display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
6 ideas
| 4009 | Nominalists defended the sovereignty of God against the idea of natural existing good and evil [Taylor,C] |
| Full Idea: Late medieval nominalism defended the sovereignty of God as incompatible with there being an order in nature which by itself defined good and bad. | |
| From: Charles Taylor (Sources of the Self [1989], §3.3) | |
| A reaction: Part of their attack on Platonism. But what made them place such a high value on the sovereignty of God? |
| 3307 | Frege put forward an ontological argument for the existence of numbers [Frege, by Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: Frege put forward an ontological argument for the existence of numbers. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Ch.4 |
| 7741 | The predicate 'exists' is actually a natural language expression for a quantifier [Frege, by Weiner] |
| Full Idea: On Frege's logical analysis, the predicate 'exists' is actually a natural language expression for a quantifier. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Joan Weiner - Frege Ch.8 | |
| A reaction: However see Idea 6067, for McGinn's alternative view of quantifiers. In the normal conventions of predicate logic it may be that existence is treated as a quantifier, but that is not the same as saying that existence just IS a quantifier. |
| 22286 | Existence is not a first-level concept (of God), but a second-level property of concepts [Frege, by Potter] |
| Full Idea: For Frege (unlike Kant) existence is a genuine concept, but of the second level, not the first. Since God's perfections are of the first level, existence is not a candidate to be one of them. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Foundations) [1884], §053) by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 09 'App' | |
| A reaction: That is, God's perfections are of God, but existence is a concept of concepts (that they are instantiated). So existence is a metaconcept. I'm not convinced. If I bake a successful cake, its existence is its most wonderful feature. |
| 8644 | Because existence is a property of concepts the ontological argument for God fails [Frege] |
| Full Idea: Because existence is a property of concepts the ontological argument for the existence of God breaks down. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Foundations) [1884], §53) | |
| A reaction: The point being that existence (like number) is not a property of actual things. His proposition sounds rather dubious. The concept of unicorns exists quite entertainingly; it is the failure of actual unicorns to exist that is so heartbreaking. |
| 8491 | The Ontological Argument fallaciously treats existence as a first-level concept [Frege] |
| Full Idea: The ontological proof of God's existence suffers from the fallacy of treating existence as a first-level concept. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Function and Concept [1891], p.38 n) | |
| A reaction: [See Idea 8490 for first- and second-order functions] This is usually summarised as the idea that existence is a quantifier rather than a predicate. |