(October 19, 2017 at 12:13 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote:(October 19, 2017 at 10:05 am)Jörmungandr Wrote: If I'm being charitable, the best I can interpret your answer is that you believe in a metaphysics in which things just "are" intrinsically good or bad. That things are motivated to becoming by "essences" and "natures". That God's "goodness" somehow communicates itself to the human intellect by "supernatural means". It's an incoherent mess of medieval ideas that make no sense in light of our modern understanding of cause and effect, and natural law. It's a throwback to a time when we were ignorant of the nature of things. When instead of attributing a nut growing into an oak because of DNA and physics and chemistry, we postulated mysterious "essences of oak" that caused it to develop into an oak tree.
My general purpose is to recover necessary concepts that have been lost because of radical skepticism of the sort you peddle. You are not the only one that seems incapable of purging herself of the language of teleology and essential properties. Are you really going to try to tell me that an electron doesn't have a nature? Or that the form of an amino acid isn't just as important as it's chemical composition? Or that various composites do not have have unique dispositions? Without the connection between quantitative and qualitative properties there is no coherent way to understand anything because you've basically undermined the very notion that there actually are things, objects capable of existing independent of a knowing subject's interpretation. And yes it means something to be an oak as opposed to something else, just like it means something to be human, or an electron, or a star, or any other thing that is a thing.
Physical properties aren't analogous to moral properties. So you've just made a bunch of false analogies.
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