Why Do I Keep Existing? A Lecture on Being | Prof. Paul Symington

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🗓️ 1 November 2022

⏱️ 56 minutes

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Summary

This talk was given on September 12, 2022 at the University of Rochester. For more information please visit thomisticinstitute.org. Paul Symington is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Scholarly Excellence at Franciscan University of Steubenville. His publications include On Determining What There Is (Walter De Gruyter, 2010) and over a dozen peer reviewed articles ranging in topics from philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of science and medieval philosophy. He has also given numerous paper presentations, in topics ranging from medieval metaphysics and teleology in modern science, including talks on prime matter as well as the problem of human death at University of Oxford in 2015.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:04.0	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:08.0	I want to thank Cole and company for suggesting this talk.
0:17.0	Why do I keep existing a lecture on being?
0:21.6	And it was a really nice opportunity for me to look into some recent work that was done by your very own professor, Paul Adi,
0:32.6	who had done to work on this idea of existential inertia.
0:47.9	So in this talk, my job here is to find some points of commonality between a to mystic approach and a contemporary analytic approach illustrated very nicely in Professor Paul Adi's recent paper on existential inertia I just mentioned.
0:59.0	I wanted to avoid merely translating the problematic developed by Adi into a to mystic framework
1:06.0	and within that jargon that comes with a different framework,
1:11.6	which sometimes in so doing loses some interesting and fruitful points of contrast between the two.
1:20.6	So in other words, in this talk, I approached this question from a different philosophical perspective and focus than as
1:30.3	if I were to come at it from a purely to mystic approach. Some of you may be familiar with
1:36.9	the work of Dr. Edm. Faser, who has also worked on this idea of existential inertia as well.
1:47.0	So, you know, I like to think that in this approach, I really tried to get into the mind or the head of a contemporary
1:57.0	and metaphysician in order to do some of these points of comparison and analysis.
2:03.6	As a result of doing this, I feel like I have attained some fresh perspectives myself
2:11.6	on traditionally conceived to mystic principles.
2:15.6	I'll give you a couple of examples, which you'll see in this talk.
2:22.4	So the first example, in thinking about existential inertia within the parameters of Professor
2:29.0	Audie's paper, I was able to see the concept of present time, or the present, in a new light, even being able to connect it up with a notoriously difficult idea, which is Boethius's very famous definition of eternity.
2:48.0	More about this later. Another example of, I think, a fresh perspective that I was
2:54.5	able to have on this topic is how I was forced to look at being an existence in a passive way.
	...

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