(September 17, 2021 at 11:19 am)Angrboda Wrote: Mereological nihilism is the position that there are no parts and wholes in the world, that identifying something as a part and something else as a whole is just an arbitrary convention that we adopt which has no basis in the features of reality.
IMO mereological is refuted if there is at least one self-evident example of a whole. And there is: the Totality. And there is, for me anyway, a self-evident example of a part: me. You have to decide for yourself if you are a Self who is in relationship with some external other and therefore a part within the Totality.
Anyways....
The Vsauce video kinda reveals the problem with elevating two types of cause (material and efficient*) fundamental and dismissing two other types of causes (final and formal) as properties contingent on matter and its operations. In classical philosophy, this was a mistake. Perhaps it is the other way around. Perhaps matter and its operations are properties that supervene on a fundamental reality of forms and purposes. After all, just before the 20th Century, idealism was the reigning metaphysics. For an intellectual of the Industrial Revolution it was, like, philosophically obvious, man. So when Vsauce, unfolded the paper and said, "where'd the swan go?" I was kinda like, so you removed the formal cause, that doesn't mean the swan ceased to exist in every sense...it just ceased having material properties.
*I cringe to write this because the Scholastics' concept of efficient cause different from Decartes and everyone after him.
<insert profound quote here>
