Delete comment from: Edward Feser
Professor Feser, you state,
"But if you divide a human body in half, you do not get two human bodies; "
This seems potentially problematic.
If I were to be cut in twain, the two bodies consequently produced would still be human. Consider forensics. Finding the bones or even just the teeth suffices to have found, in many cases, "the body" simply. But how do we know? Because we found human bones or specifically human teeth; and not only that, but exactly this (human) person's teeth. There is a something that makes the bodies not only properly human but even properly this or that human's body or body parts. We speak, for instance, of Saint Peter's bones under Saint Peter's - and they had better be Saint Peter's! It is the remains of Saint Peter's body.
But of course I can appreciate what you mean. To be properly or fully a human body would require the presence of a human soul united with that body and animating it; no shortage of logical absurdities would arise absent that, sort of like trying to define man's sexual act without the conditions necessary to realize fertilization or a natural child.
@ Luke
"Once a mind has embraced a logical contradiction, might that split it into two parts?"
But the mind cannot embrace a logical contradiction, strictly speaking, because such things are really non-things - again strictly. One at best things of different or contradictory things in turn; so I think of a square or I think of a circle - but a square circle cannot be thought, as there is no such thing or being to be thought.
Feb 28, 2015, 5:31:30 PM
Posted to Descartes’ “indivisibility” argument