Ontology, or the Theory of BeingCoffey, P. (Peter)
Philosophy
Ontology, or the Theory of Being
Coffey, P. (Peter)
Ontology
Reverting now to _real_ identity: whatever we can predicate affirmatively
about a being considered as _one_, and as subject of a judgment, we regard
as really identical with that being. We cannot predicate a real part of
its real whole, or _vice versa_. But our concepts, when compared together
in judgment, bear _logical_ relations of extension and intension to each
other, that is, relations of logical part to logical whole. Thus, the
_logical_ identity of subject and predicate in the affirmative judgment
may be only _inadequate_.(152) But the real identity underlying the
affirmative judgment is an adequate real identity. When we say, for
example, that “Socrates is wise,” we mean that the object of our concept
of “wisdom” is in this case really and adequately identical with the
object of our concept of “Socrates”: in other words that we are conceiving
one and the same real being under two distinct concepts, each of which
represents, more or less adequately, the whole real being, and one of them
in this case less adequately than the other.
We have to bear in mind that while considering being as one or manifold,
identical or distinct, we are thinking of it in its _static_ mode, as an
object of abstract thought, not in its _dynamic and kinetic_ mode as
actually existing in space and time, and subject to change. It is the
identity of being with itself when considered in this static, unchanging
condition, that is embodied in the logical _Principle of Identity_. In
order, therefore, that this principle may find its application to being or
reality _as subject to actual change_—and this is the state in which _de
facto_ reality is presented to us as an immediate datum of experience—we
must seize upon the changing reality and think of it in an indivisible
instant apart from the change to which it is actually subject; only thus
does the Principle of Identity apply to it—as _being_, not as _becoming_,
not _in fieri_, but _in facto esse_. The Principle of Identity, which
applies to all real being, whether possible or actual, tells us simply
that “a thing is what it is”. But for the understanding of actual being as
subject to real change we must supplement the Principle of Identity by
another principle which tells us that such an actual being not only is
actually what it is (Principle of Identity), but also that it _is
potentially something other than what it actually is, that it is
potentially what it can become actually_ (Ch. ii.).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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