Even things that don't have natures have natures. It is the nature of artifacts, artificial things, that they do not form natural kinds.

Chairs do not form a natural kind in the way bears do, or as gold does.

Yet all chairs are artifacts, and "to be an artifact" is something.
TO BE is TO BE SOMETHING.

TO BE SOMETHING (which is required TO BE AT ALL) entails ESSENCE.

ESSENCE is a fundamental as EXISTENCE. BEING bifurcates.

This is why denying Platonism is denying reality. To deny ESSENCE is as nonsensical as Gorgias' attempt to deny EXISTENCE:
Of course, Gorgias is not in earnest about what he is saying.

He is enchanted by the power of LANGUAGE to say even the most absurd and impossible things — so he chooses to say THE most impossible things.

And it is true that speech has no NECESSARY connection to SAYING TRUTH.
It is possible that Being trifurcates, into τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι, τόδε τι, and ἐνέργειᾰ.

That is, into Whatness (essence; quiddity), Thisness (haecceity), and the Act of To Be (actualitas).
Although this trifurcation would need to be qualified.

As Aquinas would say, in angelic powers, the whatness and the thisness are the same, such that angels are compounds of essence/haecceity and the act of to be.

In the case of God, all three are one.
Despite Aristotle clearing away some of the darkness, it was Thisness or haecceity (better known to us as particularity or individuality) that remained and remains a stumbling block to the Greeks.

Yes, and to the moderns too.
What they can never get past is that God isn't a mere universal, but is in particular THIS ONE, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

And that God is THIS MAN, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ.

Nevermind that all they know is particular — it still appears a defect to them.

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More from @EveKeneinan

Feb 10
"IF"
Beds don't have ideas. They are artifacts — it is *always* a mistake to simply interpret Socrates as giving a "straightforward" exposition of "Plato's theory."

That doesn't happen.

That is not the way to read Plato.

The "mouthpiece" theory is unutterably dumb.
Eva Brann rightly begins her famous lecture "Plato's Theory of Forms" by noting than "every word in the lecture's title, besides 'of' is wrong."
Read 7 tweets
Feb 10
The denial of Platonism in the broadest sense delivers us over to a metaphysics of construction, explicit in the moderns, but with the consequence that construction becomes deconstruction, since no standard or template is given by which construction must or should be guided.
The original Modernist hope or more accurately dream (Descartes) was that REASON could serve as the standard for CONSTRUTION—this is clearest in Kant—but reason or logos is "safe" only when held to a transcendent standard, the essences or natures of beings, the Platonic εἴδη.
Reason as λόγος, saying, most say something, and the standard by which it may be determined whether the λόγος is true or false, is not itself λόγος. This is found in not in saying, but seeing, in νόησις. But what is SEEN are the LOOKS of beings, viz. the εἴδη.
Read 8 tweets
Feb 8
While the famous Political Compass test is a very blunt instrument, it is basically correct in distinguishing both a left/right axis and an authoritarian/libertarian one.
A good reason to be on the Right today, is that our current live options are Right-Liberty or Left-Authoritarian.

If you are a friend of freedom, you should be on the Right. The Left-Liberty faction has been eaten alive, and there’s no significant Right-Authoritarian wing.
The Free Right is where all decent persons should be today, fighting back against the Authoritarian Left.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 7
An adult having sex with a child not being wrong falls straight out of Kershnar's view that nothing is wrong. He is an error theorist: he holds that morality does not substantially exist in any meaningful way.

Cf. amazon.com/Total-Collapse…
Kershnar's view that "there is no morality" is only half insane. His argument is, broadly, "Both consequentialism and Kantianism fail as moral theories; so there just is no morality."

The proper conclusion, of course, is "so virtue ethics is correct." Image
I can't analyze Kershnar's argument more deeply without taking a deep dive into it, but I can already identify some lines along which it is flawed. He argues in general from "various theories of X fail; so there is no X, or at least, we don't know whether there is an X."
Read 15 tweets
Jan 14
The rationalism of the Enlightenment was an overcorrection of the overcorrection of the Reformation, which opposed faith to reason. Reason can understand even things which are irrational — but the Enlightenment demanded (impossibly) that those things themselves BE rationalized.
The Left is always asking the question "What plan should be imposed to achieve social justice?"

That's the wrong question in TWO ways: you shouldn't be trying to *plan* society and such things shouldn't be *imposed*.
Humanity cannot be rationalized.

We are indeed the animal with the logos, but although essentially constituted by reason, we are not reasonable creatures for that.
Read 10 tweets
Jan 14
The dogma of "representation" undermines all merit-based institutions.

It is merely code for "let in those who are not qualified."
It isn't even clear what "representation" means here. It doesn't mean it in the way a lawyer represents a client, or an elected representation represents his constituents.

It appears to be ICONIC: "He is black. Therefore, in his LOOK of being black, he 'represents' all blacks."
This of course depends on the idea that "every member of a race is an icon of that race."

An odd idea, to say the least.
Read 4 tweets

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