Re: Pragmata = Objects?

And let us not forget Buckminster Fuller's ''I Seem To Be A Verb'' --

But there seems to be, more lately, or perhaps recurringly,
a regression from the hey-days of process, relational, and
systems thinking into ontological particularism, a curious
compromise formation between essentialism and nominalism.

Jon Awbrey

John F. Sowa wrote:
 > Jon and Gary,
 >
 > Classical Greek did not have a word that corresponds to the Latin
 > 'res' for 'thing'.  The two words that come closest to 'thing' --
 > 'pragma' and 'chrêma' -- are both derived from verbal roots.  In
 > fact, the Latin 'objectus' is also derived from a verbal root.
 >
 > Following is a discussion of those issues from a paper I wrote
 > on "Signs, Processes, and Language Games."  You might also check
 > the book by Wolfgang-Rainer Mann, whom I quoted in that article.
 >
 > I quoted that point because it supports my preference for
 > Whitehead's process ontology, which makes processes primary.
 > For Whitehead, physical things are slowly changing processes
 > that are recognizable by patterns (i.e., mathematical forms)
 > that are sufficiently similar at repeated encounters.
 >
 > John
 > _______________________________________________________________________
 >
 > Source: http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.htm
 >
 > The thing-property ontology, which Russell (1918) pushed to the extreme
 > of treating objects as nothing but "a bundle of properties," is derived
 > from the substance-property-accident representation of Aristotle's
 > early philosophy.  In reviewing the development of Greek philosophy,
 > Wolfgang-Rainer Mann (2000) observed that far from being common sense,
 > the position Aristotle presented in the Categories was "a revolutionary
 > metaphysical picture":
 >
 >    To formulate it most starkly: before the _Categories_ and _Topics_,
 >    there were no things. Less starkly, things did not show up as
 >    things, until Aristotle wrote those two works. (p. 4)
 >
 > The fundamental issue is the nature of the 'beings' or 'entities' (ta
 > onta) that are ontologically primary. Both Plato and Aristotle used the
 > word ousia for those privileged entities. Plato considered the abstract
 > Forms to be ousiai and physical entities to be imperfect copies that
 > participate in the Forms. In the Categories, however, Aristotle
 > considered physical things, of which his main examples were living
 > things, to be ousiai, which Boethius translated into Latin as
 > substantiae. But as Mann notes, Aristotle distanced himself from those
 > early views in his later philosophy, especially the Metaphysics and De
 > Anima. In those books, Aristotle's primary representation of physical
 > entities is the form-matter composite, which is more compatible with
 > Plato than with his own early philosophy. The main difference between
 > Plato and the later Aristotle is over the nature of the combination:
 > whether physical entities participate in the Forms or whether the Forms
 > inhere in the physical entities.
 >
 > Besides telling a fascinating story about the development of ancient
 > philosophy, Mann raised serious questions about what views might be
 > considered "common sense." He also observed that the presocratic
 > philosophers had no single word that corresponds to the English word
 > thing. The closest words in Greek were derived from verbs: pragma
 > literally means what is done, and chrêma means what is used. Other
 > languages also use verbal forms for "object": objectus in Latin and
 > Gegenstand in German mean something that is thrown against or standing
 > in the way. As Mann's analysis indicates, a revolutionary view that
 > Aristotle once proposed and later abandoned can hardly be considered so
 > obvious that no further justification is required.

cc: Arisbe, Inquiry

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