Category: Limit Concepts
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How Could God be Ineffable?
The mystically inclined say that God is ineffable. The ineffable is the inexpressible, the unspeakable. Merriam-Webster: Ineffable comes from ineffābilis, which joins the prefix in-, meaning "not," with the adjective effābilis, meaning "capable of being expressed." Effābilis comes from effārī, "to speak out," which in turn comes from ex- and fārī, meaning “to speak.” But: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in…
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The Concept GOD as a Limit Concept
The concept GOD is the concept of a being that cannot be constituted in consciousness in Husserl's sense of 'constitution,' a being that cannot be a transcendence-in-immanence, but must be absolutely transcendent, transcendent in itself, not merely for us. It follows that there cannot be a phenomenology of God. At best, there can be a…
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Can Kant Refer to God?
This is a re-working of an entry from 19 September 2016. It relates to present concerns about limit concepts and whether and to what extent God can be subsumed under our concepts. ………………………. Ed Buckner raises the title question, and he wants my help with it. How can I refuse? I'll say a little now,…
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The Concept of the Metaphysical Self in Wittgenstein as Limit Concept
I continue my investigation of limit concepts. So far I have discussed the concepts of God, prime matter, bare particulars, and particularity. We now turn to the Tractarian Wittgenstein. As I read him, Wittgenstein accepts Hume's famous rejection of the self as an object of experience or as a part of the world. "There is…
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Is the Concept of Particularity a Limit Concept?
That depends. The term is ambiguous. 'Particularity' can be taken to refer to a category common to all particulars, whether concrete or abstract. (Tropes are abstract particulars using 'abstract' in the old, not the Quinean, way.) The concept of particularity in this sense is not a limit concept. We have no trouble conceptualizing the category…
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Bare Particular as Limit Concept
I have already shown that the concept prime matter is a limit concept. The same holds for the concept bare particular. Both are lower limits of ontological analysis. I will be using 'bare particular' in Gustav Bergmann's sense. What is a Particular? Particulars in the sense relevant to understanding 'bare particular' may be understood in…
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What is a Limit Concept? The Example of Prime Matter
In an earlier entry I suggested that the concept God is a limit concept or Grenzbegriff. I now need to back up a few steps and clarify the concept limit concept and give some non-divine examples. If I cannot supply any non-divine examples, then I might justifiably be accused of ad-hoc-ery. Terminological note: The term…