HU Philosophy of Religion

Feser gives three arguments for the distinction between essence and existence in the objects of our everyday experience (dogs, trees, planets, grass, humans, etc.) The first argument, the one examined in this post, is what I will call the Epistemic Argument (EA). It seems that we can grasp the essence of a tiger, a T-rex, and a centaur. We can know what each one is. Our grasping of these essences does not seem to include a grasp of the existence of any instance of them. In other words, we can know the essence of something without knowing whether it exists. Put differently, we can know what a thing most fundamentally is, without knowing that it exists. So, essence and existence are distinct. Put a bit more formally, here is the argument Feser provides: EA1. S can know that the essence of x is E without knowing that x exists EA2. Knowing that p without knowing that q, implies that p and q are distinct EA3. Hence, the essence of x is distinct from the existence of x A pro...

Concepts of Existence Consider the following: some dogs are brown. (In what follows, I use the phrases, property, first-order property, predicate, first-order predicate, as synonyms. They each mean roughly: a feature of some individual object. So a second-order property or second-order predicate is a property or predicate of an individual's first-order property. The considerations below suggest that 'existence' is best understood as a second-order property and not a first-order one. This will all be more understandable after you read below!) Given the truth of the above it seems to follow that some dogs exist. We do not need to add to the above claim: Some dogs are brown and they exist. Once we know that some dogs are brown, we already know that they exist. So, existence is not really a property of anything in the way that, say, being brown is a property of some dogs. So, it looks like thinking existence is a property is either unnecessary or incoherent. If x...

The following ideas (inspired by Barry Miller's A Most Unlikely God) might help us as we try to make sense of what it means to worship God and not our concept or image of God.  Limit simpliciter:   if x is F, the limit simpliciter of F is still an F. Example : there is an upper limit of speed, namely, the speed of light.    Notice that the speed of light is still a speed.    So, if x is traveling at the speed of light it follows that x is traveling at a speed. Example : there is no intrinsic upper limit on the length of a line (there are some complications here, but ignore them, since I don't think they have any real bearing on the main point).    Notice that for any length of some line x, x is still a line. Example:  there is no intrinsic upper limit on the number of sides of a polygon (at least I don't think there is; even if there is it does not matter for the present point). Notice that for any number of sides n of a poly...