I said they were different. My point is that those sorts of equivocations look similar in natural language, and involve only nomological contexts, but...
The way St. Thomas puts it in De Ente et Essentia, which is fairly standard, is that essences are the metaphysical reality, and definitions are the si...
Think about it this way. Prior to my writing this post, it only existed potentially. That it has become actual shows that it existed potentially. My p...
:up: But that's sort of the point. Again, although you represented "a spreadsheet lookup array" metaphysics as my position, I actually presented that ...
I would think not. A stray hair has your dog's DNA. A severed cat tail or paw has cat DNA. In theory, you could take a cat embryo and tweak its enviro...
Facts are facts in virtue of modal logic? The question here is metaphysical, what makes things what they are. No doubt, modal logic can be used descri...
As a consolation, he and Darwin remain the most cited people in the field IIRC (although often in a pretty cursory fashion to be fair). Although, argu...
You could have just reached for "domesticated animal" or "livestock." But no, I was clearly asking for a culture that doesn't distinguish the species ...
So cats would still be cats in a world without people in virtue of the fact that people have created a logical system that allows them to say "cats wo...
That's because of how you are translating it. If the relation is identity then it is: (i = w) ? Bridge(I) ? Bridge(w) That was exactly my point. And o...
Well, what do you think of the notion of principles outlined above? And could there be a principle by which different individuals are the same sort of...
Right, this is the extreme volanturism and linguistic idealism I was talking about. Cats would not exist if man was not there to call them forth as su...
What exactly is the difference between a property and an ability? Or is it just that minded things have abilities instead of properties for whatever "...
You'll have to lay out what you understand by "essence" because I'm not sure how these objections apply to what I've said or realist uses of the term ...
Right, if you offer 10,000 people either a rotting, stinking fish to eat, or a choice of appetizing meals, and no one chooses the rotting fish, this d...
Right, and theories of essences and universals are not primarily about naming and referring. The idea of use fixing the meaning of stipulated signs is...
It's an interesting question. The idea of "nudges and incentives" still dominates the public policy space. If you look back, you can see that people w...
So is everything that is irreducible also circular? Are definitions of mathematical objects circular? Yes, that cats exist is an assumption here. The ...
I think that's right, but the question of why it is more plausible seems to lie in the ability to equivocate on the way in which water, ice, and steam...
How so? At any rate, the "problem" you have identified exists just as much for reductionism. If we say a being a cat consists in having some set of pr...
Sure, but the issue is similar, as evidenced by the Israel/Palestine geographic area versus state equivocation. I am not sure how the move to natural ...
I don't necessarily disagree with that. There is however, IMO, a quite good argument against "substances" that is advanced by process metaphysicians o...
Sure, if you have something to add. I was just thinking of similar cases that don't involve belief. Another equivocation with proper names would be th...
Sure, but you could easily make one that fits the form you were using. The difficulty there is that, in a simple three premise form, you end up with t...
Consider the wholly nomological context of: Steam is H2O Ice is H2O Therefore, steam is ice This is obviously incorrect. So too: Ice is H20 Fog is H20...
Exactly. The rationalists are a prime example here. They generally have good aims, such as securing faith in reason, trying to resolve sectarian disag...
They're not that different on the language here, or even the praxis. I used the East to explicate the West because the Western language (e.g. substanc...
There is definitely at least some ambiguity in Samuel. When the Israelites ignore his anti-monarchy polemic, God tells Samuel to give them a king and ...
I wouldn't put much stock in that. Even if I was prepared to ignore all my personal experiences at a variety of churches for a survey that includes no...
Not really, or at least not without many important caveats. The Trinity appears in Origen and others (although not in its mature Capaddocian formulati...
The Trinity is absolutely affirmed as mysterious and beyond reason (super rational); it is not affirmed as contradictory and irrational (in a sense, b...
Ha, I had this idea for a short story, although in my version and alien race was receiving the slowly scrolling text of the whole of Wikipedia through...
Something does not need to be contradictory to be a mystery. Indeed, I'd argue that if something is contradictory, in a strict logical sense, it is si...
:rofl: I don't know, you're the expert on Catholic theologians. I was under the impression that Augustine spent fifteen years working on a book on the...
You appear to be continually conflating "mystery," "mystical," and "involves analogical predication," with "involves recognizing a contradiction and t...
When I have a bit more time in a few weeks I was interested in doing a reading group on "The Joy of the Knife. Nietzschean Glorification of Crime," a ...
So it seems you have gone with adding the premise: "classical theologians are wrong about what they think they are saying, and have been wrong since t...
Any work on Peirce that covers his studies should do. It's not an ancillary fact, but central to his whole project. I thought Realism and Individualis...
It's "one nature, three persons." Consider the analogous case of human nature: Mark is human. (A is B) Christ is human. (C is B) Therefore Mark is Chr...
You made the point better than I could. There is the thorny issue here of identifying virtue. Classically conceived, the virtues should be as benefici...
I guess I disagree here, for the aforementioned reason that I don't think it makes sense to talk about time in the first place unless something is alr...
To be clear, I haven't suggested anything of the sort. What I said is that there is a long history of theologians looking at the cosmos as a revelatio...
We'd have to clarify that. "One thing with three faces" (or masks) is a common formulation of the modalist heresy. Granted that the distinction from o...
Not long ago I happened to come across a very short clip where John Milbank was contrasting culture with manners. Being 44 seconds long, it's not part...
Exactly, which requires sameness and identity. Hence, the principles being equal (or even co-constituting, at least in the order of conception), or ev...
This is factually incorrect. Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of signs is based explicitly on his study of scholastic theories of signs that were devel...
First, I'll just point out that I think it's a mistake to conflate "emancipatory" with "critical theory" and "definitely not post-modern." Even in les...
It's a good question. Freedom and power were traditionally understood in terms of actuality, potency itself being nothing, and so inherently most stat...
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