This comes up in Leibniz. He is familiar with and in alignment with Plato. He distinguishes between the laws that are contingent, willed/created into existence/temporality… and the laws that describe that which is eternal/necessary. He acknowledges the freedom and creativity of the eternal/necessary being. The synthesis towards/back to which all the Platonic dialectics point.
I don’t have him right in front of me right now, and am still not taking the bait.
This takes me back to 2011 and 2014 but both are “unfinished”…
…because … even though I had be/do/end(1) (requiring each distinctly, without letting one stand in for the other), I still conflated doing/existantiating the good (the moral law) with value (essence, meaning) in general… because I didn’t fully have the Venn of Import (will eventually articulate, I’m sure, that is, Lord-willing). And we have seen that Leibniz also grasped its relevance to the character of Nature (position/conception, action/perception, force/judgment).
… but mostly because if this is ever “finished” at all… it will take (or, takes) an act of God (hopefully not a human-caused/-preventable natural, globally warming disaster).
Footnote:
(1) I gleaned be/do/end from “The Moral of the story” by Nina Rosenstand, who brought the golden rule up in comparison to all major theories in ethics, and highlighted character/virtue (part 2, ch 6, part 3), conduct (part 2, ch 6, 7, part 3, ch 12), and consequences/teleology (part 2, chs 4, 5, 7 & part 3).
It seems like you have been studying Leibniz for over 10 years already.
What about Bertrand Russell’s Teapot argument? One might say that the idea of a teapot circling the Moon exists, but does that mean that a teapot is circling the Moon?
The idea of existence is possible only through an inherently opinionated context, a conscious self, and that implies that the idea of existence cannot be separated and be placed in a position of either being true or not.
It doesn’t matter whether one might be able to conceive of a “First Cause” or other causality based context (i.e. ‘the world existing independent of mind’). From a philosophical perspective, all that matters is the ability for justification.
Are you interested in the nothingness itself (Einstein), or why nothingness was glorified? Or is it the process of mocking the nothingness that amuses you?
Digest and understand the basics. Power elevates fools and scoundrels to distract from when it humbles and kills geniuses.
Forget time travel. If you truly wanna dominate the universe, you don’t have to travel to another time. You’re already in every time and you never leave the current one, so you maintain dominion over it. There’s only ever gonna be one being that is always ever doing this. You have to be that being in order to do it in the “first” place. If it ever feels like you’re experiencing more than one moment, you yourself did not initiate that—unless you are that being—and you initiated it for someone else—because you didn’t need to initiate it for yourself.
Is that being like Russell’s teapot, or is that being as the future and the past is to us? And that is an example of why the verification principle is crap. Plus, you can argue for the existence of the past and the future by looking at artifacts and fulfilled prophecies… and certain arguments of reason and logic. And when you’re arguing them, you are arguing for the existence (or being) (or essence) of that being.
I haven’t been studying Leibniz for ten years—I had not actually read him until just recently. Before that, I was exposed to him via Dr. William Lane Craig. Whenever any of us arrives at or seeks out anything that is true, it is not merely ourselves we are studying, it is that in whose image we are made we are studying, and that is my official position on who we have been studying for much longer than 10 years.
Teapot argument? One might say that the idea of a teapot circling the Moon exists, but does that mean that a teapot is circling the Moon?