Category: Modes of Being
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What are Modes of Being?
The following has been languishing in my unpublished archives since December 2009. Time to clean it up and send it out. If it triggers a bit of hard thinking in a few receptive heads, and therewith, the momentary bliss of the sublunary bios theoretikos, then it has done its job. Don't comment unless you understand…
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Artifacts, Organisms, and Modes of Existence
Hello Dr. Vallicella, greetings from Germany! I have been revisiting your paper "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, eds. Novotny and Novak, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75. One of the most intriguing arguments you give against the opponent of modes of being/existence is the argument at the end against Peter van Inwagen's…
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Holes and Their Mode of Being
A tight little entry of 708 words over at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical.
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Nominalism, Existence, and Subsistence
Here are five versions of nominalism by my current count: Mad-Dog Nominalism: No word has an extra-linguistic referent, not even proper names such as 'Peter' and 'Paul.' Extreme Nominalism: The only words that have existing referents are proper names like 'Peter' and Paul'; nothing in reality corresponds to such predicates as 'blond.' And a fortiori nothing…
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On the Status of Thomistic Common Natures
Aquinas says that any given nature can be considered in three ways: in respect of the esse it has in concrete singulars; in respect of the esse it has in minds; absolutely, in the abstract, without reference to either material singulars or minds, and thus without reference to either mode of esse. The two modes…
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In Defense of Modes of Being: Substance and Accident
The following entry, first posted on February 20, 2011, is relevant to the question whether God is a being among beings. My rejection of this claim requires that there be modes of Being. If talk of modes of Being is unintelligible, or based on an obvious mistake, then the claim that God is not a…
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Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms? Reply to a Comment
Dr. James Anderson writes, I appreciated your recent post with the above title. However, I note that you didn't connect your comments there with your ongoing discussion with Dale Tuggy. From point 3 of your post: Ryan seems to think that to believe in God is to believe that there is a special object in…
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God and Socrates: Two Different Ways of Existing?
This is another round in an ongoing discussion (via face-to-face conversations, podcasts, and weblog posts) with Dale Tuggy on whether or not God is best thought of as a being among beings, albeit the highest being (summum ens), or rather as self-subsistent Being itself (ipsum esse subsistens). In this entry I will respond to just…
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John Passmore on Entity-Monism and Existence-Monism
The Australian philosopher John Passmore (1914 – 2004) is described in his Telegraph obituary as "an Andersonian radical, swept away, though not to the point of unquestioning devotion, by his Scottish-born philosophy professor, John Anderson . . . ." The influence of Anderson on Passmore is very clear from the latter's Philosophical Reasoning (Basic Books,…
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Levels of Reality and the Essence of Religion
Reading John Anderson has enhanced my sense of the centrality of the question of levels of reality for those of us who view philosophy as a quest for the Absolute and a project of self-transformation. Of course it was more or less obvious to me all along, Plato's Allegory of the Cave being the richest…
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God as an Ontological Category Mistake
John Anderson's rejection of God is radical indeed. A. J. Baker writes: Anderson, of course, upholds atheism, though that is a rather narrow and negative way of describing his position given its sweep in rejecting all rationalist conceptions of essences and ontological contrasts in favour of the view that whatever exists is a natural occurrence…
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Anderson Against Modes of Being: The Case of Berkeley
I'm on a John Anderson jag at the moment and I'm having a blast. (Whatever else you say about philosophy it is a marvellous and marvellously reliable source of deep pleasure, at least to those to whom she has revealed herself and who have become her life-long acolytes.) Anderson (1893-1962) is a fascinating character both…
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John Anderson on Levels of Reality
Call it the MOB doctrine: there are modes of being, ways of existing, levels of reality. I have defended the MOB in these pages and in print, chiefly in "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novotny and Novak eds., Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, 45-75. But I have yet to come to grips with…