Philosophy: Null-A and the Catholic Church

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Speaking about Real Presence and direct experience: Heidegger?
As authentically temporal, Dasein as potentiality-for-being comes towards itself in its possibilities of being by going back to what has been
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Your bi-directional arrow of time. :extrahappy:
it always comes towards itself from out of a possibility of itself. Hence, it comports itself towards the future by always coming back to its past; the past which is not merely past but still around as having-been…

Heidegger’s task is precisely to show that there is a meaningful concept of being. “We understand the ‘is’ we use in speaking,” he claims, “although we do not comprehend it conceptually”. Can then being be thought of? …

The “ontological difference,” the distinction between being (das Sein) and beings (das Seiende), is fundamental for Heidegger. The forgetfulness of being which, according to him, occurs in the course of western philosophy amounts to the oblivion of this distinction…

Heidegger argues that the question of being would still provide a stimulus to researches of Plato and Aristotle, but it was precisely with them that the original experience of being of the early Greeks was covered over. The fateful event was followed by the gradual slipping away of the distinction between being and beings.

Called variously by different philosophers, being was reduced to a being: to idea in Plato, *substantia *and actualitas in Medieval philosophy, objectivity in modern philosophy, and will to power in Nietzsche and contemporary thought.

The task which the later Heidegger sets before himself is then to make a way back into the primordial beginning, so that the “dead end” can be replaced by a new beginning.

And since the primordial beginning of western thought lies in ancient Greece, those are the Presocratics, the first western thinkers, to whom Heidegger ultimately turns for help into solving the problems of contemporary philosophy and reversing the course of modern history.
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So I was assuming that null-a only came millenia after Aristotle. But Heidegger looked for it before Aristotle.

And so did Barfield. On freedom and on original participation (being, history)
Language is a living and creative power, from which man’s subjectivity was slowly extracted. The function of language is to create that esthetic distance between man and the world which is the very thing that constitutes his humanity. It is what frees him from the world…

Participation is the extra-sensory relation between man and the phenomena… we must accept that our thinking is as much out there in the world as in our heads… The participation of primitive man (what we might call “original” participation) was not theoretical at all, nor was it derived from theoretical thought. It was given in immediate experience…
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Is Barfield’s original participation referenced by Heidegger’s forgetfulness of being? Is any of this a kind of language – logos – which references the Real Presence?

Those of you who know what I am talking about know that I haven’t a clue what I am talking about.
:rotfl:
 
Ani Ibi:
Point me to what Aquinas would have said about General Semantics? Thanks.
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Truthstalker:
Well, that would definitely indicate the future affected the past.
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Oh! Oh! I get it now: the bi-directional arrow of time again!

Holy Hawkings, Batman! :hypno:
 
From what I’ve read, Aristotle starts off with observations about existence as his philosophical basis. Aquinas cheerfully follows suit, but points to Being as that which preexists our observation. I think there must have been null-A philosophies before Aristotle; there are some now. A further hint of what a proper superrationality would be is an absolute insistence that it is right to the exclusion, subsumation or absorption of other philosophies (an eerie resemblence to Catholic thought, yes?

Gotta go. Later.
 
Rather than the foundational cornerstone being observation or being, what if it is God. There is being not as a universal but because God created being (aside from the fact that God is, which pushes His being into another kind of more profound being than everyday, created being). God not just as prime cause but as Prime. Reason is because God created it. God as the Urgrund, and more. There would be nothing without God.

God is, therefore I am.
God is, therefore there is a therefore.
God is, therefore there is an is.

This does a number of things. For one thing, it preserves causation as an effect of the will of God rather than something apart from God. Another thing it does is pushes ultimate objectivity to where it ultimately belongs: God. We can have all kinds of disjointed, subjective experiences, but know that they are explicable in God.

The unknown = mystery, God at work, taken seriously instead of laughed out of the classroom.

The starting point of philosophy not what we see, not in our heads, but in the One who allowed philosophy, sight and heads to exist. Perhaps this has been an unsatisfactory starting point because it is also difficult and also acknowledges a deity.

Hmmmmm…
 
dylanschrader said:
No. Even if quantum events are unpredictable, etc. even if it seems that electrons pop in and out of existence or other similar phenomena, things don’t happen for no reason. Even the idea that observation affects the behavior of particles upholds causality.
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In the swarm of posts, I forgot to get back to you to say that you have persuaded me. For now. 😉

I had been toying with an idea put forward by a friend the week before. He said that the laws of thermodynamics are so sacrosanct that physicists were even willing to sacrifice the laws of causality in order to buttress the laws of thermodynamics.

Well… if that isn’t a seductive little bit of mind candy, I don’t know what is. And besides I was in the company of folks whose background in physics was … well… absent. So I didn’t want to rock the boat.

The thing is that – observation being as ephemeral as it is these days – if we lose causality (ie, theory, logic), then we are left with no tools by which knowledge can be apprehended. That is, we can’t know anything.

That is certainly an anti-survival position. Yet many of us survive. Accident?

It’s also a nihilist position. Nihilism is not a pretty point of view. That alone has me suspicious. Because truth is pretty.
 
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DL82:
This is something I have struggled with myself. I think it’s fair to say that many Catholic doctrines are expressed in terms of Aristotelian logic and deductive method, particularly by those who are influenced by Thomas Aquinas. Because the two major teaching orders (Jesuits and Dominicans) tend to be Thomistic, this influence can sometimes appear to be all-pervasive.
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Thank you for this insight.
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DL82:
Nonetheless, this is only the expression of the doctrine, not the doctrine itself. The Church has always possessed the fullness of Christian truth, though in some cases it was not rigorously defined until it came into conflict, either with schismatics, heretics or unbelievers. It just happens that most of the period that these conflicts took place in was dominated by scholastic and Aristotelian thought, so that’s the language that’s used.
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This is useful too. Thank you.
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DL82:
Also, much recent theology, including John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, is expressed in a language that is much more in conformity with the positivism of the sciences.
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Emphasis mine. Can you flesh this out in more detail please so that I can understand it? Thank you.
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DL82:
Be in no doubt that as time progresses, new expressions of the same eternal truths will be found through the language of scientific relativity, the social sciences and other valid systems of enquiry.
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Pomo has certainly taken a beating. Yet it always struck me as being useful equally for defending the Church as for disagreeing with Her. Trouble is in deciding where modernism ends and pomo begins. My recollection of university reading is that a lot of modernism kind of sneaks in through the backdoor into pomo.
 
Catholicism embraces a both-and, which I think is not allowable in an Aristotelean system, ja?

You know that thread rating system with the stars (1-5 stars)? This thread should have a warning that it is likely to drive you out of your mind.

I am behind on my reading as well. Some link-aholic has been actively dumping long heavy articles all over the philosophy threads.
 
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Truthstalker:
Catholicism embraces a both-and, which I think is not allowable in an Aristotelean system, ja?
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Aristotle’s math had axioms and posits as starting points. Axioms were, I guess, ‘obvious’ understandings. Posits were hypotheses and definitions. Hypotheses are either-or: either something is (a) or it is is (not-a).

Catholicism and (pomo) embraces both-and on some things. On other things Catholicism is very either (a) or (a) but not (b). I don’t know whether you could call that either-or which was a hallmark of modernism. Although modernism seemed to me to be (a) or (a) but not (b).
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Truthstalker:
You know that thread rating system with the stars (1-5 stars)? This thread should have a warning that it is likely to drive you out of your mind.
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Yeah. Hey, next time you start a thread you can choose a thread smiley from below. Maybe we can ask the mods to add that twirly-eyed smiley to the menu.

I haven’t started any PHIL threads. No time. :eek: Some thread-aholic has been dumping huge heavy questions all over the apologetics forums.
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Truthstalker:
I am behind on my reading as well. Some link-aholic has been actively dumping long heavy articles all over the philosophy threads.
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Yeah. And some thread-aholic has been dumping huge heavy questions all over the apologetics forums. 😛
 
Part of null-A is that rather than either-or as the extremes truth can be known in the middle positions - not necessarily as defined on a probabalistic basis but as part of its nature. Not:
the cat is black or white
but the cat is black and white (but not gray).
 
Ani_Ibi said:
On other things Catholicism is very either (a) or (a) but not (b)… modernism seemed to me to be (a) or (a) but not (b).
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I am invoking the Motto. I have know idea what I was talking about.
 
Now that’s just funny. If people could read a book and come away with the same reading, this forum wouldn’t exist.
Ani_Ibi said:
Um… no. That is not what they said at all.
How can our readings of the same paper be so divergent? :confused:
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I am posting this as an experiment to see if it affects any of the previous posts on this thread, given the bi-directional arrow of time. But how would I know if it affected a post that was previously made??
 
Truthstalker said:
I am posting this as an experiment to see if it affects any of the previous posts on this thread, given the bi-directional arrow of time. But how would I know if it affected a post that was previously made??
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Well that’s an interesting question. Is there some way we can set a marker in events in history? A trail of breadcrumbs?

I guess I have to go back and read what we posted on the bi-directional arrow of time, but I have to go to Mass soon. Also our discussion on time never resolved itself. We got bogged down between the Flexiverse and the Multiverse.

Certainly in an informal sense, revisionism has its effects on time: change the past and you change the future – even if the changes made to the past are unfounded in reason.
 
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