In a fundamental way the church fathers and tradition has rejected the traditional attribute driven ontology. Long ago I read a presentation describing the difference between Platonic and Aristotelian ontological methods by comparing how they attached, manipulated, and viewed attribute attachments to ontological categories. The Nicene fathers and the theological\/philosophical aftermath of that 4th century upheaval rejected that and arrived at a new conception. Their notion was that ontological objects and categories are not defined by their attributes but defined instead by the qualities and aspects of their relationships with other objects and categories. Existence of a thing depends crucially not on its substance of qualities (attributes) but on the aspects of its relationships with others things. A chair is not a chair because it has chair-like attributes but because people (or I for example) have a relationship with it that categorizes it as chair.<\/p>\n
I’d like to examine a few consequences of how that works especially in a Christian context.<\/p>\n
In a fundamental way the church fathers and tradition has rejected the traditional attribute driven ontology. Long ago I read a presentation describing the difference between Platonic and Aristotelian ontological methods by comparing how they attached, manipulated, and viewed attribute attachments to ontological categories. The Nicene fathers and the theological\/philosophical aftermath of that 4th century […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,58,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christianity","category-marko","category-religion"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t