(November 1, 2021 at 1:13 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: It goes deeper.
Sure, it could be that some intangibles are not real but that is different from extrapolating from examples about chairs and pots and concluding that no intangibles are real. Here's an intangible: a unit. Are there units? If not how can we do math without it. Or maybe go the other way: is there a totality? ...the All, as it were.
It is obvious were I am going by mentioning units and allness. These are attributes of God: unity and perfection. And we recognize those attributes in creatures to the degree they participate as some limited kind unity and completeness. So I can see why an atheist would deny the validity of any intangibles even if it comes at the cost denying the validity of math and the utility of language.
That is why I think the issue is deeper. The intelligibility of the material world of change necessarrily depends on the reality of some unchanging intangibles to make sense of it...like a unified and complete ground for being. And it is my position that, even if the 5 Ways do not demonstrate to the satisfaction of Pyrrhonian skeptics the reality of some grond for being, the 5 Ways still show us how indispensible intangibles are to reasoning.
Very interesting, Neo. I must admit I haven't really given much thought to 'intangibles', and that's one of the interesting things that's coming out of this new interest. But just for clarification:
1) are you talking about Platonic Forms when you're talking about intangibles? (or Aristotles' version of them, if different... I haven't finished reading Aristotle by a long shot), and
2) when in your other post you were talking about 'things', and talking about things like chairs and human rights in the same sentence, I just want to be clear, in terms of Aristotles' causes (and/or in Aquinas) are they treated the same; ie you've got something explained by these four causes (material, form, efficient, and final), but in that sense are tangible and intangible things used interchangably? ie are the both treated as equally real in the same sense, and therefore requiring the same sorts of explanations (ie with those four causes)?
