260. Once and for All: Scotus on Being

I was mostly responding to the second half of your comment, when you started talking about Godfrey (also, when you said "one might go so far...", by one do you mean Godfrey, someone radicalising Godfrey's position, or just a more radical position that isn't related to Godfrey's position, if that makes sense). 

Getting a little off topic, this makes me wonder how exactly the content of essences relate to metaphysics. Of course, to some extent it does, as how Avicenna and others have talked about that if the essence is contradictory, then the essence rules out its own existence (or something along those lines, it is already confusing enough to talk about essences as "not having received being", implying the essences somehow don't exist until they receive being (how does it make sense to talk about something before it exists? not in the sense that that we are talking about the future, when it will exist, but somehow how it is in the present while it doesn't exist), a point you yourself have brought up a few times that I am either forgetting the replies to or you haven't brought up any, but it gets even worse when talking about contradictory essences being unable to receive being in the first place because it seems like we wouldn't be able to call it an essence at all even if it makes sense to talk about non-existing essences waiting to receive being), the special case of God's essence implying existence, but beyond those two cases the actual content of any essence seems to not matter according to this theory of metaphysics and it is left to the case of theoretically God willing an essence into being (actually don't know if Avicenna would agree with that considering his very abstract idea of God that doesn't directly know particulars which weirdly enough implies in my mind that he couldn't bring essences into being since the essence would be substantiated in a particular, no?), or to physics by which I mean, shall we say, "the world working itself out", the domain of actually existing things acting on each other that would bring other things in and out of existence. 

To put it in a linguistic metaphor, putting aside the two special cases the theory seems like a Syntactic theory, that is it only cares about the structure of being rather than any content. This seems to work until we start talking about some specifics. Does the answer as to why horses exist and the answer as to why unicorns don't exist lay purely on the non metaphysical level, i.e. that it was either an arbitrary choice on God's part or that was just how the evolution of the world/universe went as to why horses exist and unicorns don't? Intuitively for that case maybe so, but what about 4d objects? Intuitively this seems like a different case somehow, and yet nothing in the essence of 4d objects themselves seem to rule out their existence, despite that we (unless some Lovecraftian monster is about to give us a rude awakening, or some string theory like M-theory which posits 9 spatial dimensions gets experimental evidence somehow) know it is impossible since we exist in a universe that has 3 spatial dimensions. If there is a metaphysical explanation for the difference, it seems like it would require the theory to be Semantic instead of Syntactic to explain that difference specifically but also to answer the specific question this has been building up to - is there a metaphysical reason why some essences seem, by nature or not (given that the analysis of the relevant essences for this question does not rule out their potential to exist or not, like unicorns or hypercubes) can only ever have mental existence or can possibly have extramental existence? These musings make me wonder further specific questions - what is the nature of space and time in relation to metaphysics? Did Avicenna ever write about that? Maybe with relation to a 4d spatial universe it would be an anachronistic case but did he ever consider if the universe could have been 2d spatially? Does space and time have an essence?

Sorry for such a long comment just to ask the simple question of if there is any interesting metaphysical reasons behind why some essences seem to only have mental existence and can't have extramental existence, even if the their essences don't seem to rule out their existence. Just to add on one final question - what about essences that seem to imply change, i.e. essences that within their very definition the potential of non being? A lot of the philosophy so far seems to take it for granted that things are stable and any change is due to something outside acting on said thing, but what about cases where the change is internal? To take a example, life - for me it just seems inventible that if you are alive you will someday die, that it is within the nature of living things that they aren't immortal. Maybe a broader example could be the existence of entropy means that everything is undergoing internal change. Or another example, a student. The very essence of a student means that they will become learned will no longer be a student, if nothing goes wrong. Final example, a flame, which by its nature eats up the oxygen around it, so unless something else is producing more oxygen, there will be less oxygen which will eventually mean the flame dies out. I probably sound very Hegelian with that line of thinking haha.