Trying, in his Soliloquia, to prove the immortality of the soul from the imperishability of truth, Augustine apparently commits a fallacia aequivocationis. Truth is imperishable insofar as it subsists independently. Immortality follows from this only insofar as truth is constituted by mental acts and is thus inseparable from the soul; for dualistically inspired scepticism, truth is given as being immanent to consciousness through methodologically correct procedures establishing coherence. This fallacy is avoidable only by presupposing a Platonic two-world-dualism: The soul, as (...) well as truth, belongs to the subsisting intelligible and therefore essentially has knowledge. Ignorance can be understood, according to recollection theory, as partial forgetting allowing for distinguishing between true and false, and remarkably also between true ideas and deceiving sensory imaginations. Such a faculty encompassing the intelligible as well as the sensible, however, undermines dualism. (shrink)

If every concept ist not, in trivial terms, to have a content, then the content of a concept has to be understood as the set of all concepts that it contains , the concept itself and the tautological concept being excepted. Since a negated concept can only include, in terms of content, the negations of the special concepts, the negated individual concepts are consequently without content . The individual concept, whose content is the sufficient condition for establishing a possible individual (...) as extension, is indispensable if Leibniz's theses are to be upheld: equality of extent is also always equality of content. The intensional conceptual estimation can also be extensionally interpreted. Conceptual negations are however indispensable if a Spinozistic monism is to be avoided and a multitude of the most general elementary concepts obtained. (shrink)