Combining Philosophers

All the ideas for Bonaventura, John Bacon and Michael Lavers

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7 ideas

8. Modes of Existence / B. Properties / 8. Properties as Modes
Accidents always remain suited to a subject [Bonaventura]
     Full Idea: An accident's aptitudinal relationship to a subject is essential, and this is never taken away from accidents….for it is true to say that they are suited to a subject.
     From: Bonaventura (Commentary on Sentences [1252], IV.12.1.1.1c)
     A reaction: This is the compromise view that allows accidents to be separated, for Transubstantiation, while acknowledging that we identify them with their subjects.
8. Modes of Existence / B. Properties / 13. Tropes / a. Nature of tropes
Individuals consist of 'compresent' tropes [Bacon,John]
     Full Idea: 'Qualitons' or 'relatons' (quality and relation tropes) are held to belong to the same individual if they are all 'compresent' with one another.
     From: John Bacon (Tropes [2008], §4)
     A reaction: There is a perennial problem with bundles - how to distinguish accidental compresence (like people in a lift) from united compresence (like people who make a family).
A trope is a bit of a property or relation (not an exemplification or a quality) [Bacon,John]
     Full Idea: A trope is an instance or bit (not an exemplification) of a property or a relation. Bill Clinton's eloquence is not his participating in the universal eloquence, or the peculiar quality of his eloquence, but his bit, and his alone, of eloquence.
     From: John Bacon (Tropes [2008], Intro)
     A reaction: If we have identified something as a 'bit' of something, we can ask whether that bit is atomic, or divisible into something else, and we can ask what are the qualities and properties and powers of this bit, we seems to defeat the object.
Trope theory is ontologically parsimonious, with possibly only one-category [Bacon,John]
     Full Idea: A major attraction of tropism has been its promise of parsimony; some adherents (such as Campbell) go so far as to proclaim a one-category ontology.
     From: John Bacon (Tropes [2008], §2)
     A reaction: This seems to go against the folk idiom which suggests that it is things which have properties, rather than properties ruling to roost. Maybe if one identified tropes with processes, the theory could be brought more into line with modern physics?
9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 6. Successive Things
Successive things reduce to permanent things [Bonaventura]
     Full Idea: Everything successive reduces to something permanent.
     From: Bonaventura (Commentary on Sentences [1252], II.2.1.1.3 ad 5), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 18.2
     A reaction: Avicenna first took successive entities seriously, but Bonaventure and Aquinas seem to have rejected them, or given reductive accounts of them. It resembles modern actualists versus modal realists.
10. Modality / E. Possible worlds / 2. Nature of Possible Worlds / a. Nature of possible worlds
Maybe possible worlds are just sets of possible tropes [Bacon,John]
     Full Idea: Meinongian tropism has the advantage that possible worlds might be thought of as sets of 'qualitons' and 'relatons' (quality and relational tropes).
     From: John Bacon (Tropes [2008], §3)
     A reaction: You are still left with 'possible' to explain, and I'm not sure that anything is explain here. If the actual world is sets of tropes, then possible worlds would also have to be, I suppose.
17. Mind and Body / E. Mind as Physical / 2. Reduction of Mind
We imagine small and large objects scaled to the same size, suggesting a fixed capacity for imagination [Lavers]
     Full Idea: If we think of a pea, and then of the Eiffel Tower, they seem to occupy the same space in our consciousness, suggesting that we scale our images to fit the available hardware, just as computer imagery is limited by the screen and memory available.
     From: Michael Lavers (talk [2003]), quoted by PG - Db (ideas)
     A reaction: Nice point. It is especially good because it reinforces a physicalist view of the mind from introspection, where most other evidence is external observation of brains (as Nietzsche reinforces determinism by introspection).