Re: BHA: Re: starting up DPF readings again.

[LH Engelskirchen <lhengels@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have a commute, which is one of the things of this world I'd like
to absent, but being not at that point yet I had the wisdom to read
Gary's post before my trek.  Here are freeway ruminations:

1.   What is the significance of our being able to imagine a world
of absence only?  What must be the case for me to be able to
imagine this?  Well there must be a being like me engaged in some
activity like guiding a hulk of metal over a path of concrete in
excess of a mile a minute, conscious, and able to abstract from
every feature of being.  But this is an epistemological feat which
has no bearing on the existence of totally no being unless it is
accompanied by some sort of explanation as to how something comes
out of nothing.  But as far as I know the only thing science has
been able to explain is how energy and matter are transformed.

2.   Is it really true that if there were only the positive nothing
could happen?  In Critique of Gotha Marx makes what I take to be a
truly fundamental philosophical point: for anything to be an
individual thing it must be in some way different from every other
thing.  When we treat one thing as like another it is always by
abstracting from some feature which differentiates the two.  So
suppose everything were one thing.  Just one thing.  Then it would
seem to be the case that nothing would happen.  But if every
individual thing is different in some way from every other
individual thing, then how does it follow that there must be
absence or that nothing would happen?  Each thing will be in some
way distinguishable from the other.  So now they are all jammed up
against each other without gaps.  All we need is to suppose that
their interaction with one another is perfectly choreographed and
we have no need of absence. We can even allow that they decay and
are transformed.  The idea that absence is necessary to read the
letters on a page doesn't work for instead of absence I can have,
as I actually do have, different kinds of being.

3.   Now what I do have is an individual and an other ("to allow at
least two . . . non identicals is transcendentally necessary").
That does seem necessary for something to happen.  Then what I have
is a relation between them.  What is the ontology of that relation?
Since it is a relation it is imperceptible.  Is it real?

4.   In what sense is the absence of either the past or the future
real?  Dinosaurs, we infer, lived in the past.  They do not live
now.  We have bones or bones turned to rock which give evidence of
their existence.  We have a sign of their existence.  And clouds
are a sign of rain to come because we know the meteorological laws
that connect the one thing with another.  But we also know that in
an open universe one mechanism may override another and the rain we
expect may never come.  In what sense is the rain absent in the
future real?  In what sense is any of the future real?  Real
absence exists as Pierre not being in the cafe.  Is the real
absence of the future different?  Is this a real absence that
doesn't exist?
No doubt I have missed the point.

* * * *

Does the first section of Chapter 2 mean that the following
argument from a book I teach out of is error?:  "The problem as to
omissions is that reliance on an omission is an illogical concept.
We can say that A acted -- bought or sold -- at a given price in
reliance on what B told him, but we can't say that A acted --
bought or sold at a given price -- in reliance on what B didn't
tell him."

* * * *

Anybody have a workable definition of "ontologically
extensionalist" (p 40 at bottom).

Howard


Howard Engelskirchen
Western State University
r



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