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Tuesday, January 05, 2021

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This is a very good post. You make many intricate distinctions in this above outline. Since there is so much to be pondered here, I will have to limit myself to a few probing questions and statements.
I. I am not sure it is exactly correct to say, as you do in sense (3) of the term world, that God is not included in the world. If the theology that we are speaking of is Christian theology, and if the Christian theology that we are talking about is the classical theology founded by the early fathers and developed systematically in the medieval period, then I think a case can be made that God is indeed part of the world. Since (1) God is the immanent sustainer of created being, and (2) this sustaining activity can interpreted as the continuous activity of the third person of the Trinity( the Holy Spirit). This also depends upon how much you want to emphasize the Neoplatonic aspects of Christian theology in contradistinction to some of the Aristotelian ideas of, say, Aquinas (for many would say that God is neither a being, or the being, but beyond being, super-essential and so on). God, in short, may not be reducible to his worldly activity, but nonetheless be part of the world too as the sustaining cause of things or( in the Neoplatonic language) the persisting divine energy that gives all existents their being and configuration.
II As regards to your discussion of modality, there is of course sense of this use of world--the one used by Leibniz, but this does not seem to fall under either the modal-abstractist, or the modal-concretist sense. In the way that you talk of the modal-abstractist form, it seems to be connected to propositional formulations connected to the philosophy of language, whereas Leibniz's was an onto-theological formulation connected to the theory, shared by Aquinas as well, that ideas, in the Platonic sense, subsisted within the mind of God( of course this meant different things for both of them but that's not at issue here).
III Sense (7) of the way that you talk of World is very similar to ideas that the stoics formulated. However, it could be said(as was customary for ancient philosophers) that they mixed the ontological with the existential, and the focus on the present was a way of training the soul and managing impressions, but I am not sure if they actually took up this view as an explicit ontology or if they simply attempted to inhabit perspective that such an ontology might make easier.
IV There are a lot of other questions and observations that I have, but I will end with this for now: The world horizon, for Husserl, factually speaking also has within it our world-pictures or conceptions of the world. These conceptions condition the way that we move through the world to a great extent. The live-world, for the contemporary American or the Japanese citizen from 500 years ago, will be very similar insofar as the grass will appear green for them and the sun a tiny dot in the sky, but at the same time the general world-conception that one has (or perhaps more importantly, that is dominant in one's age) will also circumscribe one’s existential sense of being in-the-world. We speak of the worldlings being caught up in the passions and pleasures of mundane existence, but this could be a matter of lack of spiritual attunement or it could be a matter of the dominant naturalistic world-conception( which Husserl, rightly, criticized as physicalism) limiting his ability to express a spiritual dimension that is unseen because the ( "concrete-possibility", as they say) is not open to him. Some men may be born wordings--other may have been made that way but their world. Just as one may have the genetic predisposition for tall height but because of malnutrition it never manifested, so there may be worldlings now who in past age would have been great saints or spiritual masters.

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