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Re: Good old onty... 2 Years, 4 Months ago
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[quote1262035145=nougat]
Hyper.
It seems like making that distinction, between the essence and its modulations or effects, commits you to a being that can't be disclosed by a description of those effects.
[/quote1262035145]
No it doesn't, that's just to be committed to that confusion again. Your use of the terminology is a bit wonky, which is probably why you're a bit confused... It's understandable... this isn't easy stuff...
You've got to go back and understand the definitions of substance, mode, attribute, etc... otherwise it won't make any sense.
The essence of a substance is its attribute(s). An attribute is a way of conceiving of the substance. Modes are particular finite things understood under an attribute. So modes are expressions of the essence of substance as understood finitely.
The whole point is that in understanding particular modes, you understand Substance. But the mistake is in thinking that by understanding a particular mode, you understand Substance as a whole.
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The kind of philosophy one chooses depends upon what kind of person one is. ~ J.G. Fichte
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Re: Good old onty... 2 Years, 4 Months ago
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It seems very rooted in Parmenidean logic: "There are two ways of inquiry: that it is and cannot not be, or that it is-not and cannot be.
I do, however, have some concerns.
It seems that there would be things that we could neither prove nor disprove the existence of due to ignorance, but this seems to be only applicable to particulars.
Also, how does this play into Abelard's argument that you cannot move from logical to ontological (I tried to find the argument online but couldn't; I'm reasonably sure it was Abelard. If anyone knows where/what the argument is, let me know). I'm more interested in whether Spinoza is addressing it/taking it into account that whether the argument invalidates Spinoza's onty.
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"All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking." -Friedrich Nietzsche.
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Re: Good old onty... 2 Years, 4 Months ago
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Well, there are probably similarities between Abelard's and Spinoza's metaphysics, just from a cursory glance at this: plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/#2 , but I'm not quite sure... would take me some time to investigate.
Individuals have natures, and in virtue of their natures they belong to determinate natural kinds. But an individual's nature is not something really shared with or common to other individuals; Abelard's refutation of realism has shown that this is impossible. Instead, Abelard takes a natural kind to be a well-defined collection of things that have the same features, broadly speaking, that make them what they are. Why a given thing has some features rather than others is explained by how it got that way ” the natural processes that created it result in its having the features it does, namely being the kind of thing it is; similar processes lead to similar results. On this reading, it is clear that natural kinds have no special status; they are no more than discrete integral wholes whose principle of membership is similarity, merely reflecting the fact that the world is divided into discrete similarity-classes of objects. Furthermore, such real relations of similarity are nothing themselves above and beyond the things that are similar. The division into natural kinds is, presumably, a ˜shallow fact™ about the world: matters could have been otherwise had God ordained them differently; fire might be cold, heavy bodies fall upwards, frogs reason. If these causal powers were different, then natural kinds might be different as well, or might not have been as sharply differentiated as they are now. Given how matters stand, natural kinds carve the world at its joints, but they are the joints chosen by God.
That sounds about right for Spinoza, too, except that "chosen" is a bit of a misnomer since there is only one way for God to be. |
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The kind of philosophy one chooses depends upon what kind of person one is. ~ J.G. Fichte
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Re: Good old onty... 2 Years, 4 Months ago
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[quote1262366224=Hypersonic]
That sounds about right for Spinoza, too, except that "chosen" is a bit of a misnomer since there is only one way for God to be.
[/quote1262366224]
Wow, that is an interesting parallel I didn't think about.
How much of a nominalist is Spinoza? I've always understood him to be more of a conceptualist.
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"All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking." -Friedrich Nietzsche.
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Re: Good old onty... 2 Years, 4 Months ago
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[quote1262420246=Colin Michael]
[quote1262366224=Hypersonic]
That sounds about right for Spinoza, too, except that "chosen" is a bit of a misnomer since there is only one way for God to be.
[/quote1262366224]
Wow, that is an interesting parallel I didn't think about.
How much of a nominalist is Spinoza? I've always understood him to be more of a conceptualist.
[/quote1262420246]
I've been trying to figure that out, actually.
At one point Spinoza says (roughly, in Elwes's words):
PROP. XXIV. The more we understand particular things, the more do we understand God.
Which sure looks like an endorsement of a sort of nominalism.
He also calls numbers (and other universals) infinite modes. (and modes are, in a certain sense, a kind of "particular" instance of being, for God, rather than universal realities like Platonic Forms, though there might be a way of reading Forms in a Spinozistic way... depending on whether you can get Platonism to fit into a monistic framework or not... not sure why you'd want to, really... but it might work).
plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/
There are, however, differences in the way things depend on God. Some features of the universe follow necessarily from God”or, more precisely, from the absolute nature of one of God's attributes”in a direct and unmediated manner. These are the universal and eternal aspects of the world, and they do not come into or go out of being; Spinoza calls them œinfinite modes. They include the most general laws of the universe, together governing all things in all ways. From the attribute of extension there follow the principles governing all extended objects (the truths of geometry) and laws governing the motion and rest of bodies (the laws of physics); from the attribute of thought, there follow laws of thought (understood by commentators to be either the laws of logic or the laws of psychology). |
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