at all what it looks like. That would be called an illusion. Thomist try to hairsplit between illusion (the word Descartes used for the Eucharest) and normal reality. But God works in mysterious ways. Is the sun a hamburger?

Aristotle thought the world was eternal in the past and future. A constant loop. But something kept the whole from falling into its parts or losing all its parts and hence ceasing. Some way the world can be understood rationally, however that is. But why does this imply there was a First reason or a Final reason for the whole? Again the loop. Reality keeps the world alive

I dont understand why Wittgenstein thinks language has anything to do with abstract thought. Language is both noise and an understanding of the noise in HOW it relates to thoughts. Thoughts are what philosophy is about and language is just a tool. I know Wittgenstein had an aversion to normal philosophy, but i find his attempt to turn abstraction into language to be lame

Question: if the future need not resemble the past, why did you say a first cause needs a final cause. Your post seemed contradictory to me

You can profane a sacramental, right? And i didnt insult you. I respect you but not your religion. Seriously, does Jesus feel your tongue when you chew him? This is why Aquinas is a waste of time! He defends nonsense with alleged philosophy. He's not a philosopher. He was a big fat doodo bird. As for the "miracle", do you have any idea how rich your church is and how much they can invest in convincing people to sit in a pew with Jesus in their stomach because they HAVE to? Dont be so guillable. Finally, Frances says IN the Catechism that now the Church "TEACHES, in light of the GOSPEL, that the death penalty is an ATTACK on the DIGNITY of the human person...ect". The ect part is the pastoral part. What i quoted is the doctrinal part. Yet this contradicts the Catechism of Trent and many other Popes. So case closed, the Church is wrong and you were fooled by a piece of decaying flesh

So does your tongue touch Jesus when you eat him? Where? Like is your tongue glidding over his chin or ass? Is it really in the realm of possibility that your house is really a lady bug? Your church teaches nonsense and nonsense such that it's hard to know what it's even teaching anymore. Is pope Francis's teaching on capital punishment infallible? Nobody knows. Are the briefs and bulls from the middle ages ex cathedra or ordinary magisterium? Nobody knows. The system completely breaks down upon examination.

You have to interpret scripture in order to establish the catholic authority. Is that not private interpretation. As for Vatican I and simplicity, why what that means philosophically be understood as Aquinas would have? It's open to many interpretations. There is hardly anything if not nothing in Catholic dogma that doesnt have many interpretations. Thomist interpretation has been broken for almost a hundred years.

Ludwig Ott is not the magisterium. Simplicity can be interprerted along with many philosophical traditions. But no i am no longer Catholic. Vicarious atonment is an immoral doctrine and is central to Christianity. No one can do your repentence for you. Priesthoods are evil. And yes Aquinas was a priest. Ugg

Divine simplicity is a contradiction however. How can God create if he has to make an moment of choice, thus changing his simplicity to a multiplicity. Suddenly he is a God who knows he created and is now related to creation. Also God, despite the choice to create, makes no true moral decisions so he is, not immoral, but amoral. He may be innocent but he doesn't have the goodness of courage ect. within him. The idea that he owns goodness like a possession is absurd. So ye Aquinas sucks. I dont consider his writings to be real philosophy. He was a theologian, commited to things he had no proof for

Not all Catholics are Thomists. In fact many many are not these days. Traditional Catholic scholar Robert Sungenis has a book The Immutable God Who can Change his Mind nd has debated Thomist Jimmy Akin and others about it. Thomism in Catholicism is an opinion.

Plato, and also Descartes, thought we dont see with our eyes but through our eyes.

For my understanding "subjective" is thoughts which are opinion instead of knowledge. When you are mulling over an issue you are thinking subjectively. When the truth is discovered it becomes objective. Our sense of objects' existence and features is objective unless it's diseased in some way. Even then we can still call it objective because it arises in and from a real world. To be talked about implies a things existence in some way. If something was purely subjective it would be absolute nothingness. So feautures such as beauty, when perceived without some disease of the understanding, truly witnesses something real and true

A physical feeling can only be objective. It doesn't mean anything to call it subjective. The feeling of the chair is just a judgment that it feels good

To paraphrase Rumi, "Your task is not to seek love [beauty], but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

You're trying to separate the beauty from the person in order to make it part of you. If you are going to doubt the beautiful, why not insist the whole person is a subjective illusion? When seen something beautiful is seen to exist *as* beautiful. Beauty is imbedded in the form of an objective object or subject

I disagree with all that. If two people see a third thing and one sees it as beautiful and the other doesn't, keep in mind that they look with different eyes, are possibly in a different stage of life, and could be at different energy levels (to talk in modern terms). The beauty is there but only one is seeing it (if he is truly having beautiful experience)

If a machine can, if unhampered, do great feats this shows it's material perfection/beauty and usefulness but the question of beauty is usually about arts. Aesthetics ponders on the timeless. I like seeing a perfect score too, but not everything is beautiful. Many things are interesting but not beautiful. Many things in science are interesting but not beautiful. So I do think there is something objective about it

Common agreement doesn't make something objective. Objectivity is the experience in act of truth. I can look at something and know that it is perfectly beautiful, but others may disagree. We do not always experience the same mental qualia as others, even if words are the same

I understand and appreciate your point although i have not read enough Wittgenstein to make a judgment about what he thought. Hume talks about impressions as opposed to ideas. For me grammer is the bridge between impressions and thought. But we can still have thoughts that language cannot capture because thought, in Hegel's language, has form and also content. Form is how thinking relates to language and perception. But philosophy tries to give rise in the individual student to ideas eternal, beyond words and world. Yet you seem to think that philosophy is just a game (but one that needs to be played properly), as when you said Hegel arguments are is reality just rhetoric

Grammar is the one thing that Platonism has nothing to do with. There is science, philosophy as applied to science (which can never be finally solved), and pure philosophy. Plato dealt with ideas which have no relation to words except when they are communicated by grunts

So if it were up to you people would be banned for promoting Platonism, neo-Platonism, or continental philosophy because it is not philosophy? We are on opposite ends because i don't consider logical positivism to be philosophy but my philosophy is what has traditionally been called philosophy for thousands of years. For me modern positivism attempts to numb the parts of the soul that want to do philosophy and they try to examine what is left as this doubt reveals the truth as reduced to perfection. But basically they are just become materialists. I heard recently Richard Dawking saying "we dont know how consciousness arises but we are working on it". Isn't the brain enough? *What kind of answer is he looking for?* Is a part of the brain or QM any more explanitory? What material explanation will ever satisfy him. Science is like "we found the meaning of life: it's helium!" Or whatever. Obviously its just about matter yet they think if they focus on matter long enough the answers to life will emerge. And that's nonsense. Science is good at making life comfortable if it's done by good people. Yet science is simply pointless because it can't say what "good" is.

How is my position objectionable?

Science and math are not about philosophy except when one (Hume for example) make philosophical comments on it. Scientists usually miss the point about that stuff and this is why there is division of disciplines. But this is after all a philosophy forum right?

Let me state that no one here is denying that he has parents and drives a car, ect. That is practical truth. Philosophy addresses something more subtle. Scientists must think philosophers are crazy for speaking of the "real Reality" but we think they are crazy for talking about a theory of everything. Such a theory can't address philosophy even though much of its thinking gets mired in philosophy. If it's not the true reality, how can you have a full theory of it? Hume already shows with the induction problem that the world is radically contingent and we can't truly know what is causing what. Science is fine but it doesn't go anywhere

Well if Plato is right then science is opinion. His system stands as a certain way of looking at reality and should be addressed. Too few people are even interested in philosophy, not knowing what it's really about. Hume showed that science can't make definite statements the way mathematics can, and as philosophy can after much mulling. Science works sometimes but it fails all the time as well. It can't say what reality is and it's results are open to investigation.

To be upfront, I am a Hegelian perennialist non-dualist, so clearly I may see these matters differently than many in Western modern society. The German idealists contrasted "understanding" from speculative thinking. Practical truth is clearly differentiated from philosophical truth. The latter is without time.