[Serious] Thomism: Then & Now

[emjay]

You've hit the nail on the head.  If mereologial nihilism is true,....then wouldn't that also mean that mereologically nihilist statemens are not objects with proper parts?  

I can't remember who said it, I'm sure it's medeival "The world comes to me all at once and as one thing, not split up into discrete parts".  That's actually a pretty good summary of the position of mereological nihilism from an evidentiary standpoint...but...in exploring this relationship, doesn't mereological nihilism also posit things which are directly analagous to if not interchangeable with the contentions it directly opposes?  That there are no such things as x..except these things x which demonstrate my point - in effect.

I'm pretty sure that that concept does come up in Buddhism, in that one of the high level meditative practices (in my understanding) aims to take you back to this sort of undifferentiated state of being where say in your visual field there would be no identification/recognition of objects, just the visual field itself and presumably the colours... what a trip that would be I also think it kind of came up when I was reading Aristotle... ie quite similar to one of the positions he was arguing against, where in Metaphysics, book 5, chapter 4, he quotes Empedocles saying "Nothing that is has a nature, But only mixing and parting of the mixed, And nature is but a name given them by men."... it sounds a remarkably similar to mereological nihilism, though maybe only superficially so.

Anyway, thanks for pointing out where the nail is I definitely understand the issues much better now, including the paradoxical nature you point out of what it contends.

I feel like there's a koan for this.....  Is there a rational, cognizable, actual difference between me and my flock of cold adapted chickens?  "My Farm" being the alleged object, are "myself" and "cold adapted chickens" discrete and proper parts of it?  Where do I end and they begin?  If I or anyone else can answer that question, mereological nihilism is false on it's own merits.  Objects do have proper parts, even if proper parts( and objects too) can be meaningfully entangled.

Yep, it's definitely something interesting to ponder.

I'm not the threads mn guy, mind you, and you should definitely seek more opinions than just mine and wikis..lol, I'm sure you already know that, it's for the gallery.

My italics... you might as well be I've always been curious, where do you get all this info from anyway? I kind of picture you like Johnny Five or Data, just flip through an Encyclopedia, 'okay, got that... next!' Did you study Philosophy at university or whatever?

...Personally, I think mereological nihilism arose as a consequence of people not understanding what a bunch of the proper parts of "My Farm"..for example, were, and being blindsided by the additional actors.  We idn;t know we had microscopic partners, for example.  We didn't understand the relationship between the emerald ash borer and forced raspberry production.  Once we realized that stuff, lines that seemed clearer beforehand became fuzzy afterwards.  Which is to say that mn is describing something true about reality, but isn't true as a theory of all those things in reality.  The lines may be further out than we realized, but there are still lines.

Yep, again another interesting thing to ponder