Tuesday, November 07, 2006

2.012 In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in a state of affairs then the possibility of the state of affairs must be already prejudged in the thing.

Hard to avoid awkwardness here, but I prefer to err on the side of literalness. The word prejudged (präjudiziert) is strange though. Is this another way of saying that this possibility is built-in, metaphysically, to the thing? Or, on the contrary, are the properties of things somehow projected by us? Do these things have any existence independent of us? Perhaps not if it is at all arbitrary how states of affairs are analyzed.


On p. 49, Bearn writes of this passage: “Objects (things) are the nonaccidental. So they cannot be within the world, for if they were within the world they would be accidental, facts (see 6.41). What is accidentally the case, the world, depends on the non-accidental.”

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