/lit/ - Literature

>>10919804

I appreciate your reply, and yes their epistemologies and metaphysics are radically different. Trying to get them to speak the same conceptual language is part of the challenge and fun, compounded by their different methodologies.

Can you detail some of the inferences you make in the following?

> Laws as abstract entities makes little sense, and that kantian view leaves them with no more than descriptive usefulness, leading to some of the more skeptical views such as Hume's abandonment of induction entirely.

I don't quite get your meaning here, but I want to say that for Kant, the laws of nature are immanent, constituting and regulating all physical objects in knowable, predictable ways.

You also say

>The notion of an "edge" beyond which the power of existence is applied is something foreign to Aquinas or Aristotle

But Aristotle maintained that the cosmos is spatially finite, with the sphere of the fixed stars being furthest layer visible from the center; Aristotle's God is somehow beyond the outermost sphere, with the divine act causing the outermost sphere to turn in teleological imitation of God's infinite, simple act; that motion of the outermost sphere imparts efficient causality through the celestial spheres, turning each of them in succession and ultimately churning up the center where the earth resides, efficiently causing cycles such as animal generation and decay. If space were unending, the transmission of this motion would never reach the center - and if the act causing this motion were to cease at any moment, then all subordinate motions would cease in the same instant. Aristotle, for example, didn't believe in inertia, and this made it tricky to explain how a thrown stone can continue to move through the air after losing contact with the cause that activated its motion - the thrower's hand. Aristotle argued that the thrower's hand also causes air to move in the vicinity of the stone, and this air continues to contact the stone as it flies, actively imbuing the stone with motion continuously until the landing.

This is the cosmology and (meta)physics inherited by Aquinas (or course there are other aspects of each that I didn't mention), and I don't see how Aquinas' system can survive without them - but of course I might be wrong about this. Yet it was soon after Aquinas' death that ideas about inertia grew in popularity, and one reason that such ideas were opposed was that inertia threatened the view that the motion of the cosmos relied on an act at every moment; inertial motions are more self-sufficient, and the rejection of the older physical principle of active contact would cast doubt on the metaphysical principle that Aristotle developed from it.

I'll be back later to connect all this with the other points you argue. Thanks again!