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Correctly used, 'unique' is three-way polyvalent. It can mean that which is one of a kind, that which is necessarily one of a kind, and that which is uniquely unique in that it transcends the kind-instance distinction.
God as Uniquely Unique
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4 responses to “God as Uniquely Unique”
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Bill, your stimulating post spurred me to reminisce about when I first encountered “uniquely unique.” It was over fifty years ago in a collection of essays by Sidney Hook, then a professor of mine at NYU: The Quest for Being (Dell, 1963), within its seventh chapter entitled, “Modern Knowledge and the Concept of God” (first published in Commentary, March 1960, which originated in a lecture Hook delivered in a Unitarian church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on December 18, 1959). He used the phrase to highlight the inadequacy of Frederick Copleston’s referring to God as “unique”: “What must be intended by Father Copleston . . . is that God is uniquely unique” (p. 117).
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That’s fascinating, Tony. I read *The Quest for Being* years ago, but what I recall is not “uniquely unique,” but his “Being is a word that should be banished from the vocabulary of philosophers.” (Quoting from memory.) That got my goat! and rankled my ass!
I seem to recall that he gave the following lame contrast argument: ‘Being’ covers everything; hence has no intelligible opposite and is therefore meaningless.
But Hook was certainly right about Fr. Copleston.
I read Hook’s OUT OF STEP in the early ’90s and was mightily impressed.
His seeing through the commie delusion covered a multitude of sins.
He was (and tenselessly still is) Jewish, right?
Do you have the above-mentioned Hook books? Willing to part with them? -
I would simply respond that a God who is required to transcend any ontological framework is demanded to relate to that framework, as transcendence is a positional relation. So transcendence cannot be the first requirement of any Deity.
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But what I said was, “A truly transcendent God, however, must transcend the ontological framework applicable to everything other than God.”
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