I may never write a book on infinity, but these are some of my meditations in sketch form:
A Relatively Short History of Infinity (Greek Thought)
1) Etymology and background of the word/concept "infinity" in Greek
2) intensive infinity
3) extensive infinity
4) negative infinity
5) potential infinity
6) actual infinity
7) conceptual problems
8) an infinite God
9) transfinite math
10) infinite sets
11) an infinite past?
https://www.google.com/search?q=types+of+infinity&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1-ab http://factmyth.com/factoids/there-are-different-types-of-infinity/
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/11/113003
Friday, November 24, 2023
Sketching Infinity: The Makings of a Book?
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5 comments:
weren't you going to write a second book after your first one on Tertullian and the angels?
you can also have "countable infinities"
If you ever write anything on the concept of the infinite, especially in a theological context, I would buy it immediately.
To me, the greatest theoriticians of the infinite in a theologian sense were Gregory of Nyssa, Duns Scotus, and especially Hegel. In my mind Hegel's metaphysics of the Absolute, and the Infinite, (as theorized in his greater and lesser Logic) was some of the best laying out of the concept of God as Infinite, and is in fact (if reconstructed) perhaps the only ontological argument that I find persuasive (I made a little blog post a while back summarizing a reconstruction).
https://musingontheology.wordpress.com/2023/04/22/a-simple-hegelian-ontological-transcendental-argument-for-god/
(I would writen it a bit differently had I written it today).
I hope you do work on this, this is one of my favorite subjects. PS. As you know Michel Henry difines God as "Infinite Life," which, in content, is more or less the same as Hegel's infinite spirit.
I agree with your remarks about Nyssa, Scotus, and Hegel. Furthermore, out of all the ontological arguments I've read, Hegel's has promise and Robert Maydole's work is interesting. I look forward to reading your post and thanks for bringing in Henry as well.
Who knows? I might address some of these issues one day, but I also know some have written about the subject in one form or another.
Regarding Hegel, you might know that Hans Kung wrote a thick tome about him. I also like the lectures/books produced by Robert Brandom regarding Hegel.
I haven't read Kung's work, to be honest, I've found that the best way to get into Hegel is just to start with his Encyclopedia Logic (the "lesser" Logic), many of the expositers of Hegel don't really simplify him, they make him more complicated. The Encyclopedia Logic lays out his method, and works in out in a three section metaphysical analysis (being, essence, concept), where you get the dialectical method and a dialectical metaphysics.
Many people start with the Phenomenology, but I persoanlly think that's a mistake, especially if you're interested in Hegel for metaphysics and philosophical method as opposed to his theory of history. The Encyclopedia was also written for students, so Hegel himself sometimes uses examples to simplify things, making it more accessable than the greater logic (the science of Logic).
Robert Maydole is one I had to look up, and then I recognized him from the Blackwell Handbook of Natural theology, I'll have to read his work on the ontological argument.
I agree with you that the best way to learn Hegel and other thinkers/theologians/philosophers is to read the primary literature. I've read Hegel's Logic, his Phenomenology, his Philosophy of Law, and once wrote an undergrad paper about his Philosophy of History. He used to be one of my favorite writers and I still like to read him from time to time, but there are places where I would take issue with his metaphysics and concept of God. Nevertheless, I feel there is much that one can learn from Hegel and I like his formulation of the ontological argument.
I started with his Phenomenology because at the time, I was just picking out books to read at the public library without really knowing what they meant or I did not know much about Hegel. Knowing what I do now, the Phenomenology or Philosophy of Law are probably not good starting places.
Maydole wrote a modalized version of the cosmological argument: maybe you've seen or read that one. It's supposed to be a correction of Aquinas' third way.
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