The commentaries to the currently most recent post at Edward Feser's blog have taken on the topic in this thread. Many repeat the arguments given in this thread. There's one that puts my own position perhaps more concisely than I could.

TheOFloinn wrote:

Muddying the definitions impairs our ability to talk about something coherently. The natural pairing of men and women is simply a biological fact. See Darwin for details. In fact, that is just what marriage is -- the natural pairing off of men and women. That's why in the traditional churches, the ministers of matrimony are the couple, not the priest (who is simply an official witness for the Community). It's even more informal among muslims. Societies devised various strategies to control the behavior since, without some controls, it would spell demographic disaster for the clan. For example, the man cannot abandon the woman for frivolous reasons. He must support the woman and defend her and her children with his life if need be. In return, she guarantees that her children will be of him. There may be rules of moeities or consanguinity, or who can arrange the marriage. Some societies permit alpha males or Big Men to support multiple wives. (Among muslims, the man has to demonstrate that he has the means to do so.) etc. All of these rules and obligations are intended to inculcate stability, faithfulness and most of all to ensure that offspring do not become a burden on "the king's purse."

None of this is needed for other sorts of pairings, since there is no comparable consequences.

These are the reasons why family is important to the society. Marriage is the sanctification/celebration of (the start of) family - an indication by the society or "clan" that family is indeed important. Is there anything more intrinsic than this?

Hume (of whom I have only read occasional excerpts) seems to be full of it. Full of skepticism and empiricism and attempts at refutations of (his caricature of) theism, I mean. The famous Hume's fork is famous for the reason that it seems as effective as the Epicurean paradox against theism.

Kant, on the other hand, only dealt with the ontological argument, and only with the Cartesian version of it. Kant thought - given his own metaphysics - that God cannot be proven, but he equally solidly thought that God cannot be disproven. This because God is noumenal, and noumena are like that, empirically unprovable. But noumena are not non-existent.

In this thread, formulate your metaphysical axioms, your list of unquestionable dogmas or your mission statement (these are all synonyms for the purposes of this thread) in terms of classical theism. Give your classical theism an expression as concisely and at the same time as exhaustively as you can. I start.

According the principle of parsimony (a.k.a. Occam's razor), the simplest explanation is the best. It must be both simple and an explanation. The doctrine of divine simplicity is the simplest explanation with the greatest explanatory scope possible. The doctrine should be understood ontologically, as descriptive of reality.

Reality comes to the individual in relative degrees. Some things are more real than others, such as dreams compared to the waking experience. This is the distinction of appearance and reality. In this sense, perceived things are only an appearance, but it is an appearance of something, namely of reality.

The ultimate reality is just one, equivalent to absolute existence. Multitudes of beings and objects are subdivisions of it. This does not mean that all lesser existents are equivalent to the ultimate reality or to existence itself. In mathematics, no subdivision of the number line is equivalent to the number line itself, which is infinite.

In some contexts, apparent categories and hierarchies of the universe can be understood as an illustration, analogy or approximation of reality (such as the distinction of relative and absolute, the comparison of dreams versus waking, and the illustration from mathematics in this post), but they should never be mistaken for reality itself. Even though reality is just one, it requires active discernment to not mistake its subdivisions, limitations, misperceptions, etc. for the whole. Discernment is between reality and appearance.

Some authorities that have made a difference to me:

Plotinus, Enneads
John of Ruysbroeck, The Book of the Supreme Truth
Gaudapada, Mandukya Karika

(This thread is

Scott wrote:

Aquinas rejected universal hylemorphism and accounted for spiritual substances by his famous "real distinction" (adopted from Avicenna) between esse and essentia: the form of a spiritual substances is in potency to the substance's existence, and the substance itself is not just a form but a compound of the form and the act of existence to which that form is conjoined.

In other words, spiritual substance is potency(=form=essence)+act(=existence) rather than form+matter? This is a rather subtle workaround. It prompts the question what Aquinas takes potency to be, so that he can posit it to be the very essence of angels (provided that I am reading you right).

Scott wrote:

(Some other Scholastics were universal hylemorphists and did think spiritual substances were form/matter composites; they just thought such substances were made of "spiritual matter" rather than "corporeal matter." Obviously they didn't think spiritual substances were just forms either.)

This is a given, insofar as they relied on Aristotle. This is precisely where I see metaphysical speculations end up when one accepts Aristotelian theory of forms.

John West wrote:

Hi seigneur,

seigneur wrote:

And if there are immaterial substances, then how are they accounted for? Because, if I understood you rightly saying, the form is a human abstraction from instances, then how do you assert the existence of angels (immaterial substances) as anything other than human abstraction?

This is part of the reason I was careful to distinguish between corporeal and incorporeal components of a substance, not material and immaterial components of a substance, to help people avoid conflating different senses of the word matter. The angel has an incorporeal substance, presumably with incorporeal matter to go along with its form.

You can also use the words "potentiality" and "actuality" to make it merrier, but the idea should be to clarify the relations of the concepts used.

My main question was to Scott, concerning statements like, "The human being's "form" is an intellectual abstraction from that substance; it has no independent existence and doesn't somehow confer powers on the substance... [It's not true] that the form is something ontologically independent that comes along and "adds" powers to otherwise uninformed matter...  The substantial form just is those powers, considered in abstraction by an intellect."

So, the form(al cause) is an intellectual abstraction? This doesn't compute to me at all, on several levels. And how is the dichotomy of "corporeal" and "incorporeal" any less abstract and more concrete?