That is why I don’t believe in objective physical substances like a rock. It is a rock only because you think so. If it was a rock even if you didn’t think so, then there would have to be some objectively existing “aura” around the particles which made it a rock, and of course I don’t believe in that.
It is one of the good things that has come out of modern science. Apart from whatever philosophy scientists follow, I am thankful that we have a better understanding of matter now, as opposed to the strange philosophy developed before real deep study of matter began.No, the problem is that the the philosophers of science of today have succumbed to scientism. They are telling Aristotelian/Thomistic philosophers " there is no room at the table. " It began with Hume and Descartes and Bishop Berkley and now philosophy has become the forgotten science for the most part, though it is making a slow come back. There is much more interest in both philosophers than there was in the latter part of the 20th century. In other words, if a branch of knowledge doesn’t make something useful, if it doesn’t lead to something that produces a predictive theory then it is useless, and being useless in the productive or predictive sense then it isn’t true.
Linus2nd
Linus2nd
Please help me to understand how these two views are compatible. On the one hand, you say that objective substances do not exist, that nothing is really there but it’s just our mind fleshing out irrational stuff (Immanuel Kant’s view), but then go on to say that we “have a better understanding” of matter. Yet you deny that any stable form of matter really exists apart from our mind so how can we have a “better understanding” of it? What you have a better understanding of is the way your mind just so happens to play tricks on you.
The only logical conclusion for you is that the accidents are illusions only **after **consecration. A substantial change happens when the atoms are mixed with new atoms are separate. This does not happen here. The accidents-physical matter remain, but it is a substance beyond it that is changed.
“the substance of water has the form of water in prime matter”
I’ve tried to explain what the Church teaches and what it means. You insist that the Church does not mean what it teaches. It’s your soul, do with it what you will.
The experience of objective matter does exist. But we do not directly experience “substances” like water, rocks, air, etc. We just find that their matter exhibits similar aspects throughout their location, so we assign substances to those things in our mind. There is the philosopher’s “substance” and then there is the common person’s “substance”. I am fine with the common man’s “substance” being used to describe the physical world. But it leads to logical absurdities when we decide that those substances must necessarily exist on their own.
Sounds like you don’t really understand my position. So then unless you attempt at some point to see the logical coherency in my argument, I am wasting my time with you.Guess what. As soon as someone says that there are genuine, unitary substances, a substance denier comes crawling from beneath a rock, which of course he denies exists!
Its just a pile of atoms ( which no one has actually seen ). So man is just a pile of " something " no one has actually seen. Long live substance deniers, may they always have their shorts tied in a knot. :bounce:
Linus2nd
Yes, we do, and you admit that in the very next sentence you wrote. It’s not a sensible experience but an intellectual one. You abstract to the common nature using the sense data. The problem is that you are committed to the empiricist view that “all knowledge is sense knowledge” yet you contradict yourself in making that statement because the knowledge that all knowledge is sense knowledge is not itself sense knowledge. Rational knowledge is also available to human beings.
By virtue of what are they similar if not by a common nature? We classify all breeds of dog as “all dogs” because they have a common intelligible nature and differ only in their accidents. To deny this seems to lead to the incoherent position that they have nothing in common at all, since they are all particular.
I don’t think anyone has defended that view on this thread. Aquinas did not defend that view. Aristotle did not defend that view. You are referring to Plato’s view that forms are objects in their own right. The Aristotelian conception of a form is that a form is one of the principles by which a thing is anything at all, the other principle being matter. All the Aristotelian is committed to saying is that part of what it means to be a thing in the first place is that it is this kind of thing and not that kind of thing, and that this observation is an objective fact about the way things actually are. It seems to be the common-sensical golden mean between Platonic realism, which posits that the forms are objects in their own rights (what would that even mean?) and the nominalist view that everything is particular (which is a contradiction because it says that the common nature of everything is that it is all particular).
Actually, I do believe that not all knowledge is sense knowledge. But the only objective knowledge I can attest to about a “rock” is that I experience an arrangement of matter which I think of as being a “rock”. You cannot sense the nature of “rock”. But you can ascribe that nature to qualities of matter you experience.
I do agree with the last statement in a sense. The “common nature” is a mental classification of things which are entirely different except in that they are physical matter.
I am not a student of philosophy, I just go off of what makes sense to me. That seems better than reading about the thoughts of some philosophers who contradicted each other.
Okay, thank you for clarifying. But now you are subscribing to the conceptualist view: natures are real but they only exist in your mind. But your mind is not only active but passive as well: it is affected by outside data. Yet all the data just happen to regularly agree with our concepts, even though our concepts were invented by us and in no way actually describe reality? I suppose that technically doesn’t generate a logical contradiction, but it seems to commit you to an essentially magical or superstitious understanding of reality: that everything behaves according to our rational understandings even though there is literally no reason for them to do so. It’s not offering an explanation of this correlation but merely raising the possibility that there may be none at all and then asserting it as a brute fact about reality and/or our minds.
So if I have a Labrador retriever and a beagle, there is nothing in common between the two of them except the fact that they are made out of physical stuff? That seems to be very easily falsified empirically. All the same difficulties are raised as in the last paragraph. It’s just a bunch of fundamental particles or stuff that happens to appear to behave according to higher patterns such as “dog” or “tree” or “rock” but there is literally no reason they do so and no reason they should continue to do so. That’s not offering an explanation of anything but refusing to give an explanation. On the other hand, you could go with the Aristotelian and say that the nature of dog is such that all the powers of its material makeup are harnessed specifically to produce an instance of the universal type “dog.” That at least gives a rational basis for reality instead of simply refusing to give one.
I am not a student of philosophy either, but you were making philosophical claims earlier, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but they are claims that the Aristotelian would dispute. I happen to think that Socrates was probably right: no one has an absolute claim on Truth (except God I guess) and the best way to discover truth is to dialogue with people who think differently such that the truth can be educed from the dialogue and both parties are enriched.
Everything behaves the way we expect it to because we assign things to categories which intentionally fit patterns. That doesn’t prove that some objects all behave a certain way because they share an objective nature.
They behave similarly because they are composed similarly. The composition of matter which appears as the combination of two hydrogen atoms with one oxygen atom behaves a certain way, but the atoms in one molecule are entirely different from those in another. But it does not become an objectively real substance apart from perception.
Rational knowledge are also sense data if you abstract yourself well as a sole consciousness which can only experience and create.
I think what is matter is that we all share common essence so called consciousness.
Very well said.
Off the cuff remarks by a Pope are not Doctrine. Besides, you have not documented your remark. As far as I know it is nothing but your fertile imagination.
Blase6 I understand your observation but it may not be comprehensively correct.
I don’t even think that copper is a “pure substance”. If it can be broken down into distinct parts, it is not a substance. That is my position.
What patterns are they fitting? You are claiming that there are none objectively.
I don’t know what you are trying to say here. No one claimed that the atoms in two molecules are the same. If you are trying to say that multiple water molecules in one body of water don’t all get assumed into one gigantic substance of water, then I think you would be correct because the Aristotelian would refer to quantity as an accident.
Patterns are also based on perception.
Because one water molecule is a different instance from another water molecule, then the only thing they have in common is our perception of them belonging to one substance.