Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Presentism: Safe Passage between Tautology and Absurdity?

    Scylla CharybdisCan presentism navigate between the Scylla of tautology and the Charybdis of absurdity? Let's see.  We begin with a datum, a given, a Moorean deliverance that I think most would be loath to deny:

    DATUM: if it is true that a was F, or that a F'ed, then it was true that a is F, or that a Fs.

    For example, if it is true that John F. Kennedy was in Dallas on 22 November 1963, then it was true on that date that he is in Dallas on that date.  For a second example, if it is true that Socrates drank hemlock, then it was true that Socrates drinks hemlock.

    It follows that the present present cannot be the only present: there had to have been past presents, past times that were once present. For example there was the present when JFK was assassinated. That is a past present. Only what was once present could now be past. Suppose you deny this. Then are you saying that there are past items that were never present.  But that cannot be right. For the past is the present that has passed away.  It cannot be the case that the event of Kennedy's assassination was always past and never present.  There was a time when it was present and a time before that when it was future. When Kennedy was inaugurated, his assassination was future; when Johnson was sworn in, his asassination was past.

    Bear in mind that presentism is an A-theory.  This implies that among times there is a  privileged time that is absolutely or non-relationally present.  So while every time is present at itself, only one time is present absolutely. This time instantiates the monadic (non-relational) property of absolute temporal presentness.  This absolute property is temporary, not permanent. 

    So what is the presentist maintaining? He cannot be maintaining that

    P-Taut: Only present items presently exist

    for this is not a substantive metaphysical claim contradicted by the eternalist's  substantive denial, but a mere tautology. Nor can he be telling us that

    P-Solip: Only presently present items exist simpliciter.

    For this is solipsism of the present moment, a bizarre if not lunatic thesis. It amounts to the claim that all that ever existed, all that exists, and all that will ever exist exists now, where 'now' is a rigid designator of the present moment, the moment at which I am writing and you are reading.  If our presentist pals are not solipsists of the present moment, then they cannot be saying that only what exists at the present present exists simpliciter, and so they they must be telling us that only what exists at a given present (whether past, present, or future) exists.  Thus

    P-Always: At every time t, only what is present at t, exists simpliciter.

    This seems to do the trick.  What is says is that, at every time t, only what is temporally present at  t belongs in the ontological inventory, the catalog of what there is.

    Thinking a little deeper, however, (P-Always) seems contradictory: it implies that at each time there are no non-present times and that at each time there are non-present times. For if one quantifies over all times, then one quantifies over present and non-present times in which case there are all these times including non-present times. But the bit following the quantifier in (P-Always) takes this back by stating that only what is present at a given time exists simpliciter.

    It is obvious that (P-Taut)  and (P-Solip) are nonstarters.  So we are driven to (P-Always).  But it is contradictory. The presentist wants to limit the ontological inventory, the catalog of what exists, to temporally present items.  To avoid both tautology and the solipsism of the present moment, however, he is forced to admit that what exists cannot be limited to the present. For he is forced to quantify over times that are not present in order to achieve a formulation that avoids both (P-Taut) and (P-Solip).

    The presentist needs the 'always' to avoid Scylla and Charybdis, but it doesn't keep him from drowning. He is forced to jump out of his privileged temporal perspective from within time and view matters sub specie aeternitatis. He is forced into an illict combination of a privileged perspective within time with a view from No When, a view from outside of time.  The perspectives cannot be integrated, and therein lies the root of the problem.

    My interim conclusion is that presentism makes no clear sense.  This does not support eternalism, however, for it has its own problems. 


    2 responses to “Presentism: Safe Passage between Tautology and Absurdity?”

  • “History is written by the victors.”

    The cynicism of the saying presupposes the reality of the past.


  • Being and Time: Another Presentist Puzzle

    One type of presentism makes a double-barreled claim about the Being of all beings:  All beings are (i) in time (ii) at the present time. There is nothing 'outside' of time, and the there is nothing 'outside' of the present time.  To be just is to be temporally present.  Being = Presentness.  Since identity is symmetrical, the property identity proposition expressed by the immediately preceding sentence  does not fully convey what I want to convey.  What I want to convey is that Being reduces to Temporal Presentness on the type of presentism now being considered.   (If A reduces to B, it does not follow that B reduces to A.)

    The presentism under discussion is involved in a double restriction:  Items in general are restricted to temporal items, and then temporal items are restricted to present items. And all of this as a matter of metaphysical necessity.

    What then do we say about the Berlin Wall? It is wholly past. Being past, it is in time. For, by definition, an item is in time just in case it is the subject of a temporal predicate, whether a monadic A-determination, or a relational B-property.  The Wall is the subject of the predicate 'past', which is true of it; ergo, the Wall is in time.  To put the point B-theoretically, the Wall is such that, every time at which it existed is a time earlier than the present time. Ergo, the Wall is in time.

    On the other hand, being past, the Wall is nothing. Presentism implies that the passage of time has consigned the Wall to the abyss of nonbeing. For if Being reduces to Presentness, and an item is wholly past, then said item is nothing. But if the Wall is nothing, then it has no properties, including the monadic property of being past, and the relational property of being earlier that the present, whence it follows that the Wall is not in time.

    So the Wall is both in time and not in time. It is in time, because 'wholly past' is true of it.  It is not in time for the reason given in the immediately preceding paragraph.

    Presentism, as a thesis about the very Being of all beings, restricts everything to the present time, including the temporal modes, past and future. In so doing, presentism negates itself by eliminating time. For there is no time if there are no distinctions among past, present, and future.


    3 responses to “Being and Time: Another Presentist Puzzle”

  • A Note on Feminism and My Conservatism

    Although I am a conservative, I am not a 'throne and altar' conservative. Nor am I the sort of conservative who thinks that everything traditional trumps everything newfangled.  (The conservative's presumption in favor of the traditional is defeasible.) And of course it is silly to think that conservatives oppose change; it is just that we don't confuse change with change for the better.

    Traditionally, women were wives and mothers whose place was said to be the home.  (Either that, or they lived with their parents or entered a nunnery.)  Now the traditional wife and mother role is a noble one, and difficult to fill properly, and I have nothing but contempt for the feminazis who denigrate it and denigrate those who instantiate it.  May a crapload of obloquy be dumped upon their shrill and febrile pates.   But surely women have a right  to actualize and employ their talents to the full in whichever fields they are suited to enter, however male-dominated those fields  have been hitherto.  They must, however, be suited to enter those fields: no differential standards, no gender-norming,  no reverse discrimination.

    Simone Weil, Edith Stein, and Elizabeth Anscombe are wonderfully good philosophers, and much better than most male philosophers.  I know their works well and consider them to be my superiors both intellectually and morally.  (And I don't think anyone would accuse me of a lack of self-esteem.)  It would have been a loss to all of us had these admirable lights been prevented from developing their talents and publishing their thoughts.

    This makes me something of a liberal in an old and defensible sense.  But I don't use 'liberal' to describe my views. 'Liberal' has suffered linguistic hijacking and now is, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable in sense from 'leftist.'  Anyone who reads this site soon learns that one of my self-appointed tasks is to debunk the pernicious buncombe of the Left.  As someone who maintains a balanced and reasonable position — does that sound a tad self-serving? — I am open to attack from the PC-whipped leftists and from the reactionary, ueber-traditionalist, 'throne and altar' conservatives.  To my amusement, I have been attacked from the latter side as a 'raving liberal.'  (I respond in the  appropriately appellated Am I a Raving Liberal?)

    So much for a brief indication of where I stand with respect to feminism.

    Addendum

    Having stuck up for the distaff contingent I must now express a certain distaste for their tendency toward tribalism, group-think, and identity-fetishization.  Herewith, a congressional depiction thereof.  I cannot recall whether this was SOTU 2020 or 2019:

    Tribalism Female

     


  • Statements about the Past: Troubling for Presentism

    Ruby shoots oswald1) There are statements about the past, and some of them are true. 'Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald' is a true statement about the past. In particular, it is a true statement about the wholly past individuals, Ruby and Oswald.

    2) It is true now that Ruby killed Oswald and it was true at every time later than the time at which Ruby killed Oswald. That Ruby killed Oswald is a past-tensed truth true at present.

    3) On presentism, the (temporally) present alone exists and "the past, as the past, retains no existence whatever . . . ." (Michael Dummett, Truth and the Past, Columbia UP, 2004, p. 52) 

    4) That Ruby killed Oswald is not about anything that exists at present. This is because Ruby and Oswald are wholly past individuals.

    5) That Ruby killed Oswald is not about anything at all. This follows from (3) and (4).  So much the worse for presentism unless it can find a way to uphold and do justice to the reality of the past.

    6) At this point, one might insist that past-tensed truths are brute truths, where a brute truth is a contingent truth that requires nothing external to it for its being true.  A brute truth is just true, and that's all she wrote.  The truth expressed by the present-tensed 'Tom is smoking' presumably cannot be brute since it requires, for its being true, Tom himself at a bare minimum.  For if Tom does not exist, then 'Tom is smoking' cannot be true.  But it is true, and it is true of Tom, so Tom exists.  Here is a clear case in which truth supervenes on being, or veritas sequitur esse.  Aristotle makes this point in the Categories at 14b15-22.

    The notion that Socrates is seated cannot be a brute truth, but that Socrates was seated can be a brute truth, cannot be credited. But I won't argue this out for it is not my present topic.

    7) The present topic is a different way out of the difficulty, call it the Way of Surrogacy.  What the presentist tries to do is to find something in the present that can deputize for the wholly past item, a temporally present surrogate item that can ground the being-true of the past-tensed truth. 

    8) There is more than one way to proceed.  One way is to appeal to causal traces in the present of the past events or individuals. For example, we have video footage of Ruby shooting Oswald, and this evidence is corroborated by eye witness accounts recorded in documents presently available. So the causal traces in the present include video footage, still photographs, copies of same, as above, memories, documents, the gun, etc. That the shooting issued in a killing, is shown by other evidence available at present.

    So  one could say, with some plausibility, that the reality of the past is preserved in the present by the effects (causal traces) in the present of the past events/individuals.  But of course there is much more to the past than is recorded in the present.  But I won't pursue this line of critique at the moment.

    9) I will mention a different problem with this view.  When I assert that Ruby killed Oswald, I am making an assertion about those individuals themselves.  I am not talking about anyone's memories of them, or photographs of them, or video footage of them, or anything else.  I am not referring to things present, but to things past. The very sense of 'Ruby killed Oswald'  rules out anything present being what the sentence is about. It is about wholly past individuals.

    Suppose I show you a photograph. I say, "This is my long-dead father." You reply, "So you were sired by a photograph? What you want to say is that this is a photograph of your father."  You learn something about the appearance of a wholly past man by studying a present photograph. 

    Of course, the photograph shows what the man looked like, not what he looks like. But repeating this platitude does not to blunt the point that the dead man must in some sense exist if he is to be an object of ongoing study via photographs and other documentary evidence, not to mention exhuming the poor guy and studying his teeth and bones.

    Scollay Square is wholly past. But there are plenty of pictures of it. By studying these pictures one can learn a lot about Scollay Square itself.  The ultimate object of study is SS itself, not the evidence by means of which we infer truths about SS. Now if an historian learns more and more about Scollay Square by studying evidence in the present, how can it be maintained that such wholly past items as Scollay Square are now nothing at all?


    18 responses to “Statements about the Past: Troubling for Presentism”

  • Political Correctness in the Philosophy Journals

    I found the following in a technical article on the philosophy of time by a male author:

    The defender of the spotlight theory also embraces past and future objects, but she accepts a "fuller" conception of these objects than the Williamsonian.  According to her . . . .

    Suddenly I am distracted from the abstruse content by the injection of politics where it does not belong. "Another lefty," I think to myself, "signalling his virtue and flaunting his political correctness." The use of 'she' and 'her' is not only jarring but also slightly comical. Women are famously 'under-represented' in philosophy, to use a lefty expression that conflates the factual and the normative, but few who work in the philosophy of time are women. This is not to deny that there are women who have made outstanding contributions to this, the most difficult branch of philosophy.

    My complaint will of course leave the lefty cold. 'She' feels that standard English with its gender-neutral uses of 'he' and 'him' is sexist, presumably because it excludes women. It does no such thing, of course, but the lefty will remain unfazed. But I know how they feel, so I have an irenic suggestion.

    Let's honor the classically liberal principle of free speech. You write your way and we'll write our way.  We will tolerate you, your beliefs, and your modes of expression, but we expect the same in return.  Will it work?

    I doubt it. There is nothing classically liberal about the contemporary Left. In fact, we conservatives are the new (classical) liberals, and leftists are the new authoritarians.  Peace with such dogmatists seems not to be in the cards.  Free speech and open inquiry are not among their values. So unless we can achieve the political equivalent of divorce, we should expect tensions to run high.


  • Existence is Tenseless

    The Ostrich inquires,

    You hold that [instances of] both (1) and (2) below are true.

                   (1) X is no longer temporally present and (2) X exists tenselessly.

    Fair enough. But what does ‘exist tenselessly’ mean?

    To exist tenselessly is just to exist. To exist is to be something. More precisely, it is to be identical to something or other:

    Q. Necessarily, for any x, x exists iff for some y, y = x.

    For example,

    a. Quine exists iff Quine = Quine.

    Now is (a) true at all times, or only at some times? At all times. For at no time is Quine self-diverse.  This commits me to the affirmation of permanentism and the denial of transientism:

    P. It is always the case that everything in time exists at every time.

    T. Sometimes something begins to exist, and sometimes something ceases to exist.

    Now if nothing begins to exist and nothing ceases to exist, then the A-determinations (pastness, presentness, and futurity) are purely temporal and not at all existential. This is why, from

    b. The Berlin Wall is no longer present

    one cannot validly infer

    c. The Berlin Wall does not exist.

    Although nothing begins to exist and nothing ceases to exist, some items begin to be temporally present and some items cease to be temporally present.

    Now presentism includes transientism.  Having rejected transientism, I must also reject presentism, the view that it is always the case that whatever exists exists at present.

    Is it a substantive metaphysical question whether permanentism or presentism is true?  I should think that it is. It is a question about the nature of existence: Is existence time-independent or not?    


    17 responses to “Existence is Tenseless”

  • View from a Side Car

    We are heading east on U.S. 60 in the direction of Superior, AZ. Picketpost Mountain looms on the horizon.  Mike Valle is driving the motorcycle; your humble correspondent rides shotgun.

    Side Car View


  • The Temporal, the Atemporal, and the Tenseless

    1) Divide all entities into two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes, the temporal and the atemporal. Temporal entities are 'in time,' while atemporal entities are not 'in time.' Caesar's crossing the Rubicon is in time; 7's being prime is not in time. 

    2) Here are some temporal words: past, present, future, before, after, later, earlier, simultaneous.  We can define 'in time' as follows.  An item is in time iff a temporal word can be meaningfully predicated of it. Otherwise it is not in time. My definition is circular, but innocuously so. It is like the following which is also circular: X is possible =df X exists in at least one possible world.

    "But doesn't 6 come after 5?" Yes in the normal order of counting. Counting, however, is a temporal process. The numbers themselves are not in time. 

    "If a thing changes, then it is in time. The number 9 changed from being Tom's favorite number to being Tom's second favorite number. So numbers are in time."  But that's a mere Cambridge change; it doesn't count. 

    3) Atemporal entities tenselessly exist and tenselessly have properties.  Everything timeless is tenseless. 

    4) But can a temporal item tenselessly exist? This is the question we need to discuss. Mr Brightly in an earlier thread says No. Caesar is a wholly past individual, and obviously to be classified as temporal rather an atemporal. On Brightly's presentism, JC existed, but is now nothing. We of course agree that JC is no longer temporally present. He is a wholly past individual.  But I maintain that there is a sense in which he exists nonetheless.  I gave an argument earlier in response to Brightly.  Here is a new one.

    ARGUMENT FROM THE UNIVOCITY OF 'EXIST(S)'

    a) Both temporal and atemporal items exist.

    b) Whatever exists exists in the same sense and in the same way: there are no different modes of existence such that timeless items exist in one way and time-bound items in another. 'Exist(s)' is univocal across all applications.

    c) Atemporal items exist tenselessly.  Therefore:

    d) Temporal items exist tenselessly. Therefore:

    e) Julius Caesar and all wholly past items exist tenselessly despite being wholly past.

    COMMENT

    The main idea is that existence, by its very nature, is tenseless.  To exist is to exist tenselessly.  If so, then pastness, presentness, and futurity are purely temporal properties which, by themselves, imply nothing about existence. It follows that existence cannot be identified with temporal presentness.  Accordingly:

    Dinosaurs existed but do not still exist just in case dinosaurs exist (tenselessly) AND they are wholly past.

    Horses exist (present-tense) just in case horses exist (tenselessly) AND some of them are present.

    Martian colonies will exist just in case Martian colonies exist (tenselessly) AND they are wholly future.

    The idea is that existence is time-independent. When a thing exists has no bearing on whether it exists. 

    Think of a spotlight that successively illuminates events in McTaggart's B-series (events ordered by the B-relations, i.e., earlier than, later than, simultaneous with.)  The events and the times at which they occur are all equally real, equally existent, and their existence is tenseless.  An illuminated event is a temporally present event.  So the spotlight once shone on the event of my birth rendering it present. But the spotlight moved on such that my birth became wholly past, but not nonexistent.

    UPSHOT

    I am not endorsing the above argument, nor am I endorsing the Spotlight Theory of Time.  My point against Brightly is that there is no contradiction in thinking of a temporal item as tenselessly existing.  The trick is to realize that existence needn't be thought of as time-dependent — even in the case of items in time.


    3 responses to “The Temporal, the Atemporal, and the Tenseless”

  • Ostrich on a Ridge

    I bring an ostrich to a high and narrow and slippery ridge.  I bid him consider the abyss to his left and the abyss to his right.

    "You came from nothing to perch here a moment, but soon you will slide to your left and become nothing again. I speak in a parable to convey to you the truth of presentism: the present alone is real.  What is not yet is not; what is no longer is not.  Now is the time, transient as it is. No nunc stans for you; the nunc movens is all you've got."


  • An Advantage of Youth

    A joke tired and old to the old and tired can be fresh and young to the young and fresh.


  • Musing and Using

    "Your problems are artifacts of musing about language. Stop musing and stick to using."

    Could be, Ludwig, but I doubt it.


  • Sweet Sixteen

    BV in PragueToday is my 16th 'blogiversary.' 

    Can you say cacoethes scribendi?

    I've missed only a few days in these sixteen years so it's a good bet I'll be blogging 'for the duration.'  Blogging for me is like reading and thinking and meditating and running and hiking and playing chess and breathing and eating and playing the guitar and drinking coffee. It is not something one gives up until forced to.  Some of us are just natural-born scribblers.  We were always writing, on loose leaf, in notebooks, on the backs of envelopes, in journals daily maintained.  Maintaining a weblog is just an electronic extension of all of that. 

    Except that now I conduct my education in public.  This has some disadvantages, but  they are vastly outweighed by the advantages.  I have met a lot of interesting and stimulating characters via this blog, some in the flesh.  You bait your hook and cast it into the vasty deeps of cyberspace and damned if you don't call forth spirits or at least snag some interesting fish.  The occasional scum sucker and bottom feeder are no counterargument.

    I thank you all for your patronage, sincerely, and I hope my writings are of use not just to me. I have a big fat file of treasured fan mail that more than compensates me for my efforts.

    I am proud to have inspired a number of you Internet quill-drivers.  Some of you saw my offerings and thought to yourself, "I can do this too, and I can do it better!" And some of you have. I salute you.

    I had more to say on last year's anniversary if you care to look.


  • An Exchange on the Reality of the Past

    I wrote:

    Our penal [and other] practices presuppose the reality of the past. But how can presentism uphold the reality of the past?  The past is factual, not fictional; actual, not merely possible; something, not nothing. 

    The past is an object of historical investigation: we learn more and more about it.  Historical research is discovery, not invention.  We adjust our thinking about the past by what we discover. It is presupposed that what happened in the past is absolutely independent of our present thinking about it.

    In sum, historical research presupposes the reality of the past. If there is a tenable presentism, then it must be able to accommodate the reality of the past.  I'd like to know how.  If only the present exists, then the past does not exist, in which case it is nothing, whence it follows that it is no object of investigation. But it is an object of investigation, ergo, etc.

    David Brightly responds:

    History, archaeology, palaeontology investigate not so much the past but vestiges (from vestigium, footprint or track) of the past. Things from the past that are not wholly past, such as documents, artifacts, and fossils that have come down to us. These things are sometimes hidden away in archives and attics, or under the soil, or in rock strata, and have to be discovered. But then comes a process of invention whereby a story about the past is put together that must be consistent with the found vestiges. Sometimes the account is revised in the light of new discoveries. Such an account may well contain truths but we cannot be sure. We can't acquaint ourselves with the wholly past.

    We of course agree that the practitioners of the above disciplines study the causal traces of the past in the present. Since we cannot travel back to the past, the only accessible evidence, whether archaeological or documentary, is all in the present. The researchers then infer from present evidence various facts about the past.  "But then comes a process of invention whereby a story about the past is put together that must be consistent with the found vestiges."  That seems right.  We can also agree that any account/story of the past is subject to revision in light of new discoveries. 

    Here are some points of possible disagreement.  If the reader disagrees, he should tell me about what and why.

    1) Although we write history, the subject-matter written about is independent of us and what we write. Similarly, although we in the present remember some past events, the past events we veridically remember (as opposed to merely seem to remember) are typically if not always independent of us and our veridical memorial acts.  So, while without us there would be no history of the past, the past itself does not need us to exist.   (Compare: without us there would be no physics; but nature does not need us to exist.) To put it another way, the past is not immanent in our historiography; it is not 'constituted' (Husserl) by our historiography or by our collective memory.  Affirming this, I affirm the reality of the past, and deny anti-realism about the past.

    2) While the (partially invented) story must be consistent with the evidence discovered, and consistent with itself, it cannot be both true of historical facts and complete.    Either Big Al drank a glass of vino rosso  on January 1st, 1940, or he did not.  But there is nothing in the present that could either confirm or disconfirm the proposition or its negation.  Whatever effects Big Al's drinking or non-drinking had surely had petered out by the end of 1940.  The past is complete (completely determinate). It is as complete as the present. But no true account we give could be complete. 

    3) While our account of the past is subject to addition and revision, the past itself is not.  It is not only determinate in every detail, but also fixed and unalterable.  Although the past's events are logically contingent, they have a kind of accidental necessity (necessitas per accidens) inasmuch as neither man nor God can do anything to alter or expunge them. Not even God can restore a virgin, as Aquinas says somewhere.  What is done is done, and cannot be undone.  J. Caesar might not have crossed the Rubicon, but, having crossed it, he couldn't uncross it.

    Now how can presentism accommodate these points? How can presentism uphold the reality of the past?

    a) On presentism, whatever remains of the past must be locatable in the present. For on presentism, the present and its contents alone exist.  It follows that past events for which there are no causal traces in the present are nothing at all.  On presentism, what no longer exists, does not exist at all.  It does no good to say, with the Ostrich, that what no longer exists existed, for on presentism, what existed is nothing if it cannot be found in some form in the present. 

    b) Most past events leave no causal traces in the present.  Therefore:

    c) The  totality of causal traces  of the reality of the past in the present is incomplete.

    d) The past is complete. Therefore:

    e)  The past cannot be identified with  the totality of its causal traces in the present. Therefore:

    f) Presentism cannot accommodate the fully determinate (complete) reality of the past. Therefore:

    g) Presentism is false.

     


    27 responses to “An Exchange on the Reality of the Past”

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs of Freedom and Liberty

    Tread Not!Metallica, Don't Tread on Me

    Rascals, People Got to Be Free

    Tom Petty, I Won't Back Down

    Johnny Cash, I Won't Back Down

    Merle Haggard, The Fightin' Side of Me

    The Who, Going Mobile

    Richie Havens, Freedom

    Cream, I Feel Free

    Joan Baez, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

    Arlo Guthrie, City of New Orleans

    My Country 'tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty



Latest Comments


  1. Bill, One final complicating observation: The pacifist interpretation of Matt 5:38-42 has been contested in light of Lk 22: 36-38…

  2. The Kant-Swedenborg relation is more complicated than I thought. https://philarchive.org/archive/THOTRO-12

  3. Ed, Just now read the two topmost articles on your Substack. I’m a Kant scholar of sorts and I recall…

  4. Hi Ed, Thanks for dropping by my new cyber pad. I like your phrase, “chic ennui.” It supplies part of…

  5. Very well put: “phenomenologists of suburban hanky-panky, auto dealerships, and such.” In my student years reading Updike and Cheever was…

  6. Bill, I have been looking further into Matt 5: 38-42 and particularly how best to understand the verb antistēnai [to…

  7. Bill and Steven, I profited from what each of you has to say about Matt 5: 38-42, but I think…

  8. Hi Bill Addis’ Nietzsche’s Ontology is readily available on Amazon, Ebay and Abebooks for about US$50-60 https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=addis&ch_sort=t&cm_sp=sort-_-SRP-_-Results&ds=30&dym=on&rollup=on&sortby=17&tn=Nietzsche%27s%20Ontology



Categories



Philosophy Weblogs



Other Websites