Quote:
Originally Posted by esspoker
If relations between objects exist in spacetime, which is a function of our intuition, then they might exist, they might not.
Whether relations exist or not is not a trivial question. It cuts at the belly of the edifice of thought that you've presented.
You brush it off in barely a paragraph. As if its a footnote to your train of thought.
Bertrand Russell struggled with this idea for many years. He refused to indulge Platonism for a long time. His student Wittgenstein, and a few others weren't so reluctant. Russell eventually couldn't get around it.
Relations, like numbers, like adjectives, like many other "abstractions", are mind-independent.
In fact, this debate dates back many years before Spinoza. You can trace it back to the problem of
adjectives. Plato and Aristotle, of course. In short, adjectives brake the laws of physics. Blue, as a colour for example, exists in multiple places at the same time (sky, ocean, blueberries, etc.). Physically, it is impossible for any one thing to exist simultaneously in multiple places. Yet this is what we observe. This is problem.
As a side-note, where do adjectives belong in your
very narrow ontology?
Last edited by VeeDDzz`; 12-08-2018 at 06:16 AM.