Hey Matt, I can't say whether this debate was a major highlight of GF, I'm half through Chapter 1 and I have a few remarks so far:
David Quinn wrote:Anyway, I would like to discuss the nature of genius. To my mind, genius is a property which is intimately linked with consciousness. A genius is someone whose consciousness is of a very high quality. I'm not referring here to the ability to think complicatedly, but rather to its opposite: the ability to think truthfully and simply. A genius possesses the simplicity of someone who has opened his mind to the nature of Reality. He no longer experiences any delusion in his mind and thus no longer has to conjure up complex solutions to imaginary philosophical problems in the way that ordinary academics do. He is able to cut through to the very core of things with ease. This leads to another essential quality of genius, which is independence of thought. Because a genius grounds his every thought in Ultimate Reality, his thinking is completely unaffected by the values, myths, beliefs, and mores of his culture. He is like a child of God, producing every thought from within himself, dwelling far above the confines of human relativism. His every movement is an expression of eternity.
"This leads to another essential quality of genius, which is independence of thought." This (independence of thought) seems to be in line with the program of the Enlightenment, but David doesn't cite any thinker of the Enlightenment in his list of historical examples of genius. He doesn't cite any thinker of the Renaissance too, my current understanding of the term "genius" is that it belongs the best to the Renaissance, with Michelangelo as a representative not Da Vinci as Weininger and others put it.
David Quinn wrote:Aquinus used to do groundbreaking work in the field of theology. It used to impress his fellow theologians, and no doubt it required a considerable amount of intelligence to carry it out, but in the larger scheme of things, looked at from the perspective of a great philosopher, it is nothing.
David Quinn wrote:It won't be long before Feynman's theory of QED is old hat, just like Aquinas's quaint speculations.
I think that here David demonstrates not only an ignorance on how science works but theology too. While some scientific theories may fall in disuse the basis of scientific knowledge is to be improved and extended upon those scientific theories, you could even measure the success of a theory on its capacity to generate new theories and fields, that doesn't make the previous theory less important quite the contrary. And while to some extent that doesn't happen on a more general camp like theology as you cannot disprove a theological theory, you can have aristotelians or platonists to this day and that is not to say that the debate on metaphysics today isn't alive and thriving.
David Quinn wrote:Our deaths are no certainty. Science could, in the next decade or two, discover the key to physical immortality through their work in genetics. The possibility currently seems remote, but it can't be dismissed altogether. It's also possible that our consciousness (which is essentially what we call "life") will survive the death of our bodies in some way. Again, the possibility seems remote, but it still exists nonetheless.
Death is an empirical event that we presume will occur in the future; this alone makes it inherently uncertain.
Here for example David is effectively saying that the immortality of the soul is not out the table, so what to say about Aquinas theology?
http://members.optushome.com.au/davidqu ... npu01.html
Edit here - I guess David could be saying that both death and its contrary are uncertain, that's a logical possibility. Anyway he premissed the uncertainty of death on the possibility of the other and if the possibility of the other is also uncertain so is the uncertainty of death. Or better said our deaths are an uncertain uncertainty not just an uncertainty.
Edit 2 - To finish Chapter 1 there's this dialogue:
From David Quinn
Wed Dec 17, 2003 1:59 am:
M wrote:
DQ: A simple example is the Buddhist truth that "nothing inherently exists". This is ultimately true because a thing necessarily depends on other things for its existence....It doesn't inherently exist.
M: Existence isn't a predicate (of itself) and is presupposed in hypothesizing all possible worlds. In other words, in all possible worlds, all possible worlds exist, so existence is necessary in all possible worlds.
Contingent existence, yes.
DQ: The same principle applies to everything else in Nature; there can never be an instance in which the assertion "nothing inherently exist" is not true. It is part and parcel of the very nature of existence.
M: Let's assume that existence is a predicate (of that which enables existence and thus doesn't necessarily exist ). You're effectively declaring that contingent existence must be necessary to itself by nature. Or, it is the nature of existence to be necessarily contingent.
The latter, yes.
The obvious problem here is that a necessary predicate, or a predicate that always accompanies a concept, cannot be true only under certain conditions or it would not always accompany that concept. Contingency and necessity are polar opposites; think about it.
True, an assertion that is only true in certain cirumstances cannot be classed as a necessary truth (which is true in all circumstances). But this has no bearing on the point I was making - which is that whenever or wherever something exists, its existence is necessarily contingent. That is to say, a thing can never have a non-contingent form of existence under any circumstances.
We have no experience of anything that occurs outside spacetime, so how can we be sure that something timeless exists or, if so, what it means to be timeless?
Logical/definitional truths are timeless in the sense that they can never be falsified. For example, 1+1 will always equal 2, given the way we currently define these terms. It is not something that will become false over time.
What does "Ultimate Reality" mean???
Nature as it really is, as opposed to what deluded people falsely imagine it to be.
"
A simple example is the Buddhist truth that "nothing inherently exists". This is ultimately true because a thing necessarily depends on other things for its existence"
So we have that nothing inherently exists because a thing necessarily depends on other things for its existence. But something that is necessary is something that has inherent existence.
1. Nothing inherently exists.
2. (1) inherently exists.
3. And we have a contradiction. Or David is affirming that something is and is not at the same time or both. (Nothing is an absolute term)