God, Time, Infinity

Mirosław Szatkowski

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783110591934
• eBook ISBN: 9783110592030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

The issues of the nature and existence of God, time and infinity, respectively, and how they relate to each other, are some of the most complicated problems of metaphysics.This volume presents contributions of thirteen internationally renowned scholars who deal with various aspects of these complex issues. The contributions were presented and discussed during the international conference: God, Time, Infinity held in Warsaw, September 22—24, 2015.

Srećko Kovač

Concepts, Space-and-Time, Metaphysics (Kant and the dialogue of John 4)

1Introduction

In an empirically oriented common-sense ontology, first-order concepts are expected to be “concrete” and to denote sensible objects given in space and time, while other, “abstract”, concepts should denote words, sentences, sets, numbers, or concepts themselves, possibly of a questionable ontological status, or, moreover, conceived merely as a manner of speaking, subjective representations, or “ideas” without an actually corresponding reality. In a formalized presentation, such an empirical theory would have a model comprising a first-order domain of sensible objects denoted (possibly in n-tuples) by predicates. The domain itself and the relations on the domain, as well as syntactic “objects” (terms, predicates, formulas – replacing concepts and judgments), remain abstract, metatheoretical entities that are not empirically given for the object theory. Besides, the domain and the relations on the domain may appear as members of a second-order domain if the formalization is extended to a higher-order setting, but, of course, this still does not make the first-order domain and the relations on it themselves empirically existing objects.

Some essential features of abstract, model-theoretic, concepts of a possible empirical theory are traceable back to Immanuel Kant’s “transcendental logic” (with some characteristic differences).86 Against this background, we examine the objective reality of the abstract concepts involved, putting them in the context of a possible religious experience as presented in the text of John 4.

2From metatheory to metaphysical theory

It can be recognized that Kant’s theory of transcendental ideas serves as a sort of first-order model for empirical reasoning and knowledge, where transcendental ideas represent three sorts of totalities of conditions of empirical knowledge:

(a)	the totality with respect to a subject (“complete subject”,87 never occurring as a predicate, B 379): “I” (“mere consciousness”, “determining Self”), which thinks, is the metatheoretical subject “X” of all thoughts (e.g., of concepts), which are its predicates (B 404, A 402);88
(b)	the totality of the “series” of conditions (“world”) of an empirically given object: each such object is possible only if the whole series of its conditions, too, is in some way already given (B 436);89
(c)	the totality of concepts as predicates (“the sum total of all predicates”) – as if comprised in some common “ground” (B 607): “the most real being” (ens realissimum).90

These “transcendental” ideas do not belong to empirical knowledge as an object-theory, but to its metatheory. Kant further specifies this by assigning those ideas a non-constitutive, re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Ockham, Plantinga and the Row of Ants
• The Importance of Being Timeless
• Temporal Relations as Epiphenomena
• In Defense of Presentism and an Extratemporal God
• Concepts, Space-and-Time, Metaphysics (Kant and the dialogue of John 4)
• Basic Intuitions Concerning the Concept of Infinity in Mathematics from a Historical and Theological Point of View
• No Life without Time
• God and Time. A defense of God’s timelessness
• Thoughs on Time, Truth and Transcendence
• The Moral Desirability of Presentism
• McTaggart, Lewis and the Problem of Temporary Intrinsics
• Is Dualism Compatible with Classical Theism?
• In What Sense is God Infinite? A Consideration from the Historical Perspective
• Authors of Contributed Papers
• Abstracts
• Person Index
• Subject Index