Search results for "Quiddity"
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The Flying and the Masked Man, One More Time: Comments on Peter Adamson and Fedor Benevich, ‘The Thought Experimental Method: Avicenna's Flying Man A…
2020
AbstractThis is a critical comment on Adamson and Benevich (2018), published in issue 4/2 of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association. I raise two closely related objections. The first concerns the objective of the flying man: instead of the question of what the soul is, I argue that the argument is designed to answer the question of whether the soul exists independently of the body. The second objection concerns the expected result of the argument: instead of knowledge about the quiddity of soul, I claim the argument yields knowledge about the soul's existence independently of the body. After the objections, I turn to the masked man fallacy, claiming that although the Adamson-…
Al-Ghazāī on the Signification of Names
2010
AbstractAl-Ghazālī’s most detailed explanation of how signification works occurs in his treatise on The Beautiful Names of God. Al-Ghazālī builds squarely on the commentary tradition on Aristotle’s Peri hermeneias: words signify things by means of concepts and correspondingly, existence is laid out on three levels, linguistic, conceptual, and particular (i.e. extramental). This framework allows al-Ghazālī to put forward what is essentially an Aristotelian reading of what happens when a name successfully picks out a being: when a quiddity is named by some kind term, its referent in the mind is formally identical to the quiddity of an individual existent which belongs to that natural kind. Al…