John West wrote:

A third alternative, which may do better with relativity but doesn't help against Tom's argument, is the Growing Salami Theory (which some call the Growing Block).

Why would the Growing Salami Theory (GST) do any better with special relativity (SR)?

GST would entail a preferred reference frame — namely, the unique inertial frame in which the events with time coordinate t = 0 (the present, say) are all on the "leading face" of the Salami.  Furthermore, if you are in any other inertial reference frame, then, while you are on the leading face, some of the events that are in your past (t < 0) aren't yet in the Salami, while some of the events in your future (t > 0) are already in the Salami, "behind" the leading face.

In other words, some events that are non-existent (assuming GST) right now will prove in the future to have happened prior to right now.

If SR and GST are both true, then the exists/doesn't-exist-yet border is sweeping through events transversely to the past/future border (unless you happen to be in that one preferred reference frame).  That is, you don't have that "the past exists, while the future doesn't."  Instead you have, "some of the past exists, while the rest doesn't, and some of the future exists, while the rest doesn't".  The distinction between what is in the Salami and what isn't doesn't coincide with whatever distinguishes the past from the future.

Are there any Thomists who buy all of the Natural Theology in Thomism, but who buy absolutely none of the “sacred science” beyond that?

In other words, I'm looking for explicit, self-avowed Thomists who don't believe in any additional divine revelation. Is there anyone, now or in the past, who says something like the following?

"Hypothetical Position" wrote:

I completely agree with Aquinas about what human reason alone can tell us about God. Everything that he says about God that he attributes solely to human reason is completely persuasive to me. I also agree with him completely about what the limits of human reason are. I further agree with him that all the additional Christian beliefs that he attributes to divine revelation are logically coherent; that is, all of Aquinas's defenses of these beliefs from charges of incoherence succeed. I also agree that, when Aquinas uses human reason to draw implications from divine revelation, he makes valid conditional inferences.

BUT I don't buy any claim that any divine revelation has actually happened. I agree with Aquinas about how far human reason can take us, but I think that, beyond that point, there is no justified belief. I think that a rational appraisal of the evidence would find vanishingly little support for a divine origin of any of the purported revelations that have come down to us.

I concede that human reason leaves ‘gaps’ in our picture of God (e.g., about whether God is ‘three persons, one being’). I offer no alternative account to fill in these gaps. I agree that the Christian account is one possibility (epistemically speaking) for what might truly be the case. Certainly something is the case, some account is true, if not the Christian one. But I assert that there is no justification for believing in any account that goes beyond what human reason alone can provide.

[This post is based on [url=http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2014/03/i-was-wrong-about-keith-parsons.

For me, the most compelling case for mathematical platonism appeals to my strong intuition that (say) the twin prime conjecture must have a determinate truth value. The intuition is that this conjecture has a truth value even if

(1) it turns out not to be a logical consequence of any of our axioms,

(2) it turns out not to be a logical consequence of any axioms that would ever seem "intuitively obvious" to us, and

(3) its truth or falsity depends on the behavior of integers so large that no actual thing will ever realize them (i.e., be numerous enough to be counted by them).

I don't know how to make sense of this intuition without positing something like "platonic" integers that exist independently of human thought and even of the existence of numerable things.

The biggest problem with such platonic entities, for me, is that I don't see how we could have any knowledge of them, even if they do exist.  They don't seem to do any work in accounting for actual mathematical knowledge or practice.

The upshot is that I've gradually lost confidence in my intuition that the twin prime conjecture would have a truth value even under the circumstances that I described above.

The "pointing" language was just my attempt to render what seemed to me to be the plain reading of the first Critique. I didn't realize that I was stumbling into a controversial interpretation! I haven't read Husserl yet, so I didn't get it from him. To be honest, I am not as familiar as I should be with continental philosophy after Kant. I've read some Heidegger, who was a student of Husserl, and who does use "pointing" language, but not to say what I'm attributing to Kant. (Or, at least, I didn't consciously make that connection.)

I should clarify something that I may have expressed poorly above. For Kant, experience doesn't contain pointers that point at noumena, strictly speaking. To explain what I mean by "strictly speaking", let me distinguish the following three cases of "pointing":

(1) A finger pointing at the Moon in the sky.

(2) The track left by a subatomic particle in a bubble chamber.

(3) The inadequacy of the totality of experience to account for its own existence.

In the first case, our eyes can follow the finger to look directly at the Moon. The pointing brings the pointed-at within the realm of the actually experienced.

In the second case, we can see only the track itself (in a photograph, say). The track "points at" the subatomic particle, but the particle itself is merely inferred, not experienced. We cannot follow the track as if it were the finger in Case (1) to gaze upon the particle itself.

Nonetheless, as with the finger in Case (1), we can use the track somehow to add the particle itself to the "furniture" with which we populate the world. We acquire a concept of the particle as an object within the empirical world that we inhabit. We have real knowledge of the particle itself. Moreover, Kant would insist that the particle itself is a possible experience. We'd just need a sufficiently strong microscope to see it directly. That power of magnification may be forever beyond our ability as a practical matter, but it r

John West wrote:

The old logicism has pretty much collapsed due to results like Godel's incompleteness theorems. There are some neo-logicists out there still, but not many.

Gödel's Theorems are a problem if you want to say that math is just about the logical consequences of a particular fixed set of axioms.  Mathematics proves to be "too rich" to be captured by any such set.  Can't the logicist just say that logic itself is similarly "too rich"?