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H agrees with Wittgenstein (and disagrees with Quine) that the distinction between conceptual and factual questions is ultimate, if "factual" means empirical in a roughly Popperian sense.

Wiki MarkupBut Wittgenstein, like many of his interpreters, would presumably deny that there could be merely conceptual or nonempirical, nonfactual, reasons for asserting the existence of anything, except, possibly, elements of an abstract system like the real numbers. Hartshorne contends, on the contrary, that "it is not existence but only what \ [he calls\] actuality that in principle, and always, transcends conceptual necessity. That a definable or identifiable idea is +somehow+ instantiated in concrete actuality is . . . its 'existence,' but just how or in what concrete form it is actualized is \ [its\] 'actuality.' That, for example, the idea of +concrete particulars+ is somehow instantiated \ [is\] a nonempirical truism or necessity, and . . . that the definition of 'God' is similarly existential a priori. But this a priori validity applies only to the somehow actualized, not to the how, or in what concrete form, abstract idea (whether deity, or concrete particularity, as such) is concretized. On the highest level of abstractness merely being somehow instantiated is noncontingent" (_Insights and Oversights_: 297).

In H's view, then, "the real issue concerning metaphysics" is this "distinction between existence and actuality, or the indefinite 'somehow instantiated' and the particular how of instantiation; and also the related distinction between ultimate abstractions (such as concreteness as such) and more specific abstractions that are only contingently instantiated in that their being instantiated imposes limitations on the instantiation of other specific abstractions" (Ibid. : 297 f.), Whereas the instantiation of "concreteness" excludes nothing -- "except bare nothing itself, and that is only a word that has lost its meaning," the instantiation of more specific abstractions excludes the instantiation of yet other abstractions comparably specific. As Bergson argued, "nothing" has only relative uses. Therefore, to exclude nothing is not to exclude at all. On the other hand, contingency is competitiveness, mutual exclusiveness between possibilities equally positive.

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