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Hartshorne says, "Universals must have some embodiment (if in nothing else, in some mind thinking them)" (AD: 56 frff.). But what, exactly, does he mean by "some mind thinking them"? I take him to mean, whatever else he means, God's mind-understood mind—understood as that mind, thanks to which alone possibility as well as actuality has, as he would say, an "objective or extralinguistic" reality.

But, then, if I reject, as I do, the idea of "God's mind" as having any but a symbolic, nonliteral meaning (if it is to have any clear and coherent meaning at all), how do I account for the "some embodiment" that-on that—on an Aristotelian-Whiteheadian-WhiteheadianHartshornean Hartshornean understanding of the "ontological principle"-universals —universals have to have') 

I account for it by thinking and speaking, not of "God's mind," except as a symbolic, nonliteral concept and term, but of the universal individual's unqual(fied unqualfied inclusion (?lall modes l?lreality---possibilityof all modes of reality—possibility (both ontological and ontic) as well as actuality Hartshorne himself says that "all-inclusiveness, non-duality, is a formal character of deity," which, as such, can be stated formally and, therefore, literally, by saying "God is coincident with all truth and reality" ("The Idea of God": 5). But, then, while one certainly may interpret such literal modal coincidence by means ofthe of the psychicalist concept, "God's mind," there is just as certainly no reason why one mllst must so interpret it, since the purely formal, literal statemennhat statement that the universal individual is allinclusive all-inclusive suffices to make the point-at point—at least so far as metaphysics is concerned. 

To be embodied is to be included-being included—being instantiated as actuality being one mode of embodiment or inclusion, being entertained as possibility being the other (cf \IotebooksNotebooks, 16 November 1993). 

9 June 2008 

I suspect that heretofore I have tended to use the terms "to instantiate" and "to embody" interchangeably. But there is a good reason not to use them in this way.

...

It clearly seems important to take aCCQunt account of this Aristotelian understanding in any treatment of abstracts. But in a strictly formal or transcendental metaphysics it will not do to say with Hartshorne and other idealists that the Aristotelian requirement can be met, provided only that the abstract in question is conceived by some mind, and that it in fact is met because every abstract is conceived, at least implicitly, by the divine mind.

...

One way of making the distinction, then, is to say that an abstract must indeed be somehow embodied in a concrete, but that it is so embodied either by being instantiated in the concrete as actuality or included in it as possibility. Alternatively, one could allow that "included" is like "embodied," in that instantiating an abstract is also a way of including it, and say, instead, that an abstract is embodied!included in a concrete provided that it is either instantiated in it as actuality or entertained in it as possibility.

16 November 1993