GordonAckerman’s Weblog

To state the possibility of a position is not to claim that that position exists. Look in reality, not just sophistical argument. Where is that concept in society? It is absent.

Well certainly kids are interested in smells, but I see no evidence of an ultimate smell concept with them. Amongst adults I have not come across such a thing either. I know that the US arms research people have been searching for the nastiest smell they can find to gross out the opposition. They only seemed to have found toilet smell as a nasty smell. They are certainly aiming at smellier but they are a very small subset of humanity and even there it is difficult to argue that they have a concept of the ultimate smell beyond which there is no smellier possible.

Whereas everywhere you turn there are people with ideas of ultimate, unsurpassable goodness, justice and power.

Indeed I was a bit generous to Dawkins in terming his comments a disproof. Ridicule does not really prove anything.

I would be very glad to hear any insight that your study of Aristotle might add to the question. Otherwise we will have to be content with Dawkins presentation of the argument and our interpretations of it.

And you point?

Well you have quoted a lengthy article on the subject that covers many points. In the end it seems to only say that Aquinas was speaking into a different intelectual atmosphere. That is pretty obvious given the time he was writing in. I myself made the point that is repeated in the quoted blog that Aquinas does not appear to try and fully explain it, he takes much of it as read, being dependant on Aristotelian thinking as it is.

But what I had said in other places is that let us see what we can do with the points of the proof ourselves rather than get into historical discussions. And what I was also suggesting was that it would be more informative to the reader if we brought those points here and made them here rather than refering to lengthy texts off page.

So I was asking. What point in our discussion is illuminated by what in the blog you quote? And I was asking that you quote it in such a way that it might be clear to the reader here without having to go off to other places.

I would say that basing our dicussions of reasons on our discussions today is precisely the opposite of anachronism.

Since we are discussing the argument by degree we need to start of by looking at what it is, and then see if it makes sense today. The starting point is archaic, but we need to examine it and place the argument in today to see if it carries weight today. I am not interested in its weight in its time and original formulation, but its weight now and how we can formulate it now since that is where we are.

It is for this reason we need to consider the idea of degrees. It was obvious to Aquinas being an Aristotelian thinker. It is not obvious to us but needs to be examined. In examining it I think we find that the argument holds even more strongly now since there is a very strong sense of ultimate goodness, justice and authority but these degrees do not exist in the same way for other concepts.