Hi Stephen P. King
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/
" Descartes believed in only TWO kinds of substance: material body, which is
defined by extension,
and mental substance, which is defined by thought, which, in this context, is
more or less equivalent to consciousness."
<snip>
" For Spinoza, there is only ONE substance, the existence of which is
demonstrated by a version of
the ontological argument, which is thought of as being both God and Nature."
<snip>
Leibniz was not satisfied by this conception of divine substance, at least in
part because it
confines God to what actually exists. For Leibniz, God contains within himself
all possibilities,
not just the actual world: this latter is just that maximal set of
possibilities that he has best reason to actualize.
Leibniz acknowledges created SUBSTANCES, though they are very intimately
dependent on God.
In the Discourse on Metaphysics, (Section 14), he says:
it is clear that created SUBSTANCES depend on God, who conserves them and
indeed who produces them
continuously by a kind of emanation, just as we produce our thoughts. (1998:
66)"
Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net
9/17/2012
Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him
so that everything could function."
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Stephen P. King
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-09-16, 12:26:18
Subject: Re: science only works with half a brain
On 9/16/2012 8:52 AM, Roger Clough wrote:
> Hi Stephen P. King
>
> Mereology seems to be something like Spinoza's metaphysics,
> that there is just one stuff in the universe and that stuff is God.
> So there is just one material.
Hi Roger,
Yes. Each of these philosophers focused on different things, but
they all seemed to agree on the idea of a "fundamental substance". This
is the idea that Bruno denotes as "primitive matter". On analysis of the
concept it can be understood that this "substance" is nothing more than
a empty "bearer of properties". I think that "existence" itself, the
"necessarily possible", is sufficient to "bundle" properties together.
>
> Leibniz is completely diffferent. Every substance is not only
> different, it keeps changing, and changing more than its shape,
> and is a reflection of the whole universe.
I suspect that Leibniz saw Becoming as fundamental (the Heraclitus
view) and thus considered all properties as the result of some process,
some kind of change. His problem is that he neglected to examine in
detail the fact that we cannot assume a change without having a way to
measure its incrementation. Perhaps he merely assumes, with Newton, that
God's metronome, clocked all change equally. Modern incarnations of this
idea are evident in "Universe as Cellular automata" theories and those
fail for the same reason as L's idea. We can repair and rehabilitate
these idea by a careful consideration of what Special and General
Relativity can tell us.
> The "changing" and the "different" aspects means Leibniz is
> non-materialistic.
> And all of my comments could have been said by Leibniz.
I disagree. He was not non-materialistic at all, he just put the
burden of distinguishing matter from non-matter into the hands of God
and its PEH. He avoided the hard problems.
>
>
>
> Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net
> 9/16/2012
> Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him
> so that everything could function."
> snip
--
Onward!
Stephen
http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html
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