“In scholasticism, existence of a thing is not derived from its essence but is determined by the creative volition of God, the dichotomy of existence and essence demonstrates that the dualism of the created universe is only resolvable through God. Empiricism recognizes existence of singular facts, which are not derivable and which are observable through empirical experience.”
Can anybody put further analysis on this subject matter?
holy moly dude those guys were the worst. with the scholastics the ruling-class dogma of greek metaphysics went formally gangster. like by this time everybody was quietly accepting that there was a ‘god’, that the present social, economic and political organizations of the various forms of existing aristocratic governments were reflections of the ‘divine order’ (their ‘right’ to rule), and that only the ‘philosopher’ had a hot-line to the mind of this ‘god’, and could therefore explain to us wtf was going on.
so basically what they did was tweak out some of aristotle’s stuff… which was, fortunately for them, vague enough to be made to mean whatever they wanted it to mean to justify their and the church’s authority.
take this non-problem of the difference between ‘essence’ and ‘existence’ in a theoretical model which includes the concept that there is a transcendent ‘god’ and that everything that exists was created. then look at what spinz did; in nature existence and essence are synonymous… essence being only the ‘striving’ that each particular thing expresses through its continued existence. and this striving is not an act of ‘will’, either. to call it ‘will’ would be to split the being of the thing into two - the thing itself, and then it’s agency, its ‘self’, which ‘directs’ what its being is and what it does. there is no such cartesian duality here… so there is no secondary ontological feature or property of a thing that can only be conceived by… you guessed it… the special powers of the philosopher’s rational thought. if you let these asshats get a’hold of such nonsense, the next thing you know their justifying the present model of their aristocratic ‘state’ as the natural order and convincing you that you have freewill so you can be made guilty when you don’t follow their directions to bring the king some cheese.
so you don’t have a ‘god’ over here, and a ‘creation’ over there, and then a process of change and development according to the instructions of the former to the latter. the two are synonymous. the same thing expressed in different ways.
yeah but no, if there is no dichotomy between essence and existence, there is no need to stipulate an intermediary such as ‘god’. and if you don’t have no ‘god’, you don’t have a secret language that must be decrypted by a select class of jargon-ass inventing specialists, the philosophers.
.
.
Other than bringing the bloody Revolution into this I think promethean has a pretty good story.
But then the Revolution is his very Conatus.
I’m sorry i asked.
Actually Thomas Aquinas believed there was such a thing as just revolution, and he believed man had both duties to God, his community, and himself, natural rights.
