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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7395646" data-attributes="member: 42582">Returning to this - I at first took it to be a humorous aside, but on the chance that it's a genuine question, here's a straightfaced answer:The typical Cuthbertian, I think, regards the question as nonsense: similar to the refutation of Berkely's idealism by kicking a stone.For Tritherion it's trickier. The answer is, in effect, whatever the Kantian answer is to the same question, but I don't know what Kant's account of angels is. I'll try and do something from first principles: angels are spiritual beings, not of the phenomenal realm; so they are not &quot;constructed&quot; by the operation of mortal cognitive architecture; so the relation of on-ness (being a relation between material things located in time and space) doesn't pertain to them; so the question turns out to involve a category error. (When an angel manifests in phenomenal form so that mortals can deal with it, then the answer is &quot;none&quot; because the angel is bigger than the head of the pin.)So it turns out that in an odd way the answer is the same, but arrived at via different methodologies. (Which is also one reason why Kant is my least favourite of the &quot;great philosophers&quot; - it seems a very complicated way of getting to a slightly banal common sense!)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7395646, member: 42582"] Returning to this - I at first took it to be a humorous aside, but on the chance that it's a genuine question, here's a straightfaced answer: The typical Cuthbertian, I think, regards the question as nonsense: similar to the refutation of Berkely's idealism by kicking a stone. For Tritherion it's trickier. The answer is, in effect, whatever the Kantian answer is to the same question, but I don't know what Kant's account of angels is. I'll try and do something from first principles: angels are spiritual beings, not of the phenomenal realm; so they are not "constructed" by the operation of mortal cognitive architecture; so the relation of [I]on-ness[/I] (being a relation between material things located in time and space) doesn't pertain to them; so the question turns out to involve a category error. (When an angel manifests in phenomenal form so that mortals can deal with it, then the answer is "none" because the angel is bigger than the head of the pin.) So it turns out that in an odd way the answer is the same, but arrived at via different methodologies. (Which is also one reason why Kant is my least favourite of the "great philosophers" - it seems a very complicated way of getting to a slightly banal common sense!) [/QUOTE]

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