Hi Stephen P. King and Bruno, Number would probably be under one of Kant's categories, "quantity".
昐ubstance (e.g., man, horse) 昋uantity (e.g., four-foot, five-foot) 昋uality (e.g., white, grammatical) 昍elation (e.g., double, half) 昉lace (e.g., in the Lyceum, in the market-place) 旸ate (e.g., yesterday, last year) 昉osture (e.g., is lying, is sitting) 昐tate (e.g., has shoes on, has armor on) 旳ction (e.g., cutting, burning) 昉assion (e.g., being cut, being burned) These are the a priori categories of a human mind which Kant deduced as necessary for a human to understand anything, derived from Kant's "transcendental" deduction. The term "transcendental" is misleading, for Kant only transcended from the outside world to the human mind, not above it. However if they are a priori and make sense to a human mind (are categories of understanding), it would not seem unreasonable to assign them anthromorphically to cosmic mind such as the One or the supreme monad. I have not studied these much and need to look further into it as I cannot understand anything myselof without the additional category of "examples" :-). Roger Clough, [email protected] 10/31/2012 "Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-10-30, 17:03:47 Subject: Re: Numbers in the Platonic Realm On 10/30/2012 3:05 PM, meekerdb wrote: >> [SPK] Unless multiple entities can agree that the sequence of symbols >> "17 is prime" is an indicator of some particular mathematical object >> and one of its particular properties, then how does "17 is prime" >> come to mean anything at all? > > I agree with that. But you're talking about the tokens "17 is prime" > not the concept that 17 is prime. Could not a person who grew up > alone on an island realize that 17 has no divisors, and he could even > invent a private language in which he could write down Peano's axioms. Why are you using such trivial and parochial framing for abstract questions? Why the reference to single individuals? Did you not understand that I am claiming that meaningfulness requires at least the possibility of interaction between many entities such that each can evaluate the truth value of a proposition and thus can truthfully claim to have knowledge of true statements? A person that grew and died on a desert island may have discovered for itself that 17 objects cannot be divided into equal subsets, but our statements about that are mere figemnts of our imagination as we could know nothing objective and non-imaginative at all about that person. We are imagining ourselves to have powers that we simply do not have. We are not omniscient voyeurs of Reality and there is not anything that is. -- Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
