On BBC Radio 4's In Our Time (IOT) episode about St. Anselm's ontological argument, John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews, noted that Parmenides of Elea (fl. early 5th century BC) argued that "only what is can be thought." (In Parmenides' sole and fragmentary surviving work, On Nature, is this related claim: "For never shall this prevail, that things that are not are.")
Anselm's and Parmenides' arguments concern proving things about the nature of reality by logic alone, and it was the philosopher Kant who more than 2,000 years later came up with the term ontological.
However, Professor Haldane's statement,"only what is can be thought," prompted me to think "all that is thought is that which is." Compared to what Professor Haldane said, my thought was similar sounding but really concerns epistemology (or at least I think so...my formal education in philosophy is extremely limited!), that is, the nature of knowledge, i.e., what we can know and how we know it. Haldane's "is" means existence itself, and my "is" merely means conceivable. In other words, not being a philosopher in the slightest, I was listening to Haldane make an interesting point about existence and was driven to make for my own amusement a circular argument about something else entirely. Specifically, I was considering a belief--one I share, I imagine, with pretty much everyone (I don't think remarkable thoughts)--that no idea can exist in an intellectual or experiential vacuum. Every idea is, as it were, grounded in antecedents or hanging on related ideas (grounded and hanging being metaphors, obviously....philosophers surely have technical terms for all of this business).
Consider the idea of the unicorn. Someone thought the idea up first. But the idea even the first time was grounded in experience or previous ideas, such as the idea of horn and of horse, whether those concepts had been learned about indirectly (having seen an image of a horn or horse or been told about them by ones wife's obnoxious oaf of a brother) or directly through physical experience (having seen a horn or horse itself or having been caught by ones wife while having sensual pleasures with one...or both).
I should point out that as the episode of IOT unfolded it became clear that I'm not an ontological sort of guy, I'm pretty empirical in my view of reality. Also, two things amused me later in the program after my above-described brianstorm (okay, a brainfizzle). Another of the guests on the program, Clare Carlisle, Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at King's College London, in making a point cited the concept of...a unicorn, and all the guests kept coming back to it, too. I'm crap at philosophy, but, boy, maybe I've got a knack for classroom examples. Second, there was short discussion towards the program's end about Alvin Plantinga. He is a philosopher of the Reformed epistemology movement--"Reformed" as in the Calvinism of the Dutch Reformed Protestant traditions--and I attended a Reformed college where I was given a small introductory dose of Plantinga at some point. You can enjoy some, too. Here's an article, van The New York Times, "Philosopher Sticks Up For God." Coincidentally, Mark de Silva in The Grey Lady's online commentary feature, The Stone, which concerns contemporary philosophy, just this week considered the Dutch love of philosophy.
Photo: star-forming region NGC 6729; ESO (European Southern Observatory)
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