Re: Angels and photons (Related languages (Re: A China-Sumer connection))

From: Jacques Guy (jguy_at_alphalink.com.au)
Date: 03/10/05 

Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 22:49:54 +1000

Des Small wrote:

> Jacques, look what you actually said: multiple angels in the same
> place at the same time. No heads of pins, in particular.

Des, look what you wrote. What is a place? A dimensionless point?
St Thomas writes that, for an angel, the head of a pin is like
a continent. A continent can accommodate, vulgarly speaking,
an _infinite_ number of pin heads. And a pin head, in turn,
an infinite number of tiny little "places". So, you ought
to be able to house an infinite number of angels on...
anything whatever, as long as it has a physical reality.
Like... hey man, like a pin head!

> I would be very interested indeed to know the bibliographical details
> of this treatise

I sympathise with you. It was in a coffer, in the unused room next
to my mine in Port-Orly when I was a guest of Father Linossier,
a PhD student trying to make sense of that horrid Austronesian
language, Sakao, which had decided to turn itself into yet another
holophrastic monster.

> the "angels on the head of a pin" question is
> routinely used to mock scholastic philosophy

That is not how I understood it then.

I am an atheist. Yet I was struck by the intellectual
worthiness of that treatise, and that an infinite
number .... and so on, follows beautifully from
the nature of angels.

If, of course, and only if, you agree with that
angel hocus-pocus. But, let's face it, it's not so
very different from quarks.

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