vBulletin doesn't (or doesn't automatically, anyway) host vBulletin software. It won't be like boardhost where they host our forum because we're using their software.

We'll probably still pay for a third party to host, though. I think we're probably all too nomadic to provide stable hosting ourselves (as nice as that would be).

Johannes wrote:

To be frank, I find it quite discouraging that we are still dealing with such a basic issue at this point.

Have you considered that maybe the problem is on your end?

Try to see it from my perspective: You've pounced on a two year old conversation when you knew I wouldn't have time to pay proper attention to it. You ignore or refuse to interact with arguments, replies, and terms given, instead simply insisting that “it should be clear by now that the identity of Person and essence in trinitarian doctrine is in a qualified way which precludes transitivity” (which hardly helps when I'm looking for a positive account of how that is the case that avoids the mereological problem) or repeating accounts I've questioned (without reply) or asked for you to clarify, and you write in somewhat obscure, jargony prose (and I'm saying this as someone who reads Kant, Heidegger, and Hegel). 

Now, I confess: I'm being a little bit English when I write that “I just don't understand”. (A lot of English philosophers say this to try to get people to clarify their positions; in North America, it's primarily associated with Peter van Inwagen.) It's not that I don't understand anything you're saying. It's that your position as you've stated it is hopelessly obscure to me. I was also trying to give you the benefit of the doubt by assuming that I'm just not understanding what you're saying. (I'm curious: Do you think Vallicella and some of the philosophers Tuggy mentions are also just being dense and failing to see what you're saying?)

Johannes wrote:

2. "The divine essence" in the definition of each Person is numerically the same and is a particular, not a universal [3], which answers Vallicella's objection to the version of the septad suggested by Fr. Matthew Kirby.

The reason Vallicella does that, I assume, is that the persons, as substances, aren't instantiable by the divine essence, but the divine essence, if it's a particular, isn't multiply realizable by the persons.

You seem to want to make the persons each absolute accidents of the one divine essence (or I'm going to need you to unpack what you mean by the "as" in "the divine essence 'as' paternity"). This, along with divine simplicity, runs into the earlier problem I was worried about. (I assume that now you're backing off the claim that the paternity property is strictly identical to the common essence and moving to the claim that they're merely numerically identical and that the persons are distinguished from each other in some non-numerical way—qualitatively, perhaps.)

So he does. What does he mean? I mean, isn't it obvious that if two things are strictly identical in reality, they're also identical “in concept” (which I presume means that the exact same concepts apply to them)? The claim that the persons of the Trinity are identical in reality but not in concept sounds more like a restatement of the problem than a solution to it.

(I see that actions and passions are considered distinct categories of accident (Wuellner, Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy, p. 18). Does Aquinas really mean to claim that actions and passions are at least sometimes paired as merely two different ways of considering one strictly identical trope (accident)? If he does, is that really enough to avoid the contradiction in the septad without his using some other notion of identity? And if he's using a different notion of identity, what is it? I'll have to sit down and do some exegesis some day when I have more time.)

Alright. Well, the change won't be for a month or two, but unless there is suddenly a dramatic shift in the votes, we'll go ahead.