From: Scott R (jse885@spinn.net)
Date: Thu Mar 27 2003 - 22:43:50 GMT
Sam,
> Hi Matt, Scott, Erin,
>
> I think I'm with Matt on the concept v essence question. I don't see why
you
> have to have essences in order to have concepts. Scott - is what you are
> describing different from Platonic Forms or Ideas? That concepts are
> (somewhat) time-independent is a grammatical point, not a factual point,
> isn't it?
I am somewhat of a Platonist, though I see the passage through modernism and
post-modernism as resulting in something different from traditional
essentialism. Nominalism, which is the name for saying that a concept is a
grammatical point and not a factual point, requires the ability to abstract,
and the ability to abstract requires the transcendence of space and time.
This basically blows any conventional sense of what things and the awareness
of things are into nonsense. So to put things back together, we also need to
reject the independent reality of particulars. We see a particular *only*
because we have a concept. Now where does that concept come from, if it is
not through abstraction as conventionally imagined? As I see it, it must be
original along with the particular, and unless we want to descend into
solipsism, that original concept is where the thing seen is united with the
seer.
The way I try to make sense of it is to regard every particular as a word,
as having two inseparable sides, one of manifestation (the particular, the
physical appearance to our physical senses) and one of meaning (the essence,
which we perceive, through a glass darkly, as a concept).
- Scott
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