Heidegger

In a message dated 2/16/2007 9:04:02 AM Eastern Standard Time,
tgeorgescu at home.nl writes:
> —–Original Message—–
> From: heidegger-bounces at soca.ecu.edu.au [mailto:heidegger-
> bounces at soca.ecu.edu.au] On Behalf Of GEVANS613 at aol.com
> Sent: vrijdag 16 februari 2007 1:30
> To: heidegger at soca.ecu.edu.au
> Subject: Do Mentalisations Exist or Only He Who Thinks?
>
> Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480-524) was born to a distinguished
> family called the Anicii, near the end of the Roman Empire. When his……

Well, the answer of Heidegger to this challenge would be that his
phenomenology is totally outside the quarrel of the universals. He is
neither nominalist, nor conceptualist, nor realist, nor something like that.

> Boethius lays out the problem as follows: “Genera and species either exist
> and subsist or are formed by the understanding and by thought alone.”
> Genera
> and species are the Aristotelian terms relating to the classification of
> things. They are, at this point, interchangeable with universals. So
> Boethius
> effectively states that universals must either exist and have form, or
> they must
> be merely mental concepts.

False dilemma, says conceptualism.

> The problem is to determine which situation is
> the
> case. Boethius first turns to the argument against universals, which may
> be
> considered as follows:
>
> 1. Something that is common to many cannot be one

See how is he begging the question? He starts from a convenient assumption
in order to prove what he wants to prove.

Greetings,

Tudor

Dear Tudor;
More likely Boetheius is not out to prove anything but state the options for
a thought process such as it was known in classical society and then absorbed
in the Christian event. After all, he was consultant to the new barbarian
rule of
Christianized Rome, Theodoric the Ostrogoth, who was at odds with Byzantine
Christianity. He was simply trying to educate the Goths. He lost his head for
it and was executed by his student ruler, Theodoric, because suspected of
sympathies with the originally instituted Christian state of Byzantinum and much in
the same relation of Sir thomas More who lost his head to Henry VIII for not
rejecting the Church of Rome. What goes around comes around. In other words do
not involve Boetius in our current debated nonsense on list. He was far more
sophisticated (literally!) than that and understood the *pars pro toto*
(taking the part for the whole) and its contrary as *totum pro parte* (by which the
whole is used to predicate a part) as imperative for two heads of thought,
e.g. nomimnalist contra realists, etc. That the two must complement each other to
assemble a unity of thought was hardly news for a Greek, whether Sophist or
Stoic and no doubt the Ostrogoth Christians, much as in a modern day, sought to
understand this as a complexio oppositorum by which one must dialectically
vanquish the other. Accordingly, Boetheius was summarily executed for noting the
parity of ambivalence.
Sincerely;
Bernard

Posted on Friday, February 16th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
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