Pat,
>
> >Pat Hayes schrieb:
> >>
> >> Well, I can see a lot of problems with this. If
> >> you believe, for example, that all spatiotemporal
> >> entities are in some sense physical, you will get
> >> into trouble.
> >
> >Let me from my philosophical corner just add one long sentence: No
> >famous philosophical ontologist who posits physical (material) things in
> >space and time has argued that everything that exists in space and time
> >is physical (material); for instance, many claim that property instances
> >*inhere in* physical things, but this does not mean that these
> >spatiotemporal instances *are* physical entities.
>
> Possibly. Nevertheless, frankly, the opinion of
> famous philosophical ontologists on matters like
> this is of less interest than what actual written
> and deployed formal ontologies say about it. One
> can reasonably claim, and indeed ontologies have
> claimed, that anything spatiotemporal has a
> spatiotemporal extent, and any spatiotemporal
> extent contains a kind of physical stuff, so... (01)
Are you sure this is phrased right. What about vacuums? Surely they do not
contain stuff - where stuff is material in the normal everyday sense. Or am
I missing something? (02)
If this is what the ontologies claim - aren't they just wrong (or,
misguided, or ...) (03)
I thought formal ontologists tended to equate concrete and spatio-temporal
rather than stuff and spatio-temporal. And that there tended to be little
more here that that concrete things were spatio-temporal. (04)
>
> BTW, what exactly does 'inhere' mean? Apparently
> X may inhere in Y and Y have a quality that X
> lacks (physicality), so why does it follow that
> if X inheres in Y and Y is spatiotemporal, that X
> is spatiotemporal? (Probably we should take this
> offline, if you feel like replying :-)
>
> Pat
>
> >/Ingvar J
> >
Chris (05)
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