<snip>
I didn't know Dom & Chris were evangelising
for the Lord...It still all sounds like a con to me. [MJW]
<snip>
Well maybe for a God shaped (w)hole...
But I can see why you regard beingness as a mere hypostatisation, an offence
against the copula. For Aquinas it's simplicity rather than infinity that
provides the basis for being. In Scotus' view of Aquinas, if you conceive of
thingness as limiting being by material specificity, then God (who is
unlimited) is being stripped of thingness, form stripped of matter, which is
false: denial of the antecedent (birds have two legs but my not being a bird
hardly justifies the conclusion that I do not have two legs, for example).
Of course, the argument also removes the predicate altogether, which is the
basis of your own objection: sometimes one can have just a little too much
simplicity.
What Scotus does, by contrast, is actually to _fill_ the predicate in order
to get to the infinite. God's infinititude becomes the ultimate
generalisation of actual and potential predicates, the terminus ad quem of
metaphysical reasoning, and although *being* retains its status as copula
one might also characterise it as a sort of retaining wall for infinite
haecceity. And ontologically, in Scotus' view of things, God is also the
terminus a quo - the first efficient cause, there being neither causeless
effects nor infinite regress.
Now if I am lucky and not too inarticulate my sense that in their 'two
diverging paths' D and B are actually playing with some of these themes may
just about come across.
CW
_______________________________________________
'Listen people, I don't know how you expect to ever stop the
war if you can't sing any better than that'
- Country Joe McDonald, Woodstock 1969
|