All you need to do to disprove it is to provide just one example of an actual infinity.
Actually, DH has a point, however, it is a bit incorrect. Aristotle did define “god”, conceptually, as the “thought of thought.” I think DH can see that that definition is slightly different from “eternally thinking of thinking.” Nevertheless, Aristotle did ascribe attributes to god, and, the attributes had to be of perfections of attributes.
But I need not even give any examples since you haven’t made a single argument for why such actual infinities CANNOT exist. You’ve just asked to be disproved and deny any examples I give as disproof. You can say, “no, no, no” as many times as you want to every example that anyone ever offers and still have no logical argument that your claim is true. All you can say is that it hasn’t been disproved YET.All you need to do to disprove it is to provide just one example of an actual infinity.
A potential infinite is not an actual infinite.
You claim that you can enumerate an infinity. I’m giving you the chance to do it right now.
You may need to split it over multiple posts.
:coffeeread:
I think two concepts are being terribly conflated here.Well, if it was this way, I would stop making any plans. There would be nothing I could count on EXCEPT my own mind. But, of course, even my plans could be illusory.
It would probably be best not to involve others in your plot, especially a love interest. I mean, how fair would that be?
jd
Therefore, I guess, a triangle, all by itself, and not attached to, as a form, a physical being, is actually true? IOW, it is not a triangular shaped mobile being, or, a drawing representing the shape, but rather, I should be able to walk out my front door and encounter a (living, breathing) triangle one day? How shall I greet him/her/it? Perhaps, “Hello, Mr./Miss/Mrs. Triangle.”
You cannot attribute to the past, that which cannot be achieved in the future.
What is the point you are trying to make? Real numbers are a class of numbers. Haven’t you studied mathematics? And, none of mathematics is predicated on physics.
You see, that’s the problem: if one cannot make a distinction between that which is really real and that with is not really real, IOW, existing physically (or metaphysically), or not existing physically (or metaphysically), one can easily become confused. I know full well the distinction between classes of numbers, in mathematics. I know full well what “real numbers” signify. But, they are for use in mathematics only. We use them to quantify real stuff.
His classic lecture on this subject is The Will to Believe. The thing that I took away from it is his description of seeking knowledge as two maxims in tension: Find the truth! and Avoid error! Most philosophical methods favor the latter, all the way to the extent of Humean quasi-skepticism and beyond – but why must this be so? Why is this considered the principled way to seek knowledge?
Thanks – that’s a good read.
I’ve never actually met anything that was contingent, either.
The full context of the James quote is in “What Pragmatism Means”.
OK, that’s not the full context, but I thought that was the most humorous point to end the quotation.
He attributes it as a “scholastic adage” and I have no idea whether he is full of it or not. It seems to me like a very good strategy for sophists of all stripes and epochs, with somewhat less applicability in honest philosophy.The issue is finding a suitable instance of efficient cause without reference to a temporal dimension, as masterjedi747 said:
It seems to me that decisions happen with a temporal dimension. Maybe I don’t understand what you meant, or maybe you don’t think that they do.
That’s why “potency-in-act” includes both potency and act, yet is a single word. I must admit I got this phrase from a Korean professor with a surfeit of education in classical languages, and don’t particularly care for it except that it is strange enough to be difficult to mistake for something else. Without the hyphens and the understanding that it is meant to be a single word, along the lines of those compound words that Germans make up for everything, it is definitely not correct.
Yes, and I always understood the idea of Aristotle’s motion to be that original potency becoming actual, not the realization of potency in something that is actual.
I am pretty sure we are on the same page, if you mean by “chronology” that we are talking about “becoming,” rather than “essence.”
From here, it seems that one must reify “necessary” and “contingent” in order to claim that one form of the cosmological argument has strength. As I alluded to in another post, it seems to me that the concepts of a “necessary thing” and a “contingent thing” enjoy the same ontological status as the numbers zero and one. (In fact, Dedekind’s axioms – dunno why Peano always gets the credit – for natural numbers seem to map nicely: zero being the necessary element of the semigroup, all other numbers being contingent on that number via the successor function).
I have not been following this discussion, but I am unclear about what is meant by the word “efficient”; additionally, I assume, that when asking about a cause not related to motion, the word “motion” is being used for general types of motion, wheels turning and the like–I would like to say, most everything is in motion. Somewhere out in the far reaches of this solar system, it has been put forward that a lack of motion, zero Kelvin, would be the planet Uranus–the cause of this, might be the distance from the sun, and any other star, insufficient enough as a source of heat, to reach such a planet, and without chemical properties such as what we have on earth, which tend to be less concentrated in their mass, for whatever reason; although, the planet itself is in motion, both in terms of rotation, and orbit.
Unfortunately both “efficient cause” and “motion” are rather “technical” terms – in the sense that they don’t really mean what they seem to mean. “Efficient cause” is something like “how an object came to be” in the context of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Other causes are “material” (what it’s made of), “formal” (what it is) and “final” (what it’s for). JDaniel can surely correct my gross overgeneralization where needed.
And please note that this does not necessarily entail a cause from the motion of something else. For example, a cause can simply be the necessary presence of something in relation to some other things beginning. For example nothing is not a being, so there can never be such a thing as absolute nothing. And so naturally, it follows that everything that begins to exist, does so in relation to a necessary being.
Or it follows that everything is “necessary” – though this does make the term rather useless.
– Parmenides of Elea.
How does this follow to be true? If something begins, then it is not necessary by definition of its beginning.