Re: BHA: Santa, God, kneeling

[Louis Irwin <lirwin1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matt,

You repeated my revised suggestions (in relation to some comments by Hans
Ehrbar) regarding nomenclature, namely

>>   Sally is real, historical, existing, present;
>>   Pierre is real, historical, existing, absent;
>>   Socrates is real, historical, non-existent, absent;
>>   Santa is real, non-historical, non-existent, absent.


and then said you "can't make sense of the notion that Santa is
non-historical."

What I meant was that Santa is not, and never was, an historically existing
person.  By contrast, Socrates does not now exist, but he once did and so
qualifies as an historically exiting person.   As a lot of the recent
exchanges made clear, everyone agrees that the concept of Santa is an
histrically existing entity.

BTW, I prefer to say that Socrates is "historical", rather than
"historically existing", lest someone makes the inference from
"historically existing" to "existing" and then finds my description of
Socrates to be contradictory.

You also ask: "What is not real, or unreal? Is the category (unreality)
meaningful for realism? Is phlogiston real is some sense?"  My original
suggestion for nomenclature did have Santa as unreal; the revison makes him
real along with all the others in deference to Hans.  Both sets, though,
were suggestions for comments rather than fully worked out positions.
Phlogiston would count as real, non-historical, non-existent, absent on the
first set and unreal, non-existent, absent on the second.

Louis Irwin



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