On the other hand, the virtues of abstract painting – one of the few things art historians and interior designers can agree about – are much in evidence.
But, again, it is not in virtue of being abstract, i.e. non-spatiotemporal and causally inert, that sets violate Goodman's principle on composition.
Such bearers of value are valuable in virtue of the abstract value or values they instantiate or display (so, for example, an institution might be valuable in virtue of the liberty or equality that it engenders or embodies).
It creates space in which it is possible to ask what philosophy of religion has occluded from its angle of vision by virtue of the abstract and distanced discourse that has characterized it.
Critically, if the distinctive MCE for repeated primes in Experiment 1 was due to an exclusive modulation of central representations, then repeated and repeated/novel primes should produce the same pattern priming in the present experiment by virtue of sharing identical abstract letter identities.
These heroes are not allegorical representations of abstract virtues, but are living human beings with imagination, character and free will; but what moves them is a passion for an aspect of our ethical life, an aspect that is supported and promoted by a god.
The book usefully praises "the intellectual virtues of rigour, subtlety and mitigated scepticism", and offers a particularly incisive defence of "abstract" thought – an adjective normally used these days as a term of abuse.
More precisely, one obtains a new object by abstracting it from some given kind of entities, in virtue of certain criteria of identity for this new (abstract) object.
In a similar vein, in his 'The metaphysics of abstract objects', E. J. Lowe speaks of universals as abstract entities; yet he remarks that pieces of gold 'are soluble in aqua regia' only in virtue of being instances of the kind, gold.
