Discursive reasoning

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thinkandmull

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This is a rather insignificant thread, but anyway:

I may not quite have a grasp on what discursive reasoning consists of, nonetheless, how is it possible to say God does not have this since the each Person of the Trinity knows there are two other people in the Trinity. One and one is a composite of sorts and thus discursive reasoning understands it.
 
I had to look up the phrase “discursive reason” and found it is simply the process of coming to a conclusion based on reason rather than intuition.
how is it possible to say God does not have this since the each Person of the Trinity knows there are two other people in the Trinity. One and one is a composite of sorts and thus discursive reasoning understands it.
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Does anyone say that God doesn’t have discursive reason? I really don’t understand what you’re asking.
 
It means that God does not go through a process of chewing over information before arriving at a conclusion. Since He is omniscient and possessing of an infinite intellect, He has known all things from eternity. By intuition it just means that His total knowledge is innate, rather than acquired.

The Neoplatonists wrote a lot about it, contrasting eternal being who ‘know everything at once’ with fallen beings who experience the world as passing time, going from one thought to the next, processing that information and arriving to new thoughts.

All three persons in the Trinity have this Intellect.

Although I personally believe that three omniscient minds would necessarily have be identical. And if they all belong to one being then it would really be one mind, and therefore one person rather than three.
 
paziego said:
It means that God does not go through a process of chewing over information before arriving at a conclusion. Since He is omniscient and possessing of an infinite intellect, He has known all things from eternity. By intuition it just means that His total knowledge is innate, rather than acquired.
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Right, that makes sense.
 
thinkandmull said:
This is a rather insignificant thread, but anyway:

I may not quite have a grasp on what discursive reasoning consists of, nonetheless, how is it possible to say God does not have this since the each Person of the Trinity knows there are two other people in the Trinity. One and one is a composite of sorts and thus discursive reasoning understands it.
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Hans von Baththasur spends some time discussing what three and one means wrt the Trinity - from the point of view of the Christian “neo-Platonists”.
It isn’t “number” as you and I understand it Scotty - which may explain why discursive reasoning is not involved.
See his Cosmic Liturgy about 1/4 in.
 
Blue_Horizon said:
Hans von Baththasur spends some time discussing what three and one means wrt the Trinity - from the point of view of the Christian “neo-Platonists”.
It isn’t “number” as you and I understand it Scotty - which may explain why discursive reasoning is not involved.
See his Cosmic Liturgy about 1/4 in.
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What do Catholic “neo-Platonists” believe that non-Platonists don’t?
 
thinkandmull said:
This is a rather insignificant thread, but anyway:

I may not quite have a grasp on what discursive reasoning consists of, nonetheless, how is it possible to say God does not have this since the each Person of the Trinity knows there are two other people in the Trinity. One and one is a composite of sorts and thus discursive reasoning understands it.
Click to expand...
Discursive reason, according to St Thomas (and I think he was quite spot on with this) is temporal; in other words, reasoning which occurs in time is “discursive” because it is (in keeping with the etymology of the Latin root), literally “dashed to pieces”; in other words, no discursive reasoning is complete in any part of itself. Consider, for example, the parts of a sentence; none of these make sense on their own…they only make sense in the context of the whole. The problem of discursive reasoning was a big thing for medieval thinkers, and had its own class of study (mereology). Your question, therefore, is by no means trivial…we could have a long “discursive” chat about this!

Pax
 
Was Kant right about us projecting our intuitive experienced moments unto God? Who or how can it be said what God experiences??
 
Blue_Horizon said:
Why do you ask off topic questions?
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We were talking of about the Trinity and what we can know about its inner experience. I was wondering why you brought up Platonists-vs-nonPlatonist. The only issue I know that they disagree about is if there are entity Ideas apart from God.
 
I think you might closer to understanding the Trinity with recursive reasoning than discursive reasoning.
Yppop.
 
yppop said:
I think you might closer to understanding the Trinity with recursive reasoning than discursive reasoning.
Yppop.
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Is it the mystical experiences the source of this knowledge?
 
Ok, I get now what my original question was more readily.

“…the intellect can certainly understand many things per modum unius, but not many per modum multorum. Now I mean per modum unius vel multorum, through one or many intelligible species. For the mode of any action follows the form which is the principle of the action. So whatever the intellect can understand under one species it can understand together. So God sees all things at once because he sees all things through one, which is his essence…” Thomas Aquinas

How, however, can God understood two other Persons of the Trinity through one intuitive act. Two other Persons seem to require two separate acts of love and knowing
 
thinkandmull said:
Ok, I get now what my original question was more readily.

“…the intellect can certainly understand many things per modum unius, but not many per modum multorum. Now I mean per modum unius vel multorum, through one or many intelligible species. For the mode of any action follows the form which is the principle of the action. So whatever the intellect can understand under one species it can understand together. So God sees all things at once because he sees all things through one, which is his essence…” Thomas Aquinas

How, however, can God understood two other Persons of the Trinity through one intuitive act. Two other Persons seem to require two separate acts of love and knowing
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This question seems to imply that God thinks, and knows, like humans. Is this true?

The Aquinas quote states explicitly, “sees all things through one”, that your last sentence cannot be true.
 
What type of an argument can be put forward that that God thinks like humans do when they think most intuitively? It sounds rather fitting since those are our deeper moments, but that might be a red herring
 
thinkandmull said:
What type of an argument can be put forward that that God thinks like humans do when they think most intuitively? It sounds rather fitting since those are our deeper moments, but that might be a red herring
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I found this definition of reasoning:
  1. the process of forming conclusions, judgments, or inferences from facts or premises.
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This definition seems to be pertinent to the context of this thread.

God is omniscient. Therefore He does not need to use reasoning to know things. It would appear the reasoning, discursive or otherwise, is a strictly human activity.

Intuition includes processing information to form conclusions. God does not process information to form conclusions.
 
It would appear that since God is omniscient, God does think.

How God thinks is God’s business, not ours.

Suffice it to say God has made us in such a way as to communicate with him both discursively and intuitively.
 
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