Talk:Ontological argument for the existence of God: Difference between revisions
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imported>Larry Sanger (Please take credit for your comments...) |
imported>Peter J. King (→down with ae ligature?: responses) |
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I am all for good fun, but i think it's a case of rather gratuitous pretentiousness to use the ae ligature in medieval (or anything else, really :) ). It's just not a valid letter of the english alphabet, and there is no reason to complicate things with it. comments? --Daniel Folkinshteyn | I am all for good fun, but i think it's a case of rather gratuitous pretentiousness to use the ae ligature in medieval (or anything else, really :) ). It's just not a valid letter of the english alphabet, and there is no reason to complicate things with it. comments? --Daniel Folkinshteyn | ||
:I always use it when writing or typing, I'm certainly not alone in that, and it's still in use in various contexts (see the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' for example). (I'm not sure that accusing another editor of pretentiousness is quite the Citizendium spirit, but let that pass.) It's not a separate letter, no; as the Wikipedia article has it: "In modern English orthography Æ is not considered an independent letter but a spelling variant, for example: 'encyclopædia' versus 'encyclopaedia' or 'encyclopedia'." --[[User:Peter J. King|Peter J. King]] <span style="background:black"> [[User talk:Peter J. King|<font color="yellow"><b>Talk</b></font>]] </span> 18:21, 15 March 2007 (CDT) | |||
== That lower-case g == | == That lower-case g == | ||
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But I have to say...I have never encountered a discussion of the traditional arguments for the existence of God that did not upper-case 'God'. Is this a case where we can agree to use the upper case, purely on grounds of common usage? --[[User:Larry Sanger|Larry Sanger]] 18:07, 15 March 2007 (CDT) | But I have to say...I have never encountered a discussion of the traditional arguments for the existence of God that did not upper-case 'God'. Is this a case where we can agree to use the upper case, purely on grounds of common usage? --[[User:Larry Sanger|Larry Sanger]] 18:07, 15 March 2007 (CDT) | ||
:Well, the way that the argument works is to argue for the instantiation of a concept, then to declare that that instantiation is a god, and then sometimes to assume, but usually explicitly to argue that there can only be one such being — that it's the god of Christianity. As we discussed at [[Talk:Philosophy of religion]], neither Anselm nor Aquinas capitalised "deus"; I haven't yet had a chance to check the original typography of the early-modern philosophers (Edward Buckner's research tends to indicate that capitalisation had become common by the mid-seventeenth century. All my enquiries among mediævalists and early-modern historians have so far come up blank; they're all fascinated, but none of them actually knows anything about it). As there, I won't battle over it, but my opinion is that the lower case is correct, whatever the current common (and mostly unreflective) usage hapens to be... --[[User:Peter J. King|Peter J. King]] <span style="background:black"> [[User talk:Peter J. King|<font color="yellow"><b>Talk</b></font>]] </span> 18:21, 15 March 2007 (CDT) | |||
Revision as of 17:21, 15 March 2007
down with ae ligature?
I am all for good fun, but i think it's a case of rather gratuitous pretentiousness to use the ae ligature in medieval (or anything else, really :) ). It's just not a valid letter of the english alphabet, and there is no reason to complicate things with it. comments? --Daniel Folkinshteyn
- I always use it when writing or typing, I'm certainly not alone in that, and it's still in use in various contexts (see the Encyclopædia Britannica for example). (I'm not sure that accusing another editor of pretentiousness is quite the Citizendium spirit, but let that pass.) It's not a separate letter, no; as the Wikipedia article has it: "In modern English orthography Æ is not considered an independent letter but a spelling variant, for example: 'encyclopædia' versus 'encyclopaedia' or 'encyclopedia'." --Peter J. King Talk 18:21, 15 March 2007 (CDT)
That lower-case g
This article should be fun.
But I have to say...I have never encountered a discussion of the traditional arguments for the existence of God that did not upper-case 'God'. Is this a case where we can agree to use the upper case, purely on grounds of common usage? --Larry Sanger 18:07, 15 March 2007 (CDT)
- Well, the way that the argument works is to argue for the instantiation of a concept, then to declare that that instantiation is a god, and then sometimes to assume, but usually explicitly to argue that there can only be one such being — that it's the god of Christianity. As we discussed at Talk:Philosophy of religion, neither Anselm nor Aquinas capitalised "deus"; I haven't yet had a chance to check the original typography of the early-modern philosophers (Edward Buckner's research tends to indicate that capitalisation had become common by the mid-seventeenth century. All my enquiries among mediævalists and early-modern historians have so far come up blank; they're all fascinated, but none of them actually knows anything about it). As there, I won't battle over it, but my opinion is that the lower case is correct, whatever the current common (and mostly unreflective) usage hapens to be... --Peter J. King Talk 18:21, 15 March 2007 (CDT)