{"id":739,"date":"2009-03-19T06:55:22","date_gmt":"2009-03-19T10:55:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?p=739"},"modified":"2009-03-13T09:55:48","modified_gmt":"2009-03-13T13:55:48","slug":"arius-and-athanasius-part-3-producing-something-with-pre-existing-ingredients-jt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/arius-and-athanasius-part-3-producing-something-with-pre-existing-ingredients-jt\/","title":{"rendered":"Arius and Athanasius, part 3 — Producing something with ‘pre-existing’ ingredients (JT)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"It's
It's easy to make things with pre-prepared ingredients!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the last post<\/a>, I explained that something is \u2018created from nothing\u2019 when it\u2019s produced without any pre-existing ingredients. I also explained that by \u2018ingredient\u2019 I mean any sort of constituent which satisfies the following two conditions: first, it exists in<\/em> the product; and second, it bears its own properties, i.e., it has features that other ingredients in the product do not have, and which the product itself does not have. In this post, I will explain what I mean by \u2018pre-existing\u2019.<\/p>\n

I want to use this term in the following sense: an ingredient is a \u2018pre-existing\u2019 ingredient when it is not produced by the productive act that brings the product into being. So, for example, when a mason builds a brick wall, the mason causes the wall to come to exist, but not the bricks. The mason may have produced the bricks himself at some earlier time, in which case the mason is the producer of both the wall and the bricks, but the mason would have produced the bricks by a different productive act, so the bricks would count as \u2018pre-existing\u2019 ingredients in my sense of the word.<\/p>\n

Alternatively, someone else might have produced the bricks, but again, in this case they would also be produced by a different productive act. The bricks could even have been special eternal bricks that always existed and were never produced at all. But they\u2019d still be \u2018pre-existing\u2019 ingredients because they are not produced by the productive act that brings the wall into being, irrespective of time or producer.<\/p>\n

Now, I should emphasize that I only use the term \u2018pre-existing\u2019 because I think it readily brings to mind a rough idea of the kind of thing I mean. But the term might suggest that pre-existing ingredients must exist at some earlier point in time. I don\u2019t mean to imply that. I mean to use \u2018pre-existing\u2019 in a sense that\u2019s neutral to any temporal reference. For our purposes here, a \u2018pre-existing\u2019 ingredient can be an ingredient that does indeed exist before the product, but it can also be an ingredient that exists co-eternally with the product.<\/p>\n

Further, the term \u2018pre-existing\u2019 might suggest that a \u2018pre-existing\u2019 ingredient is a contingent ingredient in the sense that it might not have ended up in the product (if, say, history had taken a different course). But I don\u2019t mean to imply that either. I mean to use \u2018pre-existing\u2019 with a sense that\u2019s modally neutral. \u2018Pre-existing\u2019 ingredients can be contingent, or they can be necessary, in the product in question.<\/p>\n

By the same token, I don\u2019t mean to imply that a \u2018pre-existing\u2019 ingredient is capable of independent existence. For our purposes here, \u2018pre-existing\u2019 ingredients include both ingredients that are separable, and ingredients that are inseparable, from the product in question.<\/p>\n

Of course, every time I want to talk about a \u2018pre-existing\u2019 ingredient, I don\u2019t want to say \u2018an ingredient that is not produced by the productive act that brings the product into being\u2019. That\u2019s far too cumbersome, so instead I\u2019m just calling it a \u2018pre-existing\u2019 ingredient. But again, that\u2019s for convenience, and I don\u2019t mean to imply any restrictons on temporality, modality, or separability.<\/p>\n

Now that I\u2019ve explained what I mean by \u2018pre-existing ingredients\u2019, next time<\/a> I will give a more precise definition of \u2018creating something from nothing\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the last post, I explained that something is \u2018created from nothing\u2019 when it\u2019s produced without any pre-existing ingredients. I also explained that by \u2018ingredient\u2019 I mean any sort of constituent which satisfies the following two conditions: first, it exists in the product; and second, it bears its own properties, i.e., it has features that… Read More »Arius and Athanasius, part 3 — Producing something with ‘pre-existing’ ingredients (JT)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":780,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,14,13,3],"tags":[29,26,39,24,22],"class_list":["post-739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-heresy-orthodoxy","category-history","category-theologians","category-theories","tag-arius","tag-athanasius","tag-generation","tag-nicea","tag-trinity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=739"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":804,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions\/804"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}