E. J. Lowe, University of Durham

The Four-Category Ontology: A Metaphysical Foundation for Natural Science

Abstract: The four-category ontology is a metaphysical system recognizing two fundamental categorical distinctions — these being between the particular and the universal, and between the substantial and the non-substantial — which cut across each other to generate four fundamental ontological categories. The four categories thus generated are substantial particulars (‘objects’), non-substantial particulars (‘modes’), substantial universals (‘kinds’), and non-substantial universals (‘attributes’). This ontology has a lengthy pedigree, with many commentators attributing a version of it to Aristotle on the basis of certain passages in one of his early works, the Categories. Although it has been revived or rediscovered at various times during the history of western philosophy, it has never found widespread favour, perhaps due to its apparent lack of parsimony and its commitment to universals. In pursuit of ontological economy, metaphysicians have generally preferred to recognize fewer than four fundamental ontological categories. This book contends that the four-category ontology has an explanatory power which is unrivalled by more parsimonious systems, and that this counts decisively in its favour. It provides a uniquely powerful explanatory framework for a unified account of causation, dispositions, natural laws, natural necessity, and many other related matters, such as the semantics of counterfactual conditionals. The book is divided into four parts: the first setting out the framework of the four-category ontology, the second focusing on its central distinction between object and property, the third exploring its applications in the philosophy of natural science, and the fourth dealing with fundamental issues of truth and realism.

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What do you think of the basic four-fold ontology? Jeff, especially the part I italicized. I figure explanatory power INTO what makes a system parsimonious so that if the four-category system explains more than three-, two-, or one-category systems, it IS more parsimonious. But besides that, I like the four-category approach. It's intuitive, simple, and explains all the possibilities. The question, of course, is where to put Greg's "dispositions." And what of the distinction between actuality and possibility?

Tom

Post Edited (PLANIS) : 8/31/2007 4:01:59 PM (GMT-5)

Tom: Jeff, especially the part I italicized. I figure explanatory power INTO what makes a system parsimonious so that if the four-category system explains more than three-, two-, or one-category systems, it IS more parsimonious.

Jeff: Yeah, I agree. I think it was Einstein that said something like, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.

Tom:  But besides that, I like the four-category approach. It's intuitive, simple, and explains all the possibilities. The question, of course, is where to put Greg's "dispositions." And what of the distinction between actuality and possibility?

Jeff: I think if we say that capacities are attributes, then we can say God has the capacity to 1) apprehend beings and relations, 2) feel certain feelings under certain apprehended conditions, and 3) choose actions based on what He knows increases/maintains His sentient satisfaction. This way, we're still dealing with a substance/attribute metaphysic that most people seem to intuitively live and breath in. And we can explain His dispositional nature analogously to ours. We just have to add that there are multiple necessarily existing persons to render that disposition eternal in a way that is necessarily relational.

Like you've said before, we say, as the process theists, that God is necessarily relational, just not in a necessary god-world relationship. It's a peron-person relationship.

As for acutality/possibility, the fact that multiple necessary persons are volitional accounts for possibility. This is so because the godhead, in some sense, enjoys novelty as we do. This may very well be one of the ways we are in His image. It's just that novelty, for God, need not only come from created beings. It can come from the interaction of the multiple persons of the godhead since they are volitional. So again, we account for possibility in terms of capacities to know, feel, and choose. And capacities are just attributes of causal beings.

Post Edited (jefscott) : 9/1/2007 9:22:57 AM (GMT-5)

When I’m feeling up for a challenge, I venture over to Cynthia Nielsen’s blog (http://percaritatem.com/) and see what she’s commenting on. She’s reading through Aidan Nichols’ Redeeming Beauty: Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics, which got me to thinking on the metaphysics of beauty. She makes a very interesting comment. I know D will enjoy this:

“…according to Denis the Areopagite, we must be so bold as to say that [God] suffers in some way ecstasy of love, because of the abundance of his goodness which leads him to diffuse in all things a participation of His splendor." Then she says, "God's love causes the beauty of what he loves, whereas our love is caused by the beauty of what we love.”

First of all, who’s this Denis the Areopagite? Second, D, I know you’d enjoy Maritain’s description of Creation as God “diffusing in all things a participation of his splendor.” And then lastly, I loved the distinction in divine and human love and its effects: God’s love causes the beauty of what he loves, while our love is caused by the beauty of what we love. I like that very much. I may have found a reason, or a way of expressing, why it is that God could not have created us loving beings from the get-go. To BE loving, we finite creatures HAVE to BECOME loving. There's no way around it. I know D disagrees, but I'm not letting go!

So what is beauty anyway? Aquinas defined beauty as id quod visum placet (that which pleases by being seen). Here’s a quick review of Aquinas’ view: http://www.anselmphilosophy.com/read/?p=10. And there's a bit here (on Jacques Maritain http://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/etext/art5.htm) behind Nielson's comments.

Well, I was just interested. We’ve talked a lot about ‘beauty’ per se and about God being necessarily ‘relational’. What we haven’t discussed the relationship between the two. Is one prior to the other? And then there’s ‘the good’. How does that relate to ‘beauty’ per se?

Gotta run.

Tom

Post Edited (PLANIS) : 9/1/2007 12:09:53 PM (GMT-5)

Jeff: I don't remember D disagreeing with that. I must have been sleeping.  But I'm still confused about this myself because I think once we have partaken of the "divine nature" (in the sense Peter means, B), we will still love. And I can't imagine why our capacity or motivation for loving at that time will be caused or conditioned by the choices of our "first" life.

Tom: So what is beauty anyway? Aquinas defined beauty as id quod visum placet (that which pleases by being seen). Here’s a quick review of Aquinas’ view: http://www.anselmphilosophy.com/read/?p=10. And there's a bit here (on Jacques Maritain http://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/etext/art5.htm) behind Nielson's comments.

Jeff: When I get time this weekend, I'll quote you what Noah Porter says. I think the capacity for sentiently experiencing beauty is distinct from the capacity for sentiently experiencing the simple sentient state of sympathy (empathy?)--and I think beauty is a more complex experience than mere sympathy. And Porter's quote is consistent with that, too, I think (though he doesn't address it, per se).

And I'm convinced, at this time, that God is essentially sympathetic. In fact, I tend to think that God's anger is a special case of sympathy (think of prepositions like "re" and "anti" in words like resent and antipathy which imply reciprocality, which corresponds to the idea of sympathy). However, God only suffers (from sympathy that He forebears for the sake of future ends) for the sake of others in the first place (I include the Son in "others").

Consequently, I don't think God would choose to suffer from sympathy except that He knows His forebearance works for the good of all concerned parties, eventually. If so, His anger can not last forever (ECT, on the other hand, seems to imply that it could). And God's judgment is simply the motivation requisite to render right-relating rational. God motivates (both positively and negatively) us to glorify (i.e., sentiently satisfy in a creational, contingent mode) our creator (Christ) so we can partake of greater sentient satisfaction. It's relational all the way down--nothing is ever merely about or for God the Father.

IOW, the contingent sentient satisfaction of any one sentient person (including the persons of the godhead) is consistent with and conducive to the highest good of all. Because all sentient persons are sympathetic or are, at least, designed to be sympathetic (until they desensitize themselves by wrong-relating). Sympathy, by definition, implies that the sentient satisfaction of one sympathetic being is conducive to the sentient satisfaction of the rest of existentially related sympathetic beings.

This is why it can be true that God desires glory for the creator--because the Son is CO-creator. Hence, if the Father doesn't receive the sentient satisfaction He intended from creation, the SON doesn't either. This in turn occasions a sense of sympathetic loss in the Father for the Son, since God created for his sentient satisfaction too. The Father suffers nothing merely because of His own sense of loss or experience of resistance.

Hence, everything D has said can stand as true of God's essentially selfless nature, but the relational nature of reality requires judgment and its sentient correlate, anger, if God is indeed sympathetic, as opposed to merely aesthetic. This, in turn, allows all the language of scripture about God's glory, etc to be taken as true, perspicuously. Because it is the plurality of the relational godhead, revealed so much more clearly in the NT, that explains how God's interest in creation is not merely self-interest. Then we can see that "God is love" means the very metaphysical truth it seems to be saying in a way completely consistent with the other language in scripture that seemed to be contrary to it.

Post Edited (jefscott) : 9/1/2007 2:30:02 PM (GMT-5)

Tom: I may have found a reason, or a way of expressing, why it is that God could not have created us loving beings from the get-go. To BE loving, we finite creatures HAVE to BECOME loving. There's no way around it. I know D disagrees, but I'm not letting go!

Jeff: I don't remember D disagreeing with that. I must have been sleeping.

Tom: Yeah, D has always argued that God could have created us loving creatures from the get-go, that is, loving by nature, so that unloving intentions would have been impossible for us. D’s argued this has to be possible in our case because it is in fact the case with God. God is ‘essentially’ or ‘necessarily’ loving (so most Christians believe). So “necessary love” as a category isn’t logically impossible (and I agree with that much of course). So D asks, if necessary love is logically possible (because it’s in fact the case with God) we can’t say it’s impossible for humans to have been created so. This last conclusion doesn’t follow, however. It doesn’t follow that since it’s logically possible for a necessary being like God to be ‘essentially’ loving, it’s logically possible for contingent beings like us to be created ‘essentially’ loving. I think God’s creating us this way is not a possibility. D thinks it is. D believes that though God could have gone this route, God in fact decided to have us achieve such unfailingly loving characters through free choice, pain and suffering. I think D’s view complicates theodicy. If God could have gotten what he’s going to get with us through creating us without the risk of evil, why wouldn’t a perfectly loving God do so? That he doesn’t do so suggests to me that he couldn’t do so.

Jeff: But I'm still confused about this myself because I think once we have partaken of the "divine nature" (in the sense Peter means, B), we will still love. And I can't imagine why our capacity or motivation for loving at that time will be caused or conditioned by the choices of our "first" life.

Tom: It will be caused by the choices of our earthly life because a) it could not have come into existence apart from free choices, and b) it follows as effect from those choices. It’s the whole solidification process, the ultimate example of ‘habituation’, except that glorification (which only those having appropriately and freely chosen to become God-ward) seals the process of habituation, like a ratchet mechanism that may move farther forward but may not return.

I’m smiling because D figures that since God is essentially loving without having to libertarianly choose his way into such a character WE may also have been created by God this way. And you on the other hand figure that since we now libertarianly choose to love we should expect to remain free to love (or not) in the libertarian sense after glorification, or else we can't call what we will then be doing 'love' at all.

I figure that since God is essentially loving without having to libertarianly choose his way into such a character, and since we now have to libertarianly choose to love…we may in fact choose our way into such a loving character. In fact, I can't imagine what the hullabaloo over glorification is all about if the risk of evil inherent in libertarian choice with respect to loving intention is not removed from creation. What are we then hoping for? Surely we can imagine the development of loving character such that one becomes (because one chooses over time to become) unfailingly loving, so that the risk of evil which was concomitant with our world’s coming into being will in that world's glorified state be metaphysically banished forever. How are we 'glorified' otherwise?

Tom

Post Edited (PLANIS) : 9/1/2007 4:22:23 PM (GMT-5)