John Bacon

The God Insight: Vengence or Destiny?

My God is neither a Creator, much less an avenger, but rather the ultimate final cause (telos)—the end for the sake of which the cosmos works and our lives are lived out (partly in striving, as well as in pain and disappointment). This God is what Sartre denied—the meaning of life and of natural phenomena. To Aristotle’s problem of the uniqueness of the Prime Mover: if two Gods were per impossibile to exist, one would have to embrace the other’s telos. So God’s existence is to be taken for granted, but not as proven or empirically necessitated. Such a God is essential to us, but He is not detritus of the Big Bang, nor incarnate of the Virgin Mary, not omnipotent, nor comforting, nor prayer-accessible. Although such a God is undeniably a kind of let-down, He still explains the fundamental importance and value of the religious impulse in us.

The semantics of generic the

Intrigued by the namelike feel of generic the-phrases in contrast e.g. to ulZand rro-phrases, I tried and failed either formally [UG] or informally [GDD] to invest them with coherent referential or even singular-term status. Pragmatic and linguistic work of Montague and his associates points the way out of my perplexity. Generic descriptions turn out to be nonreferential or, more precisely, nonspecific singular terms, i.e. certain oblique or referentially opaque occurrences of definite descriptions.

First-Order Logic Based on Inclusion and Abstraction

Quine has shown that set theory may be based on inclusion and abstraction [1937], [1953]. He quantifies over (or abstracts upon) sets of all kinds, of course, including sets of sets. Here I confine Quines approach to quantification over (abstraction upon) individuals alone, or at any rate their unit classes. Forsaking quantification over sets undercuts Quines definition of negation, however. Smullyan sketches a first-order restriction of Quines approach with no bound class variables for which inclusion and abstraction alone are adequate logical primitives [1957, n. 10]. However, the definition of negation requires more than one element in the universe of discourse. This requirement is met for Smullyan because he is doing arithmetic. Here, on the other hand, I presuppose only that the universe is nonempty. Accordingly, I assume a third primitive notion, the empty class. I will show that this threefold basis suffices both for classical first-order logic and for a version of “free” many-sorted logic. The monadic fragment, which I call Boolean logic with abstraction, is intermediate in strength between Boolean class logic and Lesniewskis Ontology. It affords a novel perspective on descriptions, particularly in their generic use.