Golden-Crimson
The brightness sits upon the sky,
a golden-crimson in its dye;
beneath its burning, breezes sigh
and birds awake to wing on high,
for dawn is here.
The sun is born again and, new,
the splendor shines through glints of dew
and upward beams at spreading blue
and heaven clear.
The Grapes of Wrath
The terroir of the grapes of wrath is terror;
their harvest inks the feet with blood.
They are erasure of all error.
Their aging vintage is red and good.
The wrath that overthrows the Harlot
who rules the world by might and gold
shall stain her purple robe black-scarlet
as seers in every age have told.
No longer will excuse be uttered;
and how can just assessors rue,
no matter self-defenses muttered,
that all receive as they are due?
You think you know it, mortal hearer,
the taste of justice, pure and sweet?
You know it not; a flavor dearer
is stamped in press by angels' feet.
Friday, January 18, 2019
The Moral of the Story
I rejected any approach which begins with the question 'What do modern children like?' I might be asked, 'Do you equally reject the approach which begins with the question "What do modern children need?" -- in other words, with the moral or didactic approach?' I think the answer is Yes. Not because I don't like stories to have a moral: certainly not because I think children dislike a moral. Rather because I feel sure the the question 'What do modern children need?' will not lead you to a good moral. If we ask that question we are assuming too superior an attitude. It would be better to ask 'What moral do I need?' for I think we can be sure that what does not concern us deeply will not deeply interest our readers, whatever their age. But it is better not to ask the questions at all. Let the pictures tell you their own moral. For the moral inherent in them will rise from whatever spiritual roots you have succeeded in striking during the whole course of your life.
[C. S. Lewis, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children", On Stories, HarperOne (San Francisco: 2017) pp. 62-63.]
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
I Grant I Never Saw a Goddess Go
Sonnet 130
by William Shakespeare
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
My favorite Shakespearean sonnet, which probably says something about me.
Tuesday, January 15, 2019
Glory
The recent 3:AM interview with Sophie Grace Chappell has reminded me of a paper in Ethics that I think is all too underappreciated: Chappell's "Glory as an ethical idea" (originally published as, and sometimes still only found under, Timothy Chappell). I don't have a great deal of sympathy with Chappell's overall aversion to theory, but I think there is a real value in recognizing gaps in the works of modern ethicists, and I think Chappell is quite right that glory is one of them.
Chappell suggests that we could get a first approximation to what is meant by glory by coining the word 'hurrahability'; more specifically, "glory is--typically--what happens when a spectacularly excellent performance within a worthwhile form of activity meets the admiration that it merits." This can in turn be clarified by appeal to MacIntyre's account of practices, that is, developed and socially established cooperative activities with internal goods, internal goods being goods that can be had in and through the activity on its own, as opposed to external goods like salaries or awards. That is to say, a practice is a cooperative activity of a recognizable kind in which we find the activity itself provides part of the reason for engaging in the activity to begin with. Sports are practices, professions (like medical professions) are often practices, arts (understood not as individual skills but as community endeavors) are practices, politics and citizenship when taken seriously tend to be practices; they are things you don't merely do, but do as a community of people engaged in the activity, because the activity is worthwhile. Money, fame, awards, and the like are added, by means of institutions, in order to sweeten the deal, make the activity more sustainable, and so forth, but the root reason for having the activity in the first place is that the activity itself involves things worth having. Because practices have internal goods, we can (and do) define better or worse ways of engaging in the activity. Better ways of being a football player are those that achieve the internal goods -- the love of the game, the athleticism, the teamwork, and so forth. Worse ways are those that raise unnecessary impediments to achieving these goods that make the practice of football worthwhile to begin with. And as we become familiar with how this works, practices naturally form standards of behavior that are peculiar to that practice.
What Chappell notes is that this means that you can identify the glorious within the context of a practice by looking at those performances or engagements in the practice that not only meet the standard but do so very conspicuously (spectacularly, dazzlingly) so that the person engaging the activity is manifesting the worthwhileness of the activity in doing so. The glorious in a practice is found in its moments of "Yes! This is what it's all about!"
The glorious is the hero-making feat, although sometimes it can be subtle or hidden from those who do not have the requisite background. Because it is tied to the achievement of standards of excellence in a practice, it follows that the glorious is, as Chappell puts it, narrative and perspectival: it needs to be contextualized so that we can understand why it is spectacular. Someone who knows nothing about a sport cannot generally recognize the glorious moments in it; someone who knows nothing about music cannot fully grasp why someone's musical accomplishments make them not just competent but in some way heroic.
Glory, however, has another aspect, which is that it provides something that we can, for lack of a better word, call "meaningfulness". Practices come in all sorts of different grades of complexity and comprehensiveness; you can have a practice that includes and organizes other practices. And part of MacIntyre's argument is that living a human life is itself something that we recognize as a practice. And as our achievements in lesser practices can contribute to the achieving of internal goods in a fully human life, so too the glory of great achievement in these practices can mark an extraordinary contribution to living well. Indeed, I think you can argue that glory is itself one of the internal goods of a human life; it is certainly a major part of the stories we tell about ourselves.
Chappell muddles all of this a bit by suggesting that this is merely the typical course for glorious feats, and that you can in fact have glory outside of worthwhile activities. I think this is a mistake arising from mixing together standards of excellence that really belong to different practices. Practices can adapt over time to new things, their standards of excellence likewise adapt, and we can be involved in a lot of them at a given time, which can occasionally leads to complications and contradictions in our assessment of the worthwhileness of things. In any case, this is enough to show that glory is an idea relevant to ethics; certainly, it is at least as important as pleasure to ethics, and we never stop hearing about pleasure and satisfaction and related terms.
It's interesting, actually, that we do so emphasize pleasure and so often forget glory, given the latter's historical importance and the fact that we clearly can still identify it all over the place today. My suspicion is that this is an artifact of the structure of our society; I think there is a good argument (one with excellent Platonic pedigree) that broadly democratic societies will tend naturally to overemphasize the importance of pleasure, because the integrity of such a society is heavily dependent on pleasing as many people as possible, while you will find a much greater emphasis on glory in broadly aristocratic societies, by which I don't mean the broadly democratic societies with residual aristocratic institutions that you find in Europe today. What makes you noble in an aristocratic society? Ultimately it is (at least in principle) glorious deeds; some extraordinary contribution that is so great that society has to recognize it formally. Aristocratic families arise because merely recognizing you for it does not seem to be enough; it is the sort of contribution for which we cannot sufficiently reward you in your lifetime, so how do we reward you for it? We do it by rewarding your family; but the expectation is that your family will carry on the tradition -- you having done great deeds and your children having been rewarded for your greatness, they then have the obligation not to be the link in the chain that gets the reward of greatness but acts shamefully. Of course, in practice, it's messy and there's a lot of maneuvering, and people are always trying to subvert the whole system for their own benefit, just as we find in broadly democratic societies. But that's the structure of aristocratic thinking in general. And you can well imagine that in such a society duty will take precedence over preference and glory will be regarded as more essential to happiness than pleasure. One would expect such a society to overemphasize the importance of glory and honor and related terms, just as we overemphasize pleasure and related terms.
Which brings me to one of the most important discussions of glory in the history of ethics, that which is found in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. In the Consolation, Boethius who of course has been accused of treason and put under house arrest while refused the right to defend himself, portrays himself as entering into a discussion with Philosophia herself, Lady Philosophy. Philosophy is out to cure Boethius of his illness, by which she means his distress over having lost power, reputation, and the like and being in imminent danger of losing his life. And the course of her cure is to identify a series of false goods, or goods of Fortune, things that we tend to identify with human happiness, that we pursue as if our happiness depended on them, even though they clearly have characteristics showing that they are incapable of fulfilling this function. They are mutable, they are limited, they are fragmented, they are incomplete by their very nature, and they are really in great measure outside of our control, so that our pursuit of them can be successful only as a matter of chance. The goods that she identifies as goods of Fortune are wealth, office, power, glory, and pleasure. Glory fails to be a genuine source of happiness because it depends so much on the opinion of others; and reflected glory, like that you get from having parents who did glorious things, has the obvious problem that it's not yours.
But that's not really the end of the story, because Philosophy notes that the only real explanation for why we pursue goods of Fortune as if they were real goods capable of giving us happiness is because they seem like the latter. So there must be something about glory that reflects or imitates some genuine aspect of happiness. Philosophy calls this celebritas, a sort of self-revealing clarity or splendor. This is what we are really trying to get when we pursue glory. But celebritas, the work goes on to argue, is something that can really only be found in being God. That's the secret of true happiness: Be God. Of course, Boethius is a Christian Neoplatonist, so while it's obvious that we are not God by nature, we can participate in divine life, and our particular human way of participating in divine life is virtue.
This makes it sound like a very sharp break: you have glory, which is a false source of happiness, and then there is celebritas, which we are really trying to get in our pursuing of glory, and which glory cannot give us. But, of course, you could also argue on Platonic principles that it's precisely the fact that glory is celebritas-like that is confusing us; it is an imitation or shadow of glory, a trace outline of it, and the problem is not so much that we are entirely wrong as that we are confusing a crude picture of celebritas with the celebritas itself; it doesn't really help Boethius any, languishing under house arrest with a ruined reputation while he is waiting to be executed, but you can still recognize some good in glory as a picture or reflection of something higher.
We find some minor modification of Boethius's view in Aquinas. Aquinas's account of happiness is essentially Boethian, but, being more Aristotelian than Boethius, he modifies a few points. In particular, he recognizes a distinction between perfect/complete happiness (which we cannot have in this life) and imperfect/incomplete happiness, which we can. This leads him to give a slightly different account of our mistakes in pursuit of glory (ST 2-1.2.3). Human glory -- glory depending on human opinion -- cannot be a source of real happiness for precisely the reasons Boethius states, and these are all tied to the fact that glory is an after-the-fact thing. Human recognition of our excellence depends on signs of the excellence. Thus when it is right, we already have what is the real source of happiness. When it is wrong, it's because people were misled by the signs. In either case, glory is superadded. However, there is a kind of glory that does not work this way, namely, glory depending on divine knowledge. This is more than just being recognized as excellent by omniscience; the point is that in this case we find the reverse of what we find in the human case, because divine knowledge of our excellence precedes our excellence; God's knowledge of our excellence is in fact a practical knowledge of what He does with us in union with us, and therefore it is the cause of our excellence. Human glory recognizes that we seem to have done something spectacular; divine glory makes us spectacular.
Chappell suggests that we could get a first approximation to what is meant by glory by coining the word 'hurrahability'; more specifically, "glory is--typically--what happens when a spectacularly excellent performance within a worthwhile form of activity meets the admiration that it merits." This can in turn be clarified by appeal to MacIntyre's account of practices, that is, developed and socially established cooperative activities with internal goods, internal goods being goods that can be had in and through the activity on its own, as opposed to external goods like salaries or awards. That is to say, a practice is a cooperative activity of a recognizable kind in which we find the activity itself provides part of the reason for engaging in the activity to begin with. Sports are practices, professions (like medical professions) are often practices, arts (understood not as individual skills but as community endeavors) are practices, politics and citizenship when taken seriously tend to be practices; they are things you don't merely do, but do as a community of people engaged in the activity, because the activity is worthwhile. Money, fame, awards, and the like are added, by means of institutions, in order to sweeten the deal, make the activity more sustainable, and so forth, but the root reason for having the activity in the first place is that the activity itself involves things worth having. Because practices have internal goods, we can (and do) define better or worse ways of engaging in the activity. Better ways of being a football player are those that achieve the internal goods -- the love of the game, the athleticism, the teamwork, and so forth. Worse ways are those that raise unnecessary impediments to achieving these goods that make the practice of football worthwhile to begin with. And as we become familiar with how this works, practices naturally form standards of behavior that are peculiar to that practice.
What Chappell notes is that this means that you can identify the glorious within the context of a practice by looking at those performances or engagements in the practice that not only meet the standard but do so very conspicuously (spectacularly, dazzlingly) so that the person engaging the activity is manifesting the worthwhileness of the activity in doing so. The glorious in a practice is found in its moments of "Yes! This is what it's all about!"
The glorious is the hero-making feat, although sometimes it can be subtle or hidden from those who do not have the requisite background. Because it is tied to the achievement of standards of excellence in a practice, it follows that the glorious is, as Chappell puts it, narrative and perspectival: it needs to be contextualized so that we can understand why it is spectacular. Someone who knows nothing about a sport cannot generally recognize the glorious moments in it; someone who knows nothing about music cannot fully grasp why someone's musical accomplishments make them not just competent but in some way heroic.
Glory, however, has another aspect, which is that it provides something that we can, for lack of a better word, call "meaningfulness". Practices come in all sorts of different grades of complexity and comprehensiveness; you can have a practice that includes and organizes other practices. And part of MacIntyre's argument is that living a human life is itself something that we recognize as a practice. And as our achievements in lesser practices can contribute to the achieving of internal goods in a fully human life, so too the glory of great achievement in these practices can mark an extraordinary contribution to living well. Indeed, I think you can argue that glory is itself one of the internal goods of a human life; it is certainly a major part of the stories we tell about ourselves.
Chappell muddles all of this a bit by suggesting that this is merely the typical course for glorious feats, and that you can in fact have glory outside of worthwhile activities. I think this is a mistake arising from mixing together standards of excellence that really belong to different practices. Practices can adapt over time to new things, their standards of excellence likewise adapt, and we can be involved in a lot of them at a given time, which can occasionally leads to complications and contradictions in our assessment of the worthwhileness of things. In any case, this is enough to show that glory is an idea relevant to ethics; certainly, it is at least as important as pleasure to ethics, and we never stop hearing about pleasure and satisfaction and related terms.
It's interesting, actually, that we do so emphasize pleasure and so often forget glory, given the latter's historical importance and the fact that we clearly can still identify it all over the place today. My suspicion is that this is an artifact of the structure of our society; I think there is a good argument (one with excellent Platonic pedigree) that broadly democratic societies will tend naturally to overemphasize the importance of pleasure, because the integrity of such a society is heavily dependent on pleasing as many people as possible, while you will find a much greater emphasis on glory in broadly aristocratic societies, by which I don't mean the broadly democratic societies with residual aristocratic institutions that you find in Europe today. What makes you noble in an aristocratic society? Ultimately it is (at least in principle) glorious deeds; some extraordinary contribution that is so great that society has to recognize it formally. Aristocratic families arise because merely recognizing you for it does not seem to be enough; it is the sort of contribution for which we cannot sufficiently reward you in your lifetime, so how do we reward you for it? We do it by rewarding your family; but the expectation is that your family will carry on the tradition -- you having done great deeds and your children having been rewarded for your greatness, they then have the obligation not to be the link in the chain that gets the reward of greatness but acts shamefully. Of course, in practice, it's messy and there's a lot of maneuvering, and people are always trying to subvert the whole system for their own benefit, just as we find in broadly democratic societies. But that's the structure of aristocratic thinking in general. And you can well imagine that in such a society duty will take precedence over preference and glory will be regarded as more essential to happiness than pleasure. One would expect such a society to overemphasize the importance of glory and honor and related terms, just as we overemphasize pleasure and related terms.
Which brings me to one of the most important discussions of glory in the history of ethics, that which is found in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. In the Consolation, Boethius who of course has been accused of treason and put under house arrest while refused the right to defend himself, portrays himself as entering into a discussion with Philosophia herself, Lady Philosophy. Philosophy is out to cure Boethius of his illness, by which she means his distress over having lost power, reputation, and the like and being in imminent danger of losing his life. And the course of her cure is to identify a series of false goods, or goods of Fortune, things that we tend to identify with human happiness, that we pursue as if our happiness depended on them, even though they clearly have characteristics showing that they are incapable of fulfilling this function. They are mutable, they are limited, they are fragmented, they are incomplete by their very nature, and they are really in great measure outside of our control, so that our pursuit of them can be successful only as a matter of chance. The goods that she identifies as goods of Fortune are wealth, office, power, glory, and pleasure. Glory fails to be a genuine source of happiness because it depends so much on the opinion of others; and reflected glory, like that you get from having parents who did glorious things, has the obvious problem that it's not yours.
But that's not really the end of the story, because Philosophy notes that the only real explanation for why we pursue goods of Fortune as if they were real goods capable of giving us happiness is because they seem like the latter. So there must be something about glory that reflects or imitates some genuine aspect of happiness. Philosophy calls this celebritas, a sort of self-revealing clarity or splendor. This is what we are really trying to get when we pursue glory. But celebritas, the work goes on to argue, is something that can really only be found in being God. That's the secret of true happiness: Be God. Of course, Boethius is a Christian Neoplatonist, so while it's obvious that we are not God by nature, we can participate in divine life, and our particular human way of participating in divine life is virtue.
This makes it sound like a very sharp break: you have glory, which is a false source of happiness, and then there is celebritas, which we are really trying to get in our pursuing of glory, and which glory cannot give us. But, of course, you could also argue on Platonic principles that it's precisely the fact that glory is celebritas-like that is confusing us; it is an imitation or shadow of glory, a trace outline of it, and the problem is not so much that we are entirely wrong as that we are confusing a crude picture of celebritas with the celebritas itself; it doesn't really help Boethius any, languishing under house arrest with a ruined reputation while he is waiting to be executed, but you can still recognize some good in glory as a picture or reflection of something higher.
We find some minor modification of Boethius's view in Aquinas. Aquinas's account of happiness is essentially Boethian, but, being more Aristotelian than Boethius, he modifies a few points. In particular, he recognizes a distinction between perfect/complete happiness (which we cannot have in this life) and imperfect/incomplete happiness, which we can. This leads him to give a slightly different account of our mistakes in pursuit of glory (ST 2-1.2.3). Human glory -- glory depending on human opinion -- cannot be a source of real happiness for precisely the reasons Boethius states, and these are all tied to the fact that glory is an after-the-fact thing. Human recognition of our excellence depends on signs of the excellence. Thus when it is right, we already have what is the real source of happiness. When it is wrong, it's because people were misled by the signs. In either case, glory is superadded. However, there is a kind of glory that does not work this way, namely, glory depending on divine knowledge. This is more than just being recognized as excellent by omniscience; the point is that in this case we find the reverse of what we find in the human case, because divine knowledge of our excellence precedes our excellence; God's knowledge of our excellence is in fact a practical knowledge of what He does with us in union with us, and therefore it is the cause of our excellence. Human glory recognizes that we seem to have done something spectacular; divine glory makes us spectacular.
Monday, January 14, 2019
A Garden for the Wandering of Our Feet
Knowledge
by Archibald Lampman
What is more large than knowledge and more sweet;
Knowledge of thoughts and deeds, of rights and wrongs,
Of passions and of beauties and of songs;
Knowledge of life; to feel its great heart beat
Through all the soul upon her crystal seat;
To see, to feel, and evermore to know;
To till the old world’s wisdom till it grow
A garden for the wandering of our feet.
Oh for a life of leisure and broad hours,
To think and dream, to put away small things,
This world’s perpetual leaguer of dull naughts;
To wander like the bee among the flowers
Till old age find us weary, feet and wings
Grown heavy with the gold of many thoughts.
Sunday, January 13, 2019
Athanasius of the West
Today is the memorial for St. Hilary of Poitiers, Doctor of the Church. A pagan Neoplatonist, fluent in Greek despite being born in the West, he converted to Christianity with his wife and his daughter (St. Abra) after having begun to study the Bible. Somewhere between 350 and 353, he was chosen by the Christians at Poitiers to be their bishop, popular acclamation still being a significant component in the election of bishops in those days, despite the fact that he was married. He is the first bishop of Poitiers about which we know anything definite. As the Western bishop most thoroughly fluent in Greek and familiar with Greek philosophy, he became a significant player in the Arian controversies, being several times invited to participate in discussions with Eastern bishops, and he soon became one of the most important defenders of Athanasius of his day. Thus he received the two titles by which he is often known: "Hammer of the Arians" and "Athanasius of the West". From his book On the Trinity, Book I, Section 7:
Therefore, although my soul drew joy from the apprehension of this august and unfathomable Mind, because it could worship as its own Father and Creator so limitless an Infinity, yet with a still more eager desire it sought to know the true aspect of its infinite and eternal Lord, that it might be able to believe that that immeasurable Deity was apparelled in splendour befitting the beauty of His wisdom. Then, while the devout soul was baffled and astray through its own feebleness, it caught from the prophet's voice this scale of comparison for God, admirably expressed, "By the greatness of His works and the beauty of the things that He has made the Creator of worlds is rightly discerned." The Creator of great things is supreme in greatness, of beautiful things in beauty. Since the work transcends our thoughts, all thought must be transcended by the Maker. Thus heaven and air and earth and seas are fair: fair also the whole universe, as the Greeks agree, who from its beautiful ordering call it κόσμος, that is, order. But if our thought can estimate this beauty of the universe by a natural instinct — an instinct such as we see in certain birds and beasts whose voice, though it fall below the level of our understanding, yet has a sense clear to them though they cannot utter it, and in which, since all speech is the expression of some thought, there lies a meaning patent to themselves — must not the Lord of this universal beauty be recognised as Himself most beautiful amid all the beauty that surrounds Him? For though the splendour of His eternal glory overtax our mind's best powers, it cannot fail to see that He is beautiful. We must in truth confess that God is most beautiful, and that with a beauty which, though it transcend our comprehension, forces itself upon our perception.
To Dare Some Forward Part
Pusillanimity
by Bl. John Henry Newman
"I have need to be baptized of Thee, and comest Thou to me?"
How didst thou start, Thou Holy Baptist, bid
To pour repentance on the Sinless Brow!
Then all thy meekness, from thy hearers hid,
Beneath the Ascetic's port, and Preacher's fire,
Flow'd forth, and with a pang thou didst desire
He might be chief, not thou.
And so on us at whiles it falls, to claim
Powers that we dread, or dare some forward part;
Nor must we shrink as cravens from the blame
Of pride, in common eyes, or purpose deep;
But with pure thoughts look up to God, and keep
Our secret in our heart.
At Sea.
June 22, 1833.
Saturday, January 12, 2019
The Unknown Nerves
The opening of Mortiz Schlick's General Theory of Knowledge:
One does not go to logical positivists for competent history of philosophy, but this idea with which Schlick starts is not made-up, although the vagueness of it makes it at least sound exaggerated, since it's only one lineage of philosophers who reasoned in this way. The most influential proponent of the idea described here is Nicolas Malebranche, since this is one of Malebranche's arguments against second causes, and his major argument against the idea that the mind causes the body to move. We find an example of this kind of argument in the Fifteenth Elucidation to The Search after Truth:
When you will to move your arm, you do not will the micromotions that are required for your arm to move, because you have no knowledge of them. All you do know is that you will, and the motion follows, unless something interferes. The motion operates entirely by 'a general law of communication of motion'; and laws of nature, in a Cartesian system, are acts of God.
Ironically, part of Malebranche's overall argument is that descriptions like 'the union of the mind and body' and 'the will's power to move the body' are associated with no clear idea and therefore are merely "vague and indeterminate words" that are used by prejudice so that those who use them do not know what they are saying, which is very much a forerunner of the logical positivist attack on metaphysics as meaningless.
Hume takes up Malebranche's argument in ECHU, Section VII (which repeats a significant number of Malebranchean arguments for occasionalism):
He later notes the positive Malebranchean proposal (in order to reject it):
Hume thus accepts Malebranche's negative argument but not his positive solution, a recurring pattern in Section VII, which is heavily influenced by Malebranche's arguments for occasionalism. It's notable that in describing the Malebranchean position, Hume also uses the generic term 'philosophers' (that it is Malebranche's is mentioned only briefly, in passing, in a footnote at the end), as he has occasionally does throughout the Enquiry; it's a tempting hypothesis that Schlick's generic 'philosophers' is an imitation of this habit, particularly as Schlick is raising the point in order to argue that there is a flaw in skepticism.
Since it's unlikely that Schlick ever read much Malebranche himself, the only source Schlick seems to have other than Hume is Arnold Geulincx. Geulincx may actually have the priority over Malebranche as the originator of the argument, but given the late posthumous publication of most of Geulincx's works and Malebranche's general contempt for non-Catholic philosophers, it's difficult to imagine any serious influence. In any case, Geulincx's notion is summed up in his famous phrase, Quod nescis quomodo fiat, id non facis, which might be colloquially translated as, "If you don't know how you're doing it, you're not doing it." Given that this idea is more or less what Schlick will diagnose as the false assumption of skepticism about knowledge, and that Schlick will mention Geulincx twice by name later in the work, it makes sense that Geulincx would be specifically in mind here. Geulincx had been revived by authors of works about the history of philosophy and for a while was much better known than he is today.
There was once a time when philosophers marvelled that man could move his limbs even though he was not familiar with the nerve and muscle processes on which such movements depended. They even went so far as to conclude that man was quite incapable of moving his body by himself. Whenever he wished to perform some movement, they believed, a higher power had to come to his aid and do it for him. (Schlick, General Theory of Knowledge, Blumberg, tr., Open Court [La Salle, IL: 1974] p. 1)
One does not go to logical positivists for competent history of philosophy, but this idea with which Schlick starts is not made-up, although the vagueness of it makes it at least sound exaggerated, since it's only one lineage of philosophers who reasoned in this way. The most influential proponent of the idea described here is Nicolas Malebranche, since this is one of Malebranche's arguments against second causes, and his major argument against the idea that the mind causes the body to move. We find an example of this kind of argument in the Fifteenth Elucidation to The Search after Truth:
But I deny that my will is the true cause of my arm's movement, of my mind's ideas, and of other things accompanying my volitions, for I see no relation whatever between such different things. I even see clearly that there can be no relation between the volition I have to move my arm and the agitation of the animal spirits, i.e., of certain tiny bodies whose motion and figure I do not know and which choose certain nerve canals from a million others I do not know in order to cause in me the motion I desire through an infinity of movements I do not desire. (LO 669)
I deny that there is a relation between our thoughts and the motion of matter. I deny that the soul has the least knowledge of the animal spirits of which it makes use to move the body it animates. Finally, even if the soul had an exact knowledge of the animal spirits, and even if it were capable of moving them, or of determining their motion, I deny that it could thereby select the nerve ducts, of which it has no knowledge, in order to impel the spirits into them and thus move the body with the promptness, exactness, ad force observed even in those who least know the structure of their body. (LO 671)
For, in short, since the soul is a particular cause and cannot know exactly the size and agitation of an infinite number of particles that collide with each other when the spirits are in the muscles, it could neither establish a general law of the communication of motion, nor follow it exactly had it established it. Thus, it is evident that the soul could not move its arm, even if it had the power of determining the motion of the animal spirits in the brain. (LO 671)
When you will to move your arm, you do not will the micromotions that are required for your arm to move, because you have no knowledge of them. All you do know is that you will, and the motion follows, unless something interferes. The motion operates entirely by 'a general law of communication of motion'; and laws of nature, in a Cartesian system, are acts of God.
Ironically, part of Malebranche's overall argument is that descriptions like 'the union of the mind and body' and 'the will's power to move the body' are associated with no clear idea and therefore are merely "vague and indeterminate words" that are used by prejudice so that those who use them do not know what they are saying, which is very much a forerunner of the logical positivist attack on metaphysics as meaningless.
Hume takes up Malebranche's argument in ECHU, Section VII (which repeats a significant number of Malebranchean arguments for occasionalism):
Here the mind wills a certain event: Immediately another event, unknown to ourselves, and totally different from the one intended, is produced: This event produces another, equally unknown: Till at last, through a long succession, the desired event is produced. But if the original power were felt, it must be known: Were it known, its effect also must be known; since all power is relative to its effect. And vice versa, if the effect be not known, the power cannot be known nor felt. How indeed can we be conscious of a power to move our limbs, when we have no such power; but only that to move certain animal spirits, which, though they produce at last the motion of our limbs, yet operate in such a manner as is wholly beyond our comprehension?
He later notes the positive Malebranchean proposal (in order to reject it):
In like manner, it is not any energy in the will that produces local motion in our members: It is God himself, who is pleased to second our will, in itself impotent, and to command that motion which we erroneously attribute to our own power and efficacy.
Hume thus accepts Malebranche's negative argument but not his positive solution, a recurring pattern in Section VII, which is heavily influenced by Malebranche's arguments for occasionalism. It's notable that in describing the Malebranchean position, Hume also uses the generic term 'philosophers' (that it is Malebranche's is mentioned only briefly, in passing, in a footnote at the end), as he has occasionally does throughout the Enquiry; it's a tempting hypothesis that Schlick's generic 'philosophers' is an imitation of this habit, particularly as Schlick is raising the point in order to argue that there is a flaw in skepticism.
Since it's unlikely that Schlick ever read much Malebranche himself, the only source Schlick seems to have other than Hume is Arnold Geulincx. Geulincx may actually have the priority over Malebranche as the originator of the argument, but given the late posthumous publication of most of Geulincx's works and Malebranche's general contempt for non-Catholic philosophers, it's difficult to imagine any serious influence. In any case, Geulincx's notion is summed up in his famous phrase, Quod nescis quomodo fiat, id non facis, which might be colloquially translated as, "If you don't know how you're doing it, you're not doing it." Given that this idea is more or less what Schlick will diagnose as the false assumption of skepticism about knowledge, and that Schlick will mention Geulincx twice by name later in the work, it makes sense that Geulincx would be specifically in mind here. Geulincx had been revived by authors of works about the history of philosophy and for a while was much better known than he is today.
Friday, January 11, 2019
Dashed Off I
As always, dashed-off notes.
intransitive to be: to exist
transitive to be: to cause x (to make x to be)
intr. reflexive to be: to act (to be so)
trans. reflexive to be: to do x (to enact x)
excluded middle as a feature of universes of discourse (its failure as a sign that we are not dividing one universe of discourse)
int. to live: to be alive/to live
trans. to live: to enliven/quicken/give life to x
intr. ref. to live: to live as
trans ref. to live: to give life as
int. to think: to think (to be thinking)
trans. to think: to think of x
intr. ref. to think: to reflect (to be reflective)
trans. ref. to think: to reflect on x
int. to make: to be a maker
trans. to make: to make x
intr. refl. to make: to cultivate oneself
trans. refl. to make: to cultivate oneself as x (to make oneself be x)
The Kantian postulation of God is essentially a postulation of the (ultimate) unity of practical reason.
Kant on holy wills & the postulation of the possibility of angels
Pfleiderer's argument for teleology based on will as original would also work for moral realism, with minor modification (indeed, specifically moral teleology).
Material implication detaches implication from inference; which is why 'material' should perhaps be taken as alienans.
assertion : ordinary inference :: command : challenge :: question : search?
arity is a modal notion: how many objects a relation *can* relate
self-identity as relating subject and predicate: the self-identity of F is F's being F.
first subject, first ground, first totality
'What is?' as a necessary question
Modern governments are too high-maintenance to be indefinitely sustainable.
"Truth may be safely borrowed from all quarters, and it is not the less true because it has been borrowed." Max Muller
The error of quietism involves confusing 'love God for Himself and not for the sake of reward' with 'love God without regard for reward'. It creates a fictional kind of love divorced from all hope or fulfillment.
the course of every healthy inquiry:
(1) consideration of truth, dialectically
(2) contemplation of truth, intellectually
(3) admiration of the majesty or beauty of truth
"We can easily distinguish three classes of miracles. Some miracles are ideas materialised, others facts idealised, while a third class owes its origin to a simple misunderstanding of metaphorical phraseology." Max Muller
-- This is a neat and clean summary of the liberal position on miracles.
-- Note that these are in fact the three kinds of story (although one would have to state the third less tendentiously).
Modern heresies, among those who remain Catholic, tend to be, in one way or another, misconceivings of the common good of the Church.
"Whatever in nature had to be named, could at first be named as an agent only. Why? Because the roots of language were at first expressive of agency." Muller
"To overcome an error, we must discern its partial truth." E Caird
kinds of epistemological theistic argument
(1) error (Royce)
(2) skepticism-breaking
(3) illuminationist: (a) ontologistic (b) non-ontologistic
(4) epistemic precondition
Prediction is merely a branching complexity problem; it is detachable from questions of determinism. Prediction, in other words, is a use of a system of conditionals.
Prediction is hypothetical by nature.
Note that Frege takes yes/no questions to have the same thought/proposition but not the same force.
(The usual problem raised for this is that "John knows that Bill is coming" is not equivalent to "John knows whether Bill is coming"; but this seems to assume falsely that the latter is literally an embedded question.)
The yes/no of yes/no questions works exactly like true/false.
In punishment one can
(1) communicate what is the appropriate behavior for common good (public rebuke)
(2) correct behavior by discipline so as to be more appropriate to common good (corporal, shaming)
(3) force a restitution to common good (fines, community service)
(4) impede ability to harm common good further (imprisonment, exile)
(5) end ability to harm common good further (death)
Social rights in constitutions often have addressability problems: e.g., if people shall have free water, who is being addressed, specifically in this implied imperative? This interacts with the fact that different possible addressees have different capabilities and limits.
Biblical scholars have sometimes confused literary plausibility with historical plausibility. For instance, there is a literary plausibility to JEPD, in that the distribution of divine names seems not wholly arbitrary, and exhibits at least partial patterns, and in that there are functionally coherent portions that seem otherwise concerned with particular topics. There is a literary plausibility to hypotheses about redaction and even about some historical contexts. But this is treated as if it gave historical probability to various conjectures about those contexts, actions, etc. Perhaps an even more vivid cases is the Deuteronomistic History, a hypothesis which has had plenty of insightful points with structural plausibility but could never bear the historical weight that became attributed to it, because we simply don't have that kind of evidence on that kind of scale. Yet more obvious cases can be found in historical Jesus studies. (This contrasts in part with, say, dating NT books, which has sometimes been reckless in this way but has been more concerned with evidence, and also contrasts with purely literary criticism and canonical criticism on one side and with the study of manuscript history and variants on the other.) Thus one so often gets an interesting mix of ideas, serious analysis of evidence, and discussions that proceed as if the discussants had not the faintest clue how evidence and probable reasoning actually work.
Note that Caird praises the Reformation for secularizing the faith.
Every metaphor is a seed for a story.
Human beings have a standing social fear of evil rituals (in whatever form).
If there are credences, there is no particular reason to regard them as simulations of objective chances rather than assessments of salience for practical action. Indeed, the number of accounts of psychological development and structure that would not make the latter obviously preferable is very small.
Governments in practice only respect claims of natural rights when they can interpret such claims as giving license for expanding government power.
Imperialist expansionism is the political analogue of drug addiction: first you take speed to get your work done more effectively, then you begin working to get speed at any cost; first you exert imperial power to protect your interests, then you sacrifice your interests to maintaining and expanding imperial power. Imperialism teaches desire, craving, pleonexia, as an end.
To make a factual claim about the world is to make a normative claim for reason.
The principle of noncontradiction is simultaneously an Is and an Ought.
We often think of painters as dealing with flat surfaces, but it is worthwhile to remember that painting has layers (paint layers, varnish), textures, relations to frame (note Byzantine icons, for instance). Painters use microvolume to suggest deep volume; which is different from visual effect and perspective suggestions of depth.
"The Book of Acts is rightly closed with St Paul's arrival at Rome. An insight a statesman might have envied led him step by step from Jerusalem to Antioch, from Antioch to Corinth, from Corinth to Rome. The battle for the world's faith could be finally decided nowhere but in the world's capital." Gwatkin
"The roots of a belief may be deeper than the associations which suggested it or the flimsy arguments first advanced in its support." Pringle-Pattison
"The whole mind is present in every act of the mind, and every act of the mind implies the whole mind." R. Haldane
question-settling evidence
-- NB that such evidence is not necessarily indubitable; it just settles the question. E.g., if I wonder whether I have a mouse, and I see what seems to be a mouse just scurrying under the refrigerator when I turn on the light, this settles the question, not because there is no consideration that could lead me to think I was mistaken, but because there is no point in pursuing the matter further. That particular inquiry has been complete, no matter what new inquiries I might raise later.
Every step of an inference is characterizable by a question.
What premises are empirical or not can only be determined empirically, and will vary according to the empirical means available.
For it to be possible that there is something necessary, it must be necessary that there is something necessary.
Samkara's principle: Nothing even appears to be like a genuine impossibility.
Appearing-not-to-be requires relevant comprehensive search. E.g., I look over the whole room, therefore there appears to be no dog in the room. But if I only look in a corner, it does not appear to me that there is no dog in the room, but only that there is no dog in the corner. What is more, it requires that I have done a relevant search, or an action equivalent to one, in order to find what is being looked for.
external world fictionalism
-- note that Berkelely has often been read as such, although he is in fact an external world structuralist.
Note that Tillich has something like an erotetic ontological argument ("The question of God is possible because an awareness of God is present in the question of God") but characterizes it as having a transcendental structure ("This awareness precedes the question. It is not the result of the argument but its presupposition"). Systematic Theology I, 206. He does not, however, regard it as actually an argument, either.
A society involves a coming together (faith-like) in moving to a goal (hope-like) which must be accomplished by actions appropriate to a goal (love-like).
immersed vs transcending hope
E.g., a sick person may have hope for a cure, but also might have hope independent of the matter of sickness or health, e.g., hope for one's children.
In Humean ethics, the magnetism of the good is sympathy itself.
Both 'propositional meaning' and 'emotive meaning' are always operative.
Stevenson's account, despite his intent, does not save disagreement about the good; disagreement in interest is not disagreement about anything; it's just a discord of interests.
generalization to salience values, salience conditions
Salience for
-- assertions: truth (being assertible)
-- imperatives: being in force
-- questions: being askable
-- wishes: being wished (to-be-wished?)
May John get well! Therefore John is not yet well.
God save the Queen! Therefore there is a Queen
If only I were rich! Therefore I am not yet rich.
"A Sign is nothing but a correlative Effect from the Same Cause." Hume ECHU (1750)
This was dropped from later editions.
assertive imperatives vs vocative imperatives
assertions : questions :: imperatives : optatives
(1) Rationality requires consistency in choice.
(2) Consistency in choice requires, for social agents, some form of governance.
optative ontological argument?
'May there be a God'; therefore, there is a God.
This *does* seem closely analogous to the Zenonian argument, but obviously the issue is how the optative would work with the necessity.
The 'feeling of understanding' is often more a feeling of breaking through to a new perspective.
Human sympathy is always approximative.
'no evil can overcome wisdom' (Wis 7:30)
You can build propositions just from vocatives and interjections. (You!--Wow!)
Hope and forgiveness are interlinked.
Caird: the phenomenal/noumenal distinction should instead be understood as a distinction between the world as imperfectly conceived and the world as more adequately conceived.
hierarchy as a kind of semiosis
By the authority of Christ the King, the Church has an inalienable right not only to Catholic places of worship and eleemosynary institutions, but also Catholic schools, Catholic hospitals, Catholic markets, and all such similar things, as prudence determines them appropriate and feasible.
A society can go far just on customs of trustworthiness, accountability, and personal initiative.
modestia as communication of dignity
analogies as the diagrams of sacramental theology
(1) A considerable portion of 'seemings' are crude and dubitable on their face; they have no 'felt verdicality' or 'assertiveness' or 'forcefulness'.
(2) 'Seeming' is an analogical, not a univocal term.
(3) 'Felt veridicality' is usually nothing other than apparent inevitability in practice or inquiry.
(4) We are often in doubt about how things seem.
(5) We can often change how things seem by changing perspective.
(6) How things seem is often contradictory.
(7) The role of seeming in inference and inquiry is entirely a matter of its being an effect.
Only by an absurdity argument against God's existence (or anything similar) can one rationally reject PSR -- i.e., by showing a case in which PSR results in an actual absurdity.
A brute fact, in the sense inconsistent with PSR, cannot be composite because its constituents are reasons explaining its being the fact it is. It cannot have intrinsically grounded relations for the same reason.
The Holy Spirit inspires sanctity in some, and part of this sanctity is a power of attracting others to sanctity, as magnet magnetizes iron; from these saints chains of others are suspended. Through these, God sways yet more souls, one drawn to the hints of sanctity in another. But there are countervailing forces, and the influence weakens down the chain.
"If ritual is suppressed in one form, it crops up in others." Mary Douglas
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that democratic popular-governance institutions are increasingly occupying a purely ceremonial role, like kings giving way to parliaments. This is related to their increase in nominal prestige; they give dignity and communicate legitimacy to other things without having much effect themselves; everyone lauds them and everyone maneuvers around them to do whatever they like.
Nomen naturae importat habitudinem principii. (Aquinas, In Phys II)
Dodgson to Mary Brown on hell, 28 June 1889
"Everything is real, so long as you do not take it for more than it is." Bosanquet
time as measure vs time as the life of the World Soul (Plotinus)
In politics, people regularly overshoot what they believe in order, first, to build a protective ring around what they do believe, and, second, to counterbalance what they think are their most serious opponents.
The actual world exhibits objective possibilities organized by causal order.
intransitive to be: to exist
transitive to be: to cause x (to make x to be)
intr. reflexive to be: to act (to be so)
trans. reflexive to be: to do x (to enact x)
excluded middle as a feature of universes of discourse (its failure as a sign that we are not dividing one universe of discourse)
int. to live: to be alive/to live
trans. to live: to enliven/quicken/give life to x
intr. ref. to live: to live as
trans ref. to live: to give life as
int. to think: to think (to be thinking)
trans. to think: to think of x
intr. ref. to think: to reflect (to be reflective)
trans. ref. to think: to reflect on x
int. to make: to be a maker
trans. to make: to make x
intr. refl. to make: to cultivate oneself
trans. refl. to make: to cultivate oneself as x (to make oneself be x)
The Kantian postulation of God is essentially a postulation of the (ultimate) unity of practical reason.
Kant on holy wills & the postulation of the possibility of angels
Pfleiderer's argument for teleology based on will as original would also work for moral realism, with minor modification (indeed, specifically moral teleology).
Material implication detaches implication from inference; which is why 'material' should perhaps be taken as alienans.
assertion : ordinary inference :: command : challenge :: question : search?
arity is a modal notion: how many objects a relation *can* relate
self-identity as relating subject and predicate: the self-identity of F is F's being F.
first subject, first ground, first totality
'What is?' as a necessary question
Modern governments are too high-maintenance to be indefinitely sustainable.
"Truth may be safely borrowed from all quarters, and it is not the less true because it has been borrowed." Max Muller
The error of quietism involves confusing 'love God for Himself and not for the sake of reward' with 'love God without regard for reward'. It creates a fictional kind of love divorced from all hope or fulfillment.
the course of every healthy inquiry:
(1) consideration of truth, dialectically
(2) contemplation of truth, intellectually
(3) admiration of the majesty or beauty of truth
"We can easily distinguish three classes of miracles. Some miracles are ideas materialised, others facts idealised, while a third class owes its origin to a simple misunderstanding of metaphorical phraseology." Max Muller
-- This is a neat and clean summary of the liberal position on miracles.
-- Note that these are in fact the three kinds of story (although one would have to state the third less tendentiously).
Modern heresies, among those who remain Catholic, tend to be, in one way or another, misconceivings of the common good of the Church.
"Whatever in nature had to be named, could at first be named as an agent only. Why? Because the roots of language were at first expressive of agency." Muller
"To overcome an error, we must discern its partial truth." E Caird
kinds of epistemological theistic argument
(1) error (Royce)
(2) skepticism-breaking
(3) illuminationist: (a) ontologistic (b) non-ontologistic
(4) epistemic precondition
Prediction is merely a branching complexity problem; it is detachable from questions of determinism. Prediction, in other words, is a use of a system of conditionals.
Prediction is hypothetical by nature.
Note that Frege takes yes/no questions to have the same thought/proposition but not the same force.
(The usual problem raised for this is that "John knows that Bill is coming" is not equivalent to "John knows whether Bill is coming"; but this seems to assume falsely that the latter is literally an embedded question.)
The yes/no of yes/no questions works exactly like true/false.
In punishment one can
(1) communicate what is the appropriate behavior for common good (public rebuke)
(2) correct behavior by discipline so as to be more appropriate to common good (corporal, shaming)
(3) force a restitution to common good (fines, community service)
(4) impede ability to harm common good further (imprisonment, exile)
(5) end ability to harm common good further (death)
Social rights in constitutions often have addressability problems: e.g., if people shall have free water, who is being addressed, specifically in this implied imperative? This interacts with the fact that different possible addressees have different capabilities and limits.
Biblical scholars have sometimes confused literary plausibility with historical plausibility. For instance, there is a literary plausibility to JEPD, in that the distribution of divine names seems not wholly arbitrary, and exhibits at least partial patterns, and in that there are functionally coherent portions that seem otherwise concerned with particular topics. There is a literary plausibility to hypotheses about redaction and even about some historical contexts. But this is treated as if it gave historical probability to various conjectures about those contexts, actions, etc. Perhaps an even more vivid cases is the Deuteronomistic History, a hypothesis which has had plenty of insightful points with structural plausibility but could never bear the historical weight that became attributed to it, because we simply don't have that kind of evidence on that kind of scale. Yet more obvious cases can be found in historical Jesus studies. (This contrasts in part with, say, dating NT books, which has sometimes been reckless in this way but has been more concerned with evidence, and also contrasts with purely literary criticism and canonical criticism on one side and with the study of manuscript history and variants on the other.) Thus one so often gets an interesting mix of ideas, serious analysis of evidence, and discussions that proceed as if the discussants had not the faintest clue how evidence and probable reasoning actually work.
Note that Caird praises the Reformation for secularizing the faith.
Every metaphor is a seed for a story.
Human beings have a standing social fear of evil rituals (in whatever form).
If there are credences, there is no particular reason to regard them as simulations of objective chances rather than assessments of salience for practical action. Indeed, the number of accounts of psychological development and structure that would not make the latter obviously preferable is very small.
Governments in practice only respect claims of natural rights when they can interpret such claims as giving license for expanding government power.
Imperialist expansionism is the political analogue of drug addiction: first you take speed to get your work done more effectively, then you begin working to get speed at any cost; first you exert imperial power to protect your interests, then you sacrifice your interests to maintaining and expanding imperial power. Imperialism teaches desire, craving, pleonexia, as an end.
To make a factual claim about the world is to make a normative claim for reason.
The principle of noncontradiction is simultaneously an Is and an Ought.
We often think of painters as dealing with flat surfaces, but it is worthwhile to remember that painting has layers (paint layers, varnish), textures, relations to frame (note Byzantine icons, for instance). Painters use microvolume to suggest deep volume; which is different from visual effect and perspective suggestions of depth.
"The Book of Acts is rightly closed with St Paul's arrival at Rome. An insight a statesman might have envied led him step by step from Jerusalem to Antioch, from Antioch to Corinth, from Corinth to Rome. The battle for the world's faith could be finally decided nowhere but in the world's capital." Gwatkin
"The roots of a belief may be deeper than the associations which suggested it or the flimsy arguments first advanced in its support." Pringle-Pattison
"The whole mind is present in every act of the mind, and every act of the mind implies the whole mind." R. Haldane
question-settling evidence
-- NB that such evidence is not necessarily indubitable; it just settles the question. E.g., if I wonder whether I have a mouse, and I see what seems to be a mouse just scurrying under the refrigerator when I turn on the light, this settles the question, not because there is no consideration that could lead me to think I was mistaken, but because there is no point in pursuing the matter further. That particular inquiry has been complete, no matter what new inquiries I might raise later.
Every step of an inference is characterizable by a question.
What premises are empirical or not can only be determined empirically, and will vary according to the empirical means available.
For it to be possible that there is something necessary, it must be necessary that there is something necessary.
Samkara's principle: Nothing even appears to be like a genuine impossibility.
Appearing-not-to-be requires relevant comprehensive search. E.g., I look over the whole room, therefore there appears to be no dog in the room. But if I only look in a corner, it does not appear to me that there is no dog in the room, but only that there is no dog in the corner. What is more, it requires that I have done a relevant search, or an action equivalent to one, in order to find what is being looked for.
external world fictionalism
-- note that Berkelely has often been read as such, although he is in fact an external world structuralist.
Note that Tillich has something like an erotetic ontological argument ("The question of God is possible because an awareness of God is present in the question of God") but characterizes it as having a transcendental structure ("This awareness precedes the question. It is not the result of the argument but its presupposition"). Systematic Theology I, 206. He does not, however, regard it as actually an argument, either.
A society involves a coming together (faith-like) in moving to a goal (hope-like) which must be accomplished by actions appropriate to a goal (love-like).
immersed vs transcending hope
E.g., a sick person may have hope for a cure, but also might have hope independent of the matter of sickness or health, e.g., hope for one's children.
In Humean ethics, the magnetism of the good is sympathy itself.
Both 'propositional meaning' and 'emotive meaning' are always operative.
Stevenson's account, despite his intent, does not save disagreement about the good; disagreement in interest is not disagreement about anything; it's just a discord of interests.
generalization to salience values, salience conditions
Salience for
-- assertions: truth (being assertible)
-- imperatives: being in force
-- questions: being askable
-- wishes: being wished (to-be-wished?)
May John get well! Therefore John is not yet well.
God save the Queen! Therefore there is a Queen
If only I were rich! Therefore I am not yet rich.
"A Sign is nothing but a correlative Effect from the Same Cause." Hume ECHU (1750)
This was dropped from later editions.
assertive imperatives vs vocative imperatives
assertions : questions :: imperatives : optatives
(1) Rationality requires consistency in choice.
(2) Consistency in choice requires, for social agents, some form of governance.
optative ontological argument?
'May there be a God'; therefore, there is a God.
This *does* seem closely analogous to the Zenonian argument, but obviously the issue is how the optative would work with the necessity.
The 'feeling of understanding' is often more a feeling of breaking through to a new perspective.
Human sympathy is always approximative.
'no evil can overcome wisdom' (Wis 7:30)
You can build propositions just from vocatives and interjections. (You!--Wow!)
Hope and forgiveness are interlinked.
Caird: the phenomenal/noumenal distinction should instead be understood as a distinction between the world as imperfectly conceived and the world as more adequately conceived.
hierarchy as a kind of semiosis
By the authority of Christ the King, the Church has an inalienable right not only to Catholic places of worship and eleemosynary institutions, but also Catholic schools, Catholic hospitals, Catholic markets, and all such similar things, as prudence determines them appropriate and feasible.
A society can go far just on customs of trustworthiness, accountability, and personal initiative.
modestia as communication of dignity
analogies as the diagrams of sacramental theology
(1) A considerable portion of 'seemings' are crude and dubitable on their face; they have no 'felt verdicality' or 'assertiveness' or 'forcefulness'.
(2) 'Seeming' is an analogical, not a univocal term.
(3) 'Felt veridicality' is usually nothing other than apparent inevitability in practice or inquiry.
(4) We are often in doubt about how things seem.
(5) We can often change how things seem by changing perspective.
(6) How things seem is often contradictory.
(7) The role of seeming in inference and inquiry is entirely a matter of its being an effect.
Only by an absurdity argument against God's existence (or anything similar) can one rationally reject PSR -- i.e., by showing a case in which PSR results in an actual absurdity.
A brute fact, in the sense inconsistent with PSR, cannot be composite because its constituents are reasons explaining its being the fact it is. It cannot have intrinsically grounded relations for the same reason.
The Holy Spirit inspires sanctity in some, and part of this sanctity is a power of attracting others to sanctity, as magnet magnetizes iron; from these saints chains of others are suspended. Through these, God sways yet more souls, one drawn to the hints of sanctity in another. But there are countervailing forces, and the influence weakens down the chain.
"If ritual is suppressed in one form, it crops up in others." Mary Douglas
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that democratic popular-governance institutions are increasingly occupying a purely ceremonial role, like kings giving way to parliaments. This is related to their increase in nominal prestige; they give dignity and communicate legitimacy to other things without having much effect themselves; everyone lauds them and everyone maneuvers around them to do whatever they like.
Nomen naturae importat habitudinem principii. (Aquinas, In Phys II)
Dodgson to Mary Brown on hell, 28 June 1889
"Everything is real, so long as you do not take it for more than it is." Bosanquet
time as measure vs time as the life of the World Soul (Plotinus)
In politics, people regularly overshoot what they believe in order, first, to build a protective ring around what they do believe, and, second, to counterbalance what they think are their most serious opponents.
The actual world exhibits objective possibilities organized by causal order.
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